Grace and Emily

How Emily Dickinson popped up in my new book and why she stayed there

Dear friends,

I’m squeaking in under the wire at the end of a long and hectic but mostly happy January with my first newsletter of 2024.

I’ve been having a lot of fun lately giving book recommendations and watching my sixth grade students discover new stories and authors they love. I got a whole bunch of new graphic novels over winter break, mostly based on recommendations from Melissa LaSalle and Pernille Ripp, and those have been a huge hit. I love seeing them get passed from one kid to the next.

The other day, one reader, who had just finished Debbi Michiko Florence’s Sweet and Sour, asked me if I had any other books like it, and I was so happy to be able to hand her Keep It Together, Keiko Carter and Just Be Cool, Jenna Sakai. (And she was even happier!) Another reader was trying to decide between reading Make a Move, Sunny Park! by Jessica Kim and The Do More Club by Dana Kramaroff, and she decided she’d read Sunny first and Do More as soon as she’d finished. She brought back the first book so quickly that I thought maybe she’d changed her mind and wanted to switch the order–but it turned out she’d been so into it that she’d already read the whole thing and was eager for the next one! 

I remember how much it meant to me at my students’ age when I found books that really swept me up and resonated. It’s so rewarding and fun to be part of the process of giving kids that kind of experience from two angles, as a teacher and as an author who has written books that some kids feel that way about. And that joy makes the perpetual chaos of teaching, parenting, and attempting to find time to write feel worth it!

As you might remember from last month, my new upper middle grade novel, Keeping Pace, stars a character named Grace who loves to read, and there are references to real books that have resonated deeply with her throughout the novel. Last month, I shared about Grace’s love of verse novels and offered a challenge for early readers to spot the three actual verse novels that are referenced in Grace’s story. Those books are: Rajani LaRocca’s Red, White, and Whole, Cindy Baldwin’s No Matter the Distance, and Cordelia Jensen’s Skyscraping.

Melanie Dulaney messaged me all three titles and has won a choice of one of my books or one of the three verse novels. Congrats, Melanie! I’ll reach out with details. 

This month, I want to share a bit about one other literary aspect of Keeping Pace: the role of Emily Dickinson poems. Early in the novel, Grace’s dad, whom she desperately wants to impress, gives her a collection of Emily Dickinson poems as a graduation gift at the end of eighth grade. The gift was kind of a random, unplanned choice I made while “in the zone” of drafting. I had figured out generally what should happen after Grace’s graduation, and as I was drafting her interaction with her dad, the gift popped into my head and out onto the page.

Lots of random, unplanned details that show up in my first drafts don’t stay for later versions, but this one seemed right. Grace feels disconnected from her dad, who’s an English professor and novelist, and disappointed by everything that’s happened at her graduation ceremony. Her dad’s present adds to her disconnectedness and her disappointment; it comes wrapped in “happy birthday” paper (the only paper he had) and is the exact same eighth grade graduation gift he gave to Grace’s older sister, Celia, three years before. Plus, it has a frustratingly generic inscription. So the gift reflects how much Grace craves (and lacks) special attention from her dad, and it seems like the kind of book a busy English professor would choose for his kid.

There was one thing that nagged at me, though. In the first few drafts, Dad gave Grace the Emily Dickinson book and she felt let down by it, but that was pretty much it. I never came back to it, which didn’t feel quite right. If Grace’s dad was going to give her this specific poetry collection in a pivotal scene early in the book, then I thought it should reappear in some meaningful way later. The problem was, I couldn’t think of a meaningful way. But I really didn’t want to cut the gift or change the book!

Eventually, I flipped through my own collection of Emily Dickinson poems and remembered how I’d struggled to write an essay analyzing her poetry when I was in college. I’d turned in a rough draft that I thought was pretty good. I was used to the professor praising my drafts and suggesting only small tweaks for the final versions. But with my Emily Dickinson paper, he told me to start over. He didn’t think I was quite grasping the complexity of the poems, or appreciating the playfulness. 

I remember sitting in a computer lab, stuck and ashamed, until I finally started focusing on the random capital letters and the liberal use of em-dashes more than the actual words. I definitely understood “Hope Is the Thing with Feathers” and “I’m Nobody.” I had no idea if I understood what Emily Dickinson was saying in some of her seemingly simple and cheerful–but simultaneously super dark–poems . . . but I could actually find a lot to say about the way she said it and the effects her unconventional choices had.

I realized that some of Emily Dickinson’s poems would be agonizingly frustrating to logical, eager-to-understand-everything Grace—which kind of made them perfect. And then I stumbled upon one that’s about success–which is one of the main themes Grace is grappling with. Eventually, I figured out a way to incorporate that success poem–and some of Emily Dickinson’s own history, into Keeping Pace.

It wasn’t easy, because by that point I was inserting a storyline into a book that was largely working, and I didn’t want to mess up the structure or add too much when I’m perpetually fighting to keep my books from getting overwhelmingly long. But bringing the Emily Dickinson collection back into the book quieted that nagging sense that I hadn’t finished what I’d started or fulfilled the promise of the beginning.

My subconscious, creative drafting brain put Emily Dickinson in the novel, and my rational revision brain finally figured out why she belonged there.

News

My friend Mae Respicio and I are having a special virtual launch party on Instagram Live, and you’re invited! We’re excited to celebrate our new books on April 9th, our joint book birthday, and we hope you’ll save the date and join us. Mae’s new book, Isabel in Bloom, is a verse novel, so Grace would be psyched

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And if you’re in the Philly area, please stay tuned for details about an in-person launch party sometime in April. You can preorder Keeping Pace wherever books are sold, and I’ll share links to order signed copies in the near future.

Thanks as always for reading, and happy February!

Love,

Laurie