I am fortunate in my life to have some wonderful friendships that have lasted and grown over many, many years. For today’s Follow Friday I have the pleasure of introducing you to one of those longtime friends and an incredible author. Kathi Appelt and I met over twenty years ago when her children enrolled in the elementary school where I was an administrator. We soon discovered a shared passion for children’s literature and a dream of becoming published authors.

Kathi’s come a long way since those days. She is now a highly sought-after speaker in schools, conferences and workshops. Her first novel, The Underneath, was a National Book Award Finalist and a Newbery Honor Book. It also received the Pen USA Award, and was a finalist for the Heart of Hawick Children's Book Award. Her new book, Keeper, is currently gaining acclaim throughout the publishing world and is being mentioned in Newbery predictions all across the internet.

I know I am incredibly lucky to have Kathi as a critique partner, but more importantly I’m so blessed to have her as my friend. She is one of the most thoughtful, kind and generous people I know. So I encourage you this Friday to follow my friend-Kathi Appelt!

http://www.kathiappelt.com
Kathi Appelt on Facebook
@kappelt on Twitter

On my first day of Sophomore AP English, I brought home the extracurricular reading list.  I had chosen the “new” teacher – young, foreign, different.  She had big ideas.  Eccentric tastes.  Expansive theories. 

My dad grew up in the deep South.  He took a long look at that list.  Graham Greene.  Ernest Hemingway.  Kurt Vonnegut.  John Steinbeck.  Ken Kesey.  William Golding. J.D. Salinger.  Anthony Burgess.  He sighed. 

“I loved these books,” he said.  And showed me his favorites.

In honor of Banned Books week and in honor of my dad (on whose opinion I still pick up certain titles), I’d like to share a few of those books with you.   I read them in high school.  The “classics” were my books of choice.  They, and my parents, made me who I am.  The reader.  The writer.  The person.  All of these have been banned or challenged at one time or another. 

A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway.  Burned by the Nazis.  Banned by the Italians for its accurate portrayal of the retreat from Caporetto.  Challenged for being a “sex novel”.  This was my favorite Hemingway.  A brilliant love story.  Tragic.  I may have thrown it across the room when I finished it, though.  I was a little volatile as a teenager.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey.  Banned and challenged for language, promoting criminal activity and “secular humanism”.  Quite possibly one of the most heart-wrenching books I’ve ever read (another one that hit the wall when I read the final page).  I read it on my dad’s solid recommendation.  Then we watched the movie together.  Jack Nicholson rocks.

Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck.  I seriously fell in love with Steinbeck and Hemingway in high school.  This book was banned and is still challenged for profanity (damn!), violence and being defamatory to women and differently-abled people.  It was also pulled from shelves in one community because Steinbeck was known to have an “anti-business” attitude and “questionable patriotism”.  You can’t question his technique, though.  George and Lenny live in my mind 20 years later.

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee.  This book is consistently challenged for language (damn again!) and racial epithets.  Also for its portrayal of the treatment of blacks by racist whites in rural Alabama.  Huh.  I may have read it when I was sixteen, but wasn’t that kind of the point?  Lee wrote the book so eloquently she showed us what that community was like.  Her use of language fit the setting.  Those characters were unlikely to wander around calling blacks “African-Americans”.    My dad thought her portrayal of the South was acutely accurate.

This is a short list of  my favorite books when I was a teenager.  I still count them as such today.  (Yes, I was a nerd.  And a drama geek.  Double whammy). I can’t countenance removing them from the shelves of libraries and classrooms.  Or any other book that encourages a child or teenager to think, to question, to discuss.  To read.

The Long List (favorite banned books I read as a teenager):

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

Animal Farm by George Orwell

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway

The Lord of the Flies by William Golding

Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell

Sophie's Choice by William Styron

The Color Purple by Alice Walker

The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

In honor of banned book weeks, I wanted to talk about a dirty word in YA publishing- the S word- S-E-X. In reviewing the most frequently banned YA books, it seemed that the vast majority were banned for sexual situations and profanity, not for violence.

This might come as a shock to the book banners of the world, but some teens do have sex. Not all, not necessarily even the majority, but some. And I'm willing to bet that a good percentage of the rest are talking about it or thinking about it. It's almost impossible not to at that age. Hormones are kicking in, and a lot of teens are lightweights, reacting to that initial surge of hormones the same way I reacted to my first sip of champagne: way, way out of proportion to the desired or anticipated effect.

Before I reached the ripe old age of 20, my friends were having sex. And (Mom, close your eyes) so was I. I’m not advocating it, by any means. In fact, we risked things we shouldn’t have and put ourselves in situations that we were lucky to get out of in one piece. We opened ourselves up to a lot of adult problems that we were ill-equipped to handle. There was heartache. There was drama. Life and death consequences were a possibility, but never fully real until you found yourself counting down the days until your period finally came.

But if all that sex offered was the risk of pregnancy, disease and heartache, we might never have taken the plunge. There was more. Love. Pleasure. Romance. Before the world revolts, let me clarify that I’m not saying that you need sex in order to have love, pleasure and romance, or that love, pleasure and romance always come with sex. Not by a longshot. I’m just saying that sex is a complicated beast. And, whether you believe that teens should or should not be having sex, or whether sex should even exist outside of marriage or procreation, there is one inescapable truth: sex has an upside.

Sex is one of those areas of human experience that is rife with emotion and conflict; it can supply the highest highs and the lowest lows. Those highs and lows are magnified for teens. The potential consequences are so great, but so too is the raw power of sex.

No wonder writers want to write about it.

No wonder readers want to read about it.

No wonder those who want to believe that their teens aren’t thinking about it, talking about it, or heaven forbid, doing it, want to ban books with sexual content.

But that doesn't make it right. Readers should be free to make their own choices. Writers should feel free to write about the myriad of human experiences, not just the clean ones.

Go ahead. Ban this post.

Today kicks off banned books week and is the only national celebration of the freedom to read. We’d love to have you leave a comment this week on the blog about a banned book that made a difference in your life. Let us know what you would have missed without the opportunity to read this choice. We’d love to hear from you!

In the meantime, I have a wonderful treat for you. My agent, Mary Kole, has graciously agreed to answer a few questions. Mary is featured in this month’s Writer’s Digest magazine’s Hot List of top agents seeking new talent and her website, kidlit.com, is a wonderful resource for new and experienced children’s writers. So please welcome to YAMuses, Andrea Brown Literary Agency’s Mary Kole…

1. What led you to agenting books for young readers?
I've always loved books and especially kids' books. They're written for people who are experiencing so many new and exciting things in their lives, and the right book at the right time can quite simply change a young person's life and turn them into a lifelong reader. There are very many brave jobs that give people an opportunity to do good...medicine, the Peace Corps, teaching. I happen to also want to do good, but I want to do good while curled up with my cat, a good book, my coffee and my laptop.
2. Your blog and website was recently named one of the best websites for writers by Writer's Digest Magazine. You're also active on Facebook and Twitter. Why is a web presence important to you?
I have eight brilliant colleagues and, as the newest agent among them, I wanted to get myself on the map. That was my initial motivation. But when I started blogging and speaking at conferences and otherwise interacting with writers, I figured out that I really do love teaching and talking about writing and giving advice. So the blog and my Twitter are great for me, professionally, but they're also a joy to run, personally. While I disagree with the notion that ALL aspiring writers need a blog -- blogs only work if you can keep up with them and give your readers valuable content -- I do think that online presence is important, and something everyone should consider and try pursuing. For me, it was a natural fit. I grew up in the Silicon Valley and built my first website when I was 11. It's gone from the web now, thank goodness, so no one can find it, but the web has always been a passion of mine.
3. Based on my experience, I would describe you as an "editorial agent." Would you agree?
Absolutely. These days, as lists tighten, you have to make a really strong case for the editor and the acquisitions committee, so a submission has to come in wearing a suit and tie, and carrying roses. I'm very much interested in the novel craft and love working with clients on revisions. It has become a very important part of the process.
4. Your website does a great job of describing the kinds of manuscripts that catch your attention. Could you tell us more about your tastes or do you have any new interests?
I'm very much looking for new MG and YA voices. For MG, I'd love creepy, sweet, literary, or high concept and high adventure books for both boy and girl readers. For YA, I'm looking for a few different things. I'd love to find the next contemporary standout voice, like Sara Zarr or Laurie Halse Anderson, but I'm also looking for murder, ghosts (the creepy, under your skin kind), betrayal, romance, friendship, unique paranormal (no vampires or werewolves or angels, please), dystopian, thriller, horror, urban fantasy, fantasy (light, more like Cashore than Tolkien), light sci-fi, and any strong, commercial, character-driven story that will stay with me long after I've stopped reading. I'd especially love to find a truly edgy YA, and not something that's just edgy or sarcastic for the sake of being edgy or sarcastic. I've sold a lot of picture books in the last year and am being really picky. Author/illustrators are my favorite types of picture book creators to work with.
5. The Andrea Brown Literary Agency has long been located in California, but you recently moved to New York. Are you enjoying the New York book scene and how is it different from California?
I'm a very social person, so being in the heart of publishing is fantastic. There's always lots to do, and there are always people to see and meet. In California, I read for one literary agency, worked for ABLit, went to the San Francisco Writers Conference a few times, worked for Chronicle Books and sold books to Tricycle Press. With the exception of a few literary agencies, I've either worked for or sold to all the big Bay Area opportunities for children's books. Now that I'm in New York full-time, and not just on my monthly visits, I can really immerse myself in all the various publishers and get to know them on a deeper level. It's great.
6. If you could change one thing about the children's literature world what would it be and why?
If I could change one thing about children's literature, it would be the fact that it's currently easier to be a debut than to be a repeat author. I'd rather have my clients sell book after book. I take the longview. I'm glad that so many new voices are hitting the shelves, but I do wonder what the effect will be down the line, once all those debuts want to build their careers and publish additional books. That's not to say, of course, that editors and houses don't build publishing programs for their authors. They most certainly do! I just wish all writers got this kind of investment. As is, I see a lot of once-published writers who are frustrated in trying to sell their subsequent efforts. That's no way to build momentum. In publishing, each book is a risk, and that risk becomes much less attractive when an author has sales numbers to their name. In these recession years, most authors are carrying around numbers that aren't that great. It's sexier to invest in the debut author, who has unknown potential. I think that's an understandable (from the publisher's standpoint) but dangerous attitude, but I don't think it's unique to children's books.
7. What do you enjoy doing outside the world of children's books?
I love to travel and cook. Luckily, I get invited to conferences and get to travel quite a bit for work. I also work from home, so I have a flexible schedule that allows me to shop for interesting ingredients and cook when I want. Another favorite thing, as you can probably guess, is to travel somewhere new and eat in delicious restaurants. I'm a huge food snob. I'm always on the hunt for a new place to eat, like Anthony Bourdain but without the snark.
8. Are there any upcoming events you're doing where writers could meet you?
My schedule in the next few months is out of control! In October, I will be in Ohio for the SCBWI on October 9th, then I'm going to Wisconsin for the SCBWI on the 15th, and then to Florida on the 21st for the Florida Writers Association. In November, I'll be in South Dakota the weekend of the 5th, also for the SCBWI. In December, I'll be at the Andrea Brown Literary Agency's Big Sur Workshop in California the weekend of the 3rd, and then it's pretty quiet until January, when I'll do the Writer's Digest Conference and the SCBWI Winter National, both in New York City.