Guest Post: Seasons of Story

Today, I welcome to the blog a good friend who has been here a number of times—the great Lyn Miller-Lachmann. You have the floor now, Lyn!

Spring is my favorite season. I appreciate the buds and blossoms, the longer days, the fresh smell of grass after a rain shower. Yet I don’t feel the urgency to get outside with each warm day, the way I do in the fall. I know there will be many more warm, sunny days. I can afford to waste a few of them.

Writing fiction, though, I have to break the habit of wasting days. I don’t mean procrastinating in my daily word count. As a fan of spring and its endless possibilities, I tend to let my characters dilly-dally, smelling the roses, spending an afternoon on a winery tour in southern Moravia while the bad guys hunt them down.

A tight timeline is a writer’s friend. While many successful novels take place over the course of a calendar year, or in books for kids and teens, a school year (or four), tension rises when events occur within a short period of time. In some cases, there’s a ticking clock—something bad that will happen within a week if the protagonist doesn’t stop it. Long timelines tend to defuse tension, though they’re better suited to quieter novels that prioritize the emotional growth of the protagonist over a triumph over an evil adversary. As any critic of insta-love will tell you, genuine relationships and emotional transformation need time to develop.

I’ve found that my most successful novels take place over the course of one season. Of the middle grade and YA manuscripts I’ve completed—three published, two unpublished, and two due to be published in 2022—two take place in spring, two in fall, one in the northern hemisphere summer but the southern hemisphere winter, one in a six-month period between February and August cutting across three seasons, and one over the course of an entire year. The weakest manuscript, now shelved, takes place over the entire year, and much of it feels like vignettes rather than a story that builds tension to a climax. The other unpublished story awaiting revisions is a YA historical romance that takes place over a few weeks, and I’m coming to realize that I need a longer timeframe for the romance, one that balances the ups and downs of their relationship while taking into account the outside threats that the new couple faces. I will need the entire season, not just a month within it.

Given that I tend to keep the timeframe within a single season, how do I choose the season for each story? In general, I let the school calendar define my window, as school is such an important part of life for children and teenagers. My forthcoming middle grade verse novel Moonwalking, which I’m writing with Zetta Elliott [below], takes place in fall because it’s the start of the school year and my protagonist, JJ, is a newcomer to his neighborhood and school. Faced with the foreclosure of their home on Long Island and JJ’s inability to secure a scholarship at his Catholic school due to poor grades and behavioral issues, his parents move to his grandmother’s basement apartment in Brooklyn just before the school year starts. The novel explores JJ’s adjustment to attending a public school for the first time, one in which there are few white kids like him.

In contrast, my 2015 YA historical novel, Surviving Santiago, is a summer vacation story. While her newly remarried mother goes on honeymoon, Tina journeys to visit her father in Santiago, Chile, where it’s the middle of winter—though a much milder winter than it would be in her Wisconsin home. In Chile she counts down the days until she returns to her friends and her daily routines. Her father’s home is a disorienting and dangerous place on the cusp of transition from dictatorship to democracy, a time of settling scores with people who upheld a violent regime and people like her father who helped bring it down. The countdown in this “upside-down” situation means returning to safety, at least until Tina meets a mysterious boy her ago with so much in common, and then she doesn’t want to leave at all. In Surviving Santiago, the season of the year works on multiple levels, including as a metaphor for the situation in which Tina finds herself.

Other factors can determine a choice of seasons. What sports are in season at the time? That had a lot to do with my choice for Rogue, set in a northeastern US spring with opportunities for mountain biking through muddy trails and swollen creeks. With historical fiction, reality often determines when the story begins. The inciting incident for my forthcoming YA novel, Torch, involves a teenage political activist motivated by actual events that occurred one and two months earlier, in January and February of that year; in March, he would be the third to carry out the same act.

Choosing the season for your setting, and using it as a ticking clock or metaphor can help you structure your story. Your details specific to that season root your story in a time and place and help your setting become a character in itself. If you don’t like that season (and I’m not a fan of either summer or winter), you can give your book a dystopian feel, as I did with Surviving Santiago. Or you can imbue it with the kind of possibility that you feel when the calendar, and the weather, turns to your favorite time of the year.

Lyn Miller-Lachmann writes fiction and nonfiction for teens and translates children’s books from Portuguese and Spanish to English. She debuted with the award-winning historical novel, Gringolandia, followed by its companion Surviving Santiago, and  has two more historical novels forthcoming in 2022: Moonwalking (co-authored with Zetta Elliott) and Torch. She also wrote the pioneering #ownvoices middle grade novel, Rogue, based on her experience of growing up autistic but not yet diagnosed.

L. Marie here. I just learned of another book project that Lyn is working on—a nonfiction book. Check it out here: https://www.lynmillerlachmann.com/i-get-to-write-another-book/

Author photos courtesy of Lyn Miller-Lachmann. Photo of Lyn by Joan Heffler. Daffodil photo by L. Marie.

Check This Out: In Brigantia

It’s raining authors around the blog! Today, the amazing Andrew Murray (or Andy as many of you who know him and follow his blogs, City Jackdaw and Coronets For Ghosts, call him) is here to talk about his latest poetry collection, In Brigantia. (His first was Heading North, which we talked about here.)

  

Stick around after the interview to learn about a giveaway of this collection. Now, let’s talk to Andy.

El Space: Four quick facts about yourself?
Andy: Thank you! (1) I’m (at least) the fifth generation of Murray born in Manchester.
(2) My favourite place is Orkney.

 

Photos by Andy Murray © 2019

(3) A big Whovian, I once stumbled across a scene being filmed for the Doctor Who 50th Anniversary episode, and was totally unaware of it until it aired on TV.
(4) My dreams begin while I’m still awake.

El Space: Please tell us how you came to choose the theme you chose for In Brigantia.

Andy: The title of the collection takes its name from the opening long poem, ‘Brigantia’ being the territorial name of northern Celtic tribe the Brigantes. Being northern myself, the poems are either set in, or were written in, that same area, though set in the modern day. My writing is often rooted in place.

Romano-British Brigantes map

El Space: How long did it take to complete this collection?
Andy: I never started writing with a collection in mind. I continued to write individual poems following the publication of Heading North in late 2015 and eventually, when I had a considerable number, I began to go through them with an eye on bringing some together in a new book.

Along with the post-2015 poems, there are three older poems also included, one dating back to the September 11th attack, when I received a postcard from a close friend of mine, on that very day, telling me that she was in New York and going to go up one of those towers. It shook my complacency about our friendship. That friend is now my wife.

El Space: Wow! What a great story! What’s your process for writing a poem? How do you know when a poem is “done”?
Andy: I never sit to write a poem; words and lines tend to come to me when I’m out and about doing other things. I take a note of them and they grow from there; it’s quite organic really. Knowing when they are ‘done’ is an instinctive thing, just a feeling I get. As with all writing, I guess, it’s a subjective process. I was sat in a coffee shop watching a guy working the room, trying, unsuccessfully, to chat up the girls who were in there, and straight away I got every single line for ‘Romeo of Lever Street,’ written on the handy notes section of my phone. That also comes in useful for phrases that come to me when on the edge of sleep.

El Space: Amazon’s description of this collection mentions historical royalty like Queen Cartimandua and Hollywood “royalty” like Marilyn Monroe and Tom Cruise. How did these individuals come to be in this collection?

  

Andy: There’s a story to the Monroe one. I was on a train journey, listening to an audio drama over headphones as we approached the next station. As the train pulled in, the guard announced, “The next station, ladies and gentlemen, is Mytholmroyd.” I really thought, above the story that I was tuned into, that what had been said was “Ladies and gentlemen: Marilyn Monroe!” I pulled my headphones off, “What?!” Looking wildly through the window to see exactly where we were. In my defence, I was also due to have my ears syringed soon at the local surgery, but still-—Monroe! I thought to myself ‘Wouldn’t that have been a sight for a Thursday morning?’ And that’s how ‘Mytholmroyd’ came into being.

Photo by Andy Murray © 2019

As for Cartimandua, she was the queen of the Brigantes tribe. Her name translates as ‘sleek pony,’ and that’s how I came up with the cover image for the book.

El Space: Which poem(s) in the collection had the most difficult birth?
Andy: ‘Hanging On ‘Til Morning.’ With this one I went against my usual writing process, mentioned above, looking to write lyrics instead of waiting for the lyrics to come to me. I say lyrics, because this originally was for a friend who is in a band and had asked for help in coming up with words for a song. I got carried away, imagining all sorts of melodies and chord changes before I came to my senses and reigned myself in. Music is his talent, not mine, so I gave him what I’d written and told him to adapt it however he wanted to fit what he was doing.

El Space: Which poets or other artists inspire you?
Andy: There are many. Different poets speak to different people. I like Kenneth White—he writes about the things that inspire me. Now in his eighties, I mentioned him in the foreword to Heading North and received a letter from him wishing me well upon my own journey, which was wonderful. I also like Werner Aspenström, but need to brush up on my Swedish as there is only a limited amount of his work translated into English.

  

  

El Space: What will you work on next?
Andy: I will be turning to fiction next. A new publisher has expressed interest in a short story collection, tentatively called The Night Spills In. It’s the kind of stuff I read when growing up—folklore and the supernatural. I was that kind of kid! Beyond that I have the first draft of a contemporary novel, Seasons on the Hill, that I’ve left to breathe for a while, to pick up again. And I will still be writing poetry along the way.

Thank you, Andy, for being my guest!

Looking for Andy? You can find him at his blogs (City Jackdaw and Coronets For Ghosts).

Looking for In Brigantia? You can find it at Amazon. But one of you will get a copy of In Brigantia simply because you commented. Winner to be announced next week sometime!

Author photo and other photos courtesy of Andy Murray. In Brigantia cover came from Andy’s City Jackdaw blog. Kenneth White and Werner Aspenström poetry collection covers came from Goodreads and Amazon. Romano-British Brigantes map from Wikipedia. Marilyn Monroe photo from thefashiontag blog. Tom Cruise photo from vulture.com. Doctor Who image from fandomania.

Guest Post: Many “Firsts” for Translation

Today’s post was written by my good friend, Lyn Miller-Lachmann, one of my classmates from VCFA. Lyn has written novels like Gringolandia, Surviving Santiago, and Rogue. She’s here to talk about her work as a translator. Take it away, Lyn!

The months of August and September are busy times for us translators of children’s books. For the past several weeks, we’ve honored international women writers and the women who have translated their work, and next month we recognize those books for children originally published outside the U.S. and Canada, many of them translations, as part of #WorldKidlit month.

I have had the good fortune to translate six books for young readers from Portuguese to English, all but one of them written by women. I became a translator quite by accident when I attended a meeting of children’s book authors where Claudia Bedrick, the publisher of Enchanted Lion Books was speaking. Enchanted Lion’s list consists primarily of picture books originally published abroad and translated into English, and she said that she needed someone to translate a book first published in Portugal. I’d recently returned from six months in Portugal, where I took an intensive class for immigrants, after which I completed a course in Brazilian Portuguese at the University of Albany.

I raised my hand.

The result was The World in a Second, by Isabel Minhós Martins and illustrated by Bernardo Carvalho, a book that earned my first starred review ever. In addition to giving the book a star, Kirkus named it to its list of Best Children’s Books of 2015. The book also appeared on the Best Children’s Books list of the Boston Globe and was named one of the 2016 CCBC Choices of the Cooperative Children’s Book Center at the University of Wisconsin. That was another coveted “first” for me, because I graduated in 1990 from the University of Wisconsin’s School of Library and Information Studies, and I knew that making CCBC Choices was a rare and important honor.

The text of The World in a Second consists of brief commentary on illustrations of scenes throughout the world that take place at the same moment. For me, it was an easy transition into translating children’s books. My next project for Enchanted Lion, Lines, Squiggles, Letters, Words, by Ruth Rocha and illustrated by Madalena Matoso, presented many more challenges. One was translating a story featuring a young Brazilian boy named João, who goes to school for the first time and sees his world in a new way, to make it accessible to a U.S. readership while maintaining its Brazilian feel. The popular but difficult-to-pronounce-in-English name João had to be changed out of consideration for teachers and caregivers reading the book aloud; I replaced it with the only slightly less popular Pedro. My editor wanted a new title for the book, as the one in Portuguese, O Menino Que Aprendeu a Ver (The Boy Who Learned to See), felt dull and preachy. Many of the illustrations had to be altered because Pedro learns words that begin with the letters A and D, but some of those don’t begin with A or D in English. The same occurred with billboards, street signs, and labels that begin to take on new meaning as my young protagonist recognizes the letters from school. Published in 2016, Lines, Squiggles, Letters, Words also received acclaim, including another spot in CCBC Choices and one on the USBBY’s Outstanding International Children’s Books list.

In the past two years, I’ve had two books come out each year. The fable, The Queen of the Frogs, by the Italian duo, author Davide Cali and illustrator Marco Somà, was published by Eerdmans Books for Young Readers, another award-winning publisher of international books in translation. While the story didn’t win as many distinctions as my books for Enchanted Lion, it is certainly a relevant one for our times—the story of a peaceful, egalitarian pond full of frogs where everything changes when one frog catches a gold ring dropped from a bridge, puts it on her head like a crown, and, with the support of a small coterie of advisers, declares herself the queen. With no special qualification, except maybe swimming and diving ability, she puts the ordinary frogs to work serving her and her allies while she enjoys a life of leisure and luxury on a lily pad.

My second book for 2017 is also a timely one. Three Balls of Wool (Can Change the World), by Henriqueta Cristina and illustrated by Yara Kono, is the story of a Portuguese family forced to flee as a result of a cruel dictatorship in their country that won’t allow children living in poverty or in rural areas to attend school. The parents and three children end up in a country where “all children go to school,” but everyone dresses alike and there is no more freedom to speak out than in Portugal. The young narrator misses her old home and notices the lines of worry and sadness on her parents’ faces. She and her mother come up with a way of speaking without actually speaking—knitting sweaters in new patterns and color combinations and showing how immigrants and refugees enrich the lives of the countries where they settle. This book attained another prestigious “first” for me—a Skipping Stones Honor Award in the Multicultural/International Books category.

Now that it’s 2018, I have one book that launched this month, and one more in the works. Published in North America by Charlesbridge, Olive the Sheep Can’t Sleep, by Clementina Almeida, illustrated by Ana Camila Silva, combines a soothing story for young children with tips for caregivers to help establish bedtime routines and ease the little one’s journey to slumber. Although I’ve translated academic articles, Olive the Sheep Can’t Sleep is the first time I’ve translated advice for general adult readers.

And one more “first”: Earlier this year, a Brazilian publisher, Editora Caixote, contacted me to translate a middle grade novel, which they would publish in a trilingual (Portuguese, Spanish, and English) edition. Written by noted Brazilian journalist Carolina Montenegro, Amal is the story of a 12-year-old girl from Syria who must flee her bombarded village and travel alone through Turkey and Greece to Italy, where her uncle lives—along the way meeting other unaccompanied children fleeing war and poverty. This book is due out at the beginning of 2019, and although readers in the U.S. won’t have access to it, I am pleased that my translations are finding an international audience. In the coming years, however, I hope that publishers and readers in the U.S. will become more open to international literature in translation and the different perspectives that these books offer.

For more information about these books, and translation of children’s books in general, please check out these links to my blog articles:
https://www.lynmillerlachmann.com/the-americanizer-and-other-tales-of-translation/
https://www.lynmillerlachmann.com/good-news-for-lines-squiggles-letters-words/
https://www.lynmillerlachmann.com/a-fable-for-our-time-the-queen-of-the-frogs/
https://www.lynmillerlachmann.com/the-time-has-come-for-three-balls-of-wool-can-change-the-world/
https://www.lynmillerlachmann.com/olive-the-sheeps-u-s-tour/

Looking for Lyn? You can find her at her website, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

I’d love to give away one of these translated books to a worthy commenter. Comment below to be entered in the drawing. Tell me which book you’d like. The winner will be announced on August 27.

Book covers from Goodreads.