My Q&A with Jon Scieszka

Q: You are slated to give a two hour talk about inspiring guys to read on Monday, April 4 at St. Christopher's, here in Richmond. What are one or two of the most important points you hope to get across?

A: I'm only going to talk for one hour, sign for another. And most of the talking hour will be jokes, so tell people to not be afraid. But my most basic advice to folks is to 1. expand their definition of what they call "reading' to include non-fiction, graphic novels, sci-fi, magazines, audio books . . ., and 2. to let guys be a part of choosing what they want to read. Reading is a very personal activity.


Q: What do you wish you had in the way of reading and writing when you were a kid?

A: I think I had plenty of great reading and writing when I was a kid. I didn't find much reading I enjoyed in elementary school. But outside of school I read the Hardy Boys, Landmark non-fiction books, Dr. Seuss, comic books, MAD magazine, and all sorts of random literature and not-literature around the house.


Q: What event or person made the difference in your life, allowing or encouraging you to become such a prolific and beloved writer?

A: My mom made all of the difference in the world. I was reading Dick and Jane and other equally strange and uninspiring stories in school as I was learning to read. But at home, my mom was the one reading Caps for Sale, To Think What I Saw on Mulberry Street, The Carrot Seed, Go Dog Go and other stories to me that made we want to hear more stories . . . and to ultimately tell some of my own.


Q: What advice do you have for children’s writers whose primary readers are boys?

A: I tell all writers to please not "write for boys" or "write for girls." Write the best story you can. Write what thrills, excites, moves you. Your readers, boys and girls, will find it.


Q: What did you learn about young readers during your two year stint as National Ambassador for Young People's Literature?

A: I knew young readers are smart, but in my first year as Ambassador, I discovered that young readers and writers are even smarter than I had suspected. The crazy range of stories that kids are reading and writing is phenomenal.


Q: What has your work on the NYC Board of Valencia 826 taught you about writing with young people?

A: The work that 826 does connects perfectly with what I learned from kids when I was a teacher -- kids will produce amazing work if there is a good reason to. And the reason at 826 is that kids get to make real books. You use correct spelling so someone else can read your story. You edit the story as many times as you need to so it is the best it can be. You are writing for a reason, not for an abstract assignment. And that is how and why the real world of reading and writing works.


Q: Do you have anything new and exciting in the works right now?

A: I'm in the middle of the crazy 4-book / multi media storytelling extravaganza that is SPACEHEADZ . . . and really enjoying writing with the kids who become Spaceheadz. And I'm also still messing around with stories for the younger guys with TRUCKTOWN.
But my newest, and most unformed project is a YA novel I'm just starting. I don't even know what it's about yet. I'm writing to find out.


Q: Is there anything else you might like to add?

A: With all of the crazy tech developments happening right now, this is a fun time to be a writer/storyteller. I think that kids becoming writers now will take us places we never imagined even 10 years ago. And I can't wait.


Jon Scieszka will speak and sign books at St. Christopher’s School on Monday, April 4 from 7-9 pm. Adults only, please. Tickets are free, but must be reserved at: EventBrite.com Donations will benefit Read Aloud Virginia and Guys Read.

Visit him online at Jon Scieszka Worldwide.

The Right Book at the Wrong Time: A Deviant History of Reading

I have never owned one of those decorative fabric bookcovers meant to hide trashy Harlequin romances, poolside. But still, whether I like it or not, the books I read say as much about my state of mind as a temporary tattoo.

Before I discovered the joys of sneaking out in the middle of the night, I broke bad by reading "Mad Magazine" under the covers with a flashlight long after Lights Out. My mother claims this is why I'm near-sighted now, but I don't care. It was worth it.

In elementary school I blew through a few books a week when I should have been learning something about sports. Or math. Or how to get along with The Republicans.

In high school my friends and I wrote the equivalent of 12 epistolary novels each semester. I read other books too, but literature during that time consisted of decoupaging the bloodied shards of my heart into a spiral bound notebook, passing it off to friends in the hall and then white-knuckling it through Chemistry to read their replies.

Although I took a heavy load of literature classes in college, I got the most pleasure from checking out unwieldy stacks of unassigned books and stashing them by my bed to read with a stolen bit of cheese and box o' wine. I was really pulling a fast one on my professors by sneaking Rilke, Hesse, Nabokov and Rimbaud while Tolstoy, Babel and Sophocles waited patiently for me on the sidelines.

During my 4th or 5th restaurant job after graduating, a waitress-colleague and I passed trashy dating advice books wrapped in brown paper bags back and forth to each other at the cash register- like they were pistols or a pound of weed! We could not risk letting our boyfriends (or the guys on the deck eating tuna melts) know what the hell made us so beguiling.

It seems that around the time of my wedding I was on a book starvation diet and that is why, irrationally, on my honeymoon, I took up basketweaving. A venture into crafts that I repeatedly forced into other venues: stained glass, crotchet, scrapbooking.... all with the same tragic end. Now I leave crafting to the crafty and keep my nose where it belongs, in a book.

I started reading again, in earnest, after I had my son. I read all of the ironic, literary parenting books I could get my hands on--Operating Instructions, Inconsolable: How I Threw My Mental Health Out With the Diapers, etc. They were my lifeline out of the diapers and the boppies.

And then, in the midst of learning how to live with a monkey on my back, I was asked to put together a few cogent thoughts about the books I was reading. Reconciling thinking and parenting was a challenge, and as I struggled not to lactate on the books that I inevitably rolled over in bed, the likes of Breath and Bones and Whores on the Hill breathed life back into my milk-addled brain. Thank God. Not thinking beyond the realm of the mall play area would have done me in.

Untrained as a journalist, but writing for a paper, I clung to certain memoirs by certain writers that schooled me more than any copy editing class at any community college. I laughed my ass off through Nerd Girl Rocks Paradise City: A True Story of Faking it in Hair Metal L.A. and But Enough About Me: A Jersey Girl's Unlikely Adventures Among the Absurdly Famous, praying to one day write my own journalistic tell-all. Or at least pass myself off as a journalist until things got good.

You know how you find some books and some books find you? I was working at a local children's hot spot when I called up my old editor from a locked bathroom stall to see if he might have any extra work lying around. He happened to mention "I Was a Teenage Dominatrix" and I haven't found myself mixing primary colors in an apron ever since.

Lately, Bad Valley has been choosing 9 out of 1o of the books by my bed. She never finishes the dull books and skips straight to the end of the good ones. Yes, my husband has mentioned that he preferred finding "Open: Love, Life & Sex in an Open Marriage" under my pillow on our 7th anniversary to "Ask Me About My Divorce: Women Open Up About Moving On" on the occasion of our 8th. But it's my job to read everything, right? Of course it is.

Still, I felt like I was sharing a secret with my librarian this spring when I checked out "Loose Girl: A Memoir of Promiscuity" alongside Clifford's Birthday Party and Shel Silverstein's "Falling Up."

Not that staying in bed for two and a half days straight to read "The Bell Jar" bodes that well either.

And, really, there's something not right about me reading "Hos, Hookers, Call Girls & Rent Boys: Professionals Writing on Life, Love, Money and Sex," right now in the midst of this economic turndown. Because it seems that writing about life pays a lot less than living it.

I know what Azar Nafisi, author of "Reading Lolita in Tehran," meant when I interviewed her on the phone: "Reading is the one place we can allow ourselves to be promiscuous." But in these desperate times writing about reading about being promiscuous seems a necessary measure, too.

Subterranean Protozoa, Reincarnation & Hope

Ever since landing a repeat role as the drummer in our subdivision's Madonna cover band the summer after fourth grade, I've had a hangup around the idea of being famous. Because life is meaningless if your face isn't plastered in gloss on someone else's bedroom wall. Right?

As a more mature adult, it's been my belief in reincarnation that's helped me reconcile the fact that my name is conspicuously absent from Oprah's bestseller list. I have multiple lifetimes to achieve greatness! My soul has been pretty busy building pyramids, schlepping water in pails out of rivers and rubbing elbows with the Queen. Maybe more than that- I'm not sure- the latest Facebook quiz assures me I'm 88% gay, not big news to my husband THIS lifetime. So after receiving several lovely rejection letters from my first-ever national magazines queries (my fave came from Men's Vogue, which I didn't know existed 10 minutes before I sent them a typed up shard of my latest adventure query-style. Turns out they don't. "Sounds like a good idea, but Men's Vogue is no longer," wrote the editor), I've decided THAT article is just another chapter for the memoir. Which thus far exists 50% as a huge unwieldy mess on my hard drive, 10% in the journal that VANISHED from the face of the earth last month, 7% in my witty, comprehensive, beautifully crafted status updates that disappear into the ether of nowhere land and 33% in my repressed subconscious.

Regardless, I seek out my place on the food chain of literary fame and find myself subterranean protozoa, again and again. And then there's always this perspective offered by my good friend and the oft-published author, Eliezer Sobel last November at the Jewish Book Fair. "How's your book coming?" he asked.

"Miserably," I said. "I'll never get published."

"Well, hurry up and get published so you can be miserable AND published like the rest of us," he said.

So last week, plodding through the unsung joys of domestication peppered with a few rare and erotic moments of inspiration, I organized a panel for a local nonprofit on playwriting and screenwriting. You might say I joined the nonprofit so I could borrow someone else's budget to organize such panels, carting in my handful of wildly successful friends from around the country to the capitol of the South just so I can hear them talk.

Of course prior to the panel, I was most concerned with what to wear. After amassing a pile of unsightlys on the sagging mattress, I headed to the local Exxon to vacuum out the inch of dirt, twigs and volcanic sediment encrusting the bottom of my car before driving to the airport to pick up my good friend Bryan, creator of The Philocetes Project. Handing me change for a dollar, the curly-haired Hispanic woman behind the counter said, "Hey, I see you the last Thursday of every month!" I quickly scanned my memory for all of the various cults I attend regularly but came up blank. "You know, The Writing Show!" she said, introducing herself by way of her name plate, "HOPE." "I started going last October."

"No kidding!" I said. "I hope you can come tonight- it's gonna be a good one."

"I'll try," she said. "But it's the end of the month and there are a lot of inspections to get through."

Right then and there I felt more famous than God. Someone recognized me at the GAS STATION!! My whole attitude and outlook on life changed. When I saw Hope later that night in the front row of the audience splendid in a lavender v-neck, I gave her a huge hug and introduced her to the panel.

So for today, fame may not be what I'm after, after all. As I write this, I'm reminded that for a while there in '98, aspects of my life on the farm in Arkansas paralleled Monica Lewinski's and I never envied her press package one bit.

don't read this book----yet!

So I finally have a 100% shi^&* first draft!
A friend I spoke with on the phone this morning was shocked I had accomplished the amazing feat of the terrible first draft- or any draft-- because of the nature & consistency of my complaints. That I'm getting nowhere fast. That writing sucks. That I have no discipline and just can't get it together. That nobody will agree to sit down and write my book for me.
But somehow-sometime- amidst my kvetching and canoodling I have managed to come up with some pages. Here and there. Around 150 to be inexact. They lack a consistent narrative drive, lots of threads go untied and I switch frequently between past and present tense. There are 2 or 3 paragraphs I would love to show anyone but all in all it is truly awful. At least it would be if it were a book. But it's not, it's a draft and for that reason I am THRILLED.
It was heartening last Friday night to hear Travis Holland- who just won the VCU first Novelist Award for his book, "The Archivist's Story"- say that he wrote 4 or 5 drafts before striking gold. And I'll never forget Jeannette Walls saying that she wrote the first draft of "The Glass Castle" in 5 weeks and then spent the next 5 YEARS revising it. I was in complete shock at the time and thought she must be an incredibly slow writer (yeah, somebody who covers celebrities for MSNBC would be a slow writer) and that couldn't possibly ever be the case with me. Now I'd be tickled fuscia to think that 5 years was my timeline and the NY Times bestseller list was my destination. Again and again I have to pull my mind out of the gutter of the publishing industry and the end product and whether or not Oprah will still have a book club by the time I'm 40 and just remember to concentrate on my task at hand. Writing. Another draft. Page by page.

recycle my paper ridden soul

I don't know about you guys, but sometimes I feel my life is spinnnnnnning out of control. Like when there is not one clean spoon left in the house. Like when Style Weekly moves to 1313 East Main Street, Ste. 103, Richmond, VA 23219 and disconnects the phones and computers while I'm trying to write the calendar for 2008, when my husband keeps his 12 foot windsurfing pole in the bed and starts painting the living room on a Tuesday, when my cat walks across the printer, printing random HP test pages, when NONE of the tupperware lids fit the containers, when we are considering selling the house and renting an apartment in the fan, when I don't know what my purpose is or why I even need one, when my ex-boyfriend appears on the back of the Yellow Pages. (Listen to these existential bourgeois problems!! I should be so lucky!)

Anyway, the other day, I put a dent in the insanity by...........recycling. Ten bags of junk mail, rejected drafts, used envelopes, press releases, half finished never to be sent letters, receipts, scraps of things, grocery lists, remnants of my brain, feline HP test pages, I even recycled the aforementioned phone book. I admit, I am a paper whore. I am a stationery addict. I am a book-o-phile. And I can measure my level of serenity by how often I remember to beat the mean green recycling machine to my driveway at 6 am on a Thursday. And it's not often. But when I do, it's a major purge, like confession on the highest of holy days, the ultimate spring cleaning, a saging of the pulp ridden soul. And now the little recycle bin by my side looks so clean, so pure, so virginal. It won't last long.

what i read in alaska

This was my ship, and that is a whale.

In Alaska I read "Pride and Predjudice," my first ever Jane Austen novel. I lusted after Mr. Darcy and feared that I wasn't as spirited and rosy cheeked as Elizabeth and would never get the chance to run breathlessly across a moor.

I read "Gulliver's Travels" and felt like the at times huge at times tiny traveller of strange and foreign lands.

I read "Hero With a Thousand Faces." Isn't that pretentious? But I was really really trying to make sense out of the Hero's Journey, particularly those journeys upon which the hero repeatedly encounters a whale.

I read the prose-poet W.S. Merwin, particularly those prose-poems involving icebergs.

I read Poe's "Annabel Lee" because Avo the deck-hand had set it to music and kept singing it to the elderly guests after dinner.

I read a select few traditional Hebrew prayers because my mother sent them to me.

I read "She's Come Undone," the Wally Lamb novel about the obese woman who goes through therapy.

I read a Chinese poem about ghosts and drowing that the Chief Steward gave me one day in a card, with a rose.

holograms + me = nerd (squared)

During the past 2 weeks or so I have been reading "The Holographic Universe" lent to me by my good friend and colleague, Mr. Brandon Reynolds (as himself.) I have now learned just enough about how our big old world works to make me dangerous. In fact, I hesitate to even attempt to post about this because I might end up transported to another dimension. Wait! We already exist in multiple dimenisons! That's the beauty of the book. As you travel with it through time and space, you are already there. So, the author, Michael Talbot, begins by drawing the reader in by evoking the image of a holographic Princess Leia and then skyrockets us on to multiple personalities, the collective unconscious, synchronicity, psychokinesis, why placebos might work better than drugs, the effect of brain waves on technology and crazy French people throughout the ages that have been invulnerable to raging fires and falling bolders.

OK, I am not going to try to pretend to attempt to explain any of the phenomena about which I am reading, I just want to admit and brag that I am reading it. Of course, as cutting edge as it may seem- it's actually ancient history, published at the dawn of the end of the last century, the old days of 1991. (the author I just learned died the very next year of Lukemia at the age of 39).

One reason I'm excited to read this book is that it's based largely on the life work of one of Stan's favorite authors and phycisits: David Bohm. Now we have something in common other than our marriage and our child! Now I might have a vague clue as to what he's talking about! However I am in possible and grave danger of becoming an even higher ranking nerd than ever. For example, this sub-chapter heading made me laugh out loud:

"Does Consciousness Create Subatomic Particles or Not Create Subatomic Particles, That Is the Question."

Yes, Michael, that is the question! It is! What?!? I can only read about one chapter a night as I lie in bed next to my son who is watching Ice Age II with Queen Latifah as the Mommy Mammoth and Ray Romano as the Daddy Mammoth, before my brain starts to sizzle and blow blue sparks. But it's a good chapter and a good end to the day- or maybe it's the beginning?

A Readers Lament and other Discrepancies

The difference between what I want to tell people I read and what I actually want to read.

Books to read vs. books finished vs. lonely, abandoned books divided in 2 by long forgotten bookmarks.

The passionate way I read Tom Robbins at 15 vs. the confused, somewhat annoyed way I read Tom Robbins at 32.

The amount of time there is to read vs. the amount of time there is to slough through the dishes, cram laundry in the washer, make playdough doggies with 3 year-olds, cook something, shop for something to cook, go to work, have sex, consider attending church, meditate, volunteer, drive the car around, etc.

The number of new books published in 2007 (195,000!!!) and the days I have in the year to get depressed and angry that so many other people are already published (365!!!)

The books I've read vs. the books my friends have read vs. the books my husband has read vs. the conversations we have that we filter through the words of different authors in our heads.

book lovers

Maybe there shouldn't be a book about every relationship, but every relationship has its book. My first boyfriend, Carter, always makes me think of Dostoyevsky (OK, so that's an entire author) and my college heartbreaker will always smack of Rimbaud's "Season In Hell," particularly "The Foolish Virgin and the Infernal Bridegroom." The Captain of the fleet that I loved from afar in Juneau is "Gulliver's Travels" and the last boyfriend after Alaska and before my husband will, ironically, always be Isaac Singer's "The Magician of Lublin."

When I first met Stan, my soon to be husband, he was reading "The Road Less Traveled" by M. Scott Peck, "Slowness" by Milan Kundera and David Bohm's "Thought as a System." Of course this was a compelling triad, and as hard for me to condense into a simple analysis as his penny loafers and his combat boots, his flannel shirts and his collared rugbys. I was particularly compelled by "Slowness" because that was my new dating motto and I had just read some Milan Kundera myself. But "Slowness" does not properly characterize Stan's reading profile. Stan is an intense reader, but as I think about it, I can honestly say I don't know if we've ever read the same book! OK, that's not true. We've read all the Harry Potter's and I've started the Golden Compass series that he's read about 10 times. But Stan's main passion for reading lies more in the equation than the word. Physics, science, math and action/adventure novels abound. Right next to me at this desk are: "The Sun, the Genome & the Internet," by Freeman Dyson, "The Computer and the Brain" by John von Neumann and "Circles: fifty round trips through history, technology, science and culture," by James Burke. He's also always reading that Feynman guy (he has 3 humongous volumes that look larger than the freakin' encyclopedia), Einstein and actual physics textbooks. He keeps a Calculus manual in the bathroom and has "Meta Math: the Quest for Omega" by Gregory Chaitin on the coffee table.

I don't know if I could make it all the way through one of these books, no matter how compelling I found the subject matter and he wouldn't even pretend to be interested in reading 99.9% of mine. That used to drive me crazy. I had this vision of us lying in bed and reading to each other. To be fair, he has humored me a couple of times, but I can see him rolling his eyes behind the book. These days, I happily read my piles of memoirs, lite-novels, heavy novels, advice books and spiritual tomes (mostly) without shouting "honey! you've got to stop everything and read this!" And, occasionally he'll tell me his newest thoughts about polarizing different colors of light or number theory and I'll really mean it when I say that's nice, dear. But we have come to accept that we are very different readers, just like he is obsessed with motorcycles and I am not. All I can say is, when the shit really hits the fan and things start to fall apart, I'm glad somebody in our house understands quantum mechanics.

Mental Radio

Sometime last year, I had a dream about my friend Bryan Doerries (a fellow counselor at the UVA Young Writer's Workshop, you know the one all the 15 year old girls had crushes on?). I dreamt that he started a radio station, and the next day I wrote to tell him about my dream. As it turns out, he was trying to start a radio station, and he was reading the book "Mental Radio" by Upton Sinclair. So, I too, bought "Mental Radio" and between Richmond and NYC, Bryan & I conducted some of the same transmission techniques Mr. Sinclair did on a regular basis with his wife. I am quite convinced, that if we had stayed with it just a little bit longer, by now we'd be exchanging "Mental Emails" without even having to bootup or download. Bryan, now a well-known playwright in NYC, is recently married and has an intense passion for typewriters. He even had his mother wait in a Denny's parkinglot in the middle of her East Coast roadtrip in order to give me a typewriter he'd bought for me at a thriftstore. Then he sent the typewriter ribbon in the mail. Thank you, Bryan! No matter that you practically have to use your elbow to punch the keys, it is a real thing of beauty! So, when I heard an NPR interview with Darren Wershler-Henry about his new book, The Iron Whim: A Fragmented History of Typewriting, I ordered it for Bryan and had it sent to him straight away. Turns out it came on his birthday! Mental Radio to you Bryan and congrats on your marriage!

books: not supple models make

Well. I have found that books are not very photogenic. This morning, I tried to photograph 4 of my current reads atop a silky red robe. I found the results disappointing. They were flat, 2-D and uninspired. So this post goes without illustration. I am more of a verbal person anyway. A talker. A writer. A reader. I even love to read license plates. I think I only got about half of the experience of Florence, and that through a haze of hash and chianti. Art dripped off the street corners, the street signs, it was even in the garbage of the alleyways. It practically bit me in the face, but my focus was on the cocentric circles of Dante's rings of hell, Calivino's surreal world of inverted stories and the mythological mis-matches of Boccaccio's lovers.
*********************************************
May 1, 1996
My thoughts are almost completely consumed by my story which is taking away from the importance of this crazy reality. Two days ago we spent 3 1/2 hours at the police station filing a report for our denuncia. Then we got led through restricted Kafka sections of the train station to find a package of insect repellant from my mother. And then Francesco, the cop, the schitzophrenic neighbor from upstairs and Barbara the landlady all came over at the same time and yelled at each other in our foyer. Halfway through, we discreetly closed the door and hid. I have five weeks left which is a knife in my heart and my wings of flight. Gwen saw the Psychic Boyfriend walking by her phonebooth eating Dove icecream. Everyone we see in the street we think to be the one who broke down our door. There are countless suspects. I realized that 2 different Diegos have come by to retrieve 2 different tapes on 2 different occasions. I can't stop smoking and the weather won't stop raining. I can't stop writing and trying to figure this damn story out. I am so completely myself that I can't see, think, feel or hear anyone else. I realize that I am a fucking woman and a writer and that I'll be both all my life.

Firenze, Italia
76 Via Guelfa
Age 20

How can I be true?

With so many smart, insightful, sensitive, sexy books to choose from, how can I be true? Is there enough of me to go around?

Books have always been my primary love (aside from chocolate eclairs, cowboys and, um, my husband of course). I have had many fiery one-night stands as well as long, committed relationships with books. Someone I know (a college professor? Erma Bombeck? Mr. Noodle?) said they wanted to be the kind of person who finished every book they ever started. Well, I wish I were that kind of person too. But me, monogomy and books have never made it last. There are more than eeehhh a dozen half finished books laying next to my bed alone. Not to mention on my desk, in my closet, in the attic, in my son's room and piled next to the toilet. Yes, I am a book slut.