Reviews roll in, I roll out on appearances in the Bay Area with writing buddies

A couple posts ago I mentioned that scary pause where an authors finishes a book... moves on to the next project, but some part of our attention is in suspended animation, just waiting for the reviews.

Will the reviewers love my new book? Will they hate it? And worst of all, will they ignore it?

I've finally let out my breath. Two more reviews have come in on my new novel, Dogtag Summer, from Booklist and School Library Journal.

"Creative and winsome... poignant coming-of-age story that resonates with pain and a hard-fought resolution.” —Booklist

"Partridge also succeeds in incorporating solid historical research into a moving story, using the dogtag, symbol of a most unpopular war, as an instrument of catharsis.” —School Library Journal

Let the festivities begin!

Here's one of the wonderful aspects of being a writer: becoming friends with so many incredible people who also write. I've got some great appearances coming up with friends. These will be a blast, hope you can join us for one if you are in the Bay Area.

Monday February 28th: National Book Award winner Judy Blundell is here in California on a book tour with her new novel, Strings Attached. We'll be at Books Inc. Burlingame at 6:00 pm for a special wine and cheese mingler. Books Inc. is giving 25% discount on all books purchased at the event. 1375 Burlingame Ave, Burlingame, 94010 (650) 685-4911.

Tuesday March 1st: Judy and I will do a joint school visit in Santa Rosa, then a Dark Days of Winter Tea at Copperfields in Petaluma. For teens, refreshments served!

Mrach 27th at 1 pm: Great good Place for Books with Thacher Hurd and Marissa Moss. Marissa is dark-side funny, Thacher is hold-your-sides funny. Together they are funny squared. This will be rocking!

March 28th: Kid Lit Salon at Book Passages Corte Madera with Marissa Moss and Joanne Rocklin.

This is how a novel starts

I have a once-a-day feed from Google that picks up my name on the web. Usually it's just that a library somewhere has bought my book, or one of my books is for sale on eBay, or that I'll be appearing somewhere (which I already know). Pretty standard stuff.

But today I got a terrific Google Alert via Convict Records. In September 1846, Elizabeth Partridge was one of 169 convicts transported on the Elizabeth and Henry to Australia! Now usually, that side of my family rests very peacefully in small village graveyards. They were crofters -- small farmers -- and small time merchants. I had no idea I had scurvy ancestors.

What did this Elizabeth Partridge do that got her ten years in jail, swapped off for being sent to Australia? What was it like for her once she got there?

What if....

and a seed is planted. I don't know that I would ever take this any further, but it is exhilarating to have my mind tumble in a new direction.

What kind of random things have been making you think "What if....?"

The supreme vulnerablity of writing a novel

About six months ago, I finished a middle grade novel, Dogtag Summer. The idea had been brewing in the back of my mind, morphing and growing, for a long, long time. It started by my overhearing a conversation between my husband and an electrician, Jim, after they'd been working together all day. My husband asked Jim what it had been like for him to serve in Vietnam. Lots of words and feelings tumbled out of Jim. Several parts stuck with me for years. Like how he always walked point, because he'd been raised in the country, did a lot of hunting, and he didn't ever trust anyone else to walk point.

The what-ifs started for me right away. What if he had let someone else walk point, just once? What if an Amerasian child from Vietnam was pulled out of the country in the last desperate days of 1975 before the Communists took over? And what if, just what if, she were adopted by a vet with his own powder-keg of unresolved feelings?

I did a ton of research and interviews. I went to Vietnam to smell the river and the heavy rains, to listen to the cadence of people speaking to one another in the marketplace. I wrote, and rewrote and rewrote. I turned it in, (wrote and rewrote with my amazing editor's suggestions) and then wondered: how've I done, writing fiction?

Here's what Publisher's Weekly and Kirkus have to say:

Dogtag Summer

Elizabeth Partridge, Bloomsbury, $16.99 (240p) ISBN 978-1-59990-183-1

This gripping yet tender coming-of-age story reveals multiple nuanced perspectives of the Vietnam War and its aftermath in the summer of 1980. A backfiring school bus triggers a series of flashbacks for sixth-grader Tracy. Partridge (Marching for Freedom) smoothly interlaces memories of Tracy's childhood as a "con lai" (half-blood) in wartime Vietnam, where her American heritage endangered her Vietnamese family, and her present-day life as the adopted daughter of a Vietnam veteran who is dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder. When Tracy and her best friend, Stargazer--the child of hippie, war-protesting parents--discover a dogtag in her father's ammo box, the event sets off an unexpected chain of events in both families, leading to excruciating memories, painful misunderstandings, and compassionate insights. Partridge delicately portrays Tracy's struggle to reconcile her last, harrowing memory of her biological mother and her relationship with her loving, adoptive mother, who tries to understand the ghostly memories haunting her daughter and husband. Appendixes include interviews in which Partridge addresses historical questions, as well as a teacher's guide for using this book in a curriculum about Vietnam. Powerful historical fiction. Ages 8–12. (Mar.)

DOGTAG SUMMER
“A child of conflict struggles to understand her past and her present in this impressive historical novel. Partridge proves her keen understanding of young people and her ability to write engrossing fiction grounded in the history she usually illuminates in nonfiction. This is a dual narrative of Tracy’s story, alternating between her experiences as a con lai, or half-Vietnamese/half-American child, in that country in 1975 and her time as an adopted only child enmeshed in her now-ordinary life on the coast of California five years later. The trauma that she suffered in the past emerges from deeply buried memories at the beginning of summer when she and best friend Stargazer, a child of hippies, build a Viking ship of war. Tracy’s father, a Vietnam vet, has hidden an old ammo box with a set of dogtags inside, and their discovery sets into motion Tracy’s process of remembering her past and connecting it with the present. Only 11, Tracy is realistically inarticulate, yet the depth of her emotion and suffering comes through. Never reverting to stereotypes, Partridge uses Tracy and Stargazer's fast friendship to help capture the ambivalence of the culture toward the war, as well as the struggle of the vets to personally cope with their experiences. A strong yet gentle read.” – Kirkus

Vermont College winter residency

We're coming close to finishing up our ten days together at Vermont College. It's been an incredible experience. Great faculty, fantastic students, learning, learning, learning. A few things I've learned that weren't on the schedule:

Snow is very fun. Beautiful. Cold.
You must always zip up your jacket before going out the door.
Cold doesn't actually hurt until it is about ten degrees outside. Then its pretty critical to keep moving. Even with your jacket zipped up.

I don't think there is any part of craft that we left undiscussed while we were here. And part of the appeal of being on the faculty is that I've learned so much myself. My ever-supportive husband has been behind me all the way in taking on this job, but.... he did just send an email saying our dog is missing me. He's sure. The dog has called a truce with the cat, and they are sleeping curled up together on the bed. Kinda lonely.

We had a great lunch time drop-in visit by Elizabeth Bluemle, who runs the Flying Pig Bookstore, and writes the Shelftalker blog (along with Josie Leavitt). Elizabeth has a lovely post today on "The Dream, Then and Now." Meanwhile, out in the real world at Monica Edinger's blog, Educating Alice, she posted a really cool way she and her students used Marching for Freedom in an assembly. I wish I had seen this performance!

Agent love

Wonder what authors' different relationships are like with their agents? Roger Sutton at Horn Book magazine asked five of us to answer this question: "Why I love my agent." The articles came out in the latest issue, but they aren't online at the Horn Book.

Because I want to shout from the rooftops about how much and why I adore my agent, I tried to take a picture of the article with my cell phone camera, but the letters and edges came out pretty wobbly. I'll paste the article in below the image, or you can read it here.

Publication: The Horn Book Magazine
Author: Partridge, Elizabeth
Date published: January 1, 2011

Many years ago, as an aspiring writer, I overheard a successful author give her definition of a good agent. "You don't want a friend," she said. "You want someone who's like a shark, swimming next to you. But you have to be careful not to get bitten yourself."

That made sense, in a writer's overblown-hyperbole kind of way. The author/ agent relationship was a business one. You needed someone tough and scary, with lots of teeth, who kept moving on your behalf. And you didn't want to be a bothersome client, or you might get a quick nip.

When I began working with my agent, Ken Wright, I treated him like a shark with a mouthful of teeth. I was respectful, and very guarded. It took him a long time to wear down my defenses and prove that he would never bite me, or even bite anyone else on my behalf.

Turns out he doesn't subscribe to the bunny-eat-bunny model of children's publishing. He operates on the old-fashioned handshake, negotiating deals, linking people and projects. He loves to brainstorm about ideas until they suddenly come into focus as a potential manuscript. It's clear he enjoys the whole business - and he's good at it.

Ken makes me laugh and makes me think. If I'm bogged down or overwhelmed, he smells it in the wind and shoots off an e-mail. "Talk soon?" he writes. He's my touchstone and my taskmaster.

While I'm alone in my writing room with my research and my interviews and a big, rambling idea I'm trying to squeeze between the covers of a book, he's got my back.

Author affiliation:

Elizabeth Partridge's newest book is Dogtag Summer (Bloomsbury).

New Year, new adventure

Yesterday our older son, Will, headed home to freezing Minnesota, and our younger son, Felix, went back to work (currently making cow proof fences so salamanders won't get squashed.) All the holiday decorations are put away. One last birthday cake to make -- my husband's birthday is tomorrow -- and then life returns to ... well, not normal exactly. To my new adventure.

In a few days I leave for freezing Vermont. (Notice a theme here with the cold?) I've taken a job teaching at Vermont College in the MFA Writing for Children and Young Adults Program. I am incredibly excited. I've never taught in an organized program before, though I've done all the pieces (lectures, critiquing, encouraging, mentoring.) Being used to mild California weather, I sent ahead a box of warmness -- a down quilt, flannel sheets, snow boots and a teapot.

My year started off with a treat. Last summer we had an amazing Boston Globe-Horn Book award evening, with all the winners giving speeches. The Horn Book people have graciously put links to all of them on their site. Here's my Boston Globe-Horn Book speech for Marching for Freedom. It's partly about writing the book, and partly about why I write and what inspires me.

And with a time-consuming new adventure coinciding with a new year, I've come up with a New Year's resolution: prioritize. This is always a weakness with me in the best of times. So with more demands on my time, I'm going to see if I can be more mindful. I've written prioritize on a slip of paper and stuck it to the bottom of my computer screen.

What will you be doing more mindfully this year?

No cowboys in white linen on the streets of Laredo

But there is an absolutely amazing librarian in Laredo Texas: Carmen Escamilla of J.B. Alexander High School. She put together a dream program for the fall, and invited teachers in the district to join her. Students read Laurie Halse Anderson's Chains, about a slave girl during the Revolutionary War, and then read my book, Marching for Freedom, kids' part in the success of the civil rights march for the vote in 1965.

The students in Laredo face serious challenges every day. Most of the students in Mrs. Escamilla's district are on reduced or free lunches. Some kids live in stables or with their families under trees. Gang activity from Mexico is leaping across the Rio Grand River. But Mrs. Escamilla is not going to let any kid drop out, fail, or fall behind if she can help it.
Carmen Escamilla

From fifth graders through high schoolers, students in Laredo read the books, joined mixed-grade online discussion groups, made Vokis and Ven Diagrams. One group of readers made t-shirts and posters, and organized a literacy march. Two ninth graders, Troy Lomas and Eric Garay, wrote and recorded an incredible, complex song, "Keep on Reading."

Here's an excerpt:

"Last name Partridge
Fist name Lizzie,
Like a serious story she ain't nuttin to play with,
Started off local, but thanks to all those lovers,
She is signing autographs on those front book covers,
She keeps on encouraging kids to read, So Cool
She just wants everybody to be free, So true
Marching for the freedom come and join us, People

She can't do it all so get involved, niños
Drop the segregation we are all internally equal..."

© Troy Lomas and Eric Garay

Last Monday I spoke to 700 of these Laredo students and listened as the students shared their excitement about reading the books.One of the speakers had me from the first couple of lines of his speech.

"Hello, my name is Miguel Malacara and I am not a reader. I don't read much but I do have an outlook on life and a bit of passion for history. This is why this book got my attention." Incredible.

Miguel Malacara and his classmate.

She spoke about how she was born in the United States but grew up in Mexico, and had recently returned to the US. She was so discouraged by all the negative press about Hispanics that she had been just waiting to go back to Mexico. She went on to say: "Marching for Freedom changed my destiny. I used to want to go back to Mexico because I heard so many bad things about Hispanics. Now, I will stay and fight." (I'm so sorry I forgot your name!) later: Itzamara De La Garza, above with Miguel! Thank you Itzamara for your wonderful heart!

I absolutely love how Marching for Freedom jumped cultures from African American to Hispanic. As Miguel said after reading about the students in Marching: "If we had just a bit of their determination and confidence we could literally accomplish anything we want."

I have a feeling you do have more than just a bit of their determination and confidence.

Thank you Mrs. Escamilla, thank you teachers, and thank you students. I am honored to have been with you. You are truly an inspiration.

There's a nice shout-out in Publisher's Weekly (scroll down a bit).
And an article in the Laredo Sun.