By Cecil Castellucci

Photo courtesy of Antti Miettinen (flickr.com)

The village was all the world that anyone knew.  There was darkness and forest all around except for the strange lights that beamed through the trees casting its eerie glow on certain nights.  For as long as anyone could remember the mission of the town was to survive whatever lived out in the woods.  Something was out there that had shrunk the known world.  To survive it meant every year a girl must go outside of the strong wooden gates that kept the town safe to visit Grandmother.

The girls who have just turned fifteen are lined up in the center of town and the girl who is chosen dons a red cloak and walks out beyond the gates to bring supplies to Grandmother.  Sometimes there is only one girl who stands there.  If so she is automatically the chosen one.  Other times, like this year, there are a few, and so all the girls put their name into a hat and one name is picked. That is how Marie came to be the one.

“But whose Grandmother?”  Marie asks.

“Don’t ask questions,” her mother replies.

No one ever asks questions.

Once the girl is chosen, the family of the chosen girl has one week to prepare.  The women in the family busily sew as elaborate a red cloak as they can.  The richest families cover the cloak in jewels, the poorest make do with brilliant dyes.  No matter.  The cloak always dazzles in the little bit of sun that shines through as the girl leaves the confines of the town.

Except for the Huntsmen, no one else ever goes beyond the gates.  They keep to themselves.  The only difference is that the Huntsmen always come back.  The girls in red never do.  Perhaps it is because they do come back that the Huntsmen always look haunted and tired.  They never want to share what they see outside the gates. They never mix with the townsfolk.  They live apart in a barrack by the watchtower.  And although it is never spoken amongst the townsfolk, it is understood that there is something in the woods that makes the Huntsmen this way.  As though there is something to be seen that cannot be unseen.

“What happens to them, mother?  Where do the Red girls go?” Marie asks.  She is curious and excited about her adventure.  It is an honor to be the chosen girl.  To do a duty to keep the town safe.

“Hush now, and stand still.  I don’t want to stick a pin in you,” mother says.  Marie’s cloak is neither too fancy nor too plain.

But Marie wonders about the girls.  Mostly she wonders about her friend Franca, who was chosen the year before.

Supplies are readied. The family follows a strict list.  Only the things itemized on the list are allowed.  Candles are collected.  Fruits and meats are dried.  Preserves are canned. A quilt is made.  They are all packed onto a small red wagon.

It is the Red girl’s family obligation to feed the whole town for a goodbye feast.  Marie is lucky.  Her brother is one of the Huntsmen.  He makes sure to kill a big deer.  He delivers it, but although their mother asks him to stay and sit with the family, he refuses.  On his way out of the house, in the garden, he catches sight of Marie harvesting the lettuce and his hard look softens.

“Here, take this,” he says.  He presses a small hunting knife into the palm of her hand.

“Will I need this?” Marie asks.

“It’s getting harder to hunt in the woods,” he says.  “The game is moving further away.”

“Will I have to learn to hunt?” Marie says.

“I don’t know.  Perhaps,” her brother says.  “Keep it hidden.  Keep it with you.”

He turns and walks away.  Marie puts the knife in her pocket.  She does not tell her mother or anyone else about it.  It is her brother’s gift to her and it is not a thing on the list of the things that a girl in red must bring to Grandmother.  It is their secret.  Marie decides that she can do her duty and keep the knife.  She will take the knife with her beyond the gate and into the unknown.   It will remind her of her brother who she never sees anymore and sorely misses.

“It will be useful,” she says to herself.  “Grandmother will be so glad that I have brought a knife.”

Marie The Red, as she is now called, sits in the house and is visited every day before the Feast of Leaving by all the people in the village, and thanked.

“Thank you,” the mayor says.

“Thank you,” the butcher says.

“Thank you,” Marie’s best friend says.

But what they are really saying is goodbye. Never once has a Red girl come back from beyond the gate.

The girls who are chosen all have their own theory about where they are to go.  To a rumored city in the North.  To a palace on a mountain beyond the forest.  To a hut in a desert a million miles away.

Marie thinks, “To the stars.”

There is much drinking at the feast.  The town drinks to forget that Marie will be leaving them in the morning.  The only person who remains sober is Marie and one of the Huntsmen, Peter.  Marie wishes that it was her brother that stood with her but he has chosen to stay behind in the barrack.  He has not even come to say goodbye.  Marie feels the knife in her cloak pocket.  She presses her gloved thumb against the point until it she feels the prick of it.  The pain makes her not cry.

“Why did my brother not come to be the Huntsman to walk me to the gate?” Marie asks.

“He could not bear to see you go,” Peter says.

“Why did my brother not come to the Feast of Leaving?” Marie asks.

“It’s better this way.  You must do your duty and we cannot get in the way,” Peter says.  But it seems to Marie that he wants to say more.  Instead, he pulls her red cloak tighter around her shoulders.

For the rest of the evening Peter stands with her and does not say a word.   Together they look over the feast.  Sober.  Somber.

In the morning, Peter the Huntsman comes to her house to get her.  Marie’s family, still asleep, do not stir to say goodbye to her.  Peter the Huntsman walks Marie to the edge of the town where the gate that leads to the forest is.

“Do you go outside the gate often?” she asks him.

“Only to hunt,” Peter says.

“Have you ever seen the city?” she asks.

“I’ve never seen anything,” he says.

“What about Grandmother?” Marie asks.  “Surely you’ve seen her.”

“I’ve never even seen her house,” Peter says.

“Isn’t it just on the path? You could come and visit me,” Marie says.  “I could bake you a cake.”

“I like cake,” he says.

That is when they reach the gate.

Peter takes out the key and unlocks the gate.

“Never take it off,” Peter the Huntsman reminds her, touching the beads on her red cloak. “Never, until you are at Grandmother’s house.”

Marie steps through and onto the path in the woods.  Peter the Huntsman locks up behind her.  Marie hesitates and turns to talk to him through the gate.  She thinks that perhaps she should have kissed him.

“Wait!” she says.  “Wait!”

Peter comes to the gate.

“What is it?” he asks.  “You should get moving.”

“What do you think is out there?” Marie asks. “Wolves?”

“If you like,” he says.

Impulsively Marie kisses her fingers and puts them through the gate to Peter’s lips.  He blushes and then winces and steels himself.

“Go on now,” Peter says.  “Go!”

Marie pulls on the wagon overloaded with all the supplies.  It is heavy but she manages and pulls it down the path.  She wonders if she’ll know where to stop.  She only knows that she is to go to Grandmother’s house.  She only knows that it is on the path.

She walks for hours.

She feels as though there are eyes watching her from behind the trees.  She hears noises.  She thinks she hears voices on the wind.

“Where are you going, Girl?” the wind asks.

“To grandmother’s house,” Marie says out loud.  “To grandmother’s house I go!”

She pulls on the wagon harder.  Her red cloak is heavy and too warm for the spring weather.  But she knows that the one thing she must do is keep wearing it. She wonders why the red of it will keep her safe while on the path to Grandmother’s.  She wants to take it off but her need to follow the rules is stronger.  She must never deviate.  It is her duty.

On the path, there are the skeletons of animals that she does not recognize.  She wonders if these unknown beasts are what haunt the Huntsmen.  It is getting dark and there are the strange lights in the sky.  Marie begins to despair that she will never find Grandmother’s house and then she finally she sees it.  It is a small cottage with a gate and a garden that rests just a bit off the path.

“This must be it,” she thinks.

She wonders what Grandmother looks like.  She wonders if Grandmother will like her.  She wonders if she has brought the right things.  Marie knocks on the door.

“Grandmother?” Marie says.  “Grandmother?”

Slowly, the door opens and from behind it peers an old woman.  She is silver haired and wrinkled.  Her hands are gnarled.

“Oh, Marie it’s you!” the old woman says.  “Oh, why did it have to be you?”

The old woman looks at Marie as though she is looking at an old friend. It makes Marie uncomfortable.  Marie looks closely at the old woman and except for something around the eyes, she is certain that she does not know her.

It makes Marie wonder whose Grandmother this is.  But Marie knows her duty is to pretend that this Grandmother is her Grandmother.

“Hello, Grandmother,” Marie says.

The old woman sighs and opens the door all the way and lets Marie in.  There is a small fire roaring.  There is a small table with cheese and apples.  There is a large bed with a heavy quilt.  There is a wall lined with pegs upon which hang many red cloaks.   Marie knows to hang her cloak with the others.

“Do you have enough supplies?” Grandmother asks.

“Yes, I have everything on the list,” Marie says.  She does not mention the knife.

“Good,” Grandmother says.

Photo courtesy of Horia Varlan (flickr.com)

The preserves are placed in the cupboard.  The dried meat hung in the window.  The quilt is folded at the foot of the bed. The old woman sets the tea on table and they both sit.

“These are the rules,” Grandmother says.  “You must never open the shutters during the day.  You must never go outside except at night to take things from the garden.  You must never leave the yard or wander upon the path.  There, I’ve told you the rules.”

“They are simple enough to follow,” Marie says.

“Nothing is simple any more,” Grandmother says.  “One last thing. I want to be buried by the sunflowers.”

Marie takes Grandmother’s hands into hers.  “You will live a long time,” Marie says.  “I am here to take care of you.”

But Marie’s eyes wander to all of the red cloaks hanging on the peg and she wonders about the other girls who have been sent to Grandmother’s house.   Where are they? Why is Grandmother all alone?  Weren’t they supposed to take care of Grandmother? She looks back at Grandmother who is looking intensely at Marie again.  So intensely that Marie almost thinks she looks like her friend Franca, the girl in red from last year.

“Do you recognize me, Marie?” Grandmother asks.

She wants to say Franca. But Franca would only be 16.  Marie can’t help but notice that the quilt on the bed is the quilt that Franca made.  Marie helped Franca to collect the squares.

“No,” says Marie.  Marie does not know who this old woman is.

And then Grandmother begins to cry. Grandmother begins to cough and cough until finally she stumbles from the table to the bed.

Marie goes over to the bed and tries to make Grandmother comfortable.  After a bit, Grandmother finally falls asleep.  Marie is tired from her day of travel.  She looks around and notices that there is only one bed, so she settles in the chair in front of the fire and falls asleep.

In the night Marie dreams that there are bright lights enveloping her.  She hears sounds.  She feels that someone is touching her.  Marie opens her eyes and finds she cannot move.  She is trapped in the light.  In the room with her and Grandmother is a small gray man. He turns to look at her.  His eyes become enormous.  He has hair all over his body.  He looks like a man wolf.   Marie is terrified and tries to remember where she hid the knife. He comes to her and the hair that covers him pricks her with the sting of a million needles and in an instant all of the fear leaves her body.  After a while, the gray man turns from being monstrous to being beautiful.

Marie watches blissfully as the gray man goes to the bed and kisses Grandmother until it looks as though he has swallowed her.   Grandmother does not struggle.  Marie wonders what it would be like to kiss the gray man.  And then her thoughts turn to Peter.  Marie watches as the gray man lays Grandmother gently back onto the bed. Then he turns and blows Marie a kiss.  Her heart flutters.   But he does not come to her.  He is lifted into a bright light until he disappears.

In the morning, when Marie wakes up everything seems right with the world.  The sun streams gently through the window.  The birds chirp outside.  Grandmother is still sleeping in the bed.

Marie stops to admire the day and then remembers with a start that she is supposed to shutter the windows.  Sadly she does and the room plunges into darkness.

Marie puts on a kettle and makes the porridge.  She loads the breakfast onto a tray and brings it to Grandmother.

There is a body in the bed, but it is not moving.  The body is cold.  It is Grandmother and she is dead.

Photo courtesy of buddhafinger (flickr.com)

Marie cries.  She waits until nighttime and then she takes the shovel that stands next to the door and she digs a grave by the sunflowers.   She hears sounds in the night.  She hears the whistle of the Huntsmen hunting.  She goes to the path, hoping to catch sight of Peter, or her brother.  She wants to ask them to help her bring the body to the grave.  She is certain she sees a flash of a cloak and hears the crack of a gun in the forest just down the path. She is about to step out of the garden but then remembers the rules.  She stands in place for a while, hoping that if someone emerges from the woods, she will be noticed. But no one does and she is not.  After a while she goes back to the house and wraps Grandmother up in her bedding and drags her to the grave.

Exhausted, she takes the quilt and the bedding that she brought with her and puts it on the bed and crawls in and goes to sleep.  In the night, she dreams that someone is in the bed with her.

“Grandmother!” she asks.  “I dreamt that you were dead.”

But the body in the bed next to her looks so different.

It takes the girl’s hand into its own.

“Grandmother,” Marie says. “Why are your fingers so long?”

“So that I may better grasp your hand with love,” the voice says.

“Grandmother,” Marie asks.  “Why are your eyes so large and black?”

“So that I may better see your beauty,” the voice says.

“Grandmother,” Marie asks.  “Why is your mouth getting so large?”

“So that I may better take on your life force,” the voice says.

And then Grandmother, who is not Grandmother at all, but the gray man, leans towards Marie.  He is a monster until she feels the prick of his fur.  Then he is beautiful. Marie lets him place his now large mouth over Marie’s nose and mouth. Marie cannot breathe.  Everything turns black.

Marie awakens in the morning and lays on the bed feeling drained.  Soon Marie realizes that she is alone and that Grandmother is really dead and buried in the garden. The house is quiet.  Marie goes about fixing herself some supper.  There is nothing to do but make a fire and read a book.  She cannot go back home.  They will think that since Grandmother is dead that she has failed to do her duty.

A week later, Marie has the dream again.  The gray man comes back and kisses her and holds her.  It almost feels like love.  But then Marie remembers Peter and the way that his hands looked on the fence when she pressed her fingers to his lips.  She is warm when she thinks of his hands.  She is cold when she is in the gray man’s arms.

The gray man appears once a week like clockwork. After a few weeks, Marie knows that it is no nightmare.  The only thing that keeps the nights warm is the thought of Peter and his hands.

One night, on the night she knows that the gray man will come, Marie goes to wash her face.

She hears the crack of a gun from outside.  A Huntsman must be in the forest near the house.  She grabs one of the cloaks and goes outside.  She approaches the path.  She is too scared to step out.  She is too afraid to break the rules.

“Hello!” she yells.  “Hello!”

A figure emerges.  It is Peter.  He stands at the edge of the woods, gun in hand.  Deer carcass on the wagon.

“Who’s there?” Peter asks.

“It’s Marie,” she says and lets her hood down to show her face.  Her voice cracks.  She hasn’t used it in so long.

“Marie is a girl,” Peter says.

“I am a girl,” she says.

“You are a woman,” he says.

He steps closer, leaving the deer on the path.  He comes up to the garden and eyes the house but does not cross the entry.  He looks at her face.

“I did not realize I’d come so far,” he says.  “It is getting harder to find game by the village.  If something isn’t done soon we may starve. I’ve taken a terrible chance coming here.”

“Would you like some supper?” Marie asks.   “I even have cake, like I promised.”

“It is you,” he says.

“Who else would I be?”

“Grandmother,” he says.

Then in the sky there is a light and a sound.  Marie knows that sound means the gray man is coming and that she must go to bed to greet him.  But the sound makes Peter jump and run back to the road and hurry away.

“Come back,” Marie says.  “Come back tomorrow.”

Every night for weeks Marie goes outside and calls to the trees hoping that Peter will return.  Every night she is disappointed, until one night.   He is there in the center of the path.

“I have something to show you,” Peter says.

He shows her a mirror.

She notices her face in the mirror looks older.  She is no longer a girl, but a woman.  She is older than Peter.

“Where is Grandmother?” Peter asks.  “Is she inside?”

“She died the night I arrived,” Marie says.

“It’s as I suspected,” he says.

He puts his hands on the post.  She cannot help but take his hands and kiss his knuckles.  Her heart is filled with joy at touching him.  He leans over and kisses her on her lips and she knows that this is what a kiss is supposed to feel like.  Not like the frenzy of the gray man.

“Does a gray man come to you?” Peter asks.

“Yes,” she says.  She blushes ashamed of kissing the gray man.

“Do not keep me in your thoughts when you are with him,” he says.

And then he leaves.  She sees him once more.  She already knows by the way that he blanches when he sees her next that she is quite a bit older than the last time.

“I am formulating a plan,” Peter says.  “We all are.  But you are the key.”

“What are we planning for?”

“Freedom,” Peter says.  Then he shakes his fist at the sky.  “Your brother said he gave you a knife, do you still have it?”

“Yes,” Marie says.

“You must plunge it into his mouth when I tell you,” he says.

“I couldn’t,” she says.  “I’m not supposed to have it.  I keep the knife hidden.”

“Do you trust me?” Peter says.

Marie nods.

“There is something about the gray man that makes me afraid and then not,” Marie says.

“You must try to keep your mind clear,” Peter says.

“When will you come?”

“Soon,” Peter says.

This time he kisses her hands.  He does not kiss her lips and she knows that it is because she is too old for him.

“Will you show me the mirror?” Marie asks.

“You wouldn’t want to see yourself,” he says.

“I do,” she says.

Peter gives Marie the mirror.  She is much older than her mother.

“I will sleep with my knife.  I will always be ready for the signal,” she says.

She watches as Peter walks away.  She wishes she could run after him and go home.  But her path is set.

Marie now knows how this goes.  She and the other girls have been kissed by the gray man until they are no longer girls, but young women, and then no longer women but crones. There is no Grandmother.  Marie weeps that she had been excited about the adventure of being the girl in red.  She weeps at the cruelty of her fate.  She weeps as she sews herself a nightgown with thick fabric and a pocket for the knife.   She weeps at the thought of never feeling the fear and then the calm that the gray man’s fur brings. And just when she thinks she cannot weep anymore, there is a knock on the door.

It is a young girl in a red cloak.

“Run,” says Marie.  She wants to save the girl from the gray man.  She does not want anyone to do the duty anymore.  She is too tired to run herself.  She is too old.  She knows that tonight she will die.

But the girl puts her fingers to Marie’s lips and pulls back her hood.  It is Peter.  Peter goes to the chair and Marie dons her new thick long sleeved nightgown and goes to the bed with the knife hidden in a secret pocket. After a while, the lights come and the gray man descends.  The gray man holds Marie and his fur bristles, but this time it does not prick her skin through the layers of fabric.  As he leans in to kiss her, she can see him clearly for what he is:  a monster.   Her heart beats wildly and Marie thinks she might die from fright.  It is then as the gray mans lips touch hers that Peter jumps up from the chair and runs to the bed.

“Now, when he is weakest and taking his last sips of your life!” Peter shouts.  He holds the gray man’s arms down.

Photo courtesy of VanDammeMaarten.be (flickr.com)

Marie plunges the knife into the gray man’s mouth.  Her old hands tremble.  But when she strikes, light comes out of his mouth and without knowing why, she kisses the gray man on his closing eyes with all the tenderness in her heart. When she does, she feels the years coming back to her.  He slumps into her arms.  Shriveled and old, still leaking light.

Peter looks at Marie and smiles.

“There you are,” he says.  “Just like the day you left.”

She takes his hand.  It is too late for the other girls, but everything is just beginning for Marie.

Cecil Castellucci‘s novels for young adults include “First Day on Earth,” “Rose Sees Red,” “Beige,” “The Queen of Cool,” and “Boy Proof” and a picture book, “Grandma’s Gloves,” which won the California Book Award gold medal. She also wrote the graphic novels “The PLAIN Janes” and “Janes in Love” for the DC Comics Minx line. She has had short stories published in “Strange Horizons,” “Teeth,” “The Eternal Kiss,” “Geektastic” (which she co-edited) and “Interfictions 2.”   Her upcoming half prose / half graphic novel is called “The Year of the Beasts” will be out in May. In addition to  writing books, she writes plays, opera librettos, does performance pieces and occasionally rocks out.  For more information go to www.misscecil.com

So this year, we’ll have two amazing Valentines for you:  A brand-new short story by Blythe Woolston, author of “The Freak Observer,” last year’s winner of the William C. Morris YA Debut Award.  Her latest, “Catch and Release,” was just released!  AND, poetry by Richard Larson, finalist for Amazon’s Breakthrough Novel Award, for “Devolution.”

Excited yet?  We thought so.

Walden Pond. Image courtesy of rodinpresta (flickr.com)

Even when I moved to the Big City after college, I kept fantasizing about when I’d get back to farming. I collected beautiful seed catalogs and planted a container garden on my apartment’s tiny balcony. Here I am now, finally living out my dream on a plot of land in Maine – and there’s a foot of snow. So it’s time to curl up to browse gardening books and plan for the spring. I just read Michael Pollan’s “Second Nature,” and he writes about America’s tradition of wilderness writing starting with Henry Thoreau. But Pollan points out that we lack a contemporary body of literature that can take into account our rapidly changing modern-day relationship to nature. Nonetheless, everyone still has to read “Walden” in high school, right? What does it mean to today’s teens?

While thinking about where ”Walden” fits into YA reading, I came across this interesting article from The ALAN Review about modern-day themes in YA lit. We’ve blogged about this before at YARN – the question of how to define YA. Scholar Jeffrey Kaplan suggests that one reason so much mainstream YA literature features sci-fi and cyborgs is that teens today are exploring the boundaries of identity. He writes, “The once time honored ‘stuff of science fiction novels’—cloning, genetic engineering, etc.,—is now the everyday realities of young people’s lives. Everything from artificially created limbs to designer babies is very real for today’s adolescents, bringing into question the eternal question, ‘what does it mean to be human?’”

In a teen’s world, the boundaries between nature and technology are intentionally blurry. (Check out this app that allows you to find constellations in the sky using the GPS of your iPhone.) Is there room in YA lit for a modern-day “Walden”?

I can think of classroom standards in social sciences aimed at younger readers (“My Side of the Mountain,”) but not much for teens. “In the Forest” might fit the bill, but it’s post-apocalyptic. So I asked Lourdes Keochgerien, YARN’s YA Consultant, to start a list of YA novels with nature themes.  Readers, teachers, librarians – help me out. Please add to this list in the Comments section below, or write your own YA nature tale for YARN!

Lourdes’ list:
The Adoration of Jenna Fox (“Walden” is quoted throughout.)
The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate
Shipbreaker
The Whale Rider
The Nature of Jade
The Queen of Cool

Moth

Image courtesy of uzumewinter (flickr.com)

Winter rubs its moth wings on us:
plucked from the body,
they fall apart.
Leave their silver-lining
dustings on our cheeks.
Those hot swollen things muffle our voice in
a heap of broken images. We’re penitents
in a confessional of snow.
Although no one will climb
beyond the screen
until spring,
we wait for that company.

Winter rubs its moth wings on us:
Silt-filled river sprinkled
all across our clothes.
Paler than before, we
spend minutes counting
hours, watching crossed crooked limbs
crackle in black
against the wind
like they’re burning.
Breathing we
cross crooked limbs
to cover what we’ve left out.
Cold face glows
loudly through the powdered silence.

Image courtesy of beinggreen (flickr.com)

Apathy’s a pretty word
Wetted ash upon my
suit is too.
I don’t shake myself
clean nor beat the
filth loose—
I find the moth-silver
keeps me warm. I
breathe easily now,
and I dance
on the hot glass.

Aaron Handloser is a 17-year-old high school senior living in North Little Rock, Arkansas. He attended the Rhodes College Summer Writing Institute, and is planning on attending AppalachianState University to major in English. After college, he wants to teach high school EnglishLiterature. He enjoys bike rides and long, romantic walks to the fridge.

Photo by Doug Dundas (cropped to fit YARN format)

When she was little, Jennifer Donnelly never wanted to go to Disneyland. Instead, she wanted to step back in time and live in history. Since scientists haven’t figured out how to travel through time just yet, Jennifer has decided to–lucky for us!–write novels set in the past instead.

Her first novel, “The Tea Rose,” is an epic 19th-century novel for all ages. Then came her first young adult novel, “A Northern Light,” which was awarded Britain’s Carnegie Medal, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Young Adult Fiction and a Michael L. Printz Honor. Since then, she has finished the The Tea Rose trilogy with “The Winter Rose” and “The Wild Rose,” and written another YA novel, “Revolution,” which has been longlisted for Britain’s Carnegie Medal. She has also written a picture book titled “Humble Pie.”

YARN is so pleased to have the chance to talk to this wonderful author. To learn more, check out her website, facebook her, or follow her on twitter.

Writing Process

YARN: What does your writing process consist of, from the idea to publication?  Do you outline, draft, revise?  What is your favorite part it?  Your least favorite?

JD: Something grabs me and won’t let go. In “A Northern Light,” it was Grace Brown’s voice, coming through her letters to Chester Gillette. In “Revolution,” it was an article in The New York Times that showed a tiny dried heart in a glass urn. These things stir up really strong emotion in me, and I have to deal with that emotion the only way I know how—by writing a story.

I start to think how what I’m feeling might turn into a story. Who will tell it? And how? Slowly, the characters and the storyline come. I start to read about the period in which the story’s set. And I outline obsessively—scene by scene by scene, so I can see how the plot lies on the paper. I love it all, and I hate it all—depending on the day and how the work is going!

YARN: Have you ever felt “stuck” in your writing?  What advice can you give teens who might be struggling with writing assignments and need to get unstuck before the due date?

JD: Yes, I have felt stuck. I’m usually stuck! I’m stuck more than I’m unstuck. But I don’t really believe in writer’s block. Being stuck is part of writing. It’s part of doing good work whether you’re a novelist, a software engineer, a musician, whatever. Being stuck means you need to push harder to progress. For me, it usually means I haven’t got my story right yet and I need to do more thinking, questioning and plotting. Or maybe I don’t know my characters and their motivations well enough.

When I’m stuck, I get away from my computer screen, pull out big sheets of paper and start writing questions to myself about the story. What’s wrong? Why is this character doing this? Why is this section flat? And answers usually start coming. Or I draw the arc of the story. The intersecting lines of the plot. Something about the act of physically writing—on paper with a pen—helps me think better. It helps me pick up the trail when it’s gone cold.

YARN: Your books call for lots of authenticating details, from what’s in a century-old kitchen to what Parisian streets your characters wander through.  How much research is “enough” before you start the first draft?  Do you continue to research as you write?

JD: No amount of research is enough. If there were no such things as deadlines, I’d still be researching for “Revolution”! I research before I start, as I’m working, when I’m editing and proofreading, and right up until my editor says, “Give it here! Now!”

YARN: And where do you do your research?  How do you start?

JD: For “Revolution,” I started with big historical surveys of the period. For example, Simon Schama’s “Citizens,” or Carlyle on the French revolution. I plundered their bibliographies and footnotes for other titles to read. I went deeper and read primary sources—diaries, memoirs, letters. I traveled to Paris several times, visiting places with significance for my story. I looked up old maps of the city in archives. Visited museums to see art and artifacts of the late 18^th century. Hung out in the Palais Royal, the Picpus Cemetery, on the banks of the river, watching and listening to Parisians to absorb their gestures and expressions. Soaking in every possible thing that could help make my story more authentic.

YARN: How is planning a trilogy different from planning a single-volume novel?  Are they two different beasts when it comes to the actual writing?

JD: You’re giving me an awful lot of credit by assuming I plan anything! These ideas get me and I’m off. The planning is usually retroactive.

Your Books

YARN: In “Revolution,” the main character Andi is a super-smart teen who’s deeply into music, and has all sort of esoteric knowledge about classical composers, rock bands, and musical composition.  Was this something you had to research, or are you as into music as Andi?  Were you as a teen as well?

JD: Both. I love music and always have, but I’m not a musician and had to do a great deal of research to understand Andi, to know what she knows. I read a lot—especially work by the wonderful music critic Alex Ross—and I talked with musicians.

When I was a teenager, I took what I listened to for granted. Now I’m simply gobsmacked by the talent that creates albums like “Wish You Were Here” or “In Rainbows.”

YARN: You’ve also published 3 adult novels.  Do you find writing for young adults different than writing for adults?  Do you see yourself continuing to write for both audiences?

JD: Not so much. My adult books have racier scenes and saltier language, and follow the characters into adulthood—those are the main differences. I’m still very concerned, in both categories, to hook the reader and keep her reading. I definitely see myself continuing to write for both audiences.

YARN: We’ve never interviewed a Printz Award nominee before.  What was it like being nominated for “A Northern Light”?  Did you have champagne?  Rocky road ice cream?  Also, did it freak you out about writing future books?

JD: It was wonderful to be nominated for ANL, but I don’t recall guzzling champagne or scarfing ice cream. I had an baby at the time. I think I answered the phone in a sleep-deprivation daze, thanked the lovely woman on the other end for her great news, and staggered off to puree some carrots. And no, it didn’t freak me out about future books. It’s a very nice thing, a big compliment on the work—not a voodoo curse!

YARN: Where do you come across your ideas for historical characters and their stories?  “A Northern Light” is based on a real-life event, for instance—how did you find out about it, and how did it become fiction for you?

JD: I really don’t get my ideas; they get me. I found about ANL’s real life event—which was the murder of a young pregnant woman named Grace Brown by Chester Gillette, the father of her child—by reading Theodore Dreiser’s “An American Tragedy” and then several non-fiction accounts of the case. The story became fiction for me because Grace haunted me. Her death broke my heart. I had to rewrite history. I had to have something good come from Grace’s death—and that something good was my main character, Mattie Gokey. Grace Brown loses her life in Big Moose Lake, but she helps Mattie find hers.

On YA and Other Books

YARN: Quick!  Name 3 YA novels you’ve loved.  No self-censoring!

JD: “The Hunger Games” (counting them as one!), “Will Grayson, Will Grayson” and “Octavian Nothing:Traitor to the Nation.”

YARN: On your FAQ page, you mention that you’ve always read a mixture of “mass and class,” which is awesome (us, too!), but except for Steven King, you mostly list “class” books as faves.  What are some of your fave “mass” books?

JD: “A Woman of Substance” is another mass market book that I adore. I just read “The Lightening Thief” and loved it. I love the “Wimpy Kid” books, too.

YARN: Thanks so much for answering all our questions!  We eagerly await your next YA novel!!

Jennifer Donnelly lives in the Hudson Valley with her family.  She grew up in New York State, in Lewis and Westchester counties, and attended the University of Rochester where she double-majored in English Literature and European History.

Her first young adult novel, “A Northern Light,” was awarded Britain’s Carnegie Medal, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Young Adult Fiction and a Michael L. Printz Honor. Her second, “Revolution,” has been longlisted for the Carnegie Medal, awarded an Odyssey Honor by the American Library Association, and named Young Adult Book of the Year by the American Booksellers Association.

She has also written a picture book for children titled “Humble Pie,” and a series of historical novels for grown-ups which includes “The Tea Rose,” “The Winter Rose,” and “The Wild Rose.”

YARN is super excited to bring you this won’t-find-it-anywhere else writing by 5 Under 35 winner John Corey Whaley, and his friend Randi Anderson.  We know you’ve seen Corey’s novel “Where Things Come Back,” the first YA novel to be recognized in the National Book Founation’s 5 Under 35.  Now you can read him in a whole new genre–the scariest of the scary, poetry….

The Random Word Challenge

So, a few years back, Randi and I decided that we both needed something to kick start the creativity in our writing.  I was teaching public school English and Randi was working on her collection of brilliant artworks—so we both challenged each other to write, since writing was one of the reasons we’d become friends several years before at Louisiana Tech University.

I’m not sure whose idea it was to exchange lists, but that’s exactly what we did: We devised a plan to give one another a list of ten random words, with one bonus word.  The assignment was this: Use each word to write an original poem or short story (flash fiction—one page or less in length) by a certain date and then share each with each another.

We couldn’t find both lists that resulted in the works included, but here is the list that Randi sent me so many years ago (care of Gmail archives).

Image courtesy of MinimalistPhotography101.com (flickr.com)

1. window
2. atlas
3. wire
4. opaque
5. casserole
6. figurine
7. thistle
8. storage
9. chink
10. hackney
Plus: snorkel

The assignment was an instant boost of creativity for me, and I think for Randi as well, because both of us had no issues in completing the assignment within the allotted time.  (I want to say we gave each other a week or so, maybe even less time).  This was a great way to share original works with a friend without the pressure of judgment or harsh criticism.  The project, after all, was mostly for fun and nothing else.  But, as you can see, I think each of us found a few words from one another’s lists that inspired some deeper level of meaning and inspiration—and that’s something that has stuck with me: That the most random, off-the-wall, seemingly meaningless things can still inspire creativity and force one to look inside of oneself for something that he/she may not have known was there, waiting to be written and explored.

Opaque.

The sheer opacity we’re experiencing together has led me to conclude the following:
We are all alone.
So alone
In fact,
That we’ve been fooled into thinking we’re not.
And that’s when they get you.

I don’t ever see you or her or him or any of us anymore.
I see words on a screen
And I hear beeps in my earbuds
And I feel my heart breaking as the light reflecting on my face is filtered slowly out.

There is a dimmer switch on the world that we all turn down together.

Image courtesy of PaulS (flickr.com)

Atlas.

I can see my house from here
And I smell crayons
And Teddy Ruxpin
And thick plastic that you can’t bend or break
And there’s a Lego in my nose
And my brother’s G.I. Joes are all over the floor
And my mom is screaming
And my dad is gone
And it’s my house,
I can see it

Clear as day.

I can draw it on a map

With scented markers that don’t smell like any chocolate I’ve ever smelled

And I can send it to you with a pigeon from my pirate ship.

Storage.

I wish I could save you onto a flash drive that dangles from my key chain
And plug you into any computer I come across
And you’d be there
With me
In all of your glory
And I’d ask you if you’d like some music
And you’d say
Why yes I’d love some music
And I’d download Sufjan Stevens songs into your brain
And we’d hum “Chicago” while I work on my portfolio at a coffee shop
And pretend to be more important than everyone else
And when I make a typo you would stop me and say something like
Hey, now, you know better than that mister
And I’d laugh
And you’d laugh
And then I’d threaten to delete you
Because that’s the sort of games we’d play
If you were on my flash drive
And I was in complete control
But you know
And I know
That I would never delete you
That it’s just a joke
Because that’s what we do
And how we are
We joke about being deleted
And I joke about downloading porn onto your flash drive
And you don’t laugh like I expect you to
And one day I open up a Word document that you’ve created
And it reads as follows:

Dear you, I think that porn joke was very inappropriate and I’d appreciate it if you’d just go ahead and cut and paste me into an email and send me to one of your more attractive friends who doesn’t use his sense of humor to make people feel uncomfortable so often.

And I’d secretly make a copy of you for old time’s sake
And send you to Phil.
Phil is a stand-up guy.
And he has a Mac.
And I don’t think you’re compatible with that format.

And by Randi Anderson…..

Cookie

Image courtesy of scubadive67 (flickr.com)

I walked in and it smelled
Like lemons.
There was a new hand towel
In the bathroom
And lines in the carpet
From the vacuum
And I knew you’d made this effort
On my account—
And I loved it.

You fixed me a glass of water
And offered me a cookie
Because that’s what nice people like you
Do when they have guests
They offer them cookies
And small talk.
Only your talk wasn’t so small.
It was deep.
And I loved it.

Behavior

Image Courtesy of autowitch.com (flickr.com)

“Be on your best behavior,” she said.  And that is what she meant.  There was to be no jostling or giggling or chattering.  No horseplay or humming or twiddling of thumbs.  This was the kind of place where arms belonged at one’s sides and hands were safest in pockets or laps.  This was a formal, fragile place intended for people who were stiff and still.  It had only been a little thing in this fragile place on a shelf.  One very small, but beautiful object of glass with an inner glow.  And only one finger had risen to touch this object’s smooth glass side.  But as finger and glass connected, it seemed to tip on its own.  It tumbled headlong right off the shelf, landing next to his shoe.  A thousand tiny pointed shards sprinkled across the floor and that lovely, soft glow was gone.  As he looked down at the mess he’d made tears softened what he could see and blurred the sharp edges of all the broken pieces.  He cried for the beauty now lost, but more than that he cried for himself and the punishment this would reap.  “Be on your best behavior,” she’d said.  And that is what she’d meant.

John “Corey” Whaley grew up in the small town of Springhill, Louisiana, where he learned to be sarcastic and to tell stories. He has a B.A. in English from Louisiana Tech University, as well as an M.A in Secondary English Education. He started writing stories about aliens and underwater civilizations when he was around ten or eleven, but now writes realistic YA fiction (which sometimes includes zombies…). He taught public school for five years and spent much of that time daydreaming about being a full-time writer…and dodging his students’ crafty projectiles. He is terrible at most sports, but is an avid kayaker and bongo player. He is obsessed with movies, music, and traveling to new places. He is an incredibly picky eater and has never been punched in the face, though he has come quite close. His favorite word is defenestration, which is the inspiration for his second book. “Where Things Come Back” is his first novel.

Randi Anderson is an artist and stay-at-home mom who currently resides in Texas with her husband, Josh, and their two-year-old son, Frazier. She loves running, traveling, and writing when time allows.

We know you’re going to love it as much as we do!

Eyes Like Mine
By Jackie Lewis

They say the sense of hearing is the last thing you lose before you die.  Touch fades away, taking with it the gentleness of kiss upon forehead, grasp upon hand.  I slept there, perhaps not really asleep at all, while they waited by the bed.  The room was painted a cold shade of gray—or perhaps the walls were really white, the gray little more than sorrow floating like a dutiful cloud in the room that would be my last.

Image courtesy of Giant Gingko (flickr.com)

The hearing had not left me, and neither had the sight.  But the touch was gone.  Their hands were wrapped around mine, their eyes asking questions that I could not answer.  What was it that they wanted from me?  They didn’t say.  In fact, they did not speak at all.

I noticed her right away when she came into the room, her blonde hair shimmering down like angel’s wings.  Like the others around my bed, she did not speak.  I did not feel her touch upon my hand, but her very presence made the muscles in my shoulders tense. She was young, perhaps fourteen, and the blue in her eyes seemed heavy—as if the color had been forged from molten metal.  She placed a guitar case beside a wooden chair, then sat quietly and began to fumble through the pages of a small notebook.  I watched for a moment, waiting for her to speak, but instead I heard a note that seemed afraid to travel up and down the scales.  It was not music, though it had both tone and tempo.  And I knew that it somehow belonged to me:

Beep.     Beep.     Beep.

The sound rang out, slowly at first.  Then faster and faster it came, surrounding me in the room and speeding up as if somehow it knew that I was listening.

Beep.   Beep.   Beep.  Beep.  Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep.Beep.Beep.Beep.

My eyelids parted as if they were shutters being opened after a long, angry storm, but there was no calm in the gray cloud that had settled about the room.  It felt as though the heaviness in the air surrounding us had been formed from our unspoken questions.  “Who are you?” we seemed to ask one another, though neither of us spoke the words aloud.

I knew that something was there between the girl and I—a kinship, perhaps?  Were we two souls destined to meet in this moment?  Or had we met sometime before, sometime long ago when we were different people?   I could sense that we were both searching for someone, though I could not remember whom.  Did she know why we were here?  And would she share her secret?

All at once, her eyes began to dart around the room.  Her stare caught and held other eyes of steel, and then I noticed their heads nodding.  The girl rocked slowly in her chair, forward and back again, and her eyebrows arched as if she had yet another silent question to ask.  There were suddenly deep breaths surrounding me.  I felt as if I were a stalled aircraft floating on silver clouds, and all at once her eyes began to melt.  Our tears fell together, as if somehow we were both a part of something much larger than the room.  And for a brief instant, I almost knew her.

“Daddy, what should we sing to him?” she asked the man beside my bed.

His eyes were a brilliant blue; his soft, blonde hair curled slightly at the nape of his neck.  “I don’t know, Tiffany,” said the man.  He raised his hands to his face, covering his eyes.  And in the second before fingertips hid emotion, I saw the steel within.  His eyes were blue like… mine.  Mine.  My eyes are blue.  Blue eyes like hers—blue like his.

The sound of his voice startled me as I tried to connect the pieces that had all but disappeared.  My mind stuttered and stammered, as if it were an old tractor’s engine being brought back to life after too long a winter.  I looked down onto the bed below me, careful to move only my eyes until at last I saw my own hands.  They were the hands of a giant.  The skin hung loosely as if it had been stretched and draped over muscle and tendon; age spots numbered the years that had somehow escaped from my grasp.

“Should we sing ‘I’ll fly away’?” the girl asked.  There was strength in her words, softness in her voice.

“I can’t,” said the man with eyes like mine.  Through clenched lips he forced a smile, and as he reached toward me, I noticed the calluses and oil stains.  These hands were accustomed to labor.  They were thick and muscular—the type of hands that could rebuild a tractor’s engine, or work the land from dawn till dusk.  His hands were like his eyes: strong, intense, and never idle. His features seemed tense until he shook his head slightly.  I concentrated on his face for a moment, and noticed that it was rounded despite the strong, sharp line of his jaw.  His leathery skin flushed with a deep redness that traveled down his neck, where it disappeared behind the collar of his flannel shirt.  His cheekbones were high, and his forehead was broad.  His top lip was thin and almost disappeared before it reached the corners of his mouth.

“Dad, do you want us to sing to you?” the man asked.  He bent at his waist and leaned in closer.  His breath smelled of peppermint; his voice was gritty and coarse.  I shifted in my bed, the gray of the room closing in on me as if it had been waiting the whole time to swallow me up.  I looked down the bed as if somehow it could save me.  My arms were long and unfamiliar—as if they, too, knew of tractor and of field.

“Grandpa, we’re here,” said the girl with angel’s wings.  The man with eyes like mine began to sob softly, as if he had never cried before and was suddenly learning how.  I looked at the girl again, and noticed the eyes once more.  She wore a dress of pink satin, the hem cutting off sharply just above her knee.  Her skin was pale, and her lips were a shade of red that was much too dark, and as she smiled, I saw a flash of metal in her mouth.  It covered her teeth, blocking out the whiteness of a smile from long ago, and suddenly I wondered if she was really human at all.

Image courtesy of Subnet 24 (flickr.com)

She slid her arms along polished wood, until at last her fingers came to rest upon the long, metal strings.  Slowly her fingers moved, and something that could be heard, but not seen, began to drift around the room.  Her red lips shifted, then parted, and at last she began to sing.  The sound of her voice twirled itself around the bedposts and spilled out of the room through the open door.

Some glad morning, when this life is o’er, I’ll fly away.
To a hand on God’s celestial shore, I’ll fly away.

She stopped singing, and a voice that sounded as if it had been formed from honey and embers whispered in my ear.  “We’re here to sing you out, Grandpa.  It’s okay to go to the other side.  Don’t be afraid.  We love you.”

The voices joined together again, and this time there were so many that I looked around the room.

I will meet you in the morning.
Just inside the Eastern Gate.

The eyes were blue, and blue, and brown, and black; their hair came in delicate shades of gold and copper, and silky gray.  The music came to me during that moment, flooding my soul with warmth as her delicate, soprano voice eased into the chorus.  Cupping the neck of the guitar, she slid her thin fingers across metal strings that came alive beneath her hands.  And as they sang, their voices seemed to pour my memories onto the gray cloud until, at last, the sorrow lifted for a moment and I was allowed to see what it was once like to be me.  The harmonies were still there, hidden away deep inside as if they had been waiting for this moment to return to me.  I had lost the images and sounds of my childhood, then lost the memory of my own flesh and blood.  The grandchildren had disappeared one by one, and then the great-grandchildren slipped away from my memory as if they were lightening bugs being released from glass jars.

What a glad thought, some wonderful morning.
I shall hear Gabriel’s trumpet sound.
When I wake up!  To sleep no more…

I did not recognize the loss of those memories when they fled from me, and upon my unfamiliar deathbed I did not know the faces, nor the people.  But I almost knew the eyes like mine.  And I did, indeed, know the voices.

I’ve got a mansion.  Just over the hilltop.
In that bright land where, we’ll never grow old.

They sang the songs of my youth, the music I had long ago taught to young children who had grown more than distant in my memory.  The girl with eyes like mine sat at my bedside, her hands cradling the guitar.  But she cried no more from that moment forward.  Instead, she settled into the music as if she were stretching out in bed after a long day of work.  And as her lips parted, my eyes turned toward the ceiling.

It was then that I called her name, a name I had long forgotten.  My eyes were opened wide.  My lips curled up slightly at the corners; my shoulders lifted as if they had grown weightless.  The sound of memories floated around the room, and quiet voices gathered at my feet.  The songs, of love, and hope, and joy, seemed to warm the air and lift me ever upward.  And at last, I called her name before the remainder of my senses faded.

“Momma,” I said, my eyes fastened to the ceiling.  The gray of the room seemed to drift away, and in place of the gray there was a certain fabric upon the air.  It was made not from cotton, or even material at all; it folded and creased, as if the threads had been formed from light.

The girl’s voice waivered slightly at my bedside, and then returned again.  She sang in harmony with the others, until I called my mother’s name once more.  And then, with eyes like mine that dared not cry, the girl at my bedside disappeared.  All at once, I knew the girl, the blonde hair, the room.  My sight and hearing failed me then, but not before I understood the eyes of molten metal, the young woman at my bedside.  For hers were eyes like mine.

They say the sense of hearing is the last thing you lose before you die.  Touch fades away, taking with it the gentleness of kiss upon forehead, grasp upon hand.  I wonder if one day the girl at my bedside will sleep like me, in a bed that she no longer knows.  And I wonder if she will know them, the young ones in her midst— the people who have sprung from her womb, the eyes of steel, the voices of honey and embers, the harmonies that call out to her memories.

Image courtesy of Denis Todorut (flickr.com)

Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound.
That saved a wretch like me.
I once was lost, but now I’m found.

With eyes like mine, I see.

(Q&A to follow, beneath Jackie’s bio.)

Jacquelyn Lewis is the Regional Editor and Publisher of The Minute Magazine, a Louisiana publication that focuses on living life to the fullest.  Her articles have won many awards, including “Best Investigative Reporting” and “Best Community Service” through the Louisiana Press Association.  She is a US Air Force Veteran, a graduate of Southern Arkansas University, and is on the Board of Directors of Cultural Crossroads, a 501(C)-3 dedicated to preserving and encouraging the arts and the culture of Webster Parish, Louisiana.

During her years in the US Air Force, Jackie joined the elite Little Rock Air Force Base Honor Guard, a team dedicated to performing military rights at funerals in the state of Arkansas and in the city of Memphis, Tennessee. The experience of being face to face with grieving families on an almost daily basis profoundly affected Jackie, and she began writing to find her own sense of comfort. Consequently, her first article was published in Little Rock Air Force Base’s publication, The Drop Zone, and thus began her lifelong love affair with writing.

Jackie lives in Minden, Louisiana, in a historic home with her husband Shaun and two sons, Miles and Preston.  In 2007, she was appointed to the City of Minden’s Residential Historic Preservation Study Committee, and she is a strong advocate for historic preservation.  Jackie (and her husband Shaun) are currently restoring a late 1880’s Louisiana Dogtrot home in rural northern Louisiana, and she documents the restoration of The House at Sugar Creek on her blog at www.jackie-lewis.blogspot.com.

Q&A with Jackie Lewis and YARN’s Editor Kerri Majors:

YARN: This is such an “anonymous” essay, with no proper names and the like.  Can you tell us a little about the important people in the essay, and their relationship to you?

JL: Sure!  While writing the essay, I had to close my eyes and remember the day that my Grandfather died. In writing “Eyes Like Mine,” I had to travel through time.  The fourteen-year-old girl with blonde hair shimmering down like angel’s wings is now a twenty-six-year-old woman.  My baby sister has changed quite a bit since the day we sat by our grandfather’s bed and “sang him out,” as we call it in my family.  I really had to reach back into my memories to pull out details such as the braces on my sister’s teeth.

There are certain snapshots in my mind that I hope to remember forever, and I tried to recreate those snapshots within this essay.  It was my father’s hands that hid the tears from my view as my grandfather was dying beside him.  Our family knew that it was time for Papaw to go. But when someone that you love is dying, it’s difficult to give them permission to leave.  We knew that Papaw was far from comfortable in his hospital bed.  But comforting him in that moment wasn’t as simple as fluffing a pillow or adding another blanket to the pile.  Papaw was terrified of something, whether that something be death, or the unfamiliarity of the room, or the teary eyes of the people surrounding him.  As my sister and I sang, he relaxed.  And I guess in a way, we did, too.

YARN: One of the things we discussed when judging the contest was whether or not this qualified at creative *non-fiction*.  Obviously, we decided it did , but we were wondering how and why you decided to write the essay from the dying man’s perspective, and how you reasoned that it was still non-fiction, still an essay and not a short story.

JL: I know exactly what you’re talking about, because I felt the presence of this question as I wrote the essay.  But in the end, I really felt that “Eyes Like Mine” was a very creative non-fiction piece.  In actuality, the narrator’s perspective is my own.  I sat at my grandfather’s bedside and wondered what he was thinking, what he was feeling, and worried that my life would pass by so quickly that I, too, would soon be lying in a bed surrounded by a family that I no longer recognized.  So do I feel that “Eyes Like Mine” is creative non-fiction, as opposed to fiction?   Absolutely.  I can only imagine that other people have been in my shoes, at their loved one’s deathbed, wondering if Alzheimer’s Disease had stolen every last memory and left only worry behind.  Without memories, there can only be a series of instinctual emotions.  I watched Papaw’s non-verbal communication and saw fear, worry, horror, and surprise.  But I also saw something else, in the moment that he called out for his mother.  I saw happiness.  It was such a surprise to see and feel his happiness in a moment of my own profound grief.  As he crossed over, I remember being consumed by so many different emotions that I couldn’t express a single one through tears.

I chose to write “Eyes Like Mine” using my grandfather’s perspective because I wanted to verbalize my feelings and emotions.  I am an invisible character in the story, in that his thoughts are really my thoughts.  His confusion is my greatest fear.  And his eyes are my eyes, too.  But I also chose to write this essay from Papaw’s perspective because I wanted to make readers understand that we’ve got to find a cure for this horrible disease. It is my hope that this essay reaches our future scientists and doctors and to make young adults understand that their future jobs are very important.  Maybe “Eyes Like Mine” will encourage adults to push a little bit harder, too.  Though one of the main characters in “Eyes Like Mine” is a fourteen year old girl, I feel that this piece can really help those people working in the field of Alzheimer’s research feel the importance of their jobs a little more than they did before. We’ve got to end the cycle of Alzheimer’s and save future generations from enduring the torture that my family knows all too well.  Hopefully this will inspire young adults to enter into medical research.  Without the advancement of medicine, Alzheimer’s will continue to steal away our memories. And without our memories, we lose everything.

YARN: How many drafts did you write before posting to Figment?  What does your drafting process consist of?

JL: My process is a far cry from a formal checklist with bullet points.  To prepare to write my essay, I basically sat down and asked myself the question, “What is the normal, gut instinct for most people when they hear the words family gathering?  What will everyone else write about?”  I wrote my answers down on a piece of paper and then challenged myself to stay away from those topics.  I wanted to write something different, something meaningful to both me and to my family.  I went for a walk and asked myself the question, “What makes my family different from other families that I know?”  The answer came immediately.  I thought of my family’s ability to use music in both life and death.  Then I challenged myself again and asked, “Okay.  What now?  How much of yourself are you really willing to give away?”  The answer surprised me.

I wrote the essay rather quickly and edited it twice.  The first draft was based on emotion.  I allowed the prose to flow easily, and didn’t censor myself.  Then I abandoned the manuscript for a few days.  I waited until the emotions were gone, and edited for typos and grammar.  I returned to the second draft a day later and prepared to feel the emotions again.  On my final edit pre-submission, I allowed myself to look for hidden meaning and experiment with meter.  I read the essay aloud and allowed myself to tweak the tempo, pace, and timing of the sentences and paragraphs.  When I was satisfied with the final product, I forced a few friends and family members to listen to the essay.  I knew that it was special because their reactions were all somewhere between devastated and relieved.  I wanted the overwhelming theme of the essay to be the presence of two major emotions: sorrow and joy.  People rarely have the chance to experience both emotions at the same time.  But those are the moments that we never forget—unless something like Alzheimer’s takes the memory from us.  Once I saw my friends’ reactions, I knew that it was time to submit.

YARN: And we went through two rounds of edits between the original draft and this published final version.  The first required quite a bit of cutting and some moving around (a very painful process to some writers!!), and I was so impressed by your willingness to take a step back and see that it would improve your piece.  Can you give writers any advice on how and why you were willing to do that? (Also, interested readers can see the original version of the essay on Figment.)

JL: You were a wonderful editor from the start.  You established credibility right away when I received your suggested edits.  I realized that you weren’t just editing for typos, but also looking for symbolism, and even character and setting flaws.  It’s easy for me to picture the room where “Eyes Like Mine” takes place, because it’s there in my memory.  But as an editor, you questioned aspects of the setting that were inside of my head and not necessarily written down on paper.

The second round of edits were much more difficult than the first.  I have certain words in this essay that are virtually stapled and glued to the paper.  In my mind, they are unmovable, like heavy pieces of furniture that can never be rearranged.  But the words that really mattered to me, such as STEEL, COBALT, and ANGEL’S WINGS, were never really on the chopping block.  I didn’t feel like you were trying to steal away pieces of my writing.  I felt as though you really wanted the best for both me and my essay.

It probably helps that I’m not the type of writer that allows herself to get bent out of shape over the deletion of a comma or an apostrophe. As a journalist and magazine editor, I know full well that typos happen.  Words are fickle creatures, and sometimes they need to be guided a bit.  To be perfectly honest, I’m relieved to have a second set of eyes scanning my work, just so long as the edited essay is accomplishing the goal that I set before I began writing.  The point of writing, in my opinion, is emotional in nature.  If rearranging sentences, expounding on certain settings or characteristics, or removing redundant phrases makes the EMOTION of the essay easier to tap into, then it’s well worth the trouble.   Believe it or not, I actually enjoy criticism as long as it’s done from an honest, helpful perspective.  As a writer, it’s almost impossible to know what other people feel and think when they read your work.  A good editor, however, can easily point out high points and low points in the manuscript they’re editing, and take away any fear the writer has of being misinterpreted.

YARN: How was writing this piece different—and/or similar—to anything else you write?  What are you working on now?  Has writing and revising this essay changed anything about the way you are writing now?

JL: I’m a journalist by trade.  And believe me, there is an enormous difference between investigative journalism and creative non-fiction.  For me, it’s literally the difference between night and day.  By day, I write articles and conduct interviews.  But at night, after the children are in bed and hubby’s asleep, my alter-ego comes out of hiding.  When the moon rises, so does my inner author.  I love to abandon reality and escape to my imaginary world, where people have character arcs and society begs to be challenged.

I definitely learned a lot about myself through the process of editing “Eyes Like Mine” with you, Kerri.  In fact, it was much easier than I thought it would be.  I actually gained a lot of confidence during the edits, because I realized that the editing process didn’t affect me in the way I thought it would.  Before we began the revisions, I assumed that I might feel a bit self-conscious.  It’s one thing to have an article edited by a coworker before heading to newsprint, but it’s another thing to hand over an essay that’s so emotionally charged.  I thought that I would be more resistant to change, but in actuality I found that I welcomed the suggestions.  I didn’t take the revisions personally at all.  In fact, I kinda liked the process.

So what am I working on right now?  Oh, where to begin.  I’m a journalist by trade, so I’m always working on an article.  But I’m also working on the oh-so-dreaded-yet-necessary side of writing that drives my inner author up the wall: the all important query letter.  I’ve finished writing a Literary Fiction / Women’s Fiction manuscript, and I’m completing a third read-through and the all important last-minute tweaks before sending said query letter to literary agents.  And while I wait for responses from my queries, I’ll spend my time raising my boys, working on the 1880’s Louisiana Dog-trot home that my husband and I are restoring, and gathering additional research for a work of non-fiction that I will begin this spring.

YARN: Thanks once again for submitting your wonderful, highly creative essay to the contest, Jackie.  It’s been such a pleasure working with you on it!

Thanks again to Susan Beth Pfeffer for helping us judge the contest, and to all the awesome folks at Figment for making this contest a reality!

SPOILER ALERT: If you have not seen all three of the original Star Wars movies, or the Harry Potter movies/books, there are spoilers below.

Image courtesy of cuppycake feind (flickr.com)

Between Christmas and New Year’s, my husband and I embarked on a Star Wars Trilogy viewing.  The first three movies, mind you–Star Wars, Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi (no Jar Jar Binks for us!)–which is the second time we’ve done this in our eight years together.  Or maybe the third time.  We’ve also done it with the Lord of the Rings movies, and once with Indiana Jones.

Of course we’ve each seen those movies many, many times before.  In fact, when I was seven, I watched Star Wars pretty much every single day for a few months while I was recovering from some heavy medical stuff at home.  I think I had it memorized.

So, you know, when we watched them the other week, we knew what was going to happen.  We knew Luke was going to destroy the Death Star, and that Leia was going to wind up with Han, etc, etc, etc.

But did that stop my hands from sweating when Luke swooped his fighter plane down into the maze of the Death Star, risking his life–and R2-D2’s, and the future of the galaxy!–when he listened to Obi-Wan Kenobi say “Luke! Trust your feelings,” causing him to switch off his computer and allow The Force to guide his shot?

No!  My hands were sweating, my heart was racing.  I was EXCITED.

But, why?  I mean, I knew he was going to succeed.  There was no surprise involved.  Isn’t surprise integral to suspense?

That was what I wondered.  How could the movies’ suspense still work on me even though I knew what was going to happen?

As I wondered about this paradox, I found myself thinking of the Harry Potter movies as related examples:  When I saw the movies, I had already read all the books, so I knew how the stories ended.  But with each movie, it had been a while since my reading, and so I had forgotten some of the details (like Neville Longbottom pulling the sword of Gryffindor out of the Sorting Hat–what a great moment!!), which DID result in surprise and the suspense that comes from not knowing exactly how everything is going to play out.

But I had not forgotten these details when I re-watched the final movie with my husband at home.  But I was waiting for certain moments, like that one with Neville and the sword.  Waiting….anticipating….I couldn’t wait!

So, I learned, anticipation creates it’s own suspense.  Sometimes it’s as good, if not better, than the suspense that comes from surprise.  It’s like mac and cheese–you know it’s gonna be good, so you’re psyched to experience it again.  And again.

And again.

On a related note, I think this is why so many books with predictable plots still work.  Even if we’re pretty sure he’s gonna get the girl, or she’s gonna save the universe, or The Head Baddy is gonna get what’s comin’ to him, we wait for it.  We want it.  And we’re willing to experience these plots again and again because they please us.  Like mac and cheese.

And now I also know what we’re having for dinner

I stood outside the pool crouched forward, thin arms and skinny legs spread wide to cover as much wall as possible, my pubescent balls dangling like a target, waiting for the water polo game to begin.  I don’t know why we swam naked, but I suspect it was a way that Mr. Jackson, our gym teacher with the “Smokey and the Bandit” mustache, could keep forty teenagers inline and submissive. There were no co-ed gym classes and the girls didn’t have to swim nude because of “female reasons,” an excuse we boys found both unfair and unsatisfying. Instead, they received school-issued swimsuits color-coded by size: the petite girls swam in red suits, the average girls in black, and the heavy girls in an odd shade of blue that everyone called “Hippo Blue”.

Mr. Jackson, dressed in sweat pants and a golf shirt, blew his whistle and tossed a rubber ball, the same red one we used in dodge ball, into the middle of the pool to start our version of a water polo match. The two teams, one in the deep end and one in the shallow, dove in and raced towards it to gain possession. Unlike real water polo, three naked, shivering goalies stood on the deck on either end of the pool. Points were scored when the ball was thrown and hit the wall below the painted black stripe, about waist high. Sean McFarland, Ryan Connolly, and I had volunteered to guard our goal on that first water polo day. I wanted to play goalie because I was a poor swimmer and guessed that anyone with the ball would be forced underwater by a bunch of naked boys trying to wrestle it free, a thought that terrified me. Sean later said that he’d volunteered because the chlorine stung his eczema, the scaly pink patches that scarred his body and made him the object of ridicule in swim class; I think Ryan just wanted to keep his back to the wall, hiding the welts that crisscrossed his buttocks and back, the angry raised stripes left by his father’s belt.

As I stood in my crouched position, determined to be the best damn water polo goalie because I was the worst damn swimmer in the entire school, I watched my classmates fight for the ball.  It was impossible to tell which naked freshman was on my team and which was not.  All I could see was splashed water, bare limbs and asses, and smaller kids like me and Ryan getting shoved underwater by the early developers and the kids who were held back, the hair under their arms and across their chests making them easy to spot.

Photo courtesy of Paulo Avila (flickr.com)

The ball finally squirted free and Mark Jankowski grabbed it and began swimming towards me. No one tried to stop him; my teammates treaded water and let him pass. Jankowski was repeating the ninth grade for the second time and was the biggest kid in class, almost the same size as Mr. Jackson.  Cradling the ball in one arm, he side stroked his way to the shallow end of the pool until he was about five feet from me.  He stood up, cocked his arm, and yelled as he threw the ball as hard as he could. The wet rubber smacked me in the shoulder, knocking me against the wall. The ball bounced back to Jankowski, who grabbed it and fired it at me again, this time catching me in the thigh and leaving a stinging red mark. Both teams cheered as I fell to the deck holding my leg.

After that, no one tried to throw the ball below the back stripe; they followed Jankowski’s lead and aimed at the goalies instead, cheering loudest when the wet rubber ball left welts, smashed us in the genitals, or if we slipped on the slick deck and went sprawling, our tailbones and elbows striking the tiled floor, our heads banging against the wall if they were lucky.

I didn’t try stopping the shots after Jankowski’s first two throws; I tried to protect myself, punching the ball away or blocking it with my forearms, and even that was painful. Ryan and Sean didn’t fare much better. One throw tore open an eczema scab on Sean’s arm and one of Jankowski’s bullets smacked Ryan right in the gut.

“What hurts more, the ball or the belt?” Jankowski yelled to Ryan as he back stroked away.

The ball finally made its way down to the other end of the pool. I squatted and hugged my knees for warmth, my thin shoulder and thigh still stinging from Jankowski’s shots, and tried to make myself even smaller as I watched the other team’s goalies become the naked targets. I was happy it was them getting bombarded and not me, and I hoped the ball stayed in their end for the rest of the match.

Afterwards, I didn’t say anything to Ryan or Sean as we showered our battered bodies, the bruises already forming; I was too embarrassed for them and myself to even make eye contact. But the next day, Ryan did something so extraordinary that it made me want to become his friend.

Photo courtesy of JasonLangheine (flickr.com)

Swim class started normally. We had to shower before entering the pool. Mr. Tabor, the school janitor, stood in the doorway between the lockers and the shower room and Mr. Jackson stood opposite him in the doorway between the showers and the hallway leading to the pool, both of them watching us. They said they did this to keep an eye on us, to make sure there was no horseplay. Mr. Tabor grinned, as he always did, showing his dead front tooth, the faded tattoo anchors on his forearms visible, his hands buried in his pants’ pockets.

Then Ryan walked past Mr. Tabor into the showers wearing a pair of swim trunks. Conversations ended so the only sound was falling water.  I turned to Mr. Jackson and saw his face darken, his Burt Reynolds mustache twitch.

“Connolly!” he boomed, his voice bouncing off the marble walls. “What are you wearing?”

“Swim trunks, Coach,” Ryan answered, soaping his chest like this was just another day.

“Why?” Mr. Jackson boomed again.

“Going swimming, Coach,” Ryan answered, his voice calm and even, cooler than I could ever be.

“Take them off!”

Ryan rinsed off the soap.

“You know the rules, Connolly. Get rid of them!”

Ryan started shampooing his hair.

“Are you going to take them off, Connolly?”

“Can’t, Coach.  Swim class today.”

The rest of us slunk out of the showers and towards the pool, not wanting to be caught in the middle of this. Mr. Jackson didn’t even inspect us—making us turn for him, bend over, ensuring we’d rinsed all the soap from every part of our bodies before entering the pool; he just waived us to the metal bleachers. I glanced over my shoulder and saw Mr. Tabor’s hands were out of his pockets and on his hips, his face as dark as Jackson’s; Ryan was still under the shower.

I crossed my arms against my chest for warmth when I entered the pool area, the chlorine smell sharp in my nose. I sat on the cold metal bleachers, trying not to let my shoulders or legs touch the naked boy on either side of me as we waited. Everyone was quiet, even Jankowski and the other big kids who threw the water polo ball the hardest. I had my ear cocked, listening for Jackson to start screaming at Ryan but heard nothing.

“What are they going to do to him?” Sean McFarland whispered.

“Nothing,” Jankowski said. “They’ll send him to the principal. Probably give him detention.”

Jankowski’s voice was deeper than the rest of ours and carried authority. He was always in trouble and walked the halls in black Levis and concert t-shirts—Zeppelin, Aerosmith, Rush—with the sleeves cut off. The taps on his square-toed boots clicked like a warning when he went by. He wore his hair parted in the middle and down to his shoulders like we all did, except his hair was thick and blonde like a Viking’s. If anyone knew what Ryan’s punishment would be, it would be him. So it surprised me a moment later when Ryan walked into the pool area, followed by Mr. Jackson, still wearing his swim trunks.  He took a seat on the bleachers with the rest of us. Jackson called attendance, spitting our names through his teeth and checking us off on his clipboard with an angry wrist flick.

When he was done, he smoothed his mustache with his index finger and then slapped the clipboard against his leg. I jumped at the sound, remembering the time he had smacked it across my bare ass for running near the water’s edge.

“As you can see,” he said, “Mr. Connolly has decided to bring in trunks today. I told him this wasn’t necessary. I could’ve borrowed a red suit from the girls for him to wear.”

Jankowski laughed the loudest.

“Mr. Connolly declined this offer and he also declined to take off his trunks and swim naked like the rest of you men,” he said, even though Jankowski was the only one of us anywhere near manhood. “So, we’re going to sit here until Mr. Connolly takes off his suit and follows the rules.”

Everyone groaned, including me. The only way to stay warm during swim class was to get in the water. To sit naked and wet on metal bleachers for forty minutes would be torture and we all knew it.

“Asshole,” Jankowski muttered, not to Mr. Jackson but to Ryan.

In ten minutes, my skin puckered into goose bumps. In fifteen, my teeth chattered. It felt as if the metal bleachers were sucking the heat from inside me, drawing it from my marrow and out my legs and ass and scrotum as I squirmed trying to stay warm.

“Just take them off, Ryan,” somebody whispered.

“This sucks,” someone else said.

“Take them off,” Jankowski said, “or I’ll beat your ass like your old man does.”

Ryan rubbed his arms for warmth but didn’t make a move to take off his trunks.

More and more kids began whispering for him to come on, to take them off, that they were freezing, for chrissakes.  A Joe’s Boy, a new kid who had transferred from St. Joe’s after getting expelled, sat a row higher than Ryan and kicked him in the kidneys and whispered Come on whenever Mr. Jackson wasn’t looking.

I didn’t say anything. My hands and head shook, but I wanted him to keep his trunks on, thinking that somehow his stand would make Mr. Jackson give in and we could all wear bathing suits. But Mr. Jackson didn’t budge and neither did Ryan and we spent the entire forty minutes freezing on the bleachers. I can’t remember ever feeling so cold.

“That’s the class, gentleman,” Jackson said, when the bell rang. “We’ll sit here like this tomorrow if Mr. Connolly decides to break the rules again.”

Image Courtesy of cdsessums (flickr.com)

“Wear ‘em tomorrow and you’re dead,” Jankowski said to Ryan loud enough for Mr. Jackson to hear. Jackson said nothing. He just slapped the clipboard against his leg.

As each boy hurried past Ryan to get to the warm showers, they made sure to bump him with their shoulder, jab an elbow to his ribs, or whisper a threat.  I patted his back when I walked by. He hurried and dressed and got the hell out of the locker room before Jankowski and the rest of them finished showering.

News of Ryan and his swim trunks spread through school.  When I told the story, my friends’ eyes saucered in amazement until I got to the part about sitting on the bleachers, then they shook their heads, muttered what a jerk he was, and said they were glad they weren’t in that class.  Ryan’s hall locker was about seven away from mine. Kids walked by, pointed, and some shoved him.

After school, I was at my locker grabbing my jacket when I looked up and saw Ryan hurrying away. I didn’t blame him. Fast-deserting hallways were a bad place to be when you were a target. The new kid from St. Joe’s flipped the books out of Ryan’s hand as he rushed by; his notes scattered across the floor. Other kids heading for the exit stepped on them. Someone kicked his history book all the way to the drinking fountain.

“Don’t wear your bikini tomorrow, asshole,” The Joe’s Boy called over his shoulder as he walked away. Some girls, sophomores, laughed.

I helped Ryan gather his papers and tried to straighten them and brush away the dusty footprints, the treads and sneaker soles clearly visible across the pages. Ryan’s face was blank, unreadable. If he was mad or scared he didn’t show it. Only his lips, pressed together in a hard line, revealed anything.

“Wearing the trunks took some guts, man,” I said, and picked up his science notes:  delicate sketches he had made of the leaves we were studying—Petiolated, Sessile, Lobed—and rosebuds, shaded red in colored pencil.

“Thanks,” he mumbled, trying to shove the papers back through the binder rings.

“Swimming naked is fucked up.”  I handed him his notes.

Ryan looked at me, his eyes flat, gray. “Then wear yours tomorrow.”

“What?”

“If you think it’s fucked up, which it is, wear your suit. If a bunch of us wear them, what are they going to do? Send us all down to the office? Big deal. Getting yelled at or detention is still better than swimming naked or getting killed in water polo.”

Now it was my turn for my eyes to saucer. “You’re going to wear them again?”

Ryan nodded. “And so will you if you have any balls.” He turned and headed to the drinking fountain to retrieve his history book, a jumble of notes under his arm. I stood there, my body electrified with the idea of taking a stand.

For the rest of the day, my mind kept drifting back to the idea of wearing swim trunks to class. I imagined strutting past Tabor like he and his hungry eyes didn’t exist.  Different comebacks, each one cooler than the previous one, came to me when I thought of Mr. Jackson asking me what the hell I was doing.  I pictured the other kids, after seeing me and Ryan in our trunks, pulling their own swim suits from their lockers and putting them on, so only Jankowski and the other assholes were standing naked with their dicks hanging out. Their stunned expressions floated before me like plates to be smashed with a baseball bat.

The next morning I hesitated before packing my trunks in my book bag, pushing them to the bottom, covering them with notebooks and folders.

I saw Ryan before homeroom, but I didn’t tell him about the swim trunks in my book bag. His black eye and swollen lip made me turn away. As I worked my hall locker combination, my fingers trembling a bit, I wondered who’d beaten him, Jankowski or the Joe’s Boy.

Or both.

I wondered how badly they’d beat me if I wore my trunks that afternoon.

Then I stopped turning the dial and stared at my closed locker. Maybe it wasn’t anybody from school who had blackened his eye. Maybe Mr. Jackson had called Ryan’s parents and told them what a trouble maker their son was and his father had decided to use his fist instead of his belt this time.

My head snapped around when I heard the unmistakable sound of a body being slammed against metal. The hall went quiet. Jankowski had Ryan jacked up against the lockers, a fistful of shirt in his hand. He was shouting in Ryan’s face not to wear his trunks today, that he wasn’t going to freeze his ass off again. Ryan turned his head. I’m not sure how big Ryan’s dad was, but he must have been bigger than Jankowski because there was no fear in Ryan’s eyes, just resignation.

I was half the size of Jankowski, but if I came from behind, grabbed his shoulder and spun him, I knew I could get a punch off, one good shot to his nose or mouth. It wouldn’t be enough. He wouldn’t hold his hands to his bleeding lips and run away; he’d come for me, and I wouldn’t be able to stop him. Neither I nor Ryan was strong enough to beat a guy like Jankowski, but together I knew we could take him. Ryan, I swear, nodded at me, as if he was reading my mind, urging me to do it, to spin Jankowski’s shoulder, to throw that one good punch.  Then I saw Ryan’s black eye and the way Jankowski’s arm bulged in his cutoff Stones shirt, and I didn’t move. A long moment passed and Ryan nodded again, as if he was accustomed to no one saving him. Jankowski kneed him in the balls then let go of his collar. Ryan crumpled to the floor. The warning bell rang and I headed to homeroom, feeling smaller than I ever had.

For the rest of the morning, I avoided going to my locker between classes, afraid I’d run into Ryan, afraid he’d call me a coward, just afraid in general.  In each class, I’d pull out a binder or text book, being careful to keep the trunks covered so no one could see them, point to them, tell Jankowski about them. I regretted bringing them, and my regret added to my shame.

I made it to lunch without running into Ryan again. There was a seat open at the table where Sean McFarland sat so I slid across from him, my tray piled with pizza slices, mashed potatoes, and chocolate pudding with perfect whip cream dollops. Gorging myself was my latest attempt at gaining weight, at getting bigger.

“You going to eat all that?” Sean asked, nodding to my tray. As usual, he wore a long-sleeved turtleneck, trying to keep any eczema on his arms and neck covered, saving the ridicule for swim class.

Photo taken by Stephanie Nebeker

Before I could answer, everyone in the cafeteria rose and cheered like at a football game. A fight had broken out. A tight circle of students formed to keep the teachers and cafeteria monitors from breaking up the brawl too quickly. Sean and I jumped to our feet and pushed to the ring of students. In the center of the circle, Ryan and Jankowski fought. Each held the other’s shirt with their left hand and traded wild right hand punches to the other’s head. The crowd cheered as each blow landed. They began chanting Fight! Fight!, and I wasn’t sure if they were egging Ryan and Jankowski on or if they were calling for others to come and watch. Ryan held his own for the first couple exchanges, but Jankowski’s size and strength was overwhelming. Ryan’s left ear was already red from the battering. He sank to one knee, his own punches lifeless now and without snap. Jankowski was holding him up with one hand, the other like a piston as he punched downward, catching Ryan above his left eyebrow again, and again, and again.

I pictured myself leaving Sean’s side and crossing the distance to the fighters. I’d grab Jankowski by the right shoulder and spin him around until he faced me, like I should have done in the hall earlier that morning. My punch, crisp and clean like Sugar Ray’s in the Olympics, would smash the bridge of his nose, spreading it wide across his face. He’d stumble backward, the blood already flowing as I moved forward, driving home a left to his stomach, doubling him over in pain. Ryan would look at me from his knees. I’d meet his glance and nod before grabbing Jankowski by his Viking hair and shoving his head downward until his face met my rising knee. I saw it all so clearly, like I was watching a movie.

Standing next to Sean with everyone still chanting Fight!, my fists clenched. I took one step forward but was shoved aside as Mr. Tabor and Mr. Ring, the assistant principal, shouldered past, breaking the circle. They pulled Jankowski off of Ryan, the anchors on Tabor’s forearms moving as he grabbed him. Ryan slumped to all fours. Blood dripped from the cut above his blackened eye and landed on the cafeteria floor, the drops the color of sketched roses. He saw me staring and swallowed a few times. Kids clapped and cheered as Tabor took Jankowski away, his arm raised in triumph. Mr. Ring yanked Ryan to his feet.

“I was going to help,” I said, my voice low, hoping only Ryan could hear. “I brought trunks.”

As he was being led away to whatever punishment the school and his father had waiting for him, Ryan turned and looked at me over his shoulder.

“Wear them,” he said.

I froze, afraid someone might have heard.

“Wear them,” he said, louder, and was gone.

Kids jostled me as they headed back to their seats to finish their lunches. They laughed and said it had been a great fight, that Connolly had really gotten what he deserved, that he’d be swimming naked like the rest of us now. I don’t know how many were eating in the cafeteria that period, but I felt alone as I stood in the middle of them.

I had a science test before swimming.  The questions—naming the extended part of the leaf, defining the margin, midrib, and stem, identifying blade types—were easy and ones that I’d studied, but my thoughts kept sliding to the book bag at my feet and the trunks inside. Ryan’s words pummeled me like two tiny fists: Wear them.  I had survived in middle school and so far in high school by staying out of the way of guys like Jankowski, by playing goalie outside the pool instead of fighting for the ball inside it, by swimming naked like everyone else.  I knew what would happen if I walked into the showers wearing those trunks. Perhaps the beating wouldn’t come in the cafeteria. Maybe they’d catch me in the deserted parking lot, or after school at the bus stop, or in the second floor lav where Jankowski and his friends smoked in the stalls, the wooden doors kicked in and splintered so many times the school stopped replacing them. The beating would come and I was afraid.

Photo taken by Stephanie Nebeker

Wear them.

Science class ended and I turned in my test with half the questions unanswered and headed to the boys’ locker room. My book bag felt heavy on my shoulder, as if it contained everything I wanted to be and everything I truly was.

I undressed in front of my locker, the floor cold puddled from the previous swim class, oblivious to the sounds and conversations around me. One-by-one, my classmates stripped down and drifted to the showers, some with towels wrapped around their waists, trying to stay covered as long as they could, until I was the last one in the locker room. I knew that Mr. Tabor and Mr. Jackson were already at their posts on either side of the showers—Jackson slapping the clipboard against his thigh and fingering his mustache and Tabor grinning his dead smile, his hands busy in his pockets, both looking for troublemakers, both watching for rule breakers, both of them waiting for me.

Stephen G. Eoannou earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Queens University of Charlotte and has taught at both Ball State University and The College of Charleston. His work has appeared in the Barely South Review,Boomtown: Explosive Writing from Ten Years of the Queens University of Charlotte MFA Program, Pulp Modern, and will be forthcoming from Echo Ink Review and The Cleveland Review. Eoannou lives and writes in Buffalo, New York.

Photo courtesy of ralphbod (flickr.com)

A while ago, I was visiting a certain coffee shop when I noticed it was giving out free codes for an iPad app. Now, I usually don’t take to such stunts, but this iPad app was a book, and I found myself reaching for the code card.

The iPad app was a picture book called “The Monster at the End of This Book…Starring Grover!” in which Grover from Sesame Street narrates and acts out the story to “you,” the reader. There were also interactive qualities. I showed this book to a three year old and a five year old, and they both ate it up. Over and over again. Which reminded me: two professors from my Children’s Literature program at Hollins University also came out with iPad app books recently. Ruth Sanderson came out with Cinderella. Ashley Wolff came out Cat Saw, which was originally published in 1985 as a picture book called Only the Cat Saw, and has been out of print for a while.

Are iPad app books becoming a new trend in publishing? Or better yet, are apps paving the way for an entirely new way of storytelling? It’s not only happening in the picture books market. Writers, especially children’s book authors, are undoubtedly playing with the medium, and they’re coming up with all sorts of interesting multimedia techniques.

Back when I first got a whiff of iPad app books, this makeover of “Alice in Wonderland” received some buzz.  Since then, the app book has developed.  The trailer for “Dark Prophecy” is an app book with traditional narration along with movie segments that bridge scenes. Kind of what Brian Selznick would have done if he had a video camera instead of a drawing board. Read about it here.

Patrick Carman, author of the bestselling YA series “The Land of Elyon” and “Atherton,” has written his latest novel, “Dark Eden,” entirely for the iPad app. For him, using transmedia and multimedia is an attempt to reach today’s very wired teens. Read an interview with him here.

And then, there is “Strange Rain.”  A little tangential of an app but still a way to tell a story.  A mood piece, you could say. This app shows falling rain as if you were looking up at the sky. “Story” is an option. The designer describes the character as “a man in the midst of a family crisis who has wandered into the rain to collect his thoughts. His world, too, has gone from familiar to strange, even as his beliefs are following the opposite course. Your interaction helps determine when and how he decides to come in from the rain.” Reminiscent of the good ol’ choose your own adventure?  Here’s a trailer.

From the gamut of app book experiments out there, I get the sense that writers don’t entirely know which way to optimize what the app media has to offer. What is the Digi-Novel? How far can a “book” stretch into other mediums and still remain a book? Is the line even important?

What I do know is, app books excite me. Maybe not what’s out yet, but the medium opens up possibilities for innovation and invites us to use multimedia technology to create a new form of art. Whatever app books may bring to the storytelling world, they have gotten our juices flowing. A new frontier. A new challenge. What a lark!