This conversation came back to me, years later, when I wrote No Castles Here. About half the important characters are African-American. The primary setting is the inner-city in an imaginary neighborhood of Camden, NJ, a city where the majority of residents are African-American. Could I, as a white person write about the African-American experience?

Many, like my colleague back in the 1980s, strongly believe it isn’t possible for me to do it — as illustrated in this blog discussion about the blurb for the book. But that wasn’t what I had set out to do.

I wanted to portray a poor bullied loser who encounters a bit of magic in his life. Because the references were easier for me, I made him white. I based his character, his family’s character, the neighbors, and the neighborhood on the hundreds of people I met and on the neighborhoods I wandered over the years, in the New Haven area, Brooklyn, and during my short time in Camden and Philadelphia.

Whether I was successful in what I set out to do, others will have to decide. But regardless of the success, the effort taught me humility. It made me realize how much I didn’t know. Before spending time with my characters, I was often guilty of white default, which is choosing the color of my character’s skin the same way I might chose his or her eye color, and not paying attention to the details of the person’s life. Being faithful to those details required a lot of effort, and made me far more sensitive to how they can be gotten wrong. I wrote about this recently in an essay published in Anna Tambour’s wonderful website: It’s not like choosing the color of her hair. It’s a very personal essay, but it helped work out for me the wrongs of white default.

Thank you Minnesota Parent!

I can’t wait to hear the production!

Hope to see you there!

One of my favorites was from a mother: whenever her daughter writes an essay for her teacher, it comes back with lots of notes for corrections. Her daughter always corrects as directed, but when can or should she question those directions?

The answer Karen and I gave was twofold.

First, the teacher is teaching the rules of writing. A writer will break those rules, but on purpose, for a purpose — to create something deliberate with the piece. But before a writer can break those rules s/he has to know them. At school, the teacher’s job is to make sure a student learns the rules — which is what all those corrections are about.

A professional writer also gets corrections and directions from editors. Writers will correct as directed, but they will also build what Karen called “the internal editor.” The job of the internal editor is to have a clear sense of how the writer wants the writing to sound (the “voice” of the story). And sometimes that internal editor will trump the editor’s call.

So if you’re a kid, how do you build this internal editor?

Read, a whole lot, to see what kind of writing you like. Then write, a whole lot, and experiment with breaking those rules. But maybe not at school. ‘Cause you still have to learn the rules.

Go Rutgers!

[T]his is a book about class, something that is rarely ever present in children’s literature unless tied to a race storyline. Augie and his neighborhood are poor; his school is poor and because of that they are easy to dismiss or even worse, generalize. Bauer shows just how important a school can be to the children who attend it and how that school in many ways is the foundation for the neighborhood that surrounds it.

You can read the entire review here. I’m quite proud of it.

But don’t worry. We’ll reschedule. In the meantime, back to work!

What a gem this book is! It isn’t often that I come across a book that I truly love from the first page, but this was, indeed, one of them. First time author A.C.E. Bauer has written a novel that will capture the attention of both boys and girls (and obviously adults).

Stating that it is “easily one of [her] favorites that [she’s] read this year,” she bemoans that she’s too late for the Cybil Awards. But, she adds:

As long as some of you read it now, I won’t be disappointed!

Thank you Amanda!!

You can read the full review here.