The Strand Bookstore is my current favorite local independent bookstore these days, ever since the slightly closer Shakespeare & Co at NYU closed. Between working at Scholastic and living in a building that's got enough dead-tree-edition readers that the bookshelves in the laundry room is always worth a look, I get an awful lot of books for free, but every now and then when there's a specific book I want, I'm off to the Strand. I've been there a little more regularly than usual recently and just thought to follow them on Facebook a couple of weeks ago. A co-worker recently "liked" a "Let's Talk YA" event they were having, and for once the FB algorithm worked just right in showing that to me.
I was able to make it, I absolutely loved it, I'm so glad I went, and my only regret is that I didn't find out about it sooner so I could have let more of my YA fan friends know about it.
David Levithan's name as the moderator was what first caught my attention, as he's one of our editorial directors at Scholastic and also a great writer himself. Turns out that this panel was something that David had originally suggested to The Strand without even really knowing which authors he could get, but this ended up being a really excellent group of folks to have sitting down and talking author stuff with each other and the audience.
Three of the authors were familiar (I'd loved Kheryn Callender's younger grade book Hurricane Child, I'd read and also thoroughly enjoyed Katrina Van Dam's Come November -- I don't think I can remember ever being quite as pissed off at a fictional parent as that book made me! -- , and an ARC of Eliot Schrefer's Orphaned, the fourth in his great ape series, is sitting on my desk at work waiting its turn as commute reading) but the other three were new to me.
It was held in the Rare Books Room, which was fun in itself, although a little dangerous. I'd never been in there before and I swear that if they'd had cocktails there to lower the inhibitions, I would've been going home with an absolutely charming (but rather expensive) little book by Ruth Kraus and Maurice Sendak, Open House for Butterflies. Fortunately cocktails and rare books are not a good combination so I was able to put the book down.
The panel was a three-stage affair - first David introduced all of the authors, the 3 already mentioned plus Jay Coles (Tyler Johnson Was Here), Sara Farizan (Here to Stay), and Alex Kahler (Runebreaker). Each author read one page (and one page only, even if it broke a sentence) from their book; Sara sang that "Let's start at the very beginning" bit from The Sound of Music and then started at Page 1, 2 of the authors had each other pick a number at random, and the others just read something that they liked.
2nd part was David asking some questions touching on things like the way each author handled their protagonists' relationships with their parents (that was really intriguing as most of the authors were pretty young and some had drawn in a very direct way on their relationships with their own parents, so it ended up being a kind of personal question that they answered with great honesty and love), and specific approaches they used for writing for a young audience. One interesting point that came up there was that as the YA genre has grown, it's reaching for a wider audience, it started out aimed at teens but the stuff that's coming out now may feature youthful characters but is good enough storytelling to appeal to grownups, too. I can certainly vouch for that, one of my favorite perks of working for Scholastic is access to a ton of free books. I don't necessarily find everything we print for YA interesting, but I've read and really enjoyed an awful lot of the stories that are available on the giveaway shelf. So much more than when I was a kid!
3rd part was the audience's turn to ask questions, and some good questions were asked. I even got over my phobia about standing up and speaking in front of people to ask the final question of the evening - somebody else had asked about authors that influenced the writers who were there tonight, and I followed that up with a question about people in their lives who'd given them the earliest confidence in their own writing abilities and sense that this was maybe something they could do "for real". Seemed like a nice question with which to wrap up the evening, and as someone who's got a creative bent, there's this blog and then I love taking pictures and drawing and painting and stuff like that (enough for the "doodles" label to exist); but never even considered taking it beyond a hobby, I'm always a bit awed by people who actually take similar leanings and grow up to do something real with 'em, and thought it would be fun to hear about who'd steered them that way early on. The stories that question elicited were so much fun, with some very humorous twists to some of them - I guess asking a bunch of storytellers to tell stories about people who helped them become storytellers was not a bad idea at all!
Came away from tonight with 6 new books I really want to read now (the 7th, as I mentioned, I'd already read). They had them all for sale there and I settled on David's Someday (got him to sign it!) and Kheryn Callender's This Is Kind of an Epic Love Story - at one point David had asked a question about dedication, and Kheryn mentioned hers, which finishes "And finally, I'm lucky for all the queer people of color who exist in the world, who inspire me and make me feel a little less alone. We're beautiful, we're magical, and we deserve epic love stories". This made me think of some friends of mine who fit that perfectly, and between that and how much I enjoyed Hurricane Child, I found myself wanting to start with that one. It was a tough call deciding what to get, though. The rest I'll definitely be hunting down around the office or library, because they all sound great!
Got those 2 and then as I was leaving I remembered I've been meaning to read Sebago friend Roger D. Hodge's family history, Texas Blood, pretty much since it came out. You get to the Rare Book Room through a separate entrance, so I left there and walked into the main shop to ask after Roger's book, and there's Michelle Obama smiling irresistably from a display table right in the front of the store.
Subway reading is covered for a while!
