What Kind Of Impact Do Awards Actually Have?

My computer guy reads The Globe and Mail regularly, because the Canuckistanis are our neighbors to the north, and he believes that someone really ought to be keeping track of what they're doing. So he referred me to Literary awards are abundant in Canada, but some see a downside.

I nearly forgot about it, but I'm behind in my Bookslut reading, and while I was there catching up, I noticed posts about this prize and that prize, and this other one and oh, my goodness, another. Whoops. I missed one. It appears that literary awards are abundant all over the place.

Evidently you can make some serious bucks in Canada winning literary prizes. Maybe similar to that woman who supported her family with prize winnings. Supposedly a literary prize for poetry has made poetry cool in the great icy north, and I certainly have to respect that.

But, The Globe and Mail article says, literary awards also "have become as essential to the business of marketing books today as retail stores once were..." Jean Baird, an independent scholar, is writing a book on award culture and disputes just how effective this marketing is. Except for the Giller Prize, she says awards don't seem to raise sales. "Even the Booker doesn’t really sell books – unless you win," she claims. Nonetheless, she says there is a sense that if your book hasn't won an award, it has lost them.

I am not the type of person who has any great expectations or worries about winning awards, whether they are literary, academic, or service. I've even gotten over not being in the running for World's Greatest Mom. But I would like to see my books read, which means a little spreading the good word of their existence. That's my objection to award obsession, which occurs here in America, too. When children's literature listservs are hosting discussions in March about what books have already been published that year that could be considered for the Newbery, that encourages its members to read those books and may even create a self-fulling prophecy. The same is true of keeping some kind of spreadsheet on starred books and dishing about it regularly. Award and starred book discussions encourage readers to focus on those limited titles. Thousands of children's books are published each year, and while I will instantly agree with anyone who claims that a certain percentage of them are dreck, I also believe that more than the handful that are perceived as award books and garner stars are worth reading. But people have to learn about them, which is difficult to do if the literary discussion is limited to what are perceived as award contenders.

And I'm not even getting into the perception question: What is perceived as a potential award winner and who came up with that? Someone could also ask if it's possible to write to the award. I'm just saying the pack mentality that chases award winners (hmmm...the literary equivalent of the popular kid?) actually hurts reading in general, to say nothing of sales.

Remembering An Author I Never Knew On Memorial Day

Back in February, 1998 I attended an author presentation at my local library. The author was Richard White, on whom I can find very little information, and the book was Jordan Freeman Was My Friend. The author's presentation was primarily a reading. He was selling copies of the book, which had been published in '94, at a discounted price. I bought one and had it inscribed for my sons. Under their names he wrote, "With the best wishes of the old man who wrote this little book."

Neither of the Gauthier boys ever read it, nor did I. I tried the first few pages and for whatever reason decided not to go on. In fact, a few weeks ago while collecting books for that local library's book sale, I considered donating it. But it has my kids' names in it, so I thought I'd hold on to it a while longer.

Well, last weekend, an adult Gauthier son was going to meet a friend for lunch in Mystic, Connecticut. The friend needed to kill some time, so they had plans to go to Fort Griswold. I pulled Jordan Freeman Was My Friend down off the shelf, handed it to the son in question, and said, "Hey, this book involves Fort Griswold. And look at the title page." The story came out about how I came to have the book, and I left it with him.

Lo' and behold, I learned later, he read it. "It was pretty good," he said.

I'm telling this story because this is what authors dream of happening. Once they give up their fantasies of national fame, magazine covers, and awards, they just want to be read. They want to be read long into the future. In fact, I recall as a teenager wanting to be a writer because I thought it would make me immortal. After I was dead, someone would stumble upon one of my books on a shelf somewhere, and I would live again. I sincerely believe "the old man who wrote this little book" would be delighted to know it was still being read.

So, Richard White, wherever you are, whatever you're doing, a young man starting out his professional career read your book sometime in the past two weeks.

But I Love The Em Dash!

The Case--Please Hear Me Out--Against the Em Dash.

As much as I love the em dash, I will admit that over the years I've become aware visually when I've used them too liberally. They become the punctuation equivalent of an echo, which occurs when an author uses a word soon after already using it so that the reader is aware of the repetition. Therefore, I've tried to cut back on them for that reason.

Otherwise, I'd be sprinkling them in paragraphs like jimmies on cupcakes.

There Are Only So Many Ideas

Aliens on Vacation sounds a little bit like Club Earth. My guess is that the major difference is that in Aliens on Vacation the child main character appears to have to protect his grandmother's alien B&B from being exposed while in Club Earth the child main characters are coping with aliens who keep turning up at their house, which is functioning as an intergalactic resort whether the family likes it or not.

And, of course, Aliens on Vacation is in print and Club Earth isn't.

I Told You Yesterday That I've Been Thinking About Nonfiction

Last night, for the first time in many weeks, I managed to write in my workbook (my workbook because the word journal is too loaded with expectations for me). I wrote about Caroline Leavitt's essay Why is someone else in my book's author photo?. I wondered if it was a personal essay, which I read defined, years ago, as an essay that deals with a personal event and relates it to the greater human experience. Many personal essays, I find, are strong on the personal part and don't quite pull off the relating to the greater human experience bit. Should she have tried writing a piece of narrative nonfiction instead, I wondered. If I understand narrative nonfiction correctly, to do that she would have needed to take her interesting personal experience and treat it as a narrative, as a story with a climax, while maintaining its factual integrity. Or may be she should have used her personal experience as a jumping off point for a short story, maybe something about an author losing her identity or getting lost somehow.

Then this morning I just finished reading Caught Telling Fiction in which the author, Jessica Francis Kane, comes off as sounding a bit defensive because her new book is sometimes considered historical fiction. She seems to want to think of it as mainstream fiction that is "historically imagined" (her quotes). She says, "Here’s an analogy: movies and after-school specials. Calling a movie an after-school special seems to broadcast something lacking about it. The same thing happens when a book is described as historical fiction."

My knee-jerk reaction as I was reading her essay was that here was an author who just is having trouble self-identifying what she does, trouble connecting and engaging with her own work, and is way too concerned with how others perceive her and her work.

But her book deals with a disaster with survivors who are still living. And she goes on to talk about dealing with their response to her fiction. Her experience meeting a survivor and others affected by the tragedy she wrote about..after she'd completed the book...is something that might shake someone's view of themselves and what they do. I'm left wondering if what she is trying to defend in her essay is not historical fiction but fiction, period.

Anyway, I finished reading the essay and then noticed that up above the title is a kind of column title "Personal Essays." So here was an essay definitely being classified as a personal essay (by somebody), and I guess it does move from the author's personal experiences to something more universal because she is writing about something more universal--what is historical fiction--and not just her experiences answering questions about her book.

So, there, folks, is a little nonfiction experience prepared for you almost as I was living it, myself. I wonder if there's a name for that kind of nonfiction writing?

Interesting Nonfiction For Kids

I could have sworn that I mentioned the blog I.N.K. Interesting Nonfiction for Kids here at some point in the relatively recent past, but if I did, I can't find the post now.

The people behind I.N.K. also have a website, INK THINK TANK, relating to bringing nonfiction authors to classrooms. As it turns out, I am familiar with or even sort of know a number of INK THINKers.

I've been thinking about nonfiction a little more than usual since reading Elizabeth Partridge's essay, Narrative Nonfiction: Kicking Ass at Last and writing about it when I did the When Bob Met Woody Post. Narrative nonfiction is Partridge's preferred term for creative nonfiction, which I've been interested in writing for a while now. My feeling is, if I could pay more attention to nonfiction for children, specifically history related nonfiction, since history is an interest of mine, it might enhance my own nonfiction writing.

Hmmm. Does that sound as self-serving as I think it does?

Be that as it may, you nonfiction people should check out INK, both blog and website.

I Don't Know How Much This Would Have Bothered Me

Why is someone else in my book's author photo?

For my eighth book, in a foreign edition, after some of the dreadful author photos I've had taken? I think this would probably have rolled off my back.

If you can tolerate picking through the nasty comments, there are a few interesting ones from readers who say that, for them, author photos don't provide a connection to the author, a concern for the author of the essay.

A Book For That Worrisome Teenager You Want To Scare Straight

When I heard a few years back that Jack Gantos had written a memoir about his imprisonment for drug running when he was twenty, I thought, Gee, you'd think there'd be some parent or adult group somewhere having a hissy fit about a childen's writer with a background like this. Not that I thought someone should have a hissy fit about it. It just seems like the kind of thing someone always is having a hissy fit about.

Hole in My Life is probably a book that every teenager ought to be forced to read. Holy Moses. Talk about a cautionary tale. And I don't think Gantos was trying to do the instructional thing. His writing style is very plain, but the story is an eye popper.

Seriously, even before he gets to the crime he talks about getting so drunk he was vomiting caustic substances. That sure makes being blind drunk look attractive. And before he got caught he had to worry about one of his co-conspirators killing him. Wouldn't a lot of young minds read this kind of thing and think, Nah, I'll just get a job at Target, after all?

Interesting note: Hole in My Life also deals with Gantos's evolution as a young writer, and his movement toward becoming a children's writer. While in prison, he enjoyed recalling his childhood and thinking of childhood events in terms of stories. Some of his short stories do have a very autobiographical feel to them.

Jack Gantos is the author of books of short stories and the Joey Pigza books.

It Pays To Read Comments

You'll find a sophisticated discussion of the pencil-necked little weasel episode from earlier this month at Read Roger. Some of the commenters sound as if they actually know the funding situation in Minnesota.

A Blog With Balanced Reviews. And I've Been Missing It!

I've "known" Ms. Yingling for years, but somehow her blog got kind of lost in the shuffle for me. But today I visited Ms. Yingling Reads. Check out the fantastic reviews I saw there. What's so fantastic about them? They include what she considers to be the books' weaknesses as well as their strengths.

I rarely read blog reviews unless I am already interested in the book for some reason. I don't read them because so many bloggers have a policy of publishing only what they call "positive" reviews. What, then, does the review have to tell me other than what I already know--that the reviewers like the books because they only write about books they like?

Yes, I may recall titles if I see them at a lot of blogs, and that will lead me to pick up a book if I stumble upon it somewhere. But I often don't get more than that from blog reviews because I just can't get excited about reading a post when I know I'm only going to hear sweetness and light about the title under discussion.

Look what Ms. Yingling does: She begins her reviews with sort of an abstract describing the story and then in subtitled sections that you can't miss states the books' strengths and weaknesses. These things are so quick and easy to read. Oh, my gosh, what an opportunity to be exposed to more titles.

As I've said here so many times before, when a reviewer does a "balanced" review, including criticism that doesn't necessarily fall into the warm and cuddly category, it's not necessarily a loss for the author. Take a look at Ms. Yingling's review of Horton Halfpott, for instance. Under Weaknesses, she says, "Remember, I couldn't stand Snicket, so this was hard for me to get through. The names and Victorian setting, which may delight students, irritated me." Many readers loved the Snicket books. Mentioning that that aspect of the book irritated her has the potential to convince some readers that this is just the book for them or for the people they buy for. If Ms. Yingling had a policy of only doing reviews of books she totally loved, her readers wouldn't have been exposed to this title--a loss for the author and his book.

Also, Ms. Yingling blogs about other things, too.

Well, it's too bad The Spectacle gave up the ghost, but now I have another blog to replace it. Am off to add it to my reader right now.