Episode #147: How do you make your books so amazing? -with Corey Ann Haydu
Welcome back to another episode of Kids Ask Authors! Today we welcome Corey Ann Haydu and she answer’s the kid question… “How do you make your books so amazing?”
TRANSCRIPT:
Grace Lin: Hello, I'm Grace Lin, children's book author and illustrator of many books, including the middle grade novel Where the Mountain Meets the Moon and the picture book, A Big Mooncake for Little Star. Today I am here with Corey Ann Haydu, the author of middle grade novels like Eventown and the Someday Suitcase, as well as the Hand-Me-Down Magic chapter book series. Welcome, Corey.
Corey Ann Haydu: Hi, I'm so excited to be here.
Grace Lin: Oh, thanks so much for being on. Are you ready for today's kid question?
Corey Ann Haydu: I am extremely ready.
Grace Lin: Okay. Today's kid question is from a person named Alexandra and they ask:
Alexandra: How do you make your book so amazing?
Grace Lin: How do you make your book so amazing?
Corey Ann Haydu: Well, that is the nicest question ever. Thanks, Alexandra. So I think the way I write has a lot to do with doing two things at the same time, one of which is borrowing from my real life, whether it's big events that have happened in my family, or even just small feelings I'm having day to day, and then somehow mixing that up with magic. And for me, I find that that little combination is sort of what makes a story come to life. So I have all that real life emotion and information and real life things I care about that are in there. And then I get to just sprinkle in something totally imaginary and creative and made up to make the emotional stuff turn into an actual story and an actual book that isn't just sort of my own little feelings soup.
Grace Lin: Oh, that's so cool. How did you do that for Eventown?
Corey Ann Haydu: With Eventown, I really wanted to write about living in a place where everyone's expected to be perfect. I definitely grew up somewhere where there was a lot of expectation that everyone was perfect and everything was perfect and every family was perfect and everything was fine, and we didn't have to talk about anything at all. And I remember how uncomfortable I always felt in that world, and how it seemed like everyone else had decided that things were perfect and fine, and I wasn't so sure that they were, but it didn't seem like it was okay to have that sort of unsure feeling, and I really wanted to explore that, about what it means to have everyone telling you things are perfect when you kind of think maybe things aren't so perfect.
So I started with that really deep emotion that I've carried for a long time, and then I added in a town where things aren't just a little perfect, things aren't just sort of perfect the way they felt in my childhood. Things are magically perfect. Every bite of ice cream you take is delicious and unbelievable and the best thing you've ever had. And every book in the library looks exactly the same, and everyone knows the rules and the rules are quite strict, but everyone's happy all the time and singing songs all the time. And I just sort of amped up what perfect could mean and made it sort of a more magical idea of perfect than what I grew up with in real life.
Grace Lin: That's a perfect example of what you were saying, speaking of perfect.
Corey Ann Haydu: It's a nice little equation. It really works for me to take real life and take magic and to smoosh them together and see what happens.
Grace Lin: Yeah, I love that too. I feel like I do that a little bit with my picture books.
Corey Ann Haydu: Yeah.
Grace Lin: Not so much with my... I feel like when I write my novels, they're either very magic-magic or they're very real life-real life. But my picture books I do kind of try to do both sometimes, like A Big Mooncake for Little Star.
Corey Ann Haydu: Yes.
Grace Lin: And I do like that very much. It's something that I think is such a magical thing when you can do it well, which you do because your books are so amazing.
Corey Ann Haydu: It feels really right for what I remember of being those ages. Things for me always felt a little bit very, very real and often very painful and hard. But also there was always a little bit of sort of whimsy in the way I interacted with those hard things.
Grace Lin: Oh, that's true. It's kind of like, it's the idea... I used to love those books in middle school because it kind of gave me that hope that magic still did exist somewhere.
Corey Ann Haydu: Yeah, yes.
Grace Lin: The age when I felt like, oh, it wasn't cool to believe in fairy tales anymore, but I still wanted to.
Corey Ann Haydu: Yeah, exactly. You want to hold on to some little part of it, even if it's not the most... it's not the dragons and monsters part, but it's some little tail end of magic still there.
Grace Lin: Yeah. So, well that is why your books are so amazing. Thank you so much, Corey, for answering Alexandra's question and thank you, Alexandra, for asking. Such a great one.
Corey Ann Haydu: Yes, thank you so much. That was a lot of fun.
Grace Lin: Bye.
Corey Ann Haydu: Bye.
Today’s Kid Book Review comes from Ida! Ida is reviewing, Eventown, by Corey Ann Haydu.
Do you enjoy realistic fiction with a sprinkle of magic? If the answer is yes, you would really enjoy Eventown, by Corey Ann Haydu. Eventown is about two twin sisters named Naomi and Elodee who move to a new town called Eventown. The longer they linger, the more the main character Elodee notices things that don't seem quite right. In Eventown, everything is the same. No one has a past, only a present. Elodee must fight back for her family's past, present, and future. I liked this book because the main character felt like she was a real person and she had real opinions. I also liked how instead of relying on other people to change things, she changed things herself.
Thank you Ida!
More about today’s authors:
Corey Ann Haydu is the author of many critically acclaimed middle grade and young adult novels, including EVENTOWN, LAWLESS SPACES, EVER CURSED, ONE JAR OF MAGIC, and OCD LOVE STORY. She is also the author of the HAND-ME-DOWN MAGIC chapter book series, and the upcoming picture book, A PLACE FOR FEELINGS. Corey is a graduate of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and The New School’s Writing for Children MFA program, and has been working in children’s publishing since 2009. In 2013, Corey was chosen as one of Publisher Weekly’s Flying Starts. Her books have been on a variety of lists, including Amazon’s Book of the Month, Indie Next, Junior Library Guild, BCCB Blue Ribbon, Bank Street Childrens’ Books, SLJ Best of, and Chicago Public LIbrary Best of. In 2020, she received an Edgar Award Nomination for her novel EVENTOWN.
Corey is also a proud faculty member of the Vermont College of Fine Arts’ MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults program. Corey lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two young daughters.
Grace Lin, a NY Times bestselling author/ illustrator, won the Newbery Honor for Where the Mountain Meets the Moon and her picture book, A Big Mooncake for Little Star, was awarded the Caldecott Honor. Grace is an occasional commentator for New England Public Radio , a video essayist for PBS NewsHour (here & here), and the speaker of the popular TEDx talk, The Windows and Mirrors of Your Child’s Bookshelf. She is the co-host of the podcast Book Friends Forever, a kidlit podcast about friendship and publishing (geared for adults). Find her facebook, instagram , twitter ( @pacylin) or sign up for her author newsletter HERE.
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