When I was a teen in the 80s, I subscribed to Seventeen magazine (didn’t every girl?) but I really spent my time reading agricultural reports, learning how to vaccinate sheep rather than apply mascara. I was a 4-H member. Not because I lived on a farm. I lived in the tidy suburbs of Silicon Valley. [...]
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Suspense, like mac & cheese
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.
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 [...]
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Does an iPad Equal a Book?
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 [...]
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I Need Your Advice
I was recently interviewed by my alma mater, Wesleyan, about my writing career since college. I was flattered, of course, but mostly humbled. I’ll let you in on a secret: When taking stock of the last 15 years, my overwhelming feeling was, “What exactly HAVE I done with my life?” When I graduated from college, [...]
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Glee: A study in Integration
Oh, how many blogs could I begin with the line ”So I was watching Glee last night and thinking….” I have spared you many of those blogs, but this one kept niggling me, so here we are: So I was watching Glee the other night, boogeying on the couch to their spunky rendition of Katy [...]
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“Seeing” is Believing
Hi YARN friends! It’s great to “see” you again! Okay…I can’t really see you, of course. I don’t know what you look like, or what you sound like, all I know is that the YARN community brings us together…this is the beauty of the internet. And in the past few months, I’ve developed a new [...]
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To Submit or Not to Submit? This Should Not Be A Question.
Recently, I decided to submit a poem I wrote to a start-up literary magazine by the name of Little Room. It was created by Ohio University Creative Writing student Nathan Boley as one of his senior projects. The idea started as a simple Tumblr page [...]
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Rock Stars are People, Too
So there I was at the National Book Awards this week….. Since we won that awesome Innovations in Reading Prize, the kind folks at the Ford Foundation thought a rep from YARN should get to come to the National Book Awards Week festivities as part of the prize, but also for the kind of excellent [...]
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Write Like a Kindergartner
Over the last few weeks, I’ve been following the terrific discussion threading through YARN’s blogs and readers’ comments about the “adult” voice in YA literature. Our editors and reader-contributors have been trying to define what constitutes “adult” from both a reader’s and writer’s perspective, and I’ve particularly enjoyed the analysis of writing strategies and styles that [...]
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All the Young “Adults” Are Illustrated
For me, the highest praise for any notion is when it forces you to come back, analyze it, break it apart, and put it all back together again and again. The question and my previous blog “Where Are All the Young ‘Adults?’” is this kind of idea. I thought I would be completely off about [...]
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Is there too much “adult” in Young Adult?
So, partly as a corollary to Lourdes’s excellent and right-on “Where are all the Young “Adult”s? blog, and also as a kind of indirect response to all the “is there too much darkness in YA?” debate of the summer, I’d like to ask: Is there too much “adult” in Young Adult? By “adult” here, I [...]
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