Great New Reviews of OR NOT!
I’m very thankful today for two new glowing reviews of Or Not!
As if I deserve more than an amazing wife, two healthy and fun kids, a cool (though run-down–hey I’m a writer, teacher, and dad) 110 year old house, and so much more!
Follow these links and comment the first one. (I think for the second one you have to be a jacketflap member.)
Teen Book Reviewer just gives me a heckuva rave, which I love.
And Lisa Chellman really “gets” the book and Cassie more than any other reviewer who’s done a review of this much detail.
Oh, and here’s a picture of my mom and me at the book signing in Alabama! I’m so thankful to have a mom who is a lover of poetry and books and who inspired me so much.
Happy Thanksgiving–Buy NOTHING Day Friday
Do you love to shop? Hate to shop? Indifferent?
Wouldn’t it be nice to give it a rest? A one day shopping fast?
Should there be exceptions? Buy only one special book and only from an independent bookstore? Buy only beer, locally brewed, from the tap? When I think of Katie, the proprietor of Village Books, or Frazer Dobson of Park Road Books, I think I would exempt them. But they’re not in my neighborhood, so I ain’t buyin’ nothin’ tomorrow.
JAY ASHER, BARRY LYGA, ELLEN HOPKINS, AND BRIAN MANDABACH!
WOW. How did I manage to get myself on a bill with these talented and successful authors! Very exciting 
next question . . . from Barrington High School creative writing students
THIS IS ENTRY TWO in my series of questions and answers from senior creative writing students of my alma mater, Barrington High School.
I DON’T KNOW ANYBODY in Barrington anymore except for my high school girlfriend, Claire, and my favorite English teacher, Dale Griffith. So I spent the night in the Barrington Motel, and took a cab over to the high school. My cabbie dropped me off at the wrong entrance, by the gym and the senior lockers, but the garrulous security guard had the authority—after checking his computer—and the technology to scan my Colorado driver’s license and print me a visitor’s ID sticker. Then another security staffer escorted me to the main entrance, and a third called Dept. Chair Jack Bowyer, who collected me and led me up the stairs that hadn’t existed in my day.
Here’s the second question that teacher Maggie Olberg gave me from the class:
What influences you? (Style & content)
Everything I read influences me a lot—or everything I read that’s good and substantial, because the stuff that isn’t just passes through me without leaving an impression. When I read, the language echoes in my mind. So I have to be careful what I’m reading when I’m writing.
Right now I’m reading I Sailed with Magellan by Stuart Dybek, and I can hear his voice, very lyrical. The good stuff becomes part of me, the characters are real people inside me, the worlds that are created become real places within me. I like writing that has a deep sense of place, urban or natural or both, and I like characters with a lot of love in them, or perhaps sympathy—with other people, with nature, with music and stories and all the arts. There will be alienation, disconnection, despair—but without what I’m calling love or sympathy, the alienation has no consequence.
Sometimes the language itself expresses love. I think Hemingway did that. One of my favorite stories, which is in a book that I borrowed from the BHS English resource center and never returned, is “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.” It amazes me that I was so attracted to that story at so young an age, and I believe that even very young people often sympathize with the loss and disappointment of the age. The sympathy of the waiter in that story, the old waiter, carries the story—and the reader despises the young, self-involved waiter because he has none. Though the old waiter is preoccupied with nothingness, with emptiness, his emptiness is not nihilistic because he still feels the emptiness and sympathizes with those who also feel it.
Was this supposed to be style OR content? I think they are of equal importance. There is no style without content, and since the content is expressed via language, it can’t be communicated without good writing (which is one way to define style) or without a voice that arises naturally from the subject and expresses the content.
And everything influences me. My best friend Sam, whom I met at BHS when I was a junior and he was a soph, influenced and continues to influence me. He’s now the editor of Willow Springs and the author of an excellent novel called Safe in Heaven Dead.
But “everything under the sun”, as it says in the finale of Pink Floyd’s Dark side of the Moon, influences me. Growing up in Barrington, coming back, meeting new students . . . I could go on and on. (And usually do ☺)
OR NOT Sells Out Again! Book Launch Party; Charlotte, NC; Borders
It’s been tough keeping up on postings–just too busy.
I haven’t even told about my book launch party at Hillside Gardens, where we ran out of books.
Then I went to Charlotte, NC for visit to Myers Park HS–amazing students–and a fab party at the Trennings with Park Road Bookstore.
And today, when I did my thing at Borders at the the Chapel Hills Mall in Colorado Springs, they ran plumb out of Or Not!
I guess without the amazing Frazer Dobson of Park Road Books around, I’m a sell-out!
Details later–my friend and I have some papers to grade!
Creative Writing Questions from Barrington High School Seniors
ON THE 4th OF OCTOBER, I visited with six creative writing classes at Barrington High School, about 40 miles NW of Chicago. I hadn’t darkened the doors of BHS since I’d graduated in June of 1980, and coming back was a little weird.
It’s always strange returning to Barrington, where I spent the first 18 years of my life in a big house my father built by Bakers Lake. Despite all the changes in the neighborhood, I seem to breathe memories in from the humid air, and the shape of the land (though much of it has been built over) and the sky that sits over it (the same way it always has) strikes me with strange familiarity.
Inside, the school was so different as to have little of this effect. But I knew it was the same place. And there were moments, such as looking out the window of Ms. Sultan’s classroom and realizing it was my old typing room, when I could remember sitting there buzzed on coffee from The Breadbasket restaurant, making mistakes and borrowing Jena’s typing eraser.
THIS IS THE FIRST of a series of blogs in which I respond to questions from BHS students:
How do you come up with a concept for your writing?
For the novel that I’m currently avoiding revising, I started with an image: a canoe lodged in tall cattails at the shore of Bakers Lake, and someone–me, I suppose–lying down in the bottom of the canoe. The tall, thin blades of the cattails exude coolness and green, but from the warm water the scent of decay rises: ripe with algae and the biology of fresh water, millions of organisms living in the water and the mud. The green of the cattails and the algae breathe out the fresh oxygen, converting the sun into energy, while microorganisms eat and decompose and die and are decomposed themselves.
In the canoe, the character–the more I think about him the further he goes from being me–is aware of everything around him. He knows the ecology, the relationships between the living and non-living things around him, and his imagination brings it all into his consciousness. He is himself alone in this place, but he is thinking about his friend, and something has happened. Maybe his friend has died. And a song they used to listen to comes to his mind, haunts him, ” . . .story of her boyfriend, of teenage stone death games, handsome lad, dead in a car . . .” And he thinks of his best friend’s girlfriend because of the “story of her boyfriend” line.
So my concepts come from memory, and changing memory by drifting deep into the scenes brought to my mind from memory and letting the possibilities of those scenes shift.
Aidan Chambers uses a repeating line, placed throughout his amazing novel, This is All: The Pillow Book of Cordelia Kenn: “All writing is memory.” Some of the shifting is very deliberate–I take a memory of my best friend, and I say, “He can’t be blonde, his hair is dark.” Or I’m thinking about his girlfriend, (only it’s the character’s girlfriend now) and I’m doing the dishes and she’s not coming to me, and I’m getting frustrated. Then I think her name might be Sophia,* and the image of a Sophia I once knew comes to me. Suddenly I realize that her name isn’t Sophia, but that she looks like Sophia, and from that memory of Sophia’s physical presence–not just her hair and her eyes and her body, but the way she carries herself, her gestures, the movement of her eyes–the character suddenly takes shape.
To BHS Seniors: Hope this answers your questions better than my random presentation!
*name changed to protect the innocent. 
Mandabach’s OR NOT T-shirt Banned! Is the book next?!?!?
Don’t hate her because she’s beautiful, hate her because she has the shirt, and you don’t! lol
I thought it would be fun to get some t-shirts made up, so I worked on a design based on the last paragraph of Journal One (link here to it) of OR NOT.
To wit:
Now if I were mad, I would think there were mental viruses hidden between the bits in digital samples. There could even be microchips in our brains that are triggered by digital media to produce thoughts like: “Drink Sexy Cola and be Powerful!” “You must buy things to truly exist!” “The virtual and the actual are ONE!” “Security is Freedom is Marketing is Art is Power is America is Right is Peace is Security is Strength is Truth is Might is Liberty is Lifestyle is Property is Happiness is Automobile is Independence is Globalism is Diversity is Oneness is Jesus is the Almighty Clean of Dr. Bronner’s Peppermint Castile Soap–Dilute! Dilute! Dilute! Dilute! Dilute!”
But I’m not mad. So I don’t think that.
The shirt just starts with “Drink Sexy Cola and be Powerful!” and ends with “Dilute . . . ”
On the back it says
. . . OR NOT
a novel for audacious teens and other young adults
by
Brian Mandabach
I think it looks cool, and I like that it starts catchy and I imagine people looking at it and being embarrassed about staring at your shirt and then looking away and wanting to look more and maybe looking at your back as you walk away. Or people you know will make you stop so they can read the whole thing. So, I think it’s fun. And also, I like the irony of the ranting.
I gave one to my daughter, and guess what? After lunch a teacher noticed it and asked another teacher, and they agreed that it was INAPPROPRIATE, and they made her turn it inside out.
I have to guess that it was the word SEXY *gasp!* omg! But come on! It’s not as if she had on some sweats that said, SEXY or JUICY right across the butt! This is a statement of protest against the absurdist imagery of advertising, multimediocrity, and Johnny Jingo public “discourse”.
Or maybe that’s what they objected to, but that might be expecting too much.
Anyway, I got kind of a kick that the shirt that I sent her to school in, that I designed using an excerpt from MY book, had to be turned inside-out.
If you’ve got one of the shirts, send me a picture. And if not, come see me at one of my events and pick one up with your copy of OR NOT.
Hope to see you soon.
peace, love, & vinyl,
M
events listed on my myspace profile as “shows” and at www.mandabach.com
Oh, and I’m going to write “censored” on a piece of duct tape, and she’s going to wear it again!
Dumbledore Gay–is this news?
JK Rowling revealed some backstory that never made it into the novels, which, though not exactly short are too filled with broomstick sport and Harry YELLING in ALL CAPS to have contained details about the headmaster’s (no pun intended) intimate life. Albus Dumbledore is gay.
Here’s a link to a brief story about the revalation
Newsweek article with comments and discussion here
Now. Though I’m poking a little fun in the top paragraph, I’ve enjoyed all the Potter books. And I adore Dumbledore. I’m first and foremost a Mithrandir man (That’s Gandalf in the Common Tongue), but Albus is my second favorite wizard. And as I contemplate my reaction to the news, I have to say that I don’t care about him being gay at all. And I really like that I don’t care. Even better would be if I didn’t care that I didn’t care–does that make sense? I’m thinking about one of the comments (from a 13 year-old) on the Newsweek story, about how much homophobia there is in middle school. When I got punched in the face for calling my scoutmaster’s son a faggot, my dad told me what I had said (I’d had no idea what the word meant). But beyond the message that this epithet might get me punched in the face, and a pretty much non-judgemental definition, there were not a lot of messages out there telling me that love is just love. And there were a lot of messages teaching me to despise anyone who was “queer”, including myself if I might have any queerness in me.
Back to the big ”news”: the way Dumbledore rolls doesn’t change anything about the way I feel about this beloved character, though it does make me sad to learn about his heartbreak. Too, I think this might further illuminate his empathy for Snape. Although Snape’s heart was hurt in a different way, both of them lost in love.
What I’m wondering is: does anyone else think it’s unusual for a writer to reveal backstory in this way? Or is it just unusual for people to notice? For it to be “news”?
In any case, as Roxy says:
Mandabach @ Kitlitosphere Chicago O’Hare–Kudos to Robin Brande
Here’s a link to my tardy blog on Kidlit ‘07:
Not really scared of Barry–Mandabach’s too-long post on Andrew Karre’s FLUX Blog
Peace, Love, and Vinyl!
Brian
Brian Mandabach is a writer and teacher who lives in Colorado Springs, Colorado. OR NOT is his first novel.