"2020 has broken my heart in many ways," said Heather Duncan, executive director of the Mountains and Plains Independent Booksellers Association, at the opening session of FallCon on Thursday morning, "one of which we can't be together." She introduced Amanda Sutton of Bookworks, Albuquerque, N.Mex., and MPIBA's treasurer, to bring on the authors.
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| David Levithan | |
"I'm coming to you from my childhood bedroom where I've been since March when the pandemic hit," said David Levithan. "I think about my 10-year-old self, not believing he would be sharing a book with booksellers." In the chat, booksellers remarked upon the titles in sight (face out) on Levithan's shelves, including The Westing Game, Super Fudge and C.S. Lewis's Narnia Books. Levithan acknowledged that he is known for YA, but this book, The Mysterious Disappearance of Aidan S. (Knopf Books for Young Readers, February 2021), is middle-grade. With his first novel, Boy Meets Boy (2003), he said he was "writing into an absence. With middle grade, I'm writing into a presence." Liam wakes up one day and his brother Aidan has disappeared. For days, the townsfolk look for him. Then on the sixth night, Aidan returns with a strange story of where he's been. Levithan says he writes the story to figure out what the story is. "When I knew what Aidan's story would be, where he would be for these six days, did I know whether I believed him or not? No," says the author. "I wrote the story to figure out whether I believed him."
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| Sophie Blackall | |
Sophie Blackall was inspired to write If You Come to Earth (Chronicle Books) while visiting classrooms for UNICEF all over the world, including in India, Rwanda and Bhutan. It was at a one-room schoolhouse in Bhutan that the idea came: she and the children drew pictures together on long scrolls about the things that were important to them: families and food, school and home. The book takes the form of a boy writing a letter about what you need to know about our planet. Blackall said, "What I wanted to make was a book about all of us, that would bring us together."
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| Lev Grossman | |
"I have three children who fight constantly and hate to go to bed," said Lev Grossman. That's when he got interested in children's books. "My Magician books [for adults] are145,000 words each. Children's books are much shorter. But as it turns out, it takes the same amount of time to write a middle grade novel as it does an adult novel." The Silver Arrow (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers) features 11-year-old Kate, who writes to a mysterious wealthy uncle and asks for a present, never dreaming a full-size, functioning steam engine would show up. At the first stop, a group of talking animals waits to board. Grossman pointed out that it's been 70 years since The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was published, where the animals had been eagerly awaiting the arrival of the human children who would bring healing to their world. "If a steam train pulled up to a station full of animals today, they might not see a human as someone who'd come to save the day," he said.
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| Daniel Nayeri | |
Born in Iran, Daniel Nayeri spent his childhood in Oklahoma as a refugee and worked as a page in the Edmond Public Library. A librarian there realized that Nayeri had checked out The Lord of the Rings and "kept it far too long, so she gifted it to me. I couldn't be more grateful to her for that." That was the first book he'd ever owned. His autobiographical novel Everything Sad Is Untrue (Levine Querido) draws on Nayeri's Iranian roots. His mother converted to Christianity and her life was threatened, so she took Nayeri and his sister and fled the country. He said that to understand Persian history, one needs to know the history of the Shiite and Sunni divide. Nayeri's tale is set in Ardestan, Farsi for the land of stories, and his character, Khosrou, tells 1001 stories in order to save his life, a nod to Scheherazade.
Renée Watson took the title of her new YA novel Love Is a Revolution (Bloomsbury, February 2021) from an Audre Lorde
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| Renée Watson | |
quote, "Love is a revolution that happens inside of us." Nala tells Tye Brown, a boy she likes, that she's an activist and vegetarian--because he is both. But that's not really who she is. "To truly love a person you can't just cherish them and love the best parts; you also have to talk about what needs fixing," said Watson. "It's just like how you can love a country and talk about the things that need fixing. You can love a neighborhood and talk about the things that need fixing. So Nala begins to grapple with that work and what it means to actually love someone." Nala's grandmother, in talking to Nala and her cousin Imami, tells them to first be radical about how they love themselves, before they become activists for their neighbors and communities. Watson said, "It's important to have books where Blackness is not a burden." Nala and Imami are leading community projects about recycling and taking care of the land. "They can start their own revolutions; they don't have to wait until they're adults," said Watson.
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| Tami Charles | |
Author Tami Charles and artist Bryan Collier talked about why it's important for both children and adults to be reminded that they matter. That's what they set out to do with All Because You Matter (Scholastic). "When my son Christopher was born, I wanted to protect him," said Charles. "He experienced some things at school and came home with questions. I remember not wanting to have the conversation with him about racial injustice. I took all the words I had bottled up for years and put them into this book. It's a love letter to my son, to children from Black and brown and marginalized communities."
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| Bryan Collier | |
Collier, the youngest of six children, lived next door to his grandmother, a quiltmaker. "I didn’t pay much attention to that until I became an artist," he said. "All of a sudden, I was making collages. When you look at my art, you'll see the effect of quilting." Collier held up a handful of petals. "I have the portrait of a child's face on each petal. They're never alone." --Jennifer M. Brown, senior editor