Jack Gantos Lunch – YALSA Institute, Part Two
Here’s another installment of notes from the YALSA Institute I went to in Portland last month. I want to get the notes posted before I go to ALA Midwinter Meeting next week. If you attend a conference and never go over your notes, did it really happen? There were some good ideas offered, and copying out the notes reminds me of them in a setting where I can take my time thinking about them.
The next event of November 7, after the events of Part One of my notes, was an Author Lunch with Jack Gantos.
I was wonderfully lucky and accidentally found a place at the same table with Jack Gantos!
He’s delightful to talk with in person. I still haven’t read his new book, which is biographical, but we were given a copy and it’s at the top of my pile of books to read next. After we ate, he got up front and gave a presentation to everyone.
He began with appreciation for librarians (knowing his audience).
“I love the library because they have to take you in.”
He has written 20-25 books in the Boston Public Library, but has since switched to the Boston Atheneum, a subscription library. If anyone dares use a cell phone in that library, he comes down!
The library is the place where everyone comes together. In the library, you are anyone you want to be at any age you ever were.
He talked about other authors and books. Kevin Henkes is too nice. When Jack Gantos stands next to him, he feels the blackness in his own soul.
The magic of literacy is that when Frog is sad, Toad is sad, and the reader is sad, too.
We’re reckless junkies for feelings – that’s why we read.
You want the book to move into you like a squatter – for about 3 days.
Writing a picture book takes the same energy as writing young adult or middle grade novels.
He writes from his childhood journals. He went to 10 schools in 12 grades. His friends were the Joey Pigza kids – they’d worn out everyone else, so they were friendly to the new kid.
Here are his notes about where he lived in Florida:
When you’re at the library, watch someone reading a book and see their face change.
We know this simple truth about each other: Inside there’s so much more than on the outside.
There’s something exclusively yours every time you read a book. Yet you want to share.
There’s a time in your life when you’re completely uneven. His new book, The Trouble in Me, is about that unevenness and self-loathing.
His books have been used for Community Reads. Everyone leaves feeling so connected.
There’s a Literary Spiritualism among those of us who read and get involved in the community of readers.
You wouldn’t be the same person if you didn’t read good books and put good books in the hands of other readers.
Let’s be little fires for literacy.
(This is a terrible picture, but it shows his enthusiastic gestures.)
