editing & essays on craft

Editing

As a student editor for The Louisville Review, I read and evaluate poetry, short

fiction, and creative non-fiction for possible publication.

http://www.louisvillereview.org/

I’m on the editorial board for Best New Writing, an anthology of short fiction

published every year. The lead story is the winner of the Eric Hoffer Award which I

also help judge.

http://www.bestnewwriting.com/

Essays on Craft

I am currently in the process of compiling essays on the craft of writing young adult fiction based on analysis of modern YA novels. Below are two samples from the collection.

Marjetta Geerling

The Use of Food and Drink to Further Characterization

in Joyce McDonald’s Devil On My Heels

    Joyce McDonald’s Devil On My Heels is the story of a teen girl who finds out that her father is a member of the local KKK and has to work against him to save a childhood friend. The drama is heightened by the strong characterization of each player in the story. One way that McDonald reveals each character’s nature and the quality of the relationships between them is through the use of food and drink.

    McDonald sets up the contrast between Dove and her father in an early scene where Delia, the housekeeper who has raised Dove since her mother’s death, has prepared breakfast. First, McDonald focuses on Dove’s father.

In between scribbling numbers into a column, he takes a bite of grits dripping with egg yolk. He chews. He studies an invoice. He writes in the ledger. He forks another mouthful of eggs and grits. He chews some more. My dad has been known to take two hours to eat breakfast. (22)

    Dove’s father’s methodical eating of breakfast, interspersed with work, shows him to be slow and thoughtful with a lot on his mind. The simple fare, eggs and grits, makes him seem uncomplicated and decent, a predictable father figure. The discovery that he belongs to the KKK is shocking to the reader, given this introduction, but as the story unfolds and Dove’s father switches sides in the conflict, it is believable because Dove’s father has already been established as a careful man who studies what he does thoughtfully. He may be slow to act, but when he finally does, it is with the same predictable decency the reader experienced in the breakfast scene.

    Dove’s breakfast, on the other hand, reveals her as an emotional and reactive person.

Delia comes behind me and scrapes sausage, bacon, and two eggs over easy onto my plate. I plunge my fork into my eggs just as somebody knocks on the door…Travis Waite steps into the kitchen. He takes off his sweat stained cap and gives Dad and me a crooked smile, exposing brown tobacco-stained teeth. I stare down at my eggs. The runny yolk has started to congeal. (22)

    The plunge of the fork into the eggs hints at impulsiveness and a lack of patience. The arrival of Travis Waite changes her perception of breakfast so that the food she was shoveling down only moments before becomes suddenly unappetizing. Dove’s reaction shows her to be strongly influenced by her emotional state, and her inability to stomach a person or situation that strikes her as off.

    However, Dove does have some of her father’s methodical attention to detail, and McDonald reveals what Dove has in common with her father through food. “I shove my food around the plate with my fork, putting everything in order. Sausage at eight o’clock. Bacon at twelve. Eggs at four” (23). Dove’s positioning of the food on her plate also shows that she has an innate sense of how things should be ordered and that when faced with a situation that is out of order, she will correct it herself.

    McDonald shows the widening gap between father and daughter during a late night talk in their kitchen. “Dad stands there, his eyes aimed on me while I make coffee…Finally he wanders over to the refrigerator and gets himself a bottle of beer” (64). The choices of beverage are deliberate. Dove makes coffee for her father and herself, a service for him and a way to show that she is becoming an adult. That her father bypasses the coffee for beer effectively tells Dove that she’s not as grown up as she thinks she is.

    Food is used to show Dove’s relationships with other characters. When Gator, a black childhood friend who now works in the orchards for her father, comes to the house on an errand, Dove offers him her piece of pie.

Gator stands there holding the pie like he’s afraid it might explode if he makes one false move….

    “You go on out on the porch and eat that,” she [Delia] tells him.

    Gator doesn’t say a word. He just heads outside and dives right into that pie….Gator’s back in a minute, empty plate in hand. (89)

    The awkward way that Gator handles the pie shows the distance that has grown between Gator and Dove since they were children. His quick devouring of the treat shows how unaccustomed he is to special treatment and also how hungry he is for what Dove takes for granted every day. The pie symbolizes what Dove has and what Gator does not, and this exchange is her first move toward reestablishing her friendship with him.

    Dove’s relationship with Delia is also revealed through food and drink. Dove and Delia have had a disagreement, and Dove goes to Delia’s house to try to make things right.

Delia comes back a few minutes later, carrying a tray with two cups of coffee, sugar, cream, and a plate of biscuits. She scoops two heaping spoonfuls of sugar into my coffee and goes heavy on the cream. She knows this is how I like it. (186)

    Delia’s common courtesy of serving coffee would extend toward any visitor, but when she takes the time to fix the coffee just how Dove likes it, Dove knows that Delia still loves her and that there is a chance for them to reconcile.

    Throughout Devil On My Heels, McDonald effectively uses food and drink to establish characters and illuminate shifting relationships. Whether choice of food or beverage, the manner in which a character consumes their meal, or the act of serving food or drink to another, each action reveals who the character is to the reader. It is the small, every day life details, like eating and drinking, that make the characters come alive.

Work Cited

McDonald, Joyce. Devil On My Heels. New York: Delacorte Press, 2004. Print.

Marjetta Geerling

        Deb Caletti’s Use of First Person Point of View in The Nature of Jade

    The first person point of view is a popular choice for young adult novels, but it is a challenging view point because the author can only reveal information through the main character. The limitations of first person are such that a first person voice must be so unique and compelling that it overcomes the shortcomings of a first person narrator.  The voice must be strong enough to carry all the action, dialogue, and internal thought of the entire novel.  One way of accomplishing a distinctive personal voice in fiction is to give the narrator an unusual lens through which he or she sees the world.  In The Nature of Jade, Deb Caletti's character, Jade DeLuna, uses animal behavior as the filter through which she sees the world.

    Caletti establishes the animal behavior motif in a variety of ways.  First, each chapter opens with a  quotation from The Fundamentals of Animal Behavior, a fictitious book on animal behavior that Caletti uses to preview the emotional trajectory of each chapter.  Each of the passages from The Fundamentals of Animal Behavior  draws parallels between human and animal behavior. For example, in one of the last chapters of the novel, Jade is coming to terms with her parents' separation and is beginning to forgive them.  Chapter nineteen starts with the following quote from The Fundamentals of Animal Behavior:

                    And then, after the elephants separate for the good of the herd and each

                    other, they will sometimes later reunite.  There is no doubt the recognize

                    each other, even after long periods apart.  Mothers and daughters and sisters.

                    New sons.  They raise their trunks in salute, bump and dance in greeting,

                    entwine their trunks in warm embrace. They bellow and trumpet sounds of

                    joy and triumph... (p. 285).

    Another way that Caletti builds Jade's voice is by making her intrigued by animal behavior and by giving her opportunities to increase her knowledge through direct experiences seeded throughout the novel.  On the first page of The Nature of Jade, the reader learns that Jade's family lives close enough to the zoo that she can hear the baboons screeching at night. Jade has her computer set so that she can watch the live elephant feed from the zoo cameras.  In the second part of the book, Jade becomes a zoo volunteer and works with the elephants.  In these ways, it's established that Jade is surrounded by, in tune with, and becoming increasingly more authoritative on the behavior of animals.

    How this in depth knowledge of animal behavior influences the first person voice is evident in the language choices Caletti uses to show Jade's observations and conclusions about her world.  Jade uses information learned in biology class about barnacles to describe her relationship with her mother.

                “It [the barnacle] discards its own body to live inside of a crab (read: me), growing and

                 spreading until it finally takes over the crab's body, stealing its life, reaching its tentacles

                 everywhere, even around its eyes” (20).

    Jade extends the animal metaphors to explain her interpretation of society.  “It makes you realize how basically everything comes down to a) mating or b) competing for resources “(21).  As the story unfolds, Jade distances herself from friends and family, using her disgust over their animal-like behavior to justify her separation.  She compares the popular crowd to baboons and their displays of dominance,  and her family's denial of what's happening between her parents to the way their dog hides bones in plain sight.  “Talk about broken instinct” (197), Jade says of her dog, and by extension, her family.

    When Jade falls in love with Sebastian, a boy her age who has a son he's raising with the help of his grandmother, she becomes entwined in their lives and adopts them as her own.  The change of family allegiance is foreshadowed on p. 67 when she observes the sleeping arrangements in her home.“It occurs to me, then: four people, four different rooms. We are in our own cages, unlike elephants, who stay all together in their adopted family.”

    As Jade ponders how to integrate the disparate parts of her life, she watches a video with her little brother about elephants.  “We watch as they stay together, through  mourning, through celebration, through all things. Depending on each other for their very survival. Family, always” (167).   This observation backs up what her elephant mentor told her about elephants when she first started working at the zoo.  “People don't see the humanity that lies in the animals, same as people don't see the animal that is within humans” (96).  As Jade grows in understanding about animal behavior, she becomes more forgiving and accepting of the humans in her life, and this change is reflected in the language. Jade transitions from always comparing people to animals to finally seeing the people around her for who they really are.  The animal metaphors become less critical and begin to drop away all together as the novel  reaches its conclusion.

    Caletti's use of animal behavior as the lens through which Jade views her world gives the narration in The Nature of Jade an intriguing voice that could not be accomplished in the third person viewpoint.  Caletti's consistent, sometimes thought provoking and sometimes comic, integration of animal behavior into the viewpoint seamlessly supports the novel's themes and makes Jade a unique literary character.  The Nature of Jade exemplifies how to use first person narration in a young adult novel.

Work Cited

Caletti, Deb. The Nature of Jade. New York: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, 2007. Print.