Short Stories--My Guilty Pleasure

     Psst!  You wanna know a secret?

     I am a secret short story writer.

    OK, a sort of secret short story writer. I have stories in two YA anthologies, SUCH A PRETTY FACE: Stories About Beauty and THING I'LL NEVER SAY: Stories About Our Secret Selves, both edited by Ann Angel.


















    I grew up writing short stories. After all, what were our school readers but a bunch of short stories?  A five page short story was a doable proposition for an eight-year-old.  Writing a whole book?  That was for grown-ups.  (Sometimes I still think that I am not "grown-up" enough to write a novel!)

   Short stories were everywhere when I was a kid. My mom's magazines....Ladies Home Journal, Redbook, McCall's, Good Housekeeping...balanced out the recipes and housekeeping tips with short stories, two or three every issue. My own subscriptions to Seventeen, Teen and American Girl (a Girl Scout publication, not the doll people) not only had short stories, but story contests for their readers. In high school, I was a prize winner in both American Girl and Seventeen contests. While the prize money was cool, the real prize was publication in a national magazine.

First publicity photo, age 15, taken by my dad.

   I continued writing short stories as a young adult, but the market had dried up.  Those women's magazines had either gone out of business or stopped publishing fiction. The short story writers I admired published in "literary" magazines.  So I embarked on the "literary road" to publishing.

    It's a tough road.

   First rule of the pre-published author:  Know thy market. To educate myself, I read tons of digests, journals and reviews with names like Glimmer Train and Monkeybicycle. I discovered that if novels are a journey, short stories are an epiphany, a moment of time.

   Second rule:  Pay attention to rule number one. I learned that literary magazines don't like child protagonists, which puzzled me. I thought I was writing about childhood from an adult perspective like Kaye Gibbons' Ellen Foster or To Kill a Mockingbird.  I didn't write about adults because I just didn't find them interesting.  I was a school librarian, and spent roughly 75% of my day with kids whose lives were endlessly fascinating to me. Just not to acquiring editors. I went on writing about children anyway.

   Third rule:  Get used to rejection. These were the rejection slip years.  Literally, slips of paper with the phrase "does not meet our current needs" paper clipped to my manuscript. (Literary digests/journals/reviews run on a shoestring budget.) All this rejection arrived in my mailbox in a self addressed stamped envelope. When I pulled out those manila envelopes with my handwriting on it, it felt as if I was rejecting myself. Weird.

  Fourth rule: Always read your form rejection slips. You never know when some kind soul might add a personal note of encouragement. Thanks to a Post-it note on yet another returning story, I discovered my writing path.  "You write well about children" said the anonymous note, "but we don't publish stories about children.  Why don't you write for children?"

   Duh! I had spent years and years as a children's librarian. Why didn't I think of that?

   So I did.  Write for children from their POV, rather than about them.

   I still love short story writing. I still harbor a secret desire to wake up one morning reincarnated as John Cheever, although even Cheever might have a tough time breaking into print in today's market. Currently "little" magazines are filled with well-established authors.  I am really lucky to have been included in those YA anthologies mentioned above.  The authors for these collections have some kind of connection to the editor, either personal or professional. In my case, Ann Angel, the editor of both Such a Pretty Face and Secrets I'll Never Tell is a friend from the Vermont College MFA writing program. I keep a file of short story ideas, because you never know when someone might invite you to submit to an anthology, usually organized to a specific theme.

  Speaking of anthologies and breaking into print, here is your opportunity to be part of an anthology sponsored by WeNeedDiverseBooks.org and to be published by Crown Books for Young Readers in 2019.  Go for it! (I'd enter myself but this is specifically for unpublished writers!!!)

   I'll end this post with a picture of how I wrote my first stories. This is a my dad's 1914 Royal that  he bought secondhand in 1946 to attend night school. Talk about "pounding the keys." If you didn't throw your whole weight into typing, those keys didn't move.  Amazing I ever wrote anything because typing it was a physically exhausting experience!

     Book Giveaway: You have until Monday, Oct 16th to enter the book give-away for fellow Teaching Author Carmela Martino's new book Playing by Heart.  Click here to enter.

posted by Mary Ann Rodman

Book Giveaway and Guest Teaching Author Interview with Ann Angel!

The Teaching Authors are happy to present an interview with our good friend and Guest Teaching Author Ann Angel. To celebrate Ann's appearance on our blog, we're giving away an autographed copy of her new book Janis Joplin: Rise Up Singing. Booklist and School Library Journal both gave it starred reviews, and the Cooperative Children’s Book Center named it a Book of the Week.  To enter the drawing, see the instructions at the end of this post.

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Ann Angel believes it was amazing fortune that brought Janis Joplin’s music and style into her life. As a teen, Ann preferred writing bad poetry and drawing to Janis’s songs over following along with the popular girls. That same influence encouraged Ann to live her own life without compromise.

Since then, Ann has written many young adult biographies, including her most recent, Janis Joplin: Rise Up Singing. She served as contributing editor for the highly acclaimed Such a Pretty Face: Short Stories About Beauty and is working on more young adult fiction. A graduate of Vermont College’s MFA program in Writing for Children and Young Adults, Ann lives in Wisconsin with her family and teaches creative writing at Mount Mary College in Milwaukee.

Welcome, Ann!  How did you become a Teaching Author?

I was a journalism teacher at a local two year college when I first started to publish articles and then books. Teaching gave me the security of an income and so I always did this part time. But my writing wasn't getting where I wanted it to go, so I returned to school for an MFA in creative writing at Vermont College and graduated in 1999. After that, I became a full-time professor at Mount Mary College, where I've taught since shortly before 1990 (so long ago that I don't recall the year I actually began) when the college created a graduate program in writing. I teach creative fiction and nonfiction there, along with Teaching Author JoAnn Macken.

What's a common problem or question your students have, and how do you address it?

Students tend to stop story to explain or describe. I give them the same sage advice I received from renowned author Norma Fox Mazer at Vermont College. Use the details you've already placed in the setting as props, filter them through your primary character, and you'll create a story that moves forward while also creating voice and tone in the story.

How can teachers use your books in the classroom?

My books are probably great resources for teachers who wish to use literature while dealing with issues of self-esteem, self-image and bullying. Such A Pretty Face: Short Stories About Beauty offers teens a variety of perspectives on how teens view real beauty vs. the image of beauty that advertising offers. It surprised me when I finished Janis Joplin: Rise Up Singing and stepped back from it a bit to realize that this book, while nonfiction, also deals with issues of beauty, fitting in, and self-esteem. Through both books, I've come to realize that perceptions of beauty play a huge role in bullying. Bullies pick on people because of their differences, and so some get bullied because we don't have the sort of looks the rest of the culture admires or because we have too much of the looks admired in a culture. Stories in Such A Pretty Face certainly deal with coping in these instances. And Janis's story is so clearly one of a woman who rose above bullying with her voice.

Another book I wrote, Robert Cormier: Author of the Chocolate War, offers some tremendous insights into book challenges, censorship, and one author's efforts to fight censorship. Ironically, although he died in 2000, Cormier remains one of the most censored authors of the previous decade and continues to be listed as one of the top ten most censored authors of the year.

Can you share a funny or interesting story about how you got interested in writing?

I don't recall ever not writing. It's as if I was born to tell stories. I even have the first story--illustrated--that I ever wrote. It's a pencil drawing from about first or second grade where I drew my whole family and then wrote characteristics above each person. For my oldest sister, I wrote, "Katie yells a lot." For a little sister, I wrote, "Lulu cries a lot." Over my own head I wrote "I help the most." I look at that and think I was a fiction writer in the beginning.

When I go to schools to talk about writing, I often talk about how I choose my writing topics to focus on issues kids face. I can be talking about censorship and bullying or self-image issues, and inevitably a student will raise his or her hand and ask me, "Do you have any pets?"

For the record, I have a wicked little cat named Sparkie who fits her name perfectly.

Why do you write biographies for teens?

There is so much we can learn from entering the space of another person's life. It allows us to see how others think and behave, and it gives us a glimpse into the human condition in a way that is so real. We can learn from the lives of others. For instance, Janis Joplin was my role model. She gave me the courage to stop following along with the crowd and to do my own thing. Her death became my cautionary tale.

Would you share a favorite writing exercise for our readers?

The title of this exercise is "Who Is Listening?" Turn on the radio or turn on your iPod or click on music you've never heard before. As you listen to the song, freewrite and create a character listening to this song at the same time. As the song plays, describe the character and setting. Now listen to the song again and describe how this character is responding to the music and why. Would this character feel differently about this song if s/he weren't also dealing with ________?

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Thank you for joining us, Ann! We wish you and your books continued success!

Readers, before entering our contest, please read our Book Giveaway Guidelines. Then, for a chance to win an autographed copy of Ann Angel's new book Janis Joplin: Rise Up Singing, post a comment to today's blog post telling us some sage advice you received about writing and who gave it to you. To qualify, your entry must be posted by 11 p.m. Friday, November 26, 2010 (Central Standard Time). The winner will be chosen in a random drawing and announced by 11 p.m., Saturday, November 27, 2010.