HAL SCHRIEVE IS THE author of the 2019 book, Out of Salem, selected for the National Book Award Longlist for Young People’s Literature. Hal works as a children’s librarian at the New York Public Library. As a librarian, Hal has written educator guides to other queer books for children and teens and has poetry in Vetch magazine and is featured in Stacked Deck Press’s 2018 Trans Comics anthology, We’re Still Here. Hal writes queer fiction for young people, as well as for comics and zines. The new novel is How To Get Over The End of the World, just released from Seven Stories Press. Listen in and read along as we discuss writing LGBTQIA+ books for teens and so much more.
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Hal: Thank you so much for having me on.
Marion: I’m just thrilled that you’re here. So let’s just jump right in. Science, magic, queer and trans teens, aliens, telepathy, coming of age, apocalyptic visions, trans kids under attack, trans kids fighting back, and a whole lot of hope for changing this world. Clearly, How To Get Over The End of the World is the book for right now. So let’s start there. Books must land in a time and place for them to be relevant, to have context. So talk to me about choosing this content for the world we now inhabit.
Hal: So the book that I published this past year, I do think it’s relevant to right now. I started writing it in 2018. I wanted to write a book that was both hopeful about the potential of queer community and also was about my own experiences as a teen in LGBT nonprofits and learning with other youth, participating in community theater with other youth, and what that did for me, and how it helped me and saved me to have a book that is about that experience of being a queer teen where you’re out and you are accessing resources and you are accessing community, but then maybe there’s still problems in your life. Maybe some of those problems are unrelated to being a queer teen and maybe some of them are related to transphobia in your school or having your family sort of fracture because of your parents’ different opinions about your transition and what you are and what you’re doing.
So I was trying to write a book that was hopeful and was mainly about queer teens’ relationships to each other, but also included things about the real world and included the kind of anxiety about the climate and the future that I think a lot of teens fear right now. And I think I also feel that anxiety. I grew up in Olympia, Washington. I have watched the climate in that part of the world, and also around New York City where I live now, change in the last 10 years a lot. There’s fire season now in the Pacific Northwest where there’s huge wildfires every summer. There’s declining salmon runs. There’s a lot of things to be worried about if you’re a teenager and I don’t have easy answers for those things, but I wanted to write a book where teens are thinking about them and kind of experiencing connection to the world around them and feeling like maybe there is a way to change it even if they’re not sure what it is yet.
So my character Orsino has these visions that he understands that aliens are giving him and the aliens are time traveling aliens from the future. And they never show up directly, but they speak to him and they are telling him that he has the chance to change what’s happening in the world by making some kind of intervention that will permit the survival of humanity into the future. And the aliens want this partly because they are trying to fight imperial evil and dark forces in their own time in the future.
And this is very in the background of the real plot, which is about a bunch of queer teens trying to save their queer youth group. But this is happening for Orsino at the same time. He’s feeling connected to the past and the future and it expresses itself through sort of these mystical visions and then sort of mysterious incidences. So there’s a moment where a dinosaur shows up around his father’s house, there’s a moment where he kisses a boy for the first time and then a bunch of salmon show up in the river, to try to connect if we have enough community, we can maybe make the interventions we need to save the world.
Marion: Yes, if we have enough community. Yes. And that’s a great place to consider. So let’s give everybody just a little bit of context. Young adult literature or YA deals with the unique experiences and challenges faced by adolescents. So let’s set this up for the listeners. You’ve just given us a real good sense of where you go, but high school students trying to make a better world, it’s a great place to write from. Your previous book, Out of Salem, which was longlisted for the 2019 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature was a Publishers Weekly Best Young Adult Book and it combines teen zombie, werewolf, witchy, fairy, fantasy, murder mystery, and Publishers Weekly wrote, “Any reader who has felt it necessary to hide their true identity will find strong characters connect with in this fun, powerful story.” So two books that explore identity but go a bit otherworldly. So what advantage does it give a YA writer to utilize fantasy?
Hal: I think that I’m writing for teens because I’m thinking about the books that didn’t exist when I was a teen and the ones that I wanted to read. Hopefully I’m writing those. I like fantasy a lot. I think it’s fun. I think fantasy in general allows a flexibility in the world that we’re operating in. So it allows some potential solutions to emerge that maybe haven’t been found in the real world yet. I think it’s just a way of opening up for hope for me and then also just opening up to trying to examine how the world that we exist in came to exist. Because if you create a different world, then you can have some kind of explanation offered for how that world came to exist and then that can offer a tool for analysis for our world. So if you have a world where werewolves are oppressed, like in Out of Salem, there can be a history of places where werewolves maybe weren’t oppressed and places where people accepted werewolves and they were part of society and kind of different perspectives on that.
And Out of Salem, being a monster and being queer are not a one-to-one analogy, but there are parallels and there’s kind of points of intersection. And I think writing about teen monsters in that way allowed me to express things about the experience of being trans and isolated that I think are best expressed hyperbolically, bombastically, because they feel so big. It feels maybe like your body is falling apart or that no one recognizes you as real, or if they do recognize you as real, they see you as a danger or a threat. And so trying to write a world where those things seem closer to being literally true, so the experience of them is maybe nearer to the surface.
And I think that there’s other writers writing in this vein right now. There’s obviously Andrew Joseph White and Aiden Thomas who are two other trans YA writers right now who are writing some fantastically successful books and also some really interesting books about trans teens and fantasy worlds. Andrew Joseph White’s Hell Followed With Us is about a queer teen who escapes from an evangelical cult that is turning him into a monster and he joins up with a bunch of other queer teens on the run in this apocalyptic wasteland. And then there’s also Aiden Thomas’ Cemetery Boys and The Sunbearer Trials which draw on Mexican and Latinx folklore and tradition to create these worlds where there’s magic and there’s a trans teen sort of working within this magic system that draws on older North American traditions.
I think both of those are really cool. I think fantasy continues to be a way for teens to both escape the real world and also process it. I think fantasy is for adults too, but I do think that there is something about fantasy and adolescence where you’re figuring out how the real world works and maybe it’s kind of painful to figure out how the real world works. So thinking about other options is really important.
Marion: That’s a wonderful point and it clarifies for me so much in terms of the mirror and how we need to look at ourselves and the opportunity you’re giving us to have a look at the dysfunction in the world we live in that we may not yet have language for or even the cognition to really accept. And you do it skillfully using multiple narrators. So in How To Get Over The End of the World, you’ve got people with different voices and the question becomes why, what advantages, disadvantages does it a give a writer. And chicken and egg this for us a bit for those writers out there who want to try this. Do you diagram your characters up on the wall the way we were taught when writing screenplays so that we know them really, really, really well before we write their first word? Do they just all live inside you and you don’t need to do that? I mean, how do you map them out?
Hal: I think that in writing How To Get Over The End of the World, I knew there was going to be multiple protagonists because I wanted to show how their perceptions of reality were different. I initially meant to have two and then I ended up with three. And I will say three is a lot to juggle because you have to keep the story moving, but you also have to show what each character’s experiencing across the trajectory of the story. So balancing what’s happening and whose perspective as you plan out the book, it takes some time because then I would end up with really long chapters and then I’d be like, “Oh, no, all of this narrative is coming through this one character’s perspective and I have to move this around a little bit.” I think three is kind of a lot to juggle and there’s obviously novels with even more than that, but I think the more characters you have where their perspective is how you’re telling the story, you have to figure out what’s important to see from whose eyes.
And I also had a little bit of trouble trying to make James and Monique’s voices distinct from each other because they’re quite close friends and they’re kind of in the same friend group and they have different experiences of the world, but they are also very close. And so their voices ended up sounding more similar than James and Orsino’s voices because Orsino is this sort of mystical, probably autism spectrum homeschooled kid who has a very unique point of view. And then James and Monique are a little bit closer because they’re like queer kids in a rural high school and they’re fans of the same music and they’re always in the same place and so they sound a little closer to each other.
Marion: And did you map it out on a piece of paper? Did you just keep it all in your heart and your head? I’ve seen so many different tactics by writers over the years. But writers who are new want to know how do you do it? Do you use index cards and write down all the characteristics of each character, or do you just keep it in your head?
Hal: I ended up doing an outline of what plot points from whose perspective, a Word document, because I had the outline of the story and then I was trying to break down how many chapters there would be, how long each chapter would be because I also didn’t want to end up with some really lopsided storytelling. And then I had the draft that I had and I moved around things and cut things. I tend to overwrite and I also tend to over explain in my prose. I give too many visual descriptions, I use the same words over and over again. So I had this very long draft that I started out with and then had people read it and tell me what they thought about it and also had my friends tell me about what they thought of the pacing and how to move things around.
One person gave feedback that they thought that I should also have the character Jukebox be a POV character and that’s an older punk person in the teens’ world who is behaving really badly throughout the entire thing. And my friend Jean was like, “Jukebox should really be a POV character as well because it would really add something to the plot.” And I was like, “I don’t know how to manage that and I don’t know how to retro fit that into the outline that I have.” I do see sort of where she was coming from in terms of giving a fuller picture of the world that all the characters are in, but I didn’t know how to do that so I kept it in three.
Marion: Well, that’s very generous of you and I appreciate that because for the writers listening, boy, a bad day of writing, when somebody suggests something like that, the ability to say, “I don’t know how to do that,” is sometimes the single best thing you can say to yourself. So you said you write too many descriptions sometimes. I would say you’re kind of a master of details, small details. You’ve got great characterization for each of your characters. I was able to keep them straight. But in YA, those details must place everyone in that age group except for, of course, Jukebox, their roles and they’ve got to reveal what’s at stake, as you just said, you’ve got to kind of map out the whole character.
And so as we establish the requirement of YA is to observe and explore adolescence, which you do wonderfully in sentences like this, spoken by one of the narrators who says, “I’m growing into parts of my body I used to feel were all out of proportion.” It’s a simple sentence, but anyone who’s gotten past 15, 16, 17 knows what that feels like. It’s perfect for YA. So talk to me about shooting from there, from the coming of age point of view. We use the phrase coming of age, we know what it means, but I think a lot of writers struggle with how to get the right language on that. So you said you had some readers, but in the writing do you depend on your total recall of your younger self? Do you interview people of this age? I know you spend a lot of time with kids as a librarian. But how do you not only inhabit but portray the worldview from that age group?
Hal: I do think that working at a library is useful and we don’t get the most teens in my library, but we get a lot of teens from the art high school that’s nearby and they are joking with each other. Teens are very, very funny. Obviously not all teens but a teen friend group is hilarious to listen to. Also, my partner has worked in schools and works with kids and I work with kids. I am trying to figure out how to learn how to write for younger kids. I have read so many books to so many kids over the last five years and I think I have a good idea of what makes a good picture book, but knowing what makes a good picture book and knowing how to write a good picture book are two different things. I think it’s very hard to engineer a story that is suited for and interesting to very young readers.
And I think that is maybe a direction I want to move in over the long run because I find picture books such a fascinating art form. I think for writing for teens, it’s like they’re much closer to adults. They’re kind of almost adults in a lot of ways. They know a lot about the world, they’re thinking about real things in the real world. And I do remember a lot of how it felt to be a teenager when I was a teenager and then I also was blogging constantly. So I have all these blogs from when I was a teenager that really reflect the chaotic emotional landscape combined with learning a whole bunch about the world that is being a teen.
And I think for YA, it’s about finding the balance of writing to someone who you know is younger than yourself and experiencing the world in kind of sharper definition and brighter colors because of how their brain development is going and how their emotions are because they’re feeling a lot of things for the first time and it’s really intense. And then also trying not to talk down them because they are still smart and they know things about the world. And I want teens to feel seen and I want them to feel like I know that what they’re going through is actually serious even if it’s also kind of silly and they act really foolishly a lot of the times.
There’s someone that I know who teaches high school who has also taught middle school and is like the difference between middle schoolers and high schoolers is that middle schoolers, you really have to describe to them exactly what they need to be doing at all times because otherwise they will be off sticking pencils in the wall. But the mistakes they make are very low stakes. High schoolers, they mostly know exactly what they need to be doing at all times and you can sort of trust them with a lot, but when they do mess up, it can be catastrophic because they make bigger mistakes. And I think that part of YA literature, it’s not like it’s going to instruct them in the way to be in the world completely, but I think it is also about modeling how you could be at this time, how you could be if you feel this way, what you could do if you feel this way and what might happen if you do that because they’re figuring out what their options are.
Marion: I love the distinction. That’s very… I’m going to think a lot about that. That’s fascinating. The higher stakes, lower stakes mistakes and writing to that. I read young adult literature, I’ve interviewed YA authors before, and I think it’s fair to say this new book of yours is not your typical YA work simply because it includes trans and queer kids. So let’s talk about that. Before we went live, I asked you about your pronouns and then utterly flubbed the introduction by just using your first name after you introduced me to a term I don’t know, which is ze/hir. And so I want to talk about who you are and how you felt. You alluded before to the fact that you didn’t see yourself on the library shelves while growing up. So let’s talk about how that felt exactly. Let’s just zero in a bit and also perhaps reflect on what you see with other kids at the library when they do see themselves on the shelves. But if you could compare yourself at that age to what you see at least in New York State on the library shelves.
Hal: Yeah, I will say that I have seen a huge explosion in publishing for queer and trans kids in the last six or seven years. I wrote my library school thesis on trans literature available to kids and teens in public libraries. And literally I did that in 2018, 2019. And since then there has been so much more, which is part of why we are seeing a huge rise in book bans because a lot of what people are targeting is that new growth of queer and trans literature, along with books about racism in America. Those are the two focuses for people who are challenging and banning books. It’s a direct sort of backlash.
But when I was a kid, there was a pretty good library at my middle school and there was a book edited by Bruce Coville called Am I Blue? And I had read Bruce Coville’s fantasy novels when I was a child and I was like, “Oh, Bruce Coville.” And it was an anthology of short stories about being gay and a couple that were sort of about being trans, though the idea of a trans teenager really didn’t exist. So it was more about gender creative teenagers. But that was really important to me to find, partly because I had loved Bruce Coville’s earlier books for younger kids. I trusted him and he was publishing this at a time when there wasn’t a whole bunch available for teens.
There was Annie on My Mind, which is from 1982, which is about a lesbian teenager. But there was a very long period. The first picture book about a kind of gender queer child was called X: A Fabulous Child’s Story. And it was from 1978 and it was this kind of gender liberation book about trying to raise a gender-neutral child. And it’s kind of tongue-in-cheek, but it’s about these parents that are trying to raise a child without raising them as a boy or a girl. And after that there’s nothing about trans kids at all in publishing until probably about 2008 or 2009. And then it tends to be from a parent’s perspective and sort of written towards other parents about how do you deal with this?
And I think it’s in the last probably eight or nine years where there start to be more trans authors writing about trans experiences and trying to reflect more of what kids experience. And there’s not one trans experience. We are quite a diverse group and my experiences are going to be very different than, say, someone who grows up in Georgia, or someone who grows up in a different economic situation, or someone who grows up in the Caribbean. There’s going to be a lot of different ways to experience queerness and transness and for families to react and for your culture around you to react.
And I think it’s safe to say that there are more kids identifying as trans than there used to be and perhaps significantly more. But those people aren’t going to all do the same thing with that. Some people are going to transition and seek medical care, which is becoming more difficult to access in some states. Some people don’t want that and they just want to be able to dress and express themselves the way that they need to. And I think it’s just important to write to all of those different experiences. And I can mainly write to experiences that are more similar to my own, but I, as a librarian, it’s very important for kids to see people who look like them in fiction and then also to be able to read about a milieu of people who include people both similar and different to them. And kids have different reading preferences. So there needs to be some books that are funny, and some books that are serious and about hard things, and some books that are about real people from history who maybe have done the same thing as you. It’s all important.
I think that the YA that exists for trans teens is mostly really not threatening the traditional family structure. It’s really not threatening all the things that people are very scared of it threatening. People are afraid that it’s going to sort of demolish the American family or American schools to allow trans kids to exist or play sports or use the bathrooms or whatever. And a lot of the fiction that’s out there right now is really the safest of safe, but it’s still triggering this massive backlash, which makes me really sad.
My book, I think, is a little bit edgier. I still don’t think it’s really toppling any structures, but they smoke some weed and they put on some weird theater. I think that maybe it’s a little bit edgier than someone just changing their name at school, but it’s all important. It feels good to know that someone else is out there who’s been through the same thing as you. And I think that’s what I hope the trans kids experience. I hope that’s what foster kids experience. I think a very underserved YA market is writing actual books that deal with what kids in the American foster system experience. There’s a whole bunch of different experiences that are not reflected in literature for kids that it’s useful if they are.
Marion: I think that’s a great observation and I want to dig into it a little bit more because we’re supposed to write what we know. That’s the advice that everybody says. From anyone who’s an agent, to an editor, they say, “Write what you know.” And we’re told to write the book we want to read, but what’s a writer to do when the very books they want to write are being banned? And you make the point on your website that How To Get Over The End of the World exists on the shelves of 134 libraries. But at last count there were 17,454 public libraries in America and that doesn’t include college, university and private libraries.
So let’s talk a little bit more about writing against the reality of now. And it just seems absurd to ask a writer, is that your mission? Because we’re just supposed to write what we want, what we didn’t see, what we… It’s your life’s work. So what can you say to other writers, and you touched on this in your last answer very, very nicely in terms of foster kids and in terms of a variety of other writers. But what can you say more to other writers whose identities do not populate our library shelves in sufficient numbers? What encouragement can you give them?
Hal: I mean, I do think it’s an uphill battle to get published sometimes because it can be kind of a self-reinforcing cycle of publishers know this is what sells, so this is what they want to publish. But I do think that picture can change. Part of the reason we’re seeing a huge uptick in LGBT publishing and more broadly more realistic fiction books for kids that feature kids of color from a variety of backgrounds is because people on social media who were working in kid lit started being like, “We need diverse books,” and organizing about it and kind of finding agents who wanted to support them and sometimes calling out agents or publishers that were not publishing enough books of this type or who had given rejections, being like, “We already have a black book this year,” basically. I think it’s about organizing and meeting other people in the field and talking about what you want to produce.
And I think it’s also about cooperating so everyone can get the kind of editing and guidance on shaping their work that they need. And I also think it’s probably true for a variety of marginalized authors that many of us do not get the kind of editing we really need to make our work the best it can be. So I think it’s about finding writing community and trying to get feedback from people who you trust who know about the things that you’re trying to write about as well. Because I think the publishing industry can, even as it diversifies, feel like a place where you’re maybe there to tick a box for somebody or someone in the room thinks you’re sort of there to tick a box.
I think also indie publishers are where I have found the ability to get published. Seven Stories is a relatively small press. It’s a bigger indie press in terms of they put out at least 40 books a year, but indie publishers are having a good moment relatively right now because I think a lot of publishing houses are going through layoffs or consolidations and weird stuff with Big Five. So I think indie publishers are a place that might take a chance on more interesting or new or diverse literature that hasn’t been published before.
And I think that many of them are working with independent bookstores. Independent bookstores are still struggling. Both the fact that big box bookstores are maybe failing to fight against Amazon means that there’s room for indie bookstores to fill that gap in terms of supplying readers with what they’re looking for. There’s a lot of things to be worried about in publishing, but I do think change can happen if people get together and talk about what they want to see in the world and make the art they want to see. And that’s sort of what I can say about that.
Marion: And it’s helpful and I appreciate it. And as we wrap this up, I want to talk to you about some of the really lovely and helpful and surprising graphic aspects of the book, How To Get Over The End of the World. There were social media posts, song lyrics scribbled on a page and reproduced. It made it more deeply personal, providing a connection to the narrators to see these sort of handwritten notes. So talk to me about the decision and whether you got any pushback from your publisher to reproduce what’s pretty much art, which some people say, “Oh, the publisher is going to say no, it’s going to cost too much money.” That seems to be less of an issue these days. But just in terms of those people who want to do that, who want to reproduce something other than just type in a book, what feedback did you get from your publisher and how did you make that decision to include those?
Hal: So I would write sort of a description of what I wanted to be in there as an insert. And then they were like, “Do you want to actually give us the images that you want in there or would you just want us to have the description of what’s there?” And I was like, “I can create some images and send them to you.” They were like, “Okay, well, just send us the images and as long as they’re black and white and a certain resolution, we can probably format the book around them.” So I did really appreciate that. That is also, I had a pretty good time working with Seven Stories Press on this one. They also let me tell them I wanted a particular cartoonist for my cover because I really like Casey Nowak’s work. And they were like, “Okay, well, we have this budget. See if Casey Nowak wants to do it for this budget.”
And yeah, it’s a book about zine culture and so I think it sort of fit in with the punk zine stuff to have a few of those inserts. There is one or two of them that I think didn’t end up in the final copy of the book and I think, I don’t totally remember all of the different pieces of back and forth, but I think there was some formatting issues with some of the images I wanted to include. And so we figured out just some of them were just lyrics typed on the page and some of them were images.
Marion: Well, it works really well, and the book works really well, and I’m very grateful for the work you do in the library, for the work you do with children, and for the work you let us all read. So thank you. It’s an honor to meet you and I wish you the very best with this beautiful book.
Hal: Thank you so much for having me on. Thanks for reading my book.
Marion: You’re absolutely welcome. The author is Hal Schrieve. See more at hal schrieve dot com. The novel is How To Get Over The End of the World, just out from Seven Stories Press, available wherever books are sold. And if it’s not in your library, please request it. I’m Marion Roach Smith and you’ve been listening to Qwerty. Qwerty is produced by Overit Studios in Albany, New York. Reach them at Overitstudios dot com. Our producer is Jacqueline Mignot. Our assistant is Lorna Bailey. Want more on the art and work of writing? Visit Marion roach dot com, the home of The Memoir Project, where writers get their needs met through online classes on how to write memoir. And thanks for listening. Don’t forget to follow Qwerty wherever you get your podcasts and listen to it wherever you go. And if you like what you hear, please leave us a review. It helps others to find their way to their writing lives.
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