The Former Anne Spollen's Author Blog Is Being Retitled to "Notes from Living Upghetto": The Collingswood Book Festival

Monday, October 6, 2008

The Collingswood Book Festival

On Saturday, my daughter, husband and I went to the Collingswood Book Festival. Now, my husband reads primarily bicycle and computer magazines, and after reading the first five pages of my novel said,"It's all I need to read to know it's good." My daughter just turned ten, so she can't even read YA - she tried, but went right back to Diary of A Wimpy Kid. Amazingly, they both found things to do there. My husband became fascinated with a "Tiki Bike" (there probably is a proper name for this, but I don't know what it is - it had a tiki bar roof and it rolled), and he got to talk to all the recumbent bike building people who stood on the fringes of the festival -- he was so happy to find those kindred souls. Anyway, here's a cell phone shot of the Tiki Bike. I think five people can fit on it:

And my daughter found a make your own Wimpy Kid diary workshop, tons of homemade cookies, and this:

There were lots of authors, books, and street fair type anomalies (bubbles, gigantic, walking sharks, Cliffords, Dr. Seuss and retirement age men wearing wizard hats). Mostly teenagers stopped to talk to me, and several people thought I was a conservationist writing about the "shape" water was in (like something connected to the melting of the polar ice caps).

I had one man dressed entirely in black slither up to me. "I'm a demonologist," he said, "would I like your book?" I told him he probably wouldn't, then tried to act busy, which is not easy when all you have is a table, copies of your novel and some business cards. He asked if there was a sucubus in the book, and when I told him no, he moved along.

The funny thing was how many adults came up to me and told me they liked to read YA. I acted so surprised until my daughter looked up from her American Girl magazine and said, "So you like it so much you write it, and you're an adult."

Duh!

She's right, of course. I have always read YA and MG books, but I never admitted that until I published one.

The other weird moment was right after a couple of teenagers told me how much they wanted to be authors, and I talked to them for a few minutes about writing. They were really enthusiatic about my novel, and after I signed their copies, and they left, I turned to Emma and said, "Wow, it's almost like I have fans."

She was still reading her magazine, and this time, without looking up, she said, "Not really you don't. You're just Mom."

Books

Light Beneath Ferns

"I have this strange sense that my silence is preparing me for something I can't name . ."

Elizah Rayne is nothing like other fourteen-year-old girls. More interested in bird bones than people, she wraps herself in silence. Trying to escape the shadow of her gambler father, Elizah and her mother move into an old house that borders a cemetery. All her mother wants is for them to have "normal" lives. But that becomes impossible for Elizah when she finds a human jawbone by the river and meets Nathaniel, a strangely hypnotic boy who draws Elizah into his dreamlike and mysterious world.

Only by forgetting everything she knows can Elizah understand the truth about Nathaniel—and discover an unimaginable secret.

Teen made trailer for Light Beneath Ferns.

Order Light Beneath Ferns here.

Foreword Magazine's Review of Light Beneath Ferns

Excerpt from THE SHAPE OF WATER

CHAPTER ONE
I discovered windows one afternoon and after that, nothing was ever the same. They had always been there, of course, glass panes shimmering in the color of rain, but that spring for the first time, I was able to open the windows in my room. For years, the locks had been painted stuck, and during the winter, heat from the radiator beneath my windows finally steamed off enough paint off the metal wings of the locks could be twirled open. Knowing that I could open the windows attracted me to them, and I began sitting under the windows, staring through the glass at the sky. From that position, on a chair in my room, the sky did not seem real; it seemed a place I was making up, so I watched it.
The white wood of the window panes acted as frames so the sky came to me slowly, and the huge openness of its space did not touch me. All the window glass in our old house had wavers and bubbles inside it, so at times the clouds moved like water, melting and blurring until they passed outside of the warp. After a few afternoons of sitting, the heavens seemed too quiet to keep watching so I began watching a small patch of woods next to our yard that housed little more than trees and a scatter of bony, mean-looking rabbits.
I started gazing at the sky and the woods in March when the branches were still wet and it was then, with nothing outside my window but trees and rain, that I noticed a shine inside darkness, I noticed colors glimmering within the darkness of the wood. I watched birds come and go, I watched rain nipple down from buds to the grass. The water dripping from branch edges and leaves created optical tricks; I could see that as I watched leaves melt.
Then one day I ventured into the space outside. I did not think about doing this much beforehand. I simply opened the window and dropped to the ground below, uncertain as to why this should be such a more satisfying exit than simply using the door; my father worked until seven o’clock and I could do whatever I wanted until then. But I liked the solid sound my legs made when I landed. Leaving via a five foot drop seemed so much more a decision than just using a door. The sense of escape made my heart pound, though all I escaped was the soundless spread of moss-colored light inside my house and the silence.
I had come to know silence well during those months after my mother died. When you sit in silence long enough, you learn that silence has a motion. It glides over you without shape or form, but with weight, exactly like water. Its color is silver. And silence has a sound you hear only after hours of wading inside it. The sound is soft, flute notes rising up like the words of glass speaking. There comes a point when you must shatter the silence, when you must shatter the blindness of its words, the blindness of its light. I did this by going into the yard. Once I stood there, in the grass next to the trees I had been watching, I found silence outside as well. But I was happier outside than I had been in the house, so I stayed for a bit. I stood beneath my bedroom window for a few minutes, looking up at the branches and the crooked pieces of sky colliding between the branches. I believed I could identify the scent of the sky as I stood there, a blue menthol fragrance similar to the scent of seawater that sprayed into my face when I first dove into the ocean. That initial scent smelled much more subtle than the ocean’s heavy, fishy aroma, a whiff of salt and mint that warned a more powerful scent would enter my nose just as I approached the water on a dive. It was the scent I dreamed in. And it was the scent of that spring sky as I stood in my yard.

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