Year: 2014
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CBC Diversity: White with Envy
I grew up jealous of white children.
Though hardly fluent in English herself, my mother had tried very hard to read me English fairy tales when I was young. As a child, I was familiar with Anderson, Grimm and many stories written by Enid Blyton. I remember thinking then, questions like: Where was my snow? Why aren’t there fairies living in our garden? What does a Christmas pie taste like? And especially hated it whenever my mother would say, “We don’t have any of those things here, my dear; they are all in English places overseas.”
Last year, I had tried to recapture that feeling in a poem I wrote for a poetry class at Manhattanville College inspired by Enid Blyton’s famous series The Wishing-Chair:
THE WISHING CHAIR
Dear Wishing Chair,
please fly me out of Malaysia–
the most boring place on Earth.Won’t you take me on an adventure
to magical places,
where there are elves, and pixies
and toadstool fairies.
where children are read bedtime stories,
where there is snow on Christmas Day,
where the weather changes four times a year–
and not stay the same all through the year.
Boring, boring, boring!Dear Wishing Chair,
please fly me out of Malaysia–
and take me to places,
like England and America.Even as a child, I knew the children in the books I read were different from me and everyone around me. To me, these stories probably read more like high fantasy – the characters lived in a world that resembled next to nothing in mine! So consumed was I with this desire to live their lives, that I don’t remember ever wanting to read something with a main character of my own skin color. To my parents and many around me, I lived in my own world – a world inhabited by people with very fair skin.
Enid Blyton influenced my earliest writing, and I finished writing my first book the year I turned 17; it was a story of 71,000 words set in New York City – a place I’ve only ever read about. Understandably, the manuscript has stayed hidden in my drawer ever since its completion.
The major turning point in my writing came 2 years ago during my study under Prof. Phyllis Shalant at the Manhattanville College. The class was encouraged to draw inspiration from our own culture and heritage, which was when I realized exactly how much I have been taking mine for granted; why, we have fox demons, dragons, monkey gods and most of all, kung fu!! *yelled with the same vigor as Po the Dragon Warrior* If I could fall in love with fairies and elves and wishing chairs, other children could very well fall in love with the wonders of Asian stories, too. And from that moment, I truly wanted to become one of those who could bring magic like that to children.
Although, admittedly, I still dream of publishing a book with a white protagonist, my main goal in my writing is to give young readers this gift that I had received from authors like Enid Blyton and Roald Dahl long ago– the awareness of many exciting worlds that exist beyond where we live– this awareness that had led me on all the amazing adventures away from home that I never would’ve had if I had never been an extremely jealous child.
A Chinese born and raised in Malaysia, Celeste is currently a graduate student completing her MFA in Creative Writing at The New School and Manhattanville College. Celeste writes mainly middle-grade and young adult fiction and is represented by Rosemary Stimola of Stimola Literary Studio.
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‘Paper Towns’ Movie Adaptation with Executive Producer John Green
Nat Wolff, who plays Isaac in the TFiOS movie, will star as Q in the adaptation of Paper Towns. As of yet, there is no word on who will play …
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Macmillan Celebrates 15th Anniversary of ‘Speak’ with RAINN Donation Campaign
Macmillan to Match Up to $15,000 in Donations to RAINN In celebration of the 15th anniversary of the publication of Laurie Halse Anderson’s groundbreaking Speak, Macmillan will be matching donations …
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Jarrett J. Krosoczka to Host BEA Children’s Art Auction
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE New York, NY, April 2, 2014—The American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression (ABFFE), the bookseller’s voice in the fight against censorship, announced today that the Annual Children’s …
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Daniel Handler On Developing His Writing Style
One participant asked: “How exactly in the name of all sanity did you develop your writing style?” Handler replied: “One does not develop a writing style in the name of …
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CBC Diversity: Keeping it Real in Bologna
If you read the recent PW wrap-up of the 2014 Bologna Book Fair, you’ll notice its buoyant tone, at least for those of us who occasionally publish realistic YA fiction. I have no shame in admitting that I love everything John Green has published. If the current industry narrative mandates thanking the “John Green Effect” for changing the heart of The Market, so be it. And if The Market—that all-powerful “villain with the ferret” (awesome metaphor care of Christopher Myers in The New York Times), that Dark Force upon which we Publishers project our inertia, insecurity, excuses for failure, and self-congratulation in the wake of success—will now welcome brilliant coming-of-age books about, say, a girl who writes fan fiction about a fictional series…I’m in.
So, my takeaway from Bologna was this: Yes! It’s true. Overseas, The Market welcomes realistic YA fiction, as well. There is one caveat: As long as that reality is pretty much confined to white people.
As a white person, and for purposes of this blog post, I am quite comfortable with writing “white people.” To ratchet up any potential insult, I am not too concerned with offending any fellow white people in the Publishing Industry, here or abroad. I will also happily cop to hypocrisy on this front. I had success selling rights at Bologna with a contemporary realistic YA about a white girl: The Unfinished Life of Addison Stone, by Adele Griffin (also white). PW does not exaggerate: I was bouncing around the fair, even weighted down with pasta and ham. Adele’s book is amazing and deserves to be read by as many people as possible.
That said, the reception I got for some other books I love just as much as Adele’s or any other on the Soho Teen list wasn’t as effusive. If you mention, for instance, the words “gay” or “Latino,” you might lose interest. Maybe I should have changed my pitches? I had them at “realistic” and “contemporary,” I swear. It doesn’t matter if a book touches upon issues of identity and denial in a way I’ve never seen. Or that at its heart there’s a unique, epic, mythic journey worthy of citation by Bruno Bettelheim and Joseph Campbell (both of whom were also white). Or awesome blurbs fifteen months in advance of publication… Or a secret as delicious as E. Lockhart’s We Were Liars, another YA smash of the fair. (Which I also love. Which I won’t spoil. But which is also about a white girl and her white family.) Nope. An extraordinary novel whose protagonist isn’t a straight white girl might not satisfy The Market.
So why am I writing this post? If there was anything that I missed at Bologna, I’d love to be proven wrong. If any of you rights representatives or agents or editors or authors (or anyone else) know of great new forthcoming YAs featuring protagonists who aren’t straight white girls—and whose rights are selling abroad—please write in and tell me that I am an ignoramus, and that the world is heeding the term “realistic.”
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Rock ’n’ Roll Legend and Bestselling Author Keith Richards to Publish Picture Book for Children in Collaboration with Artist Daughter Theodora Richards
Gus & Me: The Story of My Granddad and My First Guitar; National Publication Date for Print and Digital is September 9, 2014 Megan Tingley, Executive Vice President and Publisher, …
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Free Author Readings for K-8 Classrooms Nationwide on April 4, Now with the Chance to Win Complete Classroom Sets of the 2014 Children’s Choice Book Awards Finalists!
Contact:Shira Schindel, Qlovi(551) 697-1983sschindel@qlovi.com New York, NY – March 27, 2013 — Qlovi, the classroom eBook and literacy software company, partners with the Children’s Book Council, the non-profit trade association for …
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Coffee County Students Make Dramatic Reading Gains in First Semester of Literacy Grant
Data from Students Enrolled in iRead™, READ 180® and System 44® Programs Show Outstanding First Semester Gains in Reading Achievement DOUGLAS, GA – In reviewing early data from the first few months of a …
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Lifetime to Adapt Four More V.C. Andrews Books
“Heather Graham and Ellen Burstyn have already signed up to reprise their Flowers roles for Petals on the Wind, and the Dollanganger kids’ parts have been recast with older actors …
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Librarian Draws 1,530 Kids to Sign Up For Summer Reading Program
“That summer slide also accounts for about 80 percent of the reading gap between kids from low- and middle-income families—three years by the end of eighth grade, according to University …
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Educators! Sign Up for FREE Virtual Readings with Beloved Authors & Illustrators
Educators! Sign Up for FREE Virtual Readings with Beloved Authors & Illustrators:
Tune in and connect with acclaimed children’s book authors and illustrators via YouTube and Google Hangouts on Air.
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National Golden Ticket Sweepstakes Kicks Off On April 1st
Five lucky winners will walk in Willy Wonka’s shoes for one day in a New York City-based Dylan’s Candy Bar store. The prize package also includes “two roundtrip tickets to New York …
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Jeff Kinney to Create 9th ‘Wimpy Kid’ Book
At the moment, no title has been revealed. Kinney has revealed in a statement that “I’m taking the Heffleys out of their home environment and sending them out on the …
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Harry Potter Alliance Shares Tips For How to Run a Successful Book Drive
To encourage followers to sign up and organize their own book drive, they created a how-to video. A successful “Accio Books” campaign can be broken down into seven steps. They …
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Ready, Set, Vote in the Children’s & Teen Choice Book Awards!
If you have already visited ccbookawards.com today and are having trouble with the site, please clear your browser cache and then hit refresh. This will show you the updated version. …
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Second Part of J.K. Rowling’s New Writing on Quidditch Now on Pottermore
Today the second part of J.K. Rowling’s entertaining new writing on the magical sport of Quidditch, is released on Pottermore, the digital platform for Harry Potter. The first part of …
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CBC Diversity: Mark von Bargen — How I Got into Publishing
Senior Director of Trade Sales for Children’s Books at Macmillan
Growing up in South Jersey, my dream was to work in a record store. Remember those? Specifically, the Wee Three Record store in the Moorestown Mall. The closest I ever got was a summer job at Kay-Bee Toys. Going to the mall in those days was THE EVENT. First with your parents, hoping you’d be able to spend time in YOUR stores, and then getting a little older, riding your bike across forbidden busy roads to get to … THE MALL. Wee Three wasn’t a great store if you compare it to bigger brothers like Sound Odyssey and the epic Tower Records in Philly, but it was ours. This was the place my friends and I would go to get the music we loved to hear on FM radio. Among the other stores in that mall was a little shop at the Sears end called, appropriately, The Book End. They had a robust selection of my favorites: Mad Magazine books, Beatles books, and Zander Hollander Baseball Annuals. I never thought about working there. It all seemed too intimidating.
Flash forward to the late 80s. Armed with a History degree from Rutgers, I was living in Philadelphia and needed to get a GRE test book. I went to the Encore Books store in Rittenhouse Square. This was a beautiful split-level store in Center City. They had everything. They had the Barron’s book I needed. They had a sign in the window for their Management Trainee Program. They also had a beautiful girl working behind the counter with a Welsh accent. I was interested in all of the above. The Management Trainee program sounded great, especially if it would help me on the Welsh front. I had lots of questions about the job, most of them revolved around whether this would be in the same store. Answer: “For now, yes, but there is an opportunity to work in lots of stores!” Who wanted that? I got the job, worked there for a month, and was transferred to the store in North Philly on … Welsh Road. Oh, the irony.
My Book End feelings re-surfaced. It was intimidating at first, especially dealing with customers. I was amazed at how the staff knew every book that was in their store. And where it was! After a while, I also became versed in what we had, down to the exact shelf. Something about working 50+ hours a week will do that to you. The other part of working in a store that impressed me was that our store was like a little library. Whatever subject you were interested in, we had something there. I loved that feeling. The store was like our home. We could also order books to build up certain sections, but they had to be sections that were popular. We had a lot of fun building up our Science Fiction, True Crime and Romance section. Fantasy, Sex and Violence was in the air. And it was selling. I worked at Encore for six years, moving up to store manager and then spent 2 years on the road as a merchandiser setting up new stores. Looking back, I have many fond memories of those days, except for the awful maroon aprons they made us wear.
Flash forward to the mid 90s. Unloading trucks in the rain, covering absentee shifts on Friday nights, and wearing maroon aprons can get tiring after a while. Some of my friends had made the big time, and worked at … Baker & Taylor. Cue the angel music. The more I heard about THAT, the better it sounded. No more straightening the computer book section at 10PM. No more counting out the cash register. Weekends off! In the fall of 1994, I got a job as a book buyer at B&T. I would be buying the new titles and reordering books for their warehouses. At first, I was given a handful of smaller presses to manage. I suppose they wanted to limit the damage I could do. I embraced the sales patterns of Michelin Travel Guides, Van Nostrand hair cutting manuals, and Latino fiction of Arte Publico Press.
Over the next four years, I moved on to buying more favorites that included Random House, FSG, Hal Leonard Music Books and Viking Penguin. The more I heard about the stories behind the books’ creation, the more interested I was. One of our reps recommended a new job at Holtzbrinck Publishers selling TSR. TSR? You mean Dungeons and Dragons? Yep. The game manuals and the novels. Game on. Why not?
I came into the Flatiron Building in New York on a hot May day in 1999. I misjudged the subway time, arrived late, and thought that walking up to the 12th floor would be faster than waiting for an elevator. I arrived sweaty, out of breath, and dis-shelved. Talk about making a good impression. I remembered how well those fantasy books sold back in the Welsh Road days and was hoping to be able to be a bigger part of their success “further up-stream”. I got the job and have since moved on to specialize in Children’s books. I feel very lucky to be working with such smart, creative, and fun people.
I occasionally go back to the mall near my parents’ house. Wee Three is gone. The Book End is gone. Encore is gone. The aprons are gone. Things change. But, storytelling and publishing always go on …
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Global Publishing Sensation ‘Half Bad’ Sets New Guinness World Records Title
New York, NY – Exactly one year after clinching her first publishing deal, British author Sally Green has smashed two GUINNESS WORLD RECORDS titles for the ‘Most translated book by a debut …
