Hamline MFAC

I am the unofficial tumblr of the MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults at Hamline University.

[maggie-stiefvater-deactivated20]

I’m asked at least once a week how to get published. Once upon a time, this was a very straightforward answer:

1. Write a novel.

2. Write a query letter.

3. Send the query letter to agents or to editors.

4. Rinse and repeat until said agents and editors ask to see the rest.

5. Rinse and...

[hamlinemfac]

This is a terrific post by Cynthia Leitich Smith on diversity in writing. Well worth the read.

[explore-blog]

To give constructive feedback, always snuggle it in love — because we’re only human, and we’re vulnerable… Set expectations for where you are in the project, then ask questions in a way that allows for “the love sandwich”: First, “What works for you?” Then, “What doesn’t work for you?” Then, “What works for you?” again. If you just ask people for feedback, they’ll go straight for the jugular.

"The Love Sandwich," the seventh of the 10 stages of the creative process.  (via explore-blog)

Or as we call it in workshop, The Happy Sandwich….

[explore-blog]

Talent isn’t enough, she had told us. Writing is work. Anyone can do this, anyone can learn to do this. It’s not rocket science, it’s habits of mind and habits of work. I started with people much more talented than me, she said, and they’re dead or in jail or not writing. The difference between myself and them is that I’m writing.

Alexander Chee reminisces about studying with literary sage Annie Dillard. 

The above insight reflects the psychology of the mindset essential for achievement in any field and echoes Susan Sontag’s thoughts on being a writer.

(via explore-blog)

[rebelwomen]

History is not a long series of centuries in which men did all the interesting/important things and women stayed home and twiddled their thumbs in between pushing out babies, making soup and dying in childbirth. History is actually a long series of centuries of men writing down what they thought was important and interesting, and FORGETTING TO WRITE ABOUT WOMEN. It’s also a long series of centuries of women’s work and women’s writing being actively denigrated by men. Writings were destroyed, contributions were downplayed, and women were actively oppressed against, absolutely. But the forgetting part is vitally important. Most historians and other writers of what we now consider “primary sources” simply didn’t think about women and their contribution to society. They took it for granted, except when that contribution or its lack directly affected men. This does not in any way mean that the female contribution to society was in fact less interesting or important, or complicated, simply that history—the process of writing down and preserving of the facts, not the facts/events themselves—was looking the other way.

Tansy Rayner Roberts

I actually recommend the entire post, especially if you like history or fantasy or writing. 

(via rebelwomen)

[hamlinemfac]

Carrie Mesrobian on the assumption that authors endorse their character's behavior:

At the risk of sounding whiny and naïve, I kind of want readers to leave me out of it. Talk about the book. Talk about the morality of the characters. But don’t assume that my characters speech and actions mirror my speech and actions because that is not going to be true 100% of the time.

(Obviously, the swearing thing is true, in my case. I’d say I’m sorry, but my father daily scolds me on this so if it comforts you, please realize I’m getting what’s coming to me for all my ‘cussing, foul-mouthed’ behavior.)

Or maybe you could just let the story do the talking. Or let your own mouth do the talking. Or let the kids who come to the library looking for books do the talking. I’ve already gone on for 300 pages. I kind of want to be done talking. Let the book be the beginning of the conversation. Don’t end it before it starts by judging the behavior of the fake people within or assuming things about the creator of those fake people, either.

Fiction is about problems. It’s not about good decision-making. It’s about conflict and struggle and battle and terrible, terrible decisions. Sometimes people make good decisions in fiction, but there’s no requirement that they always will. You want to read about people making good decisions, you’ve got two choices:

- read a health textbook

- read a pamphlet in the waiting room of the Guidance Counselor

If you want to understand the complexity of life, read about someone fucking things up.

Better yet, if you want to understand the complexity of life, read about someone fucking things up and then trying to fix them.

[explore-blog]

During the act of reading engaging fiction, we can lose all sense of time. By the final chapter of the right book, we feel changed in our own lives, even if what we’ve read is entirely made up. Research says that’s because while you’re engaged in fiction—unlike nonfiction—you’re given a safe arena to experience emotions without the need for self-protection. Since the events you’re reading about do not follow you into your own life, you can feel strong emotions freely. […] The key metric the researchers used is “emotionally transported,” or how deeply connected we are to the story. Previous research has shown that when we read stories about people experiencing specific emotions or events it triggers activity in our brains as if we were right there in the thick of the action.

New study by Dutch researchers confirms previous theories that reading fiction makes you a better person by expanding your capacity for empathy.

Also see how storytelling makes us human.

(via explore-blog)

AND THIS IS WHY REPRESENTATION IN FICTION IS IMPORTANT

(via girljanitor)

[hamlinemfac]

Liza Ketchum on using other kinds of art for inspiration.

When we meet in our residencies at Hamline, or when we share work in a writer’s group, we focus on writing as an isolated form. But the week I spent on that retreat reminded me that the membrane between fine arts, music, writing, and other art forms is porous. The rise in graphic novels is an exciting example of this blending.  Like Laura Ruby and Jackie Briggs Martin, who wrote in recent posts about the need to get the Butt Out of the Chair, I also work through writing problems when I take a fast walk, swim, or work in the garden. But if I’m in search of ideas or inspiration, I often discover it in other art forms. On a visit to Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, I stood in front of Gauguin’s enormous painting entitled, “D’où sommes-nous? Qui sommes-nous? Où allons-nous?” The painting suggested a way into a lecture I was writing for a Hamline residency on setting.

[becketted]

The problem that needs to be fixed is not kick all the girls out of YA, it’s teach boys that stories featuring female protagonists or written by female authors also apply to them. Boys fall in love. Boys want to be important. Boys have hopes and fears and dreams and ambitions. What boys also have is a sexist society in which they are belittled for “liking girl stuff.” Male is neutral, female is specific. I heard someone mention that Sarah Rees Brennan’s THE DEMON’S LEXICON would be great for boys, but they’d never read it with that cover. Friends, then the problem is NOT with the book. It’s with the society that’s raising that boy. It’s with the community who inculcated that boy with the idea that he can’t read a book with an attractive guy on the cover. Here’s how we solve the OMG SO MANY GIRLS IN YA problem: quit treating women like secondary appendages. Quit treating women’s art like it’s a niche, novelty creation only for girls. Quit teaching boys to fear the feminine, quit insisting that it’s a hardship for men to have to relate to anything that doesn’t specifically cater to them. Because if I can watch Raiders of the Lost Ark and want to grow up to be an archaeologist, there’s no reason at all that a boy shouldn’t be able to read THE DEMON’S LEXICON with its cover on. My friends, sexism doesn’t just hurt women, and our young men’s abysmal rate of attraction to literacy is the proof of it. If you want to fix the male literary crisis, here’s your solution: Become a feminist.

The Problem is Not the Books, Saundra Mitchell (via silverstags)

OMG THIS THIS THIS THIS!!!!!

(via lez-brarian)

The reasoning that boys don’t read books about girls ticks me off, because my teens are mostly guys and they will read anything GOOD. They devoured Hunger Games series, Divergent series, and others, and OMG, they’re featuring GIRLS. *smh*

(via mzchristie)

[hamlinemfac]

Hamline MFAC alum Jamie Kallio writes a beautiful essay on Zen and Writing and finding your love for the process again.

And then Bradbury addresses the same question I asked myself earlier today: Why do I do this? “We are working not for work’s sake, producing not for production’s sake…What we are trying to do is find a way to release the truth that lies in all of us.” Bam. There it is. I write because if don’t, I am unsettled, irritable, out of sorts. I am restless and agonizing. I feel like a rabid squirrel is clawing around in my gut, desperate to be released. I write, as I have always done, because I must. I must capture the way I see the world, express how I feel about it, set it down in words, and maybe, it will reach someone else out there, someone who needs that truth. I write because it’s who I am.

[hamlinemfac]

The lovely Jacqueline Briggs-Martin writes a lovely post about getting out and find your stories in nature.

Eloise Butler and this visit to the garden is a powerful reminder that there are wonderful stories everywhere—the more we look, the more we find them.  In this garden we have: a serious botanist, a dedicated teacher who entertains the idea that she might be getting help from the spirit world; a group of women scientists, with no power except their own determination, who decided Minneapolis needed a natural area where plants can grow undisturbed.

Eloise Butler reminds us all of the power of looking, the power of paying attention—whatever our own obsessions or interests might be.  Joyce Sidman reported last Saturday at the CLN non-fiction discussion that one of her books began in a conversation with her sister about beetles. Jen Bryant said she glanced at a painting by Horace Pippin on a visit to an art museum and that was the beginning of A Splash of Red.

[hamlinemfac]

Very happy to see our faculty members Swati Avasthi (CHASING SHADOWS), Gene Luen Yang (AMERICAN BORN CHINESE), and e. lockhart (THE DISREPUTABLE HISTORY OF FRANKIE LANDAU-BANKS) on this terrific list of books.

[hamlinemfac]

Really wonderful essay by St. Kate's professor Dr. Sarah Park Dahlen on the need for multicultural kids' books (thanks to cynsations.)

John Stuart Mill says that only by having access to the multiple sides of any issue may we come to a fuller understanding of it. This applies to youth literature as well. Readers must have access to multiple perspectives; we must have access to both windows and mirrors.

I began this essay sharing how the literature I read in my childhood didn’t serve as mirrors to my own experiences; they served as windows for me to learn about experiences not my own. I read about very hungry caterpillars and where wild things are and snowy days (having grown up in Los Angeles, this was most definitely a window). I read about your average, everyday girlhood inRamona and Her Mother, about adventures in boyhood in Tom Sawyer, about decorum and sisterhood inLittle Women. They were fantastic windows, but I really needed mirrors too.

This idea of windows and mirrors, most famously promoted by children’s literature scholar Rudine Sims Bishop, argues for children’s literature to depict a wide diversity of experiences. Specifically, we demand that children’s literature depict more people who are non-white. In 1965, Nancy Larrick stated in her landmark article, “The All White World of Children’s Literature,” that virtually all of the children in children’s literature were white. InShadow & Substance: Afro-American Experience in Contemporary Children’s Fiction(1982), Rudine Sims Bishop observed that little had changed since 1965, and she analyzed how even the existing representations of black people were slotted into particular types of stories.The Cooperative Children’s Book Center at the University of Madison-Wisconsin reportsthat over the past 20 years, 90% of the characters in children’s literature have remained white — this, even as multicultural children’s book publisherLee & Low has observed that 37% of our population is now non-white. The danger here is not just that non-white children don’t see mirrors to and validation of their experiences, but that white children don’t see windows to other experiences, thus reinforcing the idea that whiteness is normative, neutral, and standard.

[hamlinemfac]

We love these. You can buy them here.

[poisonedapplespoems]

Poisoned Apples coming September 2014

Here’s the cover for Poisoned Apples: Poems For You, My Pretty. Official Publication Date is September 23, 2014.

[hamlinemfac]

We are very excited for alum Christine Heppermann's spectacular poetry collection, coming this fall from HarperTeen. Look at the pretty cover!

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Book Photo Challenge Day 5: Favorite Non-Human Character

Okay, so this isn’t a photo. I don’t own Plain Kate by Erin Bow yet, but I loved Taggle so much. Why are children’s books littered with dogs, anyway? CATS FOR LIFE Y’ALL

[rj-anderson-deactivated20160805]

TAGGLE IS THE GREATEST.

[hamlinemfac]

Taggle is one of our all time favorite fictional kitties. See also, Mogget in Sabriel, Igor in Claire LeGrand's Year of Shadows, and the black cat in Coraline.

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[ileolai]

#FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT