Books I Love: Habibi

Title
Habibi
Author
Naomi Shihab Nye
I first read this book
during my senior year of college in 1998

I first learned about Naomi Shihab Nye from a poetry reading she gave at Texas Lutheran University, the college I attended. During her presentation, she read a poem about Shiner, a small town in central Texas that was ten miles from my own hometown.

At that point in time, lots of people in Texas had never heard of Shiner (although that has changed now due to increased marketing of Shiner Beer), so it was quite a shock to hear a poet mention it. After the reading, Nye was signing books, and I went up to her and asked if she had ever been to my hometown. She said, "No, but I want to live there for a year."

This baffled me. Like people from small towns often do, I thought my hometown was the dead end of the world. Who in their right mind would want to live there?

But I was also baffled for another reason. Why would anyone want to live somewhere for only a year? Why go to all that trouble to move if it's only temporary?

I remained fascinated by Nye, however. Something about her poetry combined with her amazingly open way of seeing the world intrigued me.

While I was attending my first Texas Library Association conference (technically the exhibits only) in San Antonio, I spotted a children's book with a gorgeous cover. Seeing Nye's name on it meant I had to read it. As it was a finished book and not an advanced reader copy, I paid for it and took it back to my college apartment to read. What a wise decision that was!

Habibi is inspired by Nye's own childhood when her family moved to Jerusalem to be closer to her paternal grandmother. It is a beautiful story of an American girl learning about her cultural heritage, her family, and herself while far away from the life she is used to living.

Each chapter begins with these poetic sentences that are simply perfect. I wish I could write like that. I wish I could think like that. I'll never be a poet, but I do love to read it. Habibi is prose, but it reads like poetry. It's nothing less than beautiful and has stayed with me all these years.

Books like Habibi make me think there could be a more peaceful, tolerant future for the world. People like Naomi Shihab Nye make me think that, too.

Teen Services Today: A Practical Guide for Librarians

I have a new book out! It's a nonfiction book about teen services in public libraries that I co-wrote with Geri Swanzy, a friend and colleague, called Teen Services Today: A Practical Guide for Librarians.

Writing this book was a different experience from writing fiction. For one thing, my name was suggested to the editor by another library colleague. I knew writing nonfiction would be different and recruited my friend Geri, so we could share the work. The two of us wrote a proposal for the book and were pleasantly surprised when it was accepted by Rowman & Littlefield.

The biggest difference between my experiences writing fiction and my experience writing nonfiction was the actual process of writing. And I don't just mean having a collaborator. We wrote this book out of chapter order and sent the individual chapters to our editor as we completed them. With fiction, the entire book is written before I send it to my agent.

While we were writing this book, we faced a number of hurdles. Since we set our own deadline with the initial proposal, we foolishly gave ourselves about six months to get this all done. Little did we know that I would accept another job and move 1200 miles during that time. And that's not even factoring in vacations and conferences!

We wrote the book for new librarians or paraprofessionals to give them some background, history, resources, and programming ideas to help them serve the teens in their communities. Our goal was to make it chatty and easy to read.

I hope Teen Services Today proves helpful to those library staff members who need and use it.

Books I Love: Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

Title
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
Author
J.K. Rowling
Illustrator
Mary GrandPré
I first read this book
during graduate school in 1999

While I love all the Harry Potter books, my favorite is the third book in the series. This is the book where all the pieces fit together so perfectly that it feels like the world's most complicated jigsaw puzzle. It also expands the universe of the story Rowling is telling as we learn more about Harry's history and see the full scope of his loss.

It introduces us to Dementors, utterly terrifying creations that are the personification of depression. What I find most fascinating about Dementors is that the best treatment for an encounter with them is chocolate. Of course it is! Chocolate is the best cure for anything.

But what truly inspires me about this book is the plot. I do not possess Rowling's skill at plotting, and I am envious. Every piece of this story falls perfectly into place, creating one whole story while still feeling like part of a larger work.

Harry? Is that you?

photo by Sara K Joiner

Rowling is a master at doling out clues in little bits and pieces throughout the course of the series. There are clues in the second book that don't become important until the sixth! How does Rowling do this? I've seen that plot outline for Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (the longest of the books), and it absolutely terrifies me.

I am not a plotter. When I write, I have a beginning (which usually changes over the course of numerous drafts) and an ending. I also have what I call "things that need to happen" throughout the course of the book. In some cases, because I generally write historical fiction, I might have a specific order in which those things must happen, but sometimes I can move them around as I need.

I don't outline. I feel like once I've outlined a story, before I've finished a first draft, I've told it, and I no longer have an interest in writing it.

When I read something like Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban or any of the other Harry Potter books, it challenges me. I'll never be able to plot a book like J.K. Rowling, but I can keep trying.

Update on After the Ashes

It's been a year since friends of mine started sending me messages on Facebook that they had received their copy of After the Ashes in the mail.

I still have a hard time believing that a novel I wrote was published.

Since the official publication date in October, a great deal has happened to me.

I accepted a new job and moved to Indiana in December. That has been an adjustment, since I am certainly not a winter person.

But the good news is that After the Ashes received some recognition.

First, it was named to the National Science Teachers Association list of Outstanding Science Trade Books for Students K-12. That was a shock, because science was not my best subject in high school. I avoided it almost entirely in college. After the Ashes was one of only two fiction titles on the 52-title list. Other authors on that list are science writers I've been reading for years -- Cathryn Sill, Steve Jenkins, Robin Page, Sneed B. Collard III, Gail Gibbons, Sandra Markle, Sy Montgomery, and April Pulley Sayre. Marianne Dyson, one of the members of my former critique group in Texas was also on the list, so I am humbled by the company I'm in.

After the Ashes sharing a list with authors I admire.

Then, as if that weren't cool enough, it was also named to the Bank Street College of Education's Best Children's Books of the Year for ages twelve to fourteen! Once again, After the Ashes is sharing space on the list with amazing historical fiction authors like Avi, Melanie Crowder, Carolyn Meyer, Michael Morpurgo, and Pam Muñoz Ryan.

On top of the recognition, I even got to speak at the Wizard World Comic Con in Philadelphia with Marie Lamba and Genese Davis, who also arranged everything. That was incredible. I never in a million years thought I would be speaking at a comics convention.

I also participated in the B-Fest Teen Book Festival at my local Barnes & Noble. Although it was a small group in attendance, I talked about the research I did for After the Ashes, and it went well.

It has been quite a ride with After the Ashes. I hope to keep pushing forward. In the meantime, I'm working on another manuscript.