{"id":12987,"date":"2016-07-01T07:30:59","date_gmt":"2016-07-01T13:30:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lastbestnews.com\/site\/?p=12987"},"modified":"2016-07-02T07:54:21","modified_gmt":"2016-07-02T13:54:21","slug":"billings-author-writes-for-young-adults-of-any-age","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/2016\/07\/billings-author-writes-for-young-adults-of-any-age\/","title":{"rendered":"Billings author writes for young adults\u2014of any age"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Blythe\"<\/a>

Ed Kemmick\/Last Best News<\/p>

Blythe Woolston, seen here in the Billings Public Library, says reading is “practice for making sense of the world.”<\/p><\/div>\n

If you think young adult fiction is something to be looked down upon, or that the people who write young adult fiction are to be condescended to, I invite you to match wits, or sentences, with Blythe Woolston.<\/p>\n

Woolston is a Billings author, a late-bloomer whose first book, \u201cThe Freak Observer,\u201d was published six years ago, when she was 53. She has published three other books since then and she is almost done with another.<\/p>\n

Before I tell you what awards she has won and what other people think of her work, it might be best to encounter her prose directly, as in this sliver of a scene from the opening pages of \u201cThe Freak Observer.\u201d In it, a school counselor tells the narrator, Lola Lindgren, that she heard Lola was friends with a girl by the name of Esther.<\/p>\n

That triggers a long passage of recollection, including an account of Lola\u2019s first meeting with Esther, when Lola and her father drove up to Esther\u2019s family\u2019s place to acquire a puppy:<\/p>\n

My dad told me to stay in the car while he got out. He went in the house to talk to Esther\u2019s dad. In a little while, the kids had all come out to stare at me in the car. I was staring back. Then one of the girls went into the house and came out with a can of creamed corn. She poured it on the dirt. A whole bunch of puppies came tumbling out from under the porch and started licking up the yellow mess. Then a pig came around the corner and headed for the corn. Before he could get there, a little tiny girl picked up a stick of firewood and whacked that pig as hard as she could right in the head. The other kids started laughing, but that little girl just stood her ground. She wouldn\u2019t let that pig get close to that creamed corn. That little tiny girl was Esther.<\/p>\n

Then my dad came out of the house. Esther\u2019s dad pointed at a couple of the puppies. My dad reached down and scooped one up.<\/p>\n

Next thing I knew, I was the happiest kid in the world and that puppy was giving me a tongue bath like crazy. He smelled a little like creamed corn.<\/p>\n

Esther is dead now. She was a defender of puppies and a whacker of pigs, and now she is dead.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Does that read like young adult fiction to you, or just fine writing? The quality of her writing and the uncondescending seriousness of her plots have earned Woolston\u2019s books a good reception from the start.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Freak Observer\u201d\u2014described on the book jacket as a story about \u201cdeath, life, astrophysics, and finding beauty in chaos\u201d\u2014won the gold medal in the 2010 Moonbeam Children\u2019s Book Awards, part of the Independent Publisher Book Awards.<\/p>\n

\"CapreAir_Variable\"<\/a><\/div><\/div>Then, in 2011, the same book won the William C. Morris Young Adult Debut Award<\/a> from the American Library Association, an award that had only been established two years earlier.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat came as such a terrible shock to me,\u201d Woolston said. It was \u201clife-changing,\u201d she said, to have a \u201cbody of librarians who found this book and said, \u2018This book matters.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

The plaudits have continued to come in. Kirkus Reviews called \u201cCatch & Release<\/a>,\u201d her 2012 book, \u201cheartbreakingly honest,\u201d and it called \u201cBlack Helicopters<\/a>,\u201d in 2013, \u201charrowing and unforgettable.\u201d That book also won High Plains Book award for young adult fiction in 2014. \u201cMARTians<\/a>,\u201d published last year, was named by both Kirkus and Publishers Weekly as one of the best young adult novels of the year.<\/p>\n

Woolston said she gravitated toward YA fiction because young adulthood is such a fraught time, when \u201cyou\u2019re trying to figure out who you are. Isn\u2019t that the same as a mid-life crisis?\u201d The difference is that older people have decades of experience and knowledge they can use to deal with a mid-life crisis.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe truth is,\u201d Woolston said, \u201cwe are always struggling with those initial experiences that we have to move through between the ages, I would say, of 11 to 22.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Observer\"<\/a>

Woolston’s first book, “The Freak Observer,” won the William C. Morris Young Adult Debut Award from the American Library Association.<\/p><\/div>\n

Her books make no attempt to sugarcoat those difficult years, and the books often deal with uncomfortable subjects. In \u201cThe Freak Observer,\u201d Lola has terrifying nightmares and sadistic flashbacks. In \u201cBlack Helicopters,\u201d a teenage girl in the Montana hinterlands is trained by her fundamentalist, conspiracy-obsessed father to be a suicide bomber.<\/p>\n

\u201cCatch & Release\u201d is about a girl who lost an eye and had one side of her face distorted by flesh-eating bacteria, and \u201cMARTians\u201d is a dystopian vision of a consumerist society in which a teen\u2019s high school education is unceremoniously ended and she is forced to work for either AllMART or Q-MART.<\/p>\n

In all her books, Woolston said, \u201cI\u2019m trying to understand what happens to the students who aren\u2019t perfect, who feel they have no purpose. \u2026 Nobody wants to stay in an uncomfortable, horrible position. But a novel makes you live there for a while. I believe that kind of extended, hard engagement is what we need.\u201d<\/p>\n

If that all sounds rather bleak, you should know that her books are leavened by humor, and her conversations by fits of laughing. After delivering that last statement, for instance, Woolston shrugged, laughed and said, \u201cBut the world, as I\u2019ve noticed, does not necessarily consult me.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n
A few more details<\/h5>\n

If you want to read more young adult fiction, you might try Tim Wynne-Jones\u2019 \u201cThe Emperor of Anyplace<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt blew the top of my head off when I read it because I got to the end and I thought, \u2018This book had made me believe things,\u2019\u201d Blythe Woolston said. \u201cI\u2019m shocked at what it led me to believe.\u201d<\/p>\n

Woolston said she is good at coming up with ideas for books, or at least the start of books.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s the big payoff for being a disorganized writer,\u201d she said. \u201cThere are no spoilers because I don\u2019t know what is going to happen.\u201d<\/p>\n

She also has a list of titles she likes, including \u201cEnvy Hill,\u201d \u201cCold Hands\u201d and \u201cNagasaki Rocket Donkey,\u201d with no plot attached to any of them.<\/p>\n

And though I did not broach this subject with Woolston and have no idea whether she\u2019d be interested, it strikes me that she would be a fascinating guest author for a local book club. Her novels are thought provoking enough; to talk with her about them is a rare treat.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Woolston was born near Potomac, on the Blackfoot River east of Missoula. \u201cIt was never Yaak-remote,\u201d she said, but it was a long bus ride to Missoula, where she went to high school.<\/p>\n

After high school, she said, \u201cI lived in Arlee (north of Missoula). I had no job and I milked goats and had a baby. It was the late \u201970s. That\u2019s what I was doing: I was living the late \u201970s.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mostly to escape a bad situation, she eventually enrolled at Montana State University, where she thought of going into nursing but settled on English at the last moment. After earning a bachelor\u2019s degree and working in MSU libraries for a time, she earned a master\u2019s in education and worked as an adjunct professor for 10 years.<\/p>\n

She credits a library science teacher with forcing her to really learn the English language, to master the basics.<\/p>\n

\u201cI took a grammar class and it was so cool because it\u2019s all mechanical, it\u2019s the machinery, the engine of language. \u2026 It was very exciting to me because I got to tinker with the gears. And then I could explain it to people. I was good at explaining things like how a semicolon worked because I\u2019d only just learned it.\u201d<\/p>\n

By the time her husband, Chris Woolston, now a freelance science and travel writer, got his first journalism job, she had quit teaching and had learned book indexing through an online course offered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.<\/p>\n

She copyedited computer manuals for a time, then started doing index work. Some of her steady clients were historical society presses in Minnesota, Texas and Wisconsin, and then she found work with academic presses, including those at Princeton and Cambridge\u2014\u201cplaces where I could never walk in.\u201d (This accompanied by another peal of laughter.)<\/p>\n

And then came the books. Her first, unpublished novel was a useful disaster.<\/p>\n

\u201cI call it a three-legged mongrel,\u201d she said. \u201cI wanted it to be \u2018Vanity Fair\u2019 written by Terry Pratchett. It was none of those things.\u201d But it had some good lines and good characters, she said, and it taught her a lot about writing.<\/p>\n

\"Cover\"<\/a>

Ed Kemmick\/Last Best News<\/p>

Woolston said she loves “to encounter beautiful books,” and she is proud that all of her books have elegant, library bindings. And she really loves this illustration on the bottom right corner of her first book’s cover.<\/p><\/div>\n

Her four published books have all done well, Woolston said, but she acknowledges, in her deadpan, deprecating way, that her success has been somewhat limited.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m not really popular. What can I say? If you\u2019re one of those not-popular people at 11, chances are good that you\u2019re going to be one of those not-popular 59-year-olds.\u201d<\/p>\n

Once, when she was feeling some doubts about herself, she wondered aloud, in talking to her agent, if her publisher was just carrying her books to help her out. She said her agent replied, \u201cEditors, publishers\u2014they don\u2019t give money to keep people alive.\u201d<\/p>\n

Her favorite feedback comes during the annual conference of the American Library Association, which always features a panel of young readers, avid library users chosen by the librarians in the host city. Those \u201chard-core local teen readers\u201d have consistently said good things about her books.<\/p>\n

\u201cThose are the ones,\u201d she said. \u201cWhen I hear what they say, I go, \u2018Hallelujah!\u2019 That feeds me a lot in terms of getting my shit together to reach the next person out there.\u201d<\/p>\n

She and Chris have two sons, one 23 and the other nearly 15. The older boy is a reader now and recently switched his major from computer science to English, but the younger son isn\u2019t really a reader.<\/p>\n

Woolston is fine with that, saying that in the world we live in, there is no \u201cmoral superiority\u201d to getting information through reading as opposed to other means. There are advantages and disadvantages to reading, just as there are to playing computer games or watching television, she said. The trick is to be careful and to know what you\u2019re doing.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m absolutely opposed to censorship,\u201d Woolston said, \u201cbut I think everyone needs to know that the act of reading, or even the act of watching a film, even the act of listening to a symphony\u2014you are giving over control of your brain, sometimes to an astonishing degree, to someone else.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If you think young adult fiction is something to be looked down upon, or that the people who write young adult fiction are to be condescended to, I invite you to match wits, or sentences, with Blythe Woolston. Woolston is a Billings author, a late-bloomer whose first book, \u201cThe Freak Observer,\u201d was published six years […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":12988,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,18],"tags":[4622,4620,4623,4624,4621],"class_list":["post-12987","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-culture","category-diversions","tag-american-library-association","tag-blythe-woolston","tag-kirkus-reviews","tag-publishers-weekly","tag-young-adult-fiction","prominence-top-story"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12987","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12987"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12987\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12988"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12987"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12987"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12987"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}