The Former Anne Spollen's Author Blog Is Being Retitled to "Notes from Living Upghetto": May 2008

Thursday, May 29, 2008

Behind the Blog: Another Perspective

One thing about reading blogs or myspace profiles is they only give you an idea about that person. My name is Philip, and I am going to guest blog on my mom's blog and give another point of view.

I am in the eighth grade this year. When my mom's book came out, a lot of the girls in my school bought it and they kept asking me questions about the plot. I haven't read it yet because it's not required. If a book isn't required, I pretty much don't read it.

It's a little bit weird growing up with a mom who is a writer. When I was little, we used to get magazines in the mail and we would find mom's name in them. I thought all mom's wrote until I was in the first grade and none of the kids in my class had moms who had stories in magazines.

Mom is very big on reading. She's the kind of mom who buys everyone books for their birthday, and then asks them if they liked the book like a week later. She bugs us all the time about not reading and tells us we are going to end up homeless if we don't start reading more. She says weird stuff to us, like, "Why don't you go journal that and see what you come up with?" And she puts commas on birthday cakes.

But there are good things about having a mom who writes. She can figure out the symbols in a movie right away. I have perfect English homework. And she's easy to buy a present for: we just get her gift cards to bookstores. This usually backfires though because she comes home and says, "Look what I found for you to read at the bookstore today, Philip." That's my mom.

Wednesday, May 14, 2008

Living A YA Theme

If asked, and I haven't been, but if asked what a major YA theme is, the one that comes to my mind first is the learning and earning of trust.

After we moved to a new state, I knew it would take time for my boys to meet new friends. They had mingled with the same kids since pre -

school. I took for granted the convenience of knowing all the parents. In a new state, none of us had any idea as to a kid's background. I had never realized how much I had navigated my sons' choices in friends: steering them away from homes where lawns grew cars, and the insides of houses smelled like cabbage boiled in beer.

Here, in our new home, my teens experienced a battlefield promotion: I had to trust them to go

to school and come home with friends. All that lip service about me trusting them to make the right choices would now be tested. For all of us. I was terrified. But I knew (because I watch Dr. Phil) that I had to let them make their own choices. Here is one choice I met this morning:

6:46 a.m. -- My front door opens after a rapid knock. In my foyer stands an obese teenager in big boy shorts that reveal a good deal of his skull and crossbone boxers. My nine year old daughter, still in her nightgown, opens her eyes very wide and takes her cereal bowl into another room. "Phil home?" the teenager asks. I say I'll get him.

6:47 a.m. -- Philip explains that Josh is "amazing" because he can eat an entire pizza. "And they give that award through the Kennedy Center, right?" I ask. "No, Mom, you don't understand." I know I have to be quiet. I nod and go back down to tell Josh that Philip will be right down. I know I should be quiet, accepting, all that Zen mother stuff, but I can't help it. "So," I say casually, "how did you meet Philip?" Josh explains that they met while taking the late bus home. "Oh," I say happily, "you're in band, too?" "Nah, I was in detention."

6:49 a.m. -- We both look up as Philip opens his bedroom door. "Hey, Josh, show my Mom that

thing you have on your tongue." He obliges and I mumble something polite about his piercing. "He's going to get his tongue split when he turns 14, " Philip says enthusiastically. "Split?"

"Yeah," Josh says, "it's kind of an inside joke. See," Josh says, grinning, "me and Satan," and he

crosses his middle finger over his index finger, "we're like this."

"Wait, Mom," Philip says, "it's kind of a song he's writing. I'll explain it to you later." Philip and Josh turn to the door. Josh goes a little ahead. "Mom, listen," Philip whispers, "we can talk about it when I get home, ok? That thing about Satan...it's just a joke with him. It's what he does."

"Right," I whisper, "because that's the only problem."

Philip starts laughing and turns to look at me one last time before running to catch up with his new friend. I watch them until the bus disappears around the corner, remembering that like all YA themes, there is a quieter adult parallel.

Sunday, May 4, 2008

Something About Teens

I am, quite openly, not much of a movie fan. I've never had the same quality of experience while watching a movie as I've had while reading. I endure most movies, but I cannot abide romantic comedy of any sort. Ever. So last night, after a really scattered week, I wanted to spend time with my two boys."Let's rent that movie, Something About Dan," they suggested. They had previewed a scene where Dan gets a couple of tickets, they said as I winced, and I should be open to new experiences. I shouldn't pre-judge. My own words coming back to me. A browsing Blockbuster customer told us the movied had gotten excellent reviews. The boys smiled smugly.

So fine.

A third into the movie, as the Disneyesque tribe of family gathered and played board games, ate amicably at a Viking-sized table, and openly discussed their emotions, my oldest son started laughing. "There's like nothing wrong with these people," he said, "all they do is get angry then frolic. It's a fury and frolic movie."

Thinking I had missed this genre, I asked him to explain.

"Watch. They get mad, then they go and put on a talent show or hop around on the lawn. No family is like this. No one gets drunk or stays mad or is really fat and weird. I never met a family like this. It's like a family made up by camp counselors."

"I think it's a lake house," I pointed out, "they all gather there."

"Right. And everyone gets along the whole time. No one messes up," my middle guy added.

"I think he likes his brother's girlfriend," I pointed out, "that's the conflict."

"So? That's the whole conflict cause like nothing else is going on. Right about right now, I'd like to see a bear come along or someone take out a gun and do something crazy," my oldest guy said, "you know he's going to get together with that girl in the end because nothing happens in this movie like it happens in real life."

"So what? Did you want him to kill his brother or something?" I asked. "Maybe take the grandma hostage?"

"Nah," Philip, my middle guy said, "just like mess him up or fight or insult him. And how come all of those kids get along so well? They do what the adults say almost every time. And they're all dorks."

"Yes," I said eagerly, "that's not at all like you two. They're so wonderfully obedient."

They both laughed. "Pull this crap," they agreed, "put something on that's realistic."

We ended up watching the last hour of To Kill A Mockingbird, the old black and white version where Tom Robinson's undeniable innocence falls victim to racism. The boys had no comments while watching this except to say it was pretty good.

Pretty good.

Perhaps that's the lure of YA literature: the audience has such a low b.s. threshhold that romantic comedy would never be a possible genre...

Books

Light Beneath Ferns

"I have this strange sense that my silence is preparing me for something I can't name . ."

Elizah Rayne is nothing like other fourteen-year-old girls. More interested in bird bones than people, she wraps herself in silence. Trying to escape the shadow of her gambler father, Elizah and her mother move into an old house that borders a cemetery. All her mother wants is for them to have "normal" lives. But that becomes impossible for Elizah when she finds a human jawbone by the river and meets Nathaniel, a strangely hypnotic boy who draws Elizah into his dreamlike and mysterious world.

Only by forgetting everything she knows can Elizah understand the truth about Nathaniel—and discover an unimaginable secret.

Teen made trailer for Light Beneath Ferns.

Order Light Beneath Ferns here.

Foreword Magazine's Review of Light Beneath Ferns

Excerpt from THE SHAPE OF WATER

CHAPTER ONE
I discovered windows one afternoon and after that, nothing was ever the same. They had always been there, of course, glass panes shimmering in the color of rain, but that spring for the first time, I was able to open the windows in my room. For years, the locks had been painted stuck, and during the winter, heat from the radiator beneath my windows finally steamed off enough paint off the metal wings of the locks could be twirled open. Knowing that I could open the windows attracted me to them, and I began sitting under the windows, staring through the glass at the sky. From that position, on a chair in my room, the sky did not seem real; it seemed a place I was making up, so I watched it.
The white wood of the window panes acted as frames so the sky came to me slowly, and the huge openness of its space did not touch me. All the window glass in our old house had wavers and bubbles inside it, so at times the clouds moved like water, melting and blurring until they passed outside of the warp. After a few afternoons of sitting, the heavens seemed too quiet to keep watching so I began watching a small patch of woods next to our yard that housed little more than trees and a scatter of bony, mean-looking rabbits.
I started gazing at the sky and the woods in March when the branches were still wet and it was then, with nothing outside my window but trees and rain, that I noticed a shine inside darkness, I noticed colors glimmering within the darkness of the wood. I watched birds come and go, I watched rain nipple down from buds to the grass. The water dripping from branch edges and leaves created optical tricks; I could see that as I watched leaves melt.
Then one day I ventured into the space outside. I did not think about doing this much beforehand. I simply opened the window and dropped to the ground below, uncertain as to why this should be such a more satisfying exit than simply using the door; my father worked until seven o’clock and I could do whatever I wanted until then. But I liked the solid sound my legs made when I landed. Leaving via a five foot drop seemed so much more a decision than just using a door. The sense of escape made my heart pound, though all I escaped was the soundless spread of moss-colored light inside my house and the silence.
I had come to know silence well during those months after my mother died. When you sit in silence long enough, you learn that silence has a motion. It glides over you without shape or form, but with weight, exactly like water. Its color is silver. And silence has a sound you hear only after hours of wading inside it. The sound is soft, flute notes rising up like the words of glass speaking. There comes a point when you must shatter the silence, when you must shatter the blindness of its words, the blindness of its light. I did this by going into the yard. Once I stood there, in the grass next to the trees I had been watching, I found silence outside as well. But I was happier outside than I had been in the house, so I stayed for a bit. I stood beneath my bedroom window for a few minutes, looking up at the branches and the crooked pieces of sky colliding between the branches. I believed I could identify the scent of the sky as I stood there, a blue menthol fragrance similar to the scent of seawater that sprayed into my face when I first dove into the ocean. That initial scent smelled much more subtle than the ocean’s heavy, fishy aroma, a whiff of salt and mint that warned a more powerful scent would enter my nose just as I approached the water on a dive. It was the scent I dreamed in. And it was the scent of that spring sky as I stood in my yard.

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