david elzey

Looking back, the one thing everyone could agree on was how normal a day it had been.

In same way that people don’t notice their health until the get sick, no one could remember what it was like when there were shelves of Young Adult novels in the libraries and bookstores. Everyone could clearly visualize the sections as they once were – thick spines of glossy covers, tantalizing one-word titles with the promise of romance or dystopia or both! – outgrowing their allotted shelves and threatening to take over neighboring shelves. The Young Adult books even began to subdivide beneath genre headings never before seen in the world of “adult” fiction. And as they began to take over slots on the various Bestseller’s Lists, forcing the New York Times to consider a separate Book Review section devoted strictly to Young Adults books, something strange happened.

Quietly, the way the light changes when a thin cloud passes briefly, the way you suddenly notice the gradual aging in a loved one’s face, the Rapture came to Young Adult books and they simply disappeared.

Though not entirely.

As with any great societal change, the writers and artists saw it coming and prepared. Those with the most vested in the genre, the writer’s themselves, stopped identifying themselves and their writing as anything other than “fiction.” When called on the change, some even being accused of abandoning the category or of trying to distance themselves from “genre writers” in general, stood their ground with the oldest explanation in the book: they wrote what they wrote, it was up to marketing departments to determine where their books belonged. But in secret they eyed the territories of Middle Grade and Literary Fiction and pivoted their attentions.

Artists, in particular the photographers who filled countless stock photo sites with typical Young Adult images suitable for multiple use on covers, began replacing their old work with new. Topless torsos were supplanted with silhouettes free of distinct racial identifiers, or iconic images of places and things evocative of various moods, replacing figurative images altogether. Designers began cultivating styles reminiscent of eras before they were born, creating books covers with modern versions of retro graphics that lent an air of literary respectability to otherwise cringe-worthy titles. It became difficult to tell whether a book was newly published or a reprint of a contemporary of classic 20th century authors. The resulting confusion deliberately set the stage for the disappearance of Young Adult books as those that were published were confused for adult titles and “mis-shelved” accordingly.

Finally, with the price break in tablet computers making them as affordable as a cell phone, digital book sales by teen readers soared and, while reviving the few remaining old guard publishers, gutted the need for Young Adult print books altogether.

Then one day – an everyday normal day, on that everyone agrees – everyone was suddenly struck with the realization that Young Adult books had vanished overnight. They had a sudden curiosity to scan the shelves and see if there was perhaps something new to discover, only to find empty shelves and reapportioned sections where Young Adult books had been. Even the “classics” in the genre had vacated their roosts. Some were later discovered among the fiction and literature, others had gained new covers and were among those books aimed at the Middle Grade reader, and some (thankfully in far too many cases) apparently disappeared as if they had never been. Rumors that some titles were found hiding in other genres could not be verified, and in the end it was agreed, the Rapture had come to Young Adult fiction.

And the world continued on without incident. Some even said it was a better world than before.

Well, THAT happened!

Thirty days, thirty poems extracted from “The Stories of John Cheever” as part of the Pulitzer Remix Project. As we hit the final few days it seemed to me as if we all taking a final sprint for home. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that many of my fellow remixers might have been holding back their one final poem as a sort of send-off. For my part, I knew going in I wanted the last poem to be one of Cheever’s most famous: “The Enormous Radio.”

Here’s how the month ended for me.

April 27: hushed sect

To be honest, the was the sloppiest of all my poems. For the project I preferred to work from photocopies that could travel with me, that I could pick up and toy with while commuting or wherever I happened to have a few moments’ free time. For this particular poem I worked at home, straight from the book, trying to be as spontaneous as possible. I had edited and saved but failed to post this on the day it was due, only realizing it was still in “draft’ form the next day. As for the poem itself, I was intrigued by the portrait that emerged early on and felt determined to make the end line up.

April 28: Oy, Death

This is, I think, the very first found poem I completed back in January. I was looking for patterns in language to play with, repetition that I could bounce off of, and when “over” and its multiple meanings came into play I knew I had found what I was looking for. I had three different ways of formatting the poem in mind before finally deciding on a very measured approach.

April 29: the blow

Outside of dialog, Cheever wrote very little first-person narratives, so when I landed on his (and my) opening line I knew I had to use it. And when you look at that blunt line you realize there’s no flowery prose that you can hide behind; what follows must be equally terse. Again, I take no credit for Cheever’s dark demons.

April 30: hearts unmoored

I walked away from and came back to “The Enormous Radio” several times because I wasn’t able to make found poetic sense of it. Each time I thought I’d found something I could build on, only to have it diverge into a yellow wood and leave me at the fork. Then I realized the two-part structure, the first with its emotions and the second with its repercussions. The word “it” became pivotal and where I had been shying away from the word “love” throughout I realized I had to use it here. In the end it becomes a farewell to the project, a tribute to all who ventured along this journey, and a sad commentary about Cheever himself.

Where I had my fears about committing to so huge a project going in, I’m happy to see those fears we unfound… okay, I freaked out a little half way through. I had some gaps and doubts that I could keep pulling out poems of a decent quality. I was buoyed along by fellow remixers in the comments who, when i was sure I had just posted the worst dreck imaginable, were able to find glimmering facets I hadn’t even noticed. Though I wasn’t part of the facebook group I really felt like we were a solid clan, working the edges of our found efforts from ragged to crystalline. I’m proud to have been a part of such a huge and committed bunch of participants and to whatever comes next.

A chapbook maybe?

So here we are, post-National Poetry Month (or ponapomo, if you will) and as much as I’d like to keep going I do have some other pressing writerly deadlines and project to finish. I hope you’ll take the time to visit not only my links but to check out some of the other 2400+ poems at the Pulitzer Remix site and see what I’ve been talking about.

And in the kidlitosphere, Poetry Friday continues, hosted this week by Elizabeth Steinglass. Plenty of goodness there, probably none of it based on the work of John Cheever.

PUBLISHERS!

How would you like to guarantee stagnant sales from the moment your book dropped in stores?
Do you want your books to have a sameness that will allow them to be lost on table displays?
Are you tired of actually having to pay designers to think?

Why not use this revolutionary new tactic proven to cause book buyers eyes to glaze over in stores all across the country?

USE WHITE!

That’s right, the most brilliant of colors (or absence of color, depending on whether we’re talking spectral or reflected light), white is the cure-all for all your design woes!

Nothing projects the image of newness like white. Nothing says “this is the future, this is NOW!” quite like white. Nothing focuses the attention on the fact that your book looks like hundreds of other new releases (and ignore the political implications!) like white!

YES, WHITE!

Granted, this has been proven on cover after cover in the non-fiction genres of science and business, but there’s nothing to stop you fiction publishers from trending into white! Start with that hot area of Young Adult fiction and watch your sales plummet like a boulder in a pool full of clear gelatin! Then kill sales of that hot new author and keep yourself from the bestsellers list with a simple serif font (Helvetica, no!) and maybe a splash of wingdings to separate the title from the author.

Nothing says generic, bland, boring, thoughtless and vapid quite like white!

GO WHITE!

With the light at the end of the tunnel in sight, it feels like this month has gone on far longer than it has. It probably has something to do with me working on these poems for the Pulitzer Remix as far back as mid-January, so three solid months of focus is at play here. No excuses; writing is hard work, even the simplest, goofiest of found poems can be unusually taxing. Not taxing in a bad way (is there such a thing as good taxing?) but simply…

Well, work.

I am beginning to see interesting patterns in Cheever’s work, little quirks of mechanics that have had a tendency to force a certain voice to appear in the poems. He isn’t fond of first-person, nor is he fond of conjunctions, and he is awfully fond of showing off his vocabulary. His themes of suburban unhappiness and the desire of his characters to simply get away speak volumes about the author more than they do about the characters. Some days, some poems, it was a real chore to deliberately not let his darkness through, to create alternate worlds and narratives that serve as antidote to The Stories of John Cheever.

Here we go with this week’s roundup of found poems.

April 20: the type
Like a foodie insisting on using every part of the animal, I considered every printed page possible fodder for a poem, and this one came from the colophon. The subtle rhyme of “designed” and “bind” was only discovered after the fact. I probably shouldn’t admit that, it makes me sound so much smarter otherwise.

April 21: mondo-ku
Originally titled “haiku” because I couldn’t find an anagram with a unifying theme, these four little ku were constructed in this order, with their lines consecutive within the text. One of those exercises where I hoped I could show a variety of styles and themes contained within a single story.

April 22: s/w/him
A second poem created from the interweaving of pages from two separate stories, with a title that means something to me but I don’t know how it tracks with readers. Anyway, Cheever’s dark world wins out in this one.

April 23: Stilettos
Knives or shoes? A personal favorite, mostly because I liked having the interrupting format. And the last lines. Oh, hell, it was a lot of fun all around.

April 24: Tableau
My first ever attempt at a pantoum, with its unusual patterns of repetition. After seeing others in the Pulitzer Remix use this form I was determined to give it a go when the moment presented itself. This story was the first where entire lines jumped out at me. The fact that I was able to lay them down in the order in which they appeared in the text was pure luck. Not as subtle as some pantoum I’ve seen, but I’m happy with the results.

April 25: arroyo
I wanted something short, but heavy and suggestive with meaning. I limited myself to two pages, wrote a much long poem, and then whittled away at it until it was merely a whiff of itself. That mysterious promise at the end – even I what to know what it was!

April 26: Err
To err is human, but as these distorted images collected I discovered perhaps human error has been rather destructive. I jokingly refer to this as my “climate change poem” and if I’d been thinking I’d have posted it on Earth Day. This poem also has some very strong resonance with one of the first found poems I ever wrote near 30 years ago. I wish I still had that poem about dog college…

Next week, the final roundup, including my found poem taking from one of Cheever’s best-known stories, “The Enormous Radio,” which managed to make itself the perfect summation of Cheever, his stories, and the poems his stories inspired.

Five unsettling days here in Boston, and somehow I didn’t feel as anxious as I could have. I’ve spent the weekend mulling this over in spare moments and I’ve come to the conclusion that, somewhere along the way, I decided I simply refuse to let fear rule me.

If there’s one thing terrorists, politicians, and the media have excelled in since 9/11 its been the increase in peddling fear for their own gain. It doesn’t matter to me if its an improvised bomb set off at public event or a pundit deliberately spewing slanted opinion or a politician trying to rationalize the sanctity of gun ownership in this country, these are all terrorists utilizing the language of fear for their own purposes.

And I’m done with all of it.

It sounds simple, to say you won’t be ruled by fear, and the amazing thing is that it is simple. I grew up in California and when I would tell people from other parts of the world where I grew up they would inevitably tell me that they couldn’t live under the constant threat that an earthquake could come without warning at any minute.

You know what? So could getting hit by a car crossing the street. Tripping and falling down a flight of stairs. A gas explosion. These things, and millions of others, could happen at any time. Maybe it sounds like a false sense of security to say that when you live under the constant threat of danger you become enured to it, but how could a person truly call it “living” to be in such a constant state of fear wondering when “the big one” is going to send your home state sliding into the sea?

Accidents happen. Tragedies occur. Horrific acts of violence are committed. Yes, there are ways to prevent and mitigate them, but should we fear them? Should we allow ourselves to live in fear?  Of course not. And there’s medical evidence to suggest that it can be both physically and psychologically damaging to your well-being to constantly worrying and living in fear.

In short, fear itself can kill you. How’s that for something to be afraid of?

I know people who were down near the Marathon last week who were fortunate enough to not be harmed; hell, my younger daughter was planning to be within a few blocks from there before her plans fell through. And later in the week, on Thursday night, I walked past the location where the MIT security officer was shot less than two hours before it happened. There was actually a moment where I almost had to double-back to work while on my way home which would have put me in Cambridge right when the convenience store up the street was being robbed by the alleged bombers. These are the “close calls” with recent events that were on my mind on Friday while I watched (as did the rest of the world) while the metropolitan area I lived in was shut down for an unprecedented manhunt. I went through a range of complicated emotions as the events unspooled but in the end, as eerie as the entire week was, I didn’t find myself once afraid.

Fear is the currency of those looking to hold power over our emotional well-being, and I’m no longer interested.

Welcome to my third roundup of my participation in the Pulitzer Remix project, wherein 85 poets are turning Pulitzer Prize-winning works of fiction into found poems. Daily.

As with adopting any habit, getting to and through the three-week mark is the hardest. Writing daily isn’t a problem, but pushing to get through the third week’s worth of poems is/was a bit of a struggle. Actually, in anticipation, I had written the first, second and fourth week’s worth of poems for the project prior to the beginning of the month, because I wanted to save this third week as a sort of additional challenge. Call it “deadline found poetry” if you will.

I picked a hell of a week to make things harder for myself.

I won’t pretend that living in Boston this week hasn’t been oddly unsettling. I’m fine, my family is fine, my friends and co-workers are fine, but I know this isn’t a universal truth. It’s also a qualified “fine” because I know that sometimes traumatic events have a way of worming their way inside our heads to deliver unexpected or unconscious consequences.

Would it change the timber or tone of my found poems?

April 13: methane melee
Okay, I promised with the limerick in the first week that potty humor was bound to return. But I swear, I don’t go looking for these things! And once I was finished the title was, and most of these anagrams have been, a happy treat of coincidence.

April 14: Neu Noir
My tip-o-the-hat to Bukowski. There is a story about me as a teen having a conversation with a wino on the street back in 1979 who I swear was Bukowski before I knew who Bukowski was. Honest. A face like his wasn’t hard to forget. Anyway, as the poem started coming together I suddenly felt like perhaps, just perhaps, Buke was raising a bottle of rotgut from the beyond and saying “Eh, nice try, kid.”

April 15: Warm People
Hunting through the original story I wasn’t coming up with anything cohesive. Everything seemed so disjointed and in lumps. Finally the word “happy” jumped out at me and I started making connections with different clumps as miniature portraits. I also realized how miserable Cheever must have been, so many of his characters seem driven by sadness and compromise.  Write what you know?

April 16: matinee
And here we are, the day after the bombing, and I’m in Rome. I wanted something simple, and simple I got. It’s best to conjure up an Italian Neo-realist movie before you start reading this one for the full effect.

April 17: whim-sea
This was an “assignment” to take two stories with connected themes – “The Swimmer” and “The Ocean” – and blend them to see what came up. This roiling result came from the first pages of each story. It wound up darker than it seemed while I was culling words and phrases initially. See my “about me” page for the personal significance of swimming pools.

April 18: old toy fever
Where the heck did this come from? I was playing with structure and didn’t even see the possibilities of parallel narrative with a shared “sigh” between them. I’m leaving it stand for now, but if I decide to do anything with this poem in terms of future publication I will probably reformat it. Your thoughts?

April 19: Euclid’s Dry Cleaning
In the original story a sign on a truck (which became the title) prompts the protagonist to ponder his life as a geometric fantasy. I was much more interested in Euclid, and what would it be like if he were a dry clearer in our modern world. Or at least in Cheever’s world. Cheever didn’t make it easy, but he never made it easy for his characters. Still, I think I managed to make it work. At least Euclid sleeps well.

It’s a bit of a long home stretch for the rest of the month, but I have the last three days already set so there’s just this coming week to sort through and decide which things are working and which just don’t make the cut.

In the meantime, there’s plenty of other poetry out there. Why, just look at the Poetry Friday postings over at Live Your Poem. Irene’s got the roundup from the kidlitosphere.

Well, the Pulitzer Remix is humming along and there’s just so much great stuff everyone is producing that I’m finding it hard to even skim through them all! It’s possible I’ll wind up spending the rest of this year casually reading all the participants’ submissions because I’m sure I’m missing real gems.

Of course, I’d love it if you discovered my gems first. Here’s what I’ve posted since last Friday, with notes about the poem’s origin or construction following the link.

April 6: The Babe of Clancy Tower
Yup, I went with a bawdy limerick. It was impossible to resist. The original story’s main character was a crusty old Irishman from County Limerick, so I just had to try! But in hunting out rhyming words I found that I had to shift the focus. The results are, well, what came together. (This will not be the last time bathroom humor appears in my found poems).

April 7: Halt
This one I think of as my dystopian poem. The source was a dark suburban tale that felt like Cheever exorcising some sort of inner demons. What I found within that were two clans of people engaged in some power struggle.

April 8: Cafe Rep
This was taken from the Preface to the collection, and as I was reading through it I wanted something that felt like a tone poem about Cheever’s New York. The duality of it – the “public” embedded within the “private” – surprised me when it was finished because I didn’t see it at first. One commenter called it “cinematic” and that probably best describes how it felt at the time I culled it.

April 9: untruths
One of the exercises I tried was to pick a page at random and limit myself to what was on the page. Page 341 being 90% dialog pretty much forced my hand: I had to find some new or different meaning in what was on the page. This mini play turned a domestic dispute into an absurdist farce.

April 10: geld
Another single-page-limited poem, and this one came together only after I started playing around with the original title. “The Pot of Gold” contains the word “geld” which is an old English word for “tax” and a German word for money. It’s also the root word for “gelding,” as in, to castrate a horse. Suddenly I saw the possibility of a poem set in the bedroom of a play by Moliere…

April 11: Withholding
Cheever used the word “cupidity” twice within two consecutive sentences, and I had to look it up because I’d never encountered it before. Excessive desire; greed, avarice. Huh. I was going to find a way to use the word when I then found Jupiter and realized I needed to extract Cupid and see what happened.

April 12: idle taste
Perhaps the most “poetic” of my found poems, simply because I wanted to find the best imagery to match the “dream.” I struggled for a long time trying to make a smoother transition between the wave and the mountain, then decided that in most dreams such transitions don’t exist.

This coming week, this is going to be a bit rough. In the past for National Poetry Month, while putting myself on a schedule to write three-plus haiku a day I found that there comes a point where the brain just starts to rebel. Things start to feel forced. Or at least they did for me. As I pushed along to get over the hump it started taking longer and longer to “see” poems within the text, and I started having doubts I could finish what I started.

How’d I do? check back next Friday and see!

In the meantime, Poetry Friday is happening elsewhere on the interwebs. Many fine people writing and sharing wonderful stuff. Check out the roundup over at Random Noodling.

For the past couple-three years now I’ve celebrated National Poetry Month with a personal challenge of tweeting upward of three original haiku or limericks a day for a month; a fun way to play a little and keep my wordsmithery focused. I usually followed this up by rounding-up the week’s tweets in one place to share with those who might have missed them in my twitter feed.

This year I decided to take myself and my writing a little more seriously and joined Pulitzer Remix, a month-long project where poets use a Pulitzer Prize-winning work of fiction as the basis for creating found poetry. Each of the participants — 85 of us, or 82, 80-something — has committed to creating and posting a new poem daily for National Poetry Month, which is going to yield an insane number of new poems when it’s all over.

My source book is “The Stories of John Cheever” from 1979. When choosing a book I wanted two things: a book published during my lifetime, and a collection of short stories where I could use each as the artificial confines from which I had to choose my words. The process I used in approaching each poem varied. For some I would glance through the story looking for interesting words or phrases to latch onto and see what they suggested. In other cases I went in with an attempt to try a particular form, structure or style — some less successfully than others. And sometimes I started with a title and tried to build from there. I should note is that the titles of all my poems are taken from the original stories themselves, near anagrams. I say near because I don’t end up using all the letters but I tried to use as many as would make sense.

Our agreement with the project is that we not repost our poems anywhere else until after the project is open, so with my weekly round-up I’ll be giving some background to the poems I’ve composed along with links to the full poems so you can check them out.

And while you’re there you should check out all the great work my fellow found poets are up to as well.

April 1: come monday

This was an early poem and took a while to coalesce. I wasn’t actually sure what, if anything, it was building up to until I came upon the phrase “the noise” mirrored at the beginning and end of the original story. It then became a question of contrasts that were bound by another mirrored word – want/wanted.

April 2: truce

For this poem, I had underlined some sections I liked and then, as I read them straight through, felt they both had the feel of a fever dream mixed with a sense of urgency. I formatted it a couple different ways before I finally settled on the tight column. I wanted it to look rigid and stiff (like the narrator’s flesh) and yet running down, running dry.

April 3: cohorts

The final structure of this poem owes a debt to Maurice Sendak’s book “Alligators All Around,” one of the tiny books in the Nutshell Library. I was actively hunting down adjectives, not really sure what I wanted to do with them, and they started to pair up nicely. In Sendak’s abcadarian the Aligators are doing things that start with one letter of the alphabet — N, Never Napping, O, Ordering Oatmeal, etc — and the resonance of that scheme just popped out at me. Not a perfect fit, but once I found the word “cohorts” in the original title, and then the phrase “fond models” I felt I’d gotten as close as I could.

April 4: Mutineer

This is actually one of the last poems I wrote, and it was because I was having problems whittling down all the material I had uncovered. As with most “lost” things, sometimes in order to find what you’re looking for you have to stop looking. After a few weeks put aside, I opened the story to a random page and found a section offset from the rest of the story that had everything I needed. The title was a happy gift.

April 5: to grieve

It took a while, but I finally found a story with a line that worked out as an ending but at the beginning, and so I pulled an e.e. cummings. Or rather a cummings-lite. With this story I started to get bugged by the way Cheever treated female characters, so I wanted something a little less… hysterical?

But enough about me, there is literally a sea of poems over at Pulitzer Remix, so if you really want to sink your teeth into a whole mess, I mean a monumental passel of poetic goodness, just head on over and jump right in! And in case you weren’t aware, there’s another whole roundup of poetry happening over at Robin Hood Black’s blog Read. Write. Howl.

Because I’m writing. Or rather, I’m rearranging.

Not editing, mind you, and they’re not even my own words. And to top it all off I’m not even getting paid for it.

To the right there you’ll notice a little badge for a thing called the Pulitzer Remix. For the entire month of April, National Poetry Month, the Pulitzer Remix project will post a new poem daily from 82 poets who have “found” poems within each of the 82 books that have won the Pulitzer Prize for Literature.

I know the collective noun for poems is (mundanely) an anthology, and that the collective noun for poets can be an attic, mezzanine, cellar, anteroom, a scansion, break, stanza, break, deign, mope, peppering, ego, havoc, madness, rejection, and so on, but this… the Pulitzer Remix seems to require a new collective.

An extraction, perhaps?

Found poems are exactly what they sound like, poems found within some other context. Shopping lists, stacks of book titles, a note found on the ground can all hold poetic nuance, but also in larger bodies of text like books or magazine articles words and phrases can be culled to create new and previously (by their original author’s) unimagined meaning. It’s within the realm of this last context that the Pulitzer Remix operates. Each poet has one novel as their Urtext from which they can apply any number of rules and choices in which to create new poetry. The challenge is to ferret out the new and unexpected from the old, not entirely unlike musical sampling where a beat or a motif creates a new framework for new music, bringing the old to new ears.

While it sounds new (and perhaps sacrilegious) to maim and mangle the carefully chosen works of literature the concept isn’t far from what artist Tristan Tzara once described as a recipe for creating a Dadaist poem nearly a century ago.

Take a newspaper.
Take a pair of scissors.
Choose an article as long as you are planning to make your poem.
Cut out the article.
Then cut out each of the words that make up this article and put them in a bag.
Shake it gently.
Then take out the scraps one after the other in the order in which they left the bag.
Copy conscientiously.
The poem will be like you.
And here are you a writer, infinitely original and endowed with a sensibility that is charming though beyond the understanding of the vulgar.

The poem will be like you. Because no one else would have made the same conscious choices, or could have produced the same exact results, not without a great deal of trial and effort. The found poem, like the Dadaist poem, exists as the hard truth within the joke that goes “I have all the great works of literature in this one single book!” wherein the teller brandishes a dictionary. Perhaps that is the ultimate challenge for the found poet, to create a new work from the dictionary that uses as many words contained in the dictionary without repeating a single one.

And so, in a few short weeks I, along with an extraction of 81 other poets, will begin a massive excursion into the rearrangement of American literature. I will post snippets and links throughout April.

I hope you’ll come along for the ride.

Though I hope this isn’t the first you’ve heard of it, the Cybils Awards were announced today. I am writing this post in advance so I don’t know all of what won in any category except one – Graphic Novels – and I only know that because I was on the judging panel. Yes, again. What can I say, I like graphic novels and have long been a supporter of them as a “legitimate” reading experience for kids.

But instead of talking about the specific finalists and winners I want to talk a little about a different kind of decision being made with regards to graphic novels in the world of children’s publishing, a question of what gets published and why.

I’ve worked in bookstores the better part of the last decade and I’ve seen a sharp rise in the number of books for all age kids that liberally get lumped together in the category of “graphic novels.” One of the reigning deans in the field, Art Spiegelman, creator of Maus, defines the graphic novel as “a long comic book that needs a bookmark and wants to be reread.” On the surface, this is a fairly inclusive definition and I suspect Spiegelman prefers that inclusion over taut ideological divisions that would perhaps attempt to separate (and forever brand) “good” from “bad.” But there is a sharp divide over the general quality of what is out there and surprisingly a large number of adults who read for children tend to let their guard down because they do not feel qualified to judge graphic novels. I’ve even heard one person suggest that the only person who could judge a good graphic novel from a bad one was another graphic novelist.

Hogwash, I say.

Since we’re talking primarily about books aimed at a young audience here I would counter that it’s just as easy to judge the quality of a graphic novel just as you would a middle grade or young adult novel… or a movie or a TV show or any other storytelling medium. For some, the inclusion of pictures as part of the storytelling seems to stir up some long-buried anxieties over whether or not a drawing style is “good,” whether one can judge based on the idea of artists as somehow more gifted than mere mortals. In truth, wither the book is in a comic panel format (graphic novel), an illustrated story format (Diary of a Wimpy Kid), or a words and picture format (picture books), the same criteria can be employed.

Does the main character have a goal or desire?
Do they face struggled that need to be overcome?
Have they been changed in some way in the process?
Does the reader gain understanding and insight from the narrative, even if the main character doesn’t?

These questions can be answered easily without the aid of a degree in fine art, but far too often I hear of people responding positively to a graphic novel based almost entirely on an emotional response: it was funny, humorous, well-illustrated, beautifully presented. It’s almost like the nervous laughter of literary criticism – if you don’t know how to analyze the story, talk about the pictures!

In the last couple of years I have talked with people about graphic novels showered with praise that I felt would have fallen flat had they been told in a more traditional novel format. In fact, I suspect that editors would have passed on these stories had they not been illustrated as comics. This idea that comics are somehow a leveler of quality, that pictures can make up for weaknesses in narrative, is what I find most troubling. I mean, here we are looking at a great opportunity to bring more young people into the reading fold through graphic novels but we do them a disservice by giving them substandard stories.

Why does this happen? I suspect it’s an editorial situation. If there is a consistency in the division between better and lesser graphic novels that divide is easily (though not universally) a question of publisher. Publishers who specialize in comics and graphic novels are overall much better than those for whom graphic novels are a sideline. First Second, Kitchen Sink, TOON, Oni Press, among others, these publishers tend to get it right, their editorial decisions on what to publish are clearly defined by a house style, a house perspective, and a level of quality that is visible from title to title. Publishers who have, in recent years, jumped on the bandwagon put out novel-length cartoon books that feel like the house is simply out to make a buck. The one exception I’ll note here is Scholastic and their Graphix imprint who seem to have a knack for catching lightning in a bottle.

I am not suggesting that graphic novels be deathly dull or pedantic, or that they take a more literary perspective, but I am asking for fewer of these books I call “cartoons” and more books with actual stories to them. These cartoon books could just as easily be storyboards for shows on the Cartoon Network. They have stock, near stereotypical characters, tired situations straight from old sitcoms, and their resolution either comes in the form a punchline or a tacked-on moral. The narrative arc of these stories is as two-dimensional as the characters who get pushed around inside them, and yet these books have glowing testimonials splashed on their covers from other writers.

So on this holiday dedicated to love, I propose we pause and enjoy books – all books – for what they can give us, and especially to what they can give younger readers. Let’s celebrate the winners of all Awards recently doled out and speak glowingly of the book and its future in all its forms.

Then tomorrow, lets all hunker down to the hard work of asking for publishers, editors, and storytellers alike to make better decisions about the quality of storytelling they produce.

Odd how some words just jump out at you when you least expect it. I came across the word concrete recently while reading and its context made me pause.

We talk about communicating in concrete terms, concrete images, concrete language. Hard, solid concrete, meant to take a pounding and retain the shape it was poured into. As opposed to vague or ethereal, when you fall upon the concrete it hits you hard. You would not confuse it for anything else.

In writing characters it becomes essential then to make them as concrete as possible, to mold them into form and make it impossible not t notice them. If they are to be remembered there can be nothing soft about them, not about their appearance, not about their manners, not about their thoughts. They can behave in fuzzy and confused ways, but all within the confines of their given shape.

When you insist on examples you are asking for the concrete to set. When you are looking for absolute proof you want it to be concrete when it arrives. No one asks for this clarification to come in the form of mushy asphalt.

But what is concrete?

By definition, concrete is a mixture of aggregate, cement, and water. Aggregate itself is just a mixture of course matter like slag and stone and sand. The cement that binds the aggregate is a powder that hardens as it dries after being mixed with water. The process is about as mysterious as making bricks from mud, but in creating characters we are creating them from this mud as well. We pull together specific traits of behavior, an aggregate of attributes if you will, and bind them within a physical concrete of appearance that, when fully-formed and hardened in the reader’s mind, become vividly certain.

These attributes (actions) and appearances (descriptions) are their skin and bones. Nouns and verbs, structured and hard-baked, these are what make characters concrete.