If you weren’t present at the YALSA Genre Galaxy preconference on Friday, you missed a day of great networking, learning, sharing, and yes — swordfighting.  Our speakers did a wonderful job of both educating and entertaining attendees, who enjoyed a full day focusing on genre fiction (and nonfiction!).

For a taste of what we experienced, here’s Elizabeth Bird’s video of author James Kennedy kicking off the day with a little commentary on his ability to best Neil Gaiman and win the Newbery!

Amy Alessio interviewed Genre Galaxy preconference speaker Patrick Jones about his take on edgy fiction. Enjoy their conversation below! (for more information about the preconference, visit the Genre Galaxy wiki!)

Why do you think so many teens want edgy or ‘urban’ fiction now?

The urban part reflects the literature catching up with the music. The influence of rap and hip-hop culture washes over every part of teen life, so that it would finally find its way into book isn’t a surprise. I just wonder why it took so long. It also mirrors what is going on in the adult market with rise of street fiction for similar reasons. As far as edgy, that is certainly a case of “meet the new boss, same as the old boss” (”Won’t Get Fooled Again” by the Who). I wrote an article over a decade ago celebrating that new edge in YA fiction, so it never surprises me. As I’m writing this, there was a big article in the Wall Street Journal about teen fiction; it was the usual decrying of the books being too dark. You get that article every ten years it seems.

What do you think makes fiction edgy?

Four things, and again there’s nothing new in any of these. Sex, drugs, language, and darker themes. Some books combine all four (like my novel Chasing Tail Lights) while others may just focus on one or two of these areas, like Ellen Hopkins’ books. The Wall Street Journal article pointed to 13 Reasons Why by Jay Asher as one title, as if there’s never been a book on teen suicide before. A book is edgy if it reflects the darker edges of the teen experience. All the stuff that parents quite rightly don’t want their kids to experience: depression, eating disorders, substance abuse, etc. The issue, as always comes, back to one of the central conflicts within adolescent life / literature: independence vs. dependence. In most edgy books, the teen characters act independently, often getting themselves into situation they can’t control.

What are some favorite responses you have received to your writing? What do you hope teens take from your books?

I still get the most response about Things Change. Most of the messages are similar to one I got last week: “you changed my life with your book. And I just have to say thank you for representing girls (like me) who have been in abusive relationships. Because you feel like no one cares or will stand up for you. So thank you, for everything.” If you look at customer reviews on Amazon, you’ll see a lot more of these. There’s a review on bn.com about Chasing Tail Lights which is pretty intense. What teens take from my books is up to them, but there are some common themes across my titles. One is this: life is hard, but for Paul, Bret, Christy, Mick, and Danielle, their lives are harder because of sins / flames they’ve inherited. So the message is don’t make bad decisions and do stupid shit that makes a hard life even harder. Another major theme in my books relates back to the edginess issue: what happens when your body does stuff that your brain or heart isn’t ready to handle. That conflict of adolescence is the central conflict in every book. Finally, my books I hope give voice to Flint kids – and by that I don’t just mean youth in my hometown — but youth anywhere who are growing up in hard economic times with an uncertain future. We’re all Flint now.

What has surprised you about the fiction writing life after all your success with professional development?

How difficult it was to do, how much an editor shapes a book, but mostly how much books can really mean to teens. I always knew it as a librarian, but I know it on a totally different level now. The hardest part personally has been going from one of the top people in the YA librarian world to just another person in the YA writer world. That’s been a humbling experience, but I’m hoping my new book — an If You Like Twilight title called The Tear Collector — might move me up a notch or two on the teen novelist ladder.

Did you write creatively as a teen? What did you like to read?

I wrote bad poetry, worse lyrics, and some ok SNL like sketches for my school theater department. My reading – or lack thereof – as a teen I think is pretty well known. As a younger teen if it didn’t have something to do with grown men in their underwear pretending to hurt each other (aka pro wrestling) I didn’t care much. In high school, I read Ball Four by Jim Bouton and Carrie by Stephen King which really turned things around.

What has changed in the teen librarianship profession in the past 10 years?

Wow – that’s a big question. I did talk about this some in my SLJ interview in 8/2006 after I won the ALA Lifetime Achievement Award, but three of the biggest things in the past ten years are the explosion of formats like graphic novels and the energy that’s brought to collections and programming. The second is the way colleagues communicate with each other about teens services, and how they involve teen customers in the discussion. Finally, is a wave of new teen librarians entering the profession / getting involved professionally who seem loaded with energy and ideas for connecting with teens, not just loving the books.

(Have you signed up for Genre Galaxy yet? Join the day of stars and get ideas for books and programs in several genres to inspire teen readers. This event will be held all day Friday, July 10 in Chicago! Authors include:

James Kennedy | Dom Testa | David Lubar
Simone Elkeles | Patrick Jones | Libba Bray | Holly Black

Contact Nichole Gilbert at ngilbert@ala.org to order a ticket and reserve your place!)

Were you a fantasy reader as a teen? Who were your favorite authors then and now?

I wasn’t much of a fantasy reader. I read the classics of fantasy, of course-Tolkien, Lewis, Alexander-but other than that, I didn’t go in for it much. Partly because fantasy wasn’t as huge as it is now, but mostly because I was more into science fiction: Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Douglas Adams, Madeleine L’Engle. I also belonged to a science-fiction book club, and every month in the mail I got an unpredictable melange of awful and awesome and quirky books. Some of it shocked my delicate eyes, because it was SF for adults, and there would be bizarre alien sex scenes or rough language that I vaguely disapproved of.

(I was a pious, prudish child. I recall, after a field trip to the Detroit Institute of Arts in third grade, I came home and tearfully confessed to my mother that I had seen naked ladies in the paintings. She assured me it was OK because it was art.)

In high school I read 1984 and Brave New World only because they were science fiction. They were so good, though, that I went ahead and read everything I could find by George Orwell and Aldous Huxley. The worlds they opened up to me were fresher and more fascinating than the diminishing returns I was getting from science fiction, so I more or less gave up SF. But I still occasionally read it. I read Ender’s Game for the first time last year and I was blown away. Ender’s Game, where had you been all my life? Marvelous.

My favorite books nowadays include The Man Who Was Thursday by G.K. Chesterton, Diary of a Nobody by George and Weedon Grossmith, The Last Hurrah by Edwin O’Connor, A Rebours by J. K. Huysmans, A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole, Seven Men by Max Beerbohm, Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh, Augustus Carp by Henry Howarth Bashford, A House for Mr. Biswas by V.S. Naipaul . . . and so on.

What do you draw from your teaching experiences for writing?

My first job out of university was as a volunteer science teacher for a Catholic junior high school in Washington, DC. I lived with a couple other volunteers and some nuns in a run-down convent.

I only lasted for a year. I was a lousy teacher. I had just finished my degree in physics, and so I kept teaching material that was way over the heads of the class. One time a four-foot-long black rat snake, which I had brought into the classroom for the purposes of science, got loose in the middle of a lab, and so I panicked and killed it in front of my screaming students. I also replaced their annual science fair with a bewildering, frustrating competition where everyone had to construct Rube Goldberg machines. (The science fair was quietly reinstated after I left the school.)

Even still, I had a good rapport with the students. Probably because I was very easily fooled. I remember trying to teach the Doppler effect. I led all the kids outside and ran past them while blowing a note on my trumpet. The kids kept saying, “Mr. Kennedy, Mr. Kennedy, we didn’t hear the pitch change. You’ll have to blow that trumpet while running past us again.” I ran back and forth in front of my thirty students, blasting that stupid trumpet, about a dozen times before I realized they were screwing with me.

Another story: this was 1995, and O.J. Simpson’s verdict was about to be announced. The social studies class upstairs got to watch this on TV as it happened, but I was sick of the O.J. Simpson case, so I told my students they’d have to wait until after class to find out the verdict. But in the middle of class, the floor above our heads shook with pounding stomps. All my kids yelled, “INNOCENT!” It turns out they had worked out a code with the kids upstairs: one stomp meant guilty, two meant innocent. I had been outsmarted.

Another time I, and all the other teachers, received a series of obscene anonymous notes from a student who only signed himself as simply “THE FOGGY WIENER.” This went on for weeks. These notes were masterpieces of absurd, debauched, pornographic, insane imagery, which unfortunately I cannot quote on a family website. We teachers couldn’t figure out who was doing it. We rounded up the usual suspects and troublemakers and brought them into the principal’s office, one by one, to accuse them, “Admit it. You’re the Foggy Wiener.” Of course the kid would inevitably burst out laughing, because (a) he’d never heard of “foggy wiener” before, and (b) the phrase “foggy wiener” is possibly the funniest thing your nun principal can say.

So, what did I learn from all this? Well, from the Doppler and O.J. Simpson incidents, I learned that you mustn’t underestimate the intelligence of a young adult audience. My students often were bored with books that I had liked at their age, because for them, those books were too simple. Nowadays kids are more sophisticated about narrative, because they have been soaking in media more intensely, from an earlier age, than we had. Since they’ve seen a million stories, they will sniff out a cliche or a clunky part faster than you will. So you must always write up, and never presume to write down, for the YA audience. I think that’s why the Harry Potter books were so successful. They dared to be long, complicated, socially rich, and sophisticated in their irony, which satisfied an unmet yearning in the YA audience.

From the “Foggy Wiener” episode I learned that no matter how gross, insane, surreal, or wacky you make your story, it is small beer compared to the actual imaginations of junior high school students. Some adult reviewers have complained that The Order of Odd-Fish is too wild-too whimsical, too absurd, too gross, too hell-bent on jokes. To them I can only say, This book is not written for you. It is written for the Foggy Wiener. And the Foggy Wiener almost certainly hates the kind of books that adult YA reviewers inexplicably routinely favor, i.e., dreary problem novels about disease, divorce, drug abuse, etc. I know I hated those books when I was a kid. I still do. Why is there this persistent subgenre of YA that masochistically glories in cheerless depictions of misery? I have no idea why adults think kids would enjoy them. They must have this notion that such dismal books are somehow “realistic.” In my experience, the relentless drabness of some of those books is more cockamamie, more detached from reality, than the most arbitrary fantasy.

That said, a YA author shouldn’t be afraid to go to the dark places. And fantasy is supremely well suited for precisely this. In fantasy, you can kill the snake in front of the class again and again, and the screams from the kids, instead of being alarmed and confused, are shouts of catharsis. There are some parts of The Order of Odd-Fish that are quite terribly dark, but I was only able to access that compelling darkness through the back door of absurdity and fantasy, and not through the obvious front door of what people are pleased to call realism.

Dreariness is not depth. And comedy and absurdity enjoy privileged access to territory that goes deeper than tragedy, territory that tragedy can’t even comprehend.

Do you have other unusual experiences you put in your writing?

I lived in Japan for three years-one year in Tokyo, and two years in the countryside. I was on the JET Programme, which I enthusiastically recommend to everyone. I was supposed to be teaching high school, but months would go by in which I wasn’t called upon to teach a single class. Instead, my new Japanese friends would take me camping, or fishing, or out to strange restaurants, or to marvelous religious festivals. The generosity and hospitality was overwhelming. They made me feel like a celebrity.

One religious festival that I participated in was the Hadaka Matsuri, or “Naked Man Festival.” In this festival, which takes place on a cold night in February, thousands of men must take off their clothes, put on a “fundoshi” (like a Japanese thong; an old man wraps it around and under you, then YANKS it painfully up between your legs before tying and tucking it to keep it secure), and then run nearly naked down the streets, whereupon you jump in a pool of cold water, circle around an idol a couple times, then jump out, run down some more streets, and climb up into an open-air temple atop some stairs, with countless other similarly naked men, crushed and gasping. Far overhead, on terraces, priests look down on the crowd with supreme contempt, occasionally flinging water onto the crowd, which immediately evaporates into a dirty cloud of yellow steam.

Then, at midnight, the priests throw a bunch of sticks into the crowd, the lights go out, and everyone beats the crap out of each other, trying to get those sticks.

Participants sometimes die in the Hadaka Matsuri, trampled or asphyxiated by the mob. I was pulled under the crowd, people were stomping on my face, I was swimming through bodies, gasping for air, certain I was going to die. I never got near any of the holy sticks-which, if you manage to get them out of the temple, are supposed to confer supernatural virility. It was enough, for me, just to survive.

I didn’t get the sticks; but what I did take out of that festival, and the many other traditional religious festivals I experienced in Japan, was a desire to create a place like Eldritch City in The Order of Odd-Fish-rich with similar bizarre traditions and violent, beautiful rituals. We don’t have the same kind of elaborate public theatrics in America, but I think we all secretly hunger for them. So I put them in my book.

What do you do when you are not writing?

My daughter, Lucy Momo Kennedy, was born just a couple weeks ago. So that’s keeping me pretty busy right now!

I’m also in an art-punk band called Brilliant Pebbles. We’re kind of an unholy mash-up of video game music, movie soundtracks, Eastern European pop music from the 1980s, and gypsy sex metal. Our singer, who emigrated from Poland when she was 8, sings half in Polish, half in English. Her fashion sense is pretty amazing: kind of like She-Ra vomited a rainbow unicorn onto Strawberry Shortcake. Our keyboard player came over from Hong Kong only a couple years ago, and has a similar amazing fashion sense-I’ve never met a man with so many exotic, colorful fanny packs. I was invited to join the band by the drummer, Philip, an old friend of mine. I play the bass. We just finished recording an EP which should be out this summer.

And as it happens, this summer Brilliant Pebbles is going to play at a library! The Oak Park Public Library in suburban Chicago has invited me to come to their library, read from The Order of Odd-Fish, and then Brilliant Pebbles will play. It should be joyfully ridiculous and amazing to be playing for a library full of junior high school and high school students. Usually we just play for jaded hipsters.

I also used to do improv comedy, but that’s not too special in Chicago. Every other person I know has taken classes at Second City or ImprovOlympic or the Annoyance. Improv classes helped me tremendously as a writer, though. Since you’re required to improvise full scenes, or even shows, without a script, it encourages the fertility of ideas, to be open to ideas that might seem terrible at first. A million bad ideas, stewed together and combined in interesting ways, might lead to a couple genius ideas. On the other hand, one good idea, diligently protected and fussed over and kept “safe” from other contaminating ideas, will probably just degenerate into a mediocre idea. Improv taught me to stay open to the glory of bad ideas, that you shouldn’t be afraid to run with a seemingly stupid notion, to turn off one’s internal editor. You can only access the great idea through the terrible idea.

How do you think librarians can best connect with fantasy readers?

I think the best fantasy stories create a world that the reader wants to live in. And the most generous fantasy invites the reader to co-participate in the worlds’ own creation. It’s only fantasy and science fiction, after all, that inspire fan art, fan fiction, and people dressing up as the characters for conventions. The Chocolate War might be a great book, but nobody wants to live in that world, and nobody dresses up as the hapless Jerry Renault.

Like medieval monks adding their own artistic marginalia while copying holy texts, fantasy fans want to be part of the process of creation of the books they love. So maybe librarians can best connect with fantasy readers by encouraging this impulse to co-create. Pick a fantasy book (preferably The Order of Odd-Fish), and encourage fan art, or fan fiction, for that book. Design, make, and wear costumes from the book, and film a scene from it. Do reader’s theater.

And then send this stuff to the author! If the author is anything like me, indeed if the author is rational at all, they will respond with the warmest appreciation, put the stuff up on his or her blog, and possibly will come visit their library. So these kinds of things build on each other.

I’ve noticed that libraries are much more vibrant social centers for kids than when I was growing up. Another way to connect with fantasy readers is to have events that offer something for everyone. At my wife’s library in Evanston, they put on a fantasy festival that involved, first, manga drawing and fantasy video gaming; then I read from The Order of Odd-Fish; and then there was a screening of Spirited Away. People who come for one part stayed for the others. At another library, in Highland Park, they started with chess and fantasy card game playing in the morning, then I read from Odd-Fish, and then there was a screening of Prince Caspian. That was successful too.

The trick is to schedule the semi-unknown author in between two events the kids will certainly show up for. I once spoke at a library that had a video game tournament in the morning. Then the schedule was to have the kids break for lunch, and then come back to see me read from my book. Of course, after the video game tournament, most of them split. I ended up talking to only three kids, when there were originally about three dozen.

What are some of the favorite responses you have received so far on Odd-fish?

I’m astonished at how creative and generous my fans have been. Many have sent me art they’ve made. It might be because Odd-fish is very visual, and it almost cries out for illustrations of its creatures, costumes, mechanisms, and neighborhoods.

I’ve noticed that a good number of young artists on DeviantART are fans of The Order of Odd-Fish. One of the DeviantART artists mentioned on a message board that she’d like to organize her and her friends to dress as some of the 144,444 gods of Eldritch City. They went ahead and invented their own Eldritch City gods, which I thought was fantastic! I loved the idea of Odd-Fish cosplay, so I got in touch with the young lady (a certain DarkshireWarlock) and she drew me some beautiful fan art: Jo (the hero) and Fiona (her rival) dressed up in their divine battle armor for the climactic duel. Jo is dressed as the god “Aznath, the Silver Kitten of Deceit,” and Fiona is dressed as “Ichthala, the All-Devouring Mother.” Marvelous stuff!

Another fan, Libby, wrote a dramatic, intense “two-voice” poem about Odd-Fish. And a Florida woman baked an amazing cake depicting the scene when a giant fish vomits the Odd-Fish lodge into Eldritch City:


My editor said, “This is simultaneously the most impressive and least appetizing cake I have ever seen.” And it’s another example of what libraries can do to connect with fans: this cake was baked for the University of Florida Libraries’ Third Annual Edible Book Contest, in which contestants baked cakes inspired by their favorite books. What a great idea!

Another great response is when Paul Michael Murphy, who is a writer of YA fiction himself, put on an Order of Odd-Fish Week on his blog (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4). Every day he doled out content from a long interview I had done with him, he put up videos of himself and his daughter reading from Odd-Fish, and at the end there was a contest in which participants had to think up their own scholarly specialty as an Odd-Fish knight. I was impressed by the energy, fertility, and ingenuity of the responses! Paul and I picked a winner, and we sent her prizes. I felt very honored to have been the focus for a whole week for that blog’s community!

Probably the most flattering fan response I got was when a high school student named Kevin Buckelew showed up at this year’s ALA Midwinter conference in Denver, proudly sporting a three-foot-long, red-and-white fish hat in honor of The Order of Odd-Fish.

I got hold of a picture of him in his hat, put it up on my blog, and wrote a story about his adventures at the ALA Midwinter conference. In it I revealed that the ALA is a dark cult of snuffling troglodytes, ALA President Loriene Roy was a many-armed lizard clothed in the gruesome remains of beloved children’s authors, and that Newbery winner Neil Gaiman is in fact two millimeters tall and that all his books are written by bees.

Within two hours of it going up, Neil Gaiman somehow found out about the post, was amused, and mentioned it in his own blog. BOOM-my site was crashed with thousands of visitors at once. A lot of people found out about me, and The Order of Odd-Fish, that way. So I owe Neil Gaiman a great debt.

Later Kevin Buckelew, himself a DeviantArt artist, did some fan art for me, which I proudly put up on the blog-it’s when Colonel Korsakov and some squires are chasing the elusive Schwenk through the streets of Eldritch City:

A couple weeks later I got an email from someone named “Jim Rettig.” He claimed that Loriene Roy’s term as President of the ALA had actually ran out, and that he, Jim Rettig, was the current President of the ALA. Therefore, my jokes that were directed at Loriene Roy should’ve been directed at him. He said he didn’t know whether to be relieved or offended at my mistake.

But you know what? I asked around among other librarians, and get this-nobody has ever heard of him! But when you think about it, isn’t it kind of touching? “Jim Rettig” has even made his own cute ALA business cards with crayon and construction paper, he put up his own “blog,” but in fact this mischievous scamp holds no official position at the ALA.

However, I did some further digging around, and learned that there is a “Jimmy Rettig” well-known in librarian circles, a semi-tolerated eccentric who tramps from library to library, telling anyone who will listen that he’s “President of the ALA”! “Just popping in for a quick inspection,” he’ll simper, his eyes wandering over to some donuts on the break table. It’s traditional for librarians give “Jimmy Rettig” a shave and a hot meal and send him on his way. That’s all he really wants.

Sometimes I think it’s almost inspiring. Jim Rettig, the last American cowboy, a wandering minstrel, tramping that open road, a nickel in his pocket and a song in his heart. He’s the last unicorn.

I guess we all wish we could be Jim Rettig, in a way. But then again, we grow up.

What will audience members at the preconference take from your talk?

A sense of furious exaltation. There will be wrestling. This is going to be big, people. Buy your tickets now.

Librarians’ hearts were aflutter yesterday as the New York Times reported on school librarians in their Future of Reading column. Motoko Richs’ article “In Web Age, Library Job Gets Update” features a day in the life of Stephanie Rosalia, a librarian at Public School 225 in Brooklyn. The piece marvels at how she does not simply stamp books and shush students, but rather teaches information literacy. It rose quickly to the #1 slot as yesterday’s most emailed NYT article.

My Twitter network was quite active as we traded links to various responses, and, regrettably, the comments on the article itself. Most dismaying was comment #24 from “suenoir,” a reader who identified herself as a school board president from King County, WA and who felt that school libraries & librarians are superfluous in the face of the Internet and public libraries. She commented:

“If teachers used the public libraries, imagine what could be done with the space now occupied by the library. What if it were a music room? An engineering lab? Students have access to a librarian at public libraries, they do not have access to so many other resources.”

This commenter appears to be affiliated with the Highline Public Schools (Susan Goding, board member, used the email suenoir@hotmail.com in her campaign information which is easily available online).  Goding’s district indicates that they enroll in excess of 17,000 students, and one of their secondary facilities reports that they see an average of around 100 students a day in their media center for regularly scheduled classes, not including students using the library who are not specifically scheduled for instruction. That’s an awful lot of students to absorb at a local public library branch!

This article served to remind us in the library community that our patrons do not always easily or readily understand the differences in purpose between different library types. They may think of us all as interchangeable widgets, able to help in any library we might find ourselves in. This is not so. I had a great email conversation with Liz Burns and Sophie Brookover of Pop Goes the Library on just this topic:

Sophie: This article made me stand up and cheer, right at the breakfast table (because that’s where I read it, after a friend posted it to my Wall on Facebook). Stephanie Rosalia is a perfect example of what a great, properly trained and enthusiastic school librarian can offer, which a public librarian cannot: just-in-time learning opportunities for students that relates directly to what they are learning in the classroom every day. She is exactly the kind of school librarian I want to be when I grow up.

edh:Yes, we public librarians often have very little contact with teachers at individual schools despite robust outreach efforts. I know some patrons get the mistaken impression that we’re not concerned with student needs.

Liz: Public libraries don’t ignore students; far from it! But a public library’s main mission is not to be geared towards students. It’s a system geared towards the entire public. Yes, that includes the homeless; teens; seniors; young mothers; people using the Internet; and students.

edh: I loved how the article and video demonstrated Ms. Rosalia’s ability to incorporate all sorts of content in her school library. She’s obviously deeply involved in the curriculum and learning process in her school.

Sophie:School librarians remix and mash up content from all sorts of sources — online, print, audio, video, and more — every day, all with a view towards matching the right content with the right kids at the right time. Public librarians do this every day, as well, but to be a great public librarian is to be a fantastic generalist. To be a school librarian is to be what many of us are called these days, a media specialist. As a media specialist, your area of specialization is your school’s curriculum. You are aware of a wide body of resources, but you home in on the materials that meet the specific needs of your students’ assignments.

edh:Absolutely! I am not entirely sure that the school board member who commented on the article understands the distinction between our libraries’ functions.

Liz: Saying “use the public library, there is so much more we can do with school resources and money” is like trying to have one’s cake and eat it, too. Because while sometimes there are actual joint libraries (with appropriate funding and staffing), more often shutting the school library does not result in additional funding being given to the public library. So there is an addition of students needing instruction, books and materials for reports, but no funds to purchase those additional books or to hire the needed staff.

edh: And some public libraries have restrictions on the materials they can buy – collection development policies can prohibit us from purchasing the books and media that would best address student learning.

Liz: And that’s aside from the loss of the librarian as teacher. When will those students be able to go to the local library? Students get transportation to schools; they don’t have the same access to public libraries. Those students with parents who have the transportation and time will benefit from school libraries; those students whose parents don’t have ready access to cars and who work while the library is open, won’t be able to use the public library. I’ve been in libraries where there are a good number of local kids who use the libraries; and just as many kids who don’t, because they don’t live close enough to the library to walk or ride a bike safely. Public libraries may be full of students; but can one imagine that if they are filled WITH school libraries available, how overwhelmed those libraries would be WITHOUT school libraries?

Additionally, public library budgets are being cut. What would your school do when the public library cuts hours, staff, and the materials budget? Open up the school library? By that time you’d have a dearth of materials missing from the years it was closed.

edh: That’s just for materials designed to support academic assignments – imagine all the great fiction titles you would have missed out on in the intervening years. The public library alone is not enough to supply a student with the choices they need to read widely for enjoyment.

Sophie: A good school library should absolutely have high-appeal leisure reading. After all, AASL’s Standards for the 21st Century Learner are fully 25% about the pursuit of personal and aesthetic growth, and with that in mind, I’ve sunk a large proportion of my own school library’s budget into high-quality, high-appeal books for my students to read for fun. I’ve been lucky enough to have the unswerving support of my school’s English Department, many members of which have brought hundreds (yes, hundreds!) of students to my Library Media Center for booktalks and reader’s advisory, all in the service of year-round independent reading assignments. This collaborative effort has been so successful that I plan to continue to develop and promote the LMC’s fiction and nonfiction collections for leisure reading.

There are so many opportunities for school librarians to collaborate with public librarians to provide even better services and collections to our students, but I think it’s very important, as Liz said, for school and public librarians to spend some serious time educating the general public about the different missions of each institution, as well.

edh: Yes, letting people know about what we do in different libraries is imperative. I find myself also recommending special libraries to students who have a very specific or advanced assignment. We’re lucky to have special libraries in the Kansas City area that will lend freely to the public and assist students with individual disciplines. The Midwest Center for Holocaust Education library is great for students looking at Judaism and World War II, and the Linda Hall Library has a special collection just for aspiring teen scientists among their more esoteric materials. Access to only one library is never enough!If it takes a village to raise a child, it also takes a variety of libraries to educate them into adulthood.

Erin Downey Howerton is the school liaison at the Johnson County (KS) Library, and is a member of YALSA and AASL.

Elizabeth Burns is a Youth Services Librarian for the New Jersey Library for the Blind & Handicapped. She is active in YALSA and NJLA.

Sophie Brookover is the Library Media Specialist at Eastern Regional Senior High School in Voorhees, NJ. She is active in YALSA and NJLA.

Particular titles dominated people’s conversations here in the Mile High City, so I headed out to the exhibit hall to see for myself.  Here’s some buzz on forthcoming YA books for 2009:

Chasing Lincoln’s Killer by James L. Swanson is the youth version of Swanson’s Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln’s Killer.  The author was heard assuring librarians that the gory details were neither gratuitous nor excised from this adaptation for younger readers.  

Swedish coming-of-age story  When the Snow Fell by Henning Mankell is a companion novel to his previous two books for YA readers: A Bridge to the Stars and Shadows in the Twilight.  To this point I have only been familiar with Mankell’s Kurt Wallander mysteries for adults, so I’m eager to give this one a try.

Many of our teachers request Holocaust stories on a yearly basis, and I am always on the lookout for new additions to our booklists.  Clara’s War: One Girl’s Story of Survival by Clara Kramer is a personal account of 20 months spent in hiding from the Nazis.

The Carbon Diaries: 2015 by Saci Lloyd combines post-disaster scenarios and contemporary environmental issues.  This “ecothriller” is making its message literal as the ARC is printed on environmentally responsible paper and inks (as will the final book).  

A coveted galley at Midwinter has been Wintergirls by Laurie Halse Anderson.  The rumors say that it is a true successor to Speak.  It looks dark and concerns eating disorders – and has already generated a lot of cocktail party discussion!

And last but not least, a companion novel to Graceling by Kristin Cashore has surfaced.  Fire is being snapped up by Graceling fans in hot anticipation.

Although the economy is faltering, it appears that authors’ imaginations are not!  YA publishing for 2009 is off to a roaring start.  Among other sightings were a new Sarah Dessen title, cover art to the Hunger Games sequel, and a succession of werewolf and fairy/faerie titles slowly surpassing vampire tales.  Did you see or read anything awesome in Denver?  Share with the rest of us in the comments section below!

There were two books keeping me sane during my wild and woolly flight back from Anaheim: Hunger Games from Suzanne Collins, of Gregor the Overlander fame… and Barry Lyga’s Hero-Type, reviewed on the blog by Carlie Webber.  Hunger Games was the one book I was determined to get at Annual, and it certainly lived up to its promise.

Hunger Games inherits the crazy premises of both Shirley Jackson’s short story “The Lottery” and Stephen King’s Bachman novella The Running Man.  It’s an unholy marriage to be sure, but the result is compelling, addictive, and relatable for a generation raised on the Survivor television series.

Katniss Everdeen is the sole provider for her family, a sad trio surviving in the remnants of North America (now called Panem) in a district not known for its winners in the annual Hunger Games.  The Games are a televised competition designed to rather cruelly remind the Panem residents that their post-apocalyptic rebellion was futile and that their subsistence economies are controlled by the whims of higher classes in the Capitol district.  Every year, a lottery-style drawing determines which boy and girl will represent their districts in the Hunger Games, where they will fight to the death: last person standing wins food and favor for their district during the next yearly cycle.  Katniss, who has turned to hunting and the black market to feed and clothe her sister and widowed mother, has far more entries in the lottery than usual in her effort to keep her family on the broad edge of survival.  Things might be looking up were it not for the drunken lout who is assigned to coach her district’s candidates, and Katniss’ youthful debt (yet to be repaid) to her male counterpart in the Games.

We’re not worried about whether Katniss can survive the Games as, after all, she’s a hunter and survivalist even in normal times.  The hook is Katniss’ deep desire to sabotage the Games and teach the Capitol a lesson in class warfare they will never forget.  Book groups will find great fodder for discussion in the question of romance in voyeuristic situations, the inequalities that the Capitol inflicts on the Panem residents in the name of keeping order, and the ethics of competition under a microscope a la today’s reality television.

Even though Teen Tech Week was in March, our library used that time to promote something new (for us, anyway) – a teen video contest. One of the challenges we face as a medium-sized library system is keeping our programming lean and focused, so we combined two ideas to make this program work:

1) our Central Library wanted to have a teen video contest this spring

2) we needed high school involvement to fulfill a Big Read grant in April/May

The combination of the programming was great, as it allowed us to use contacts we’d made with Kansas City Public Television and TimeWarner Cable. We were also able to reach out to school districts in a different way through broadcast media classes. In addition to giving the contest a tight focus, we were also able to encourage teens to experience The Maltese Falcon, our Big Read pick.

We’re nearly ready to announce the winner – and we’ve had a lot of fun with this initiative. Check out the demo video that the KCPT interns made for us below, and try a video contest yourself – you won’t regret it!

It’s time to hear from election candidates again – this time those running for the Margaret A. Edwards award committee in 2010.

Candidates are: Terry Beck, Roxy Ekstrom, Kathie Fitch, Cathy Lichtman, Mary Anne Nichols, and Maren Ostergard.

First, tell us a little about yourself.

How do you decide if a book is a “window to the world” for young adults?

What strategies would you use to help the group achieve consensus on a winner?

What new, ineligible author do you think might make a great MAE winner in the far future? (Remember that eligible books must have been printed 5+ years prior to the current award year.)

Thanks for sharing your answers with the membership!
Erin Downey Howerton, MAE committee member 2008

The 2010 Michael L. Printz Award Committee is charged to select from the previous year’s publications the best young adult book (”best” being defined solely in terms of literary merit). Now is your chance to meet the hard working folks who want to spend the next year reading, and rereading, and rereading, and taking extensive notes on hundreds of titles competing for this prestigious award.

Running on the spring ballot for the 2010 Printz Committee are:
Priscille Dando, Teri Lesesne, Jack Martin, Richie Partington, Sheila Schofer, Ann Theis, Cheryl Karp Ward, and Carlie Webber.

Candidates:
1. Please tell us a little about yourself.

2. Tell us how you define “literary quality.”

3. The books will be coming at you fast and furious – what’s your reading plan for the year?

4. How do you promote the Printz winners in your library?

Thanks, and have fun introducing yourselves to the membership!
Erin Downey Howerton
2008 Margaret A. Edwards Award Committee Member