1. Please tell us about your latest work, A Song Called Home, and any future works you’d like to share about. A Song Called Home is the first middle-grade novel I've written after making a career out of YA. It's a story based in personal experience (but far from an autobiography) about a newly eleven-year-old girl who is dealing with her mother's remarriage and a subsequent family move. In a way it's a very classic kind of MG realism story, in which nothing epic or magical happens, but the character has to deal with a lot of change, loss, and new realities that feel like they're happening all at once. I'm interested in how we experience nostalgia even at a young age--that longing for something you know you can't get back. It's also at least a little bit about a mysterious guitar that shows up near the beginning of the book. As for future works, I think my next book will be a follow-up to this one, but I'm always cautious about saying anything definite until it's really done. 2. I love your work on creativity — what leads you to craft both fiction and nonfiction? While I read mostly fiction for the first thirty or so years of my reading life, I've become an avid reader of nonfiction, too. I love history, biography, and even a little bit of politics. There have been personal essays and memoirs that have deeply affected and helped me process my own experiences, and they make me want to respond with my own attempt at articulating my thoughts. I think because I write novels that are very grounded in realism, it's not a far leap to try to say some of the same things about being human in the form of essay or memoirish stuff. And because so much of my time and mental space is taken up by being a writer, I tend to gravitate toward that as the metaphor for everything.
3. What draws you to write for young readers?
Honestly, I think it's more that I'm drawn to write young characters than to write for young readers, though that's naturally the end result when you publish on the children's literature side of things. Young characters allow me to explore a lot of the minutiae of being a person in relationships with other people in a way that's free of the layers of defense and analysis that adult characters tend to come with. The journey from childhood to adulthood is really so dramatic in and of itself, with so many possible detours and surprises and obstacles. The trick is to try to find the right container in which to tell those stories--i.e. the plot or story of a given novel.
4. Any message for young creators — and the teachers who work with them?
One of the hardest things for any creator in a world where we can so easily submit our work for judgment (likes, dislikes, disinterest) is to give ourselves total freedom and permission to fail. It's really important to take creative risks, especially when you're young and starting out. Try the thing you're pretty sure you can't do, do something badly, make a mess, do it "wrong." I imagine some teachers (and parents) find it hard to let go of their own anxieties about control or correctness, and find themselves projecting those anxieties onto students in ways they pick up on and internalize. Most people I know could be a lot better at letting go!
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