Lynell George is an LA-based, journalist, and essayist. Currently an arts and culture columnist for KCET’s Artbound, she has had a long career in Los Angeles journalism as staff writer for both the Los Angeles Times and LA Weekly–focusing on social issues, human behavior, and identity politics as well as visual arts, music, and literature. She has taught journalism at Loyola Marymount University and is also a Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities Fellow and an USC Annenberg / Getty Arts Journalism Fellow (2013). Her work has appeared in various essay collections, including The Black Body, Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology, and the recently released LAtitudes: An Angeleno’s Atlas, and in news outlets including The Smithsonian, The Washington Post, Essence, The Root, Ms., and many more. She is also the author of No Crystal Stair: African Americans in the City of Angels (Verso/Doubleday), a collection of features and essays drawn from her reporting.

Rochelle Newman interviewed Lynell George on July 24, 2015 in Los Angeles.

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When Lynell George suggests we meet at Los Angeles restaurant Post & Beam, I flash on a story she shared during her workshop, The Art of The Reported Essay. The workshop was held at my Antioch University MFA residency this past June.

“Be open to the serendipity of your reporting,” she’d said, reflecting on how an interview she’d once scheduled with a musician almost ended before it began. George had flown to New Orleans expecting to conduct the interview at the musician’s home studio. With less than seventy-two hours on the ground, time was of the essence. “I get there and there’s a text: ‘Welcome to New Orleans. I’ll meet you at this café at 11 a.m’. And I’m like — Whaat?!! I flew all this way to meet at a café? But I didn’t push it,” George explained. “I went and, as it turns out, it was the place he lived when he first got to New Orleans.”

The café was exactly where she needed to be. Where it all began.

I know Post & Beam isn’t just any restaurant. Almost a year to the date of our lunch, KCET’s hyperlocal website, Departures, published George’s essay, “A Seat at the Table: Post & Beam in Crenshaw Builds Community One Course at a Time.” Meeting here places us in the community where George spent much of her childhood, where it all began.

In her essay, George calls Post & Beam “a space [that] serves as a touchstone for Angelenos who have grown up in one of these contiguous neighborhoods,” (referring to the Crenshaw-Leimert-Baldwin Hills hub), “and may want to travel back, to not just a physical place, but to a time.”

When we sit down at the restaurant, I ask Lynell to do a little time travelling and think back to her earliest memories of wanting to be a writer. How had her community influenced her?

It did. I think I didn’t realize it until I got a little older . . . I was always a reader, and I think part of the need to write came from wanting to write stories about what I saw.

As she speaks, George looks out toward the surrounding streets. It’s almost noon on a Friday in late July. We are sitting on the restaurant patio, enclosed by thick shrubs and sleek wood walls. With its herb garden and homey furnishings, the space feels more like the private backyard of a family friend than outdoor seating adjacent to a major “inner-city” shopping mall. Although our view is blocked, George draws pictures with words, and soon it’s as if there is a window looking out onto the neighborhood.

She points to the medical building across the street where her pediatrician, Dr. Littlejohn, once had his office. She remembers family trips to a nearby shopping center, which, she says, is now a ghost town. There were visits to nearby Leimert Park, a historic African American arts and cultural enclave. Her godmother lived there, as did some of her mother’s closest friends.

The library I grew up going to is on West Boulevard, not too far from here. This was an area we circled, and we were a part of a lot. Just like this restaurant, where I run into people from different parts of my life.

George’s focus moves inside. It’s early so we have the patio to ourselves. As she scans the space, I get the sense that many of the tables hold memories.

When I was starting out as a kid, [my writing] really had to do with sketching a place and time and mood that corresponded to what I was experiencing. Then, definitely, as a journalist that’s what I wanted to write about . . . I realized that these stories were not the stories you were seeing on television, in the news, or in the newspaper. There would be some features that dealt with African Americans in Los Angeles, but a lot of the stuff was sports page or the news section and it was always crime or some sort of pathology . . . I thought this is ridiculous. There shouldn’t be two stories a year about these communities and two stories that—I’m not saying they have to be positive or as they say in the newsroom “brights”—[But] they should at least add flesh and form to our sense of community and those statistics that we read.

Part of my being a journalist is that I often feel like I’m chasing ghosts, like  something is just getting ready to drop away. I can’t remember which culture has this  saying—and I’m sure each culture has a version of this—“having an elder die is like having a library burn down.”

As a long-time staff writer for both the Los Angeles Times and LA Weekly, Lynell George has covered social issues, human behavior, identity politics, as well as visual arts, music, literature, and LA cultural and place-based stories.

During our lunch, I learn that George’s mother came to Los Angeles from New Orleans on a music scholarship but wound up studying journalism instead.

Now this is not why I went into journalism. I didn’t even know that part of the story until much later. But I did know that she wrote for the Los Angeles Tribune—that was a black paper—she learned how to use a Speed Graphic . . .

Her mother went on to spend over thirty years teaching English composition and literature to junior and senior high school students in Los Angeles.

In an essay for the Los Angeles Times entitled “Memoir: ‘Listening’ to Mom Through her Books,” George writes:

As a very young child, I imagined bliss as a house built of books, furniture made of softcover titles with wallpaper you could read, and vivid color plates standing in for framed artwork. This I know must have come from growing up in a household where books reigned. We lived with them, not the other way around. Not only did they crowd ceiling-whisking shelves, but they also grew in stacks like tall tropical trees, separated into groves by genres.

This living library was curated by my mother, who built her life on and around books. That affection was passed to me by both osmosis and example: the excitement of entering its world, the suspension of inhabiting and trusting the story.

I ask about favorite childhood books.

I loved Harriet the Spy. That book was really significant to me, and that had nothing to do with journalism. It was much more about being an engaged observer. Curious at a young age. I think it was that obsessive note-taking that gives you something to do and a place to put those observations.

What about the scarcity of characters of color in children’s literature? Was she conscious there was rarely anyone like her in the books she was reading growing up?

Yes, and my mother did work hard to try to find those books for us . . . We had this huge library of all kinds of books like African folk tales and African-American folk tales and poetry. And reading aloud became part of our growing up so I think I didn’t feel the lack as dramatically because she tried so hard to fill in the blanks with other things. There was pride . . . I [could] see a tradition of storytelling. I might not be able to find Harriet the Spy written from a black girl’s point of view but I [could] look at all this storytelling—this whole thing about griots and having people in the communities who held stories—how important that was . . . I know it filled in the blanks . . . I felt that our stories were important and other people needed to know—which is what I think pushed the journalism thing—Yeah, we came from something.

As if on cue, George’s fleur de lis silver earrings catch my eye. The iconic symbol of New Orleans, they remind me that two LAs play a prominent role in George’s life: Los Angeles and Louisiana. I shift the conversation from her Crenshaw roots to her Creole roots, focusing on something I read in her book, No Crystal Stair: African Americans in the City of Angels. In the closing essay, a quote from artist Mark Broyard states: “In order for culture to exist, there have to be artifacts.” I’m curious if George sees a connection between writing and artifact.

Part of my being a journalist is that I often feel like I’m chasing ghosts, like something is just getting ready to drop away. I can’t remember which culture has this saying—and I’m sure each culture has a version of this—“having an elder die is like having a library burn down.” That’s what it’s like when you lose someone who has that piece of a story. I’m acutely aware of that when I go to a place like New Orleans where my family is from. Even when I hear a voice that’s like my grandfather’s—which I miss, I miss that accent and it hits me hard—I want to hear what this person has to say. I want to hear it in his voice. So if I can write in a way that . . . is like a container for that story—it’s not going to be that person exactly sitting across from you telling it—but if I can [write] it as close as possible to that, so that you feel like you have that experience [of] hearing that person move and speak. That’s why I tend to tape rather than just take notes, because I want the rhythm of those voices. And I always know if I’ve got it if I feel like, ‘OK. I just got a little chill down my spine.’ I think I got it right.

Having your story not just formally told in-between pages but told in the voice that you would tell it to me, that’s the artifact. That’s the thing that we can pass on when people go.

Most recently, George has been exploring performance art. Love, Los Angeles: A Conversation in Words and Images is a multi-media piece created by George and poet Marisela Norte. Working individually and in collaboration, the two writers brought their distinct voices together against a backdrop of photographs, music, and audio design, capturing the city’s idiosyncratic sights, sounds, and stories.

I had never done anything like that before. It was a kick, but it was really different . . . I loved having the conversation with Mark McNeill, the DJ, because I said part of what I want is not just music but the environment. I want people to walk in the room and feel like they are in LA. So we were thinking about things like the sprinklers. I said it would be great to have the air brakes from the bus. It would be great so the people feel like they’re home. Because different parts of the city sound different too. They look different. They sound different. They move differently. I wanted to convey that as well.

George is also working on a new book—an exploration of chance and creativity.

It’s still shape shifting. I don’t want to write a book that’s loud and obvious and quirky, I want to write about these shifts that happen in people’s lives and in their world—this quiet nuance.

We talk about what it’s like to write for both page and stage, and about how the proliferation of media formats has changed the way she pitches. At this point in her career, it often comes down to evaluating who is going to give her the room to tell a story the way she feels like it needs to be told. As for having a writing ritual—

I’m not one of those people that gets up at five and writes and then goes on a walk or vice versa. I pretty much do write every day. Like literally every day. It might be assignment writing, it might be blogging, it might be emails which tend to be more like letters. There are these two editors I write to. We write almost every day to one another about what’s going on, what we’re working on, what we’re trying to puzzle out, what’s going on in the news. I think that kind of replaces my newsroom conversation, like the water cooler chat or ‘let’s go down and get a coffee.’ I realized how necessary that was in my life. I’ve worked in a newsroom since I was in my twenties, so it was weird not to. In a way, that has replaced it. And social media has too, but then I have to be very good about pulling a plug and being focused . . . What I’d like to get better at [is] trying to figure out more time to do more creative—and it’s strange to say more creative writing—because I really don’t partition it . . . I guess I should say more writing for myself that is solely for me. If it’s puzzling around and trying to develop an idea, or not even, just playing. Time to play with the page rather than thinking about a deadline.

I hear the word deadline, and I think procrastination. I hesitate to ask if she procrastinates. I’m hoping she does.

I think if I had continued on a fiction route nothing would have ever been finished: ‘Oh it’s almost finished. It’s close.’ But journalism just forces you to finish. It’s a draft and then you make it better . . . Sometimes I spend months on a story, and in that time I will have collected way too many notebooks and on top of that there’s a bunch of stuff to transcribe. And I get overwhelmed. [So]then I’ll think: ‘I really don’t feel like starting on that right now . . .’ That’s usually the trigger—wanting to do a good job but realizing that starting is scary. But then I learned this from an editor: ‘Put it all away. Think about what you would say to a friend about what you just experienced. You wouldn’t be looking in your notebook and trying to find an exact quote, you would tell me what happened.’ And it’s true.

When I met George at Antioch in June, the Rachel Dolezal story had just hit the news. We spoke about it briefly. At the time, I was interested in George’s point of view on the legitimacy or lunacy of the NAACP president who claimed to be black in spite of overwhelming evidence that she was a white woman raised by white parents. Now, I was interested in George’s take on creative nonfiction. Dolezal aside, how black and white should a writer be when they position their work as CNF?

I think the journalist in me is, like, fact is fact and fiction is fiction. But then we have this thing called memory and so even when I am interviewing people, I am acutely aware that memory fails and that people remember things in different ways. We used to say in class when I was teaching Beginning Interview Journalism: it’s this truth as far as we know it, as close to the truth as we can get. As reporters, that’s what I’m trying to get when I’m talking to people. But then when I think about the nonfiction writers I love the most, and I think about memoir in particular, some of the most beautiful books I’ve read are people who have just said ‘I know that this is not something that should be looked at as record and total truth. This is the truth, this is the best I can remember it, and I am going to use some techniques of fiction in order to weave this together.’ Like Leonard Michaels, he wrote what he called a fictional memoir. I just think as long as the reader knows going in what it is then I don’t feel like I’ve been deceived. And if you can’t do it that way, then just call it fiction.

From transparency we move to authenticity and accountability. How does she feel about a white writer’s ability to develop black characters? Or about the responsibility of any writer who decides to write what has been termed “other”?

When you’re observing a culture or a tradition there are things you think you know because you’ve been around them enough, and there are things that you may not get. That’s when you check with people. Like giving your book or story to someone who you really trust, who will call you on your crap . . . I think if you are writing about the other, and an other that you have no experience with, you better really, really be able to understand the levels of experience. There’s a potential to be arrogant. You have to be a really great storyteller, like Susan Straight. I think she’s a good example of somebody who has had lived experience. But also she’s a storyteller, and she lets people tell her: “call me on it if it’s wrong.”

George is no stranger to navigating issues of culture and craft. In her essay, “My End of the Bargain,” from No Crystal Stair, she reflects on her own experiences as a young MFA student:

In writing classes, I was dissected and tossed about in discussion like an absent third party, informed that my fiction wasn’t ‘like Toni or Alice’s;’ that it didn’t address tenements or sharecropping, nor did I shed any light on the ‘suffering implicit in the black experience.’ There were ‘problems’ with my autobiographical pieces, according to one workshop member: ‘Your being black might add some drama to this . . . Did ‘blackness’ add no texture at all to your young life? . . . Do you never suffer a moment’s torment that you weren’t born with soft, golden hair and blue eyes? Didn’t the little white boys prefer little white girlfriends?’

Is this what people truly believed I wished for? What we—black people—felt would ‘get us over?’ Would set us free? If ‘blackness’ failed to fit these narrow parameters, I found they had no use for it. No use for me. I found it more than frustrating or insulting. I found it lamentable.

What I really want to ask is: can it be fixed?

It starts with not making assumptions . . . One of my professors, actually a teacher in high school, she had us write numbers on our papers rather than our names because she was worried that students would make assumptions about who should be writing about what and that it would free the discussion . . . Classrooms are mixed but you may have only one of whatever—one Chinese student or one Native American student or one black student or three or whatever, a gay student. And very often a teacher will put that student on the spot in the classroom and say, ‘Well, what do you think, so-and-so.’ And that kid might be making themselves really small in the chair because they don’t want to be the person that has to explain everything . . . Yes, you can learn from the student, absolutely, that person who comes from that experience, but let them be ready to talk about it and explain it the way they want to. And deal with the work as the work itself. Like if I did something confusing with the characters, maybe they slipped in and out of ethnicity or there are some structural issues, but let’s deal with what’s on the page . . .

The waiter appears reminding us that our meal comes with dessert. We order coffee, and I toss out the classic “if-stranded-on-a-desert-island” question. Which books would she bring?

Oh wow. That’s hard—

You can see George’s mind working. Images spring to life as she takes stock of her most prized possessions.

I have one bookcase that is for the books that I revisit or want to. Or I just like looking at their spines because there’s a lovely memory attached to it. James Baldwin—and I’m trying to think which one it would be—the easy answer would be Price of the Ticket—which is all of his non-fiction in one volume. Could I bring my Kindle? If I couldn’t do the collection I would say Notes of a Native Son. Yeah — This is a hard question for me.

As we wrap up, it becomes clear that we are both heading to the San Gabriel Valley. Lynell lives there now, as does my MFA mentor with whom I have scheduled a late afternoon meeting. Had I put two and two together, I could have saved Lynell the trek. It took her over an hour to get to Post & Beam. With Friday afternoon traffic, it could be a two-hour ride back.

I start to apologize but she takes it all in stride. The location wasn’t out of the way. It was home—it’s where we needed to be. Reflecting on Post & Beam’s success, George once wrote,“If you want to build and foster something meaningful—you have to understand it from the ground up.” It’s a philosophy that is as relevant to a restaurateur as it is to a writer, especially one that roams the city chasing ghosts.

Rochelle Newman is an MFA candidate at Antioch University. An award-winning playwright, stand-up comic, and multicultural marketing specialist, she credits her Lower East Side roots with her sense of humor and social justice. Her writing has appeared in such trade and literary publications as Ad Age, NAILED Magazine, Role Reboot, and Lunch Ticket.

Sonya Sones is the author of the young adult novels in verse Stop Pretending: What Happened When My Big Sister Went Crazy, What My Mother Doesn’t Know, What My Girlfriend Doesn’t Know, One of Those Hideous Books Where the Mother Dies, and To Be Perfectly Honest. She also wrote the adult novel in verse, The Hunchback of Neiman Marcus. What My Mother Doesn’t Know has landed on the list of top one hundred books banned over the past decade.

Roz Weisberg interviewed Sones in September 2015.

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Novelist and poet Sonya Sones invited me to her home in Santa Monica to speak during September’s unending heat wave that dominated life in Los Angeles. It was the end of the day on a Friday, and commuters were already in full force using the wide residential street she lives on as a way to avoid major intersections on their way to the 405.

The traditional house with its brick walkway is set away from the street with a large protective tree that shields the front from the sun. Sones led me to the cozy living room with its vintage reading lamps, old family photos, and book-lined shelves. I couldn’t help but notice the old toys—including a talking Pee Wee Herman doll—scattered among the books. The noise from the street faded away as we settled in, and I felt like I was catching up with an old friend.

We talked for an hour and a half about everything, from how her past lives as a film editor and animator influenced her transition to writing, to the responsibility she feels for her audience, and her sense of pride for getting “banned in Bakersfield.”

To start, I was curious about how her background as an animator and film editor influences her poetry, and how she found the form of narrative poetry.

Sonya Sones: I see each scene as a movie. I wrote poems when I was a little kid and then when I got to be about sixteen, I kept a journal and I wrote everyday. Sometimes I would live for twenty minutes and spend half an hour writing about it and then live another twenty minutes and spend half an hour writing about that. I have boxes and boxes filled with my gushing journals.

Then when I was sixteen I learned how to make animated films, so filmmaking is what I thought I was going to do. I had worked my way up to being a film editor, but I didn’t have too many good credits. The one I’m proud of is co-editing River’s Edge. That was my first time of getting to edit footage of really great actors like Dennis Hopper.

When I had my kids, I didn’t want to go to work twelve hours a day. So, I looked around at my life and I thought “what else can I do,” and here’s where the animation weirdly led me to writing. My favorite time of day was when I read to my kids. I really loved that, and so I thought maybe I could write and illustrate books for kids. I thought, I used to make animated films so I know how to draw—that was my theory. Turned out, I could draw pretty well, but my first book, Smitty the Hollywood Kitty, absolutely stunk. I didn’t realize it was bad. I joined the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI) and went to a conference and brought Smitty the Hollywood Kitty and got a critique of it. Before I went into the meeting I had proudly showed it to so many people who said “nice illustrations” that when I got to the critique I already knew that my words were lousy. But through the SCBWI, I started making friends with other people who wanted to become writers, and then I started hearing about classes, and then I started taking classes at UCLA which were pretty good. I kept hearing about Myra Cohn Livingstone and what a mean and scary teacher she was, and how she was super critical and made people cry, and I was afraid to take her class, but a friend of mine said let’s do it together.

I do like the books to be more poemy, but if they can’t be, they can’t be. I have to go with whatever each book is needing. It’s like when people ask, “What’s your favorite book that you’ve written?” and you say, “I don’t have a favorite, I love all my children” and that’s true so you just have to accept what gets born. My real kids are fantastic. My book, well, to put the amount of time into writing a book, you have to love it while you’re doing it.

I was taking Myra’s class, and very quickly I became the funny one in the class. I would read a poem and everyone would laugh and Myra would say, “Oh Sonya, you bring us up, what would we do without you? Oh Sonya, you bring us up from the depths!” And I loved being the funny one. Then she gave us an assignment, write in dactyl and trochee rhythms, which are very somber rhythms. I sat down to do my homework, and a poem popped out about my sister having a nervous breakdown and having to be sent to the hospital and how horrifying and scary it was. I was really concerned about passing this in to Myra. I thought, this isn’t going to bring anyone up from the depths, and what is she going to think? It was so personal and private I couldn’t bare the thought of reading it aloud in the classroom to the other students. I wrote copiously in my journal trying to decide what to do and I decided to compromise and pass it in to Myra, but not read it aloud. And then I had to wait a week to see what she thought.

She hoped to see the initial “VG” for very good across the top. Instead the note read: “we have to talk about this one!”

I thought she was going to say, “Stop writing this, do what you’re good at. You’re funny, what are you doing?” and instead she said, “You should write more of these and if you can put yourself through it, you’d be doing a service.” The idea of doing a service, and the idea of pleasing my teacher who I had on a pedestal, seemed so fabulous to me even though I didn’t want to particularly think about my sister and that terrible time in our lives. I tried writing more poems about her. Myra’s theory was that anybody who had anyone in their family who was throwing the rest of the family off-kilter would be able to appreciate these poems and would feel they weren’t alone.

Sones credits her editor Alex Reed at HarperCollins for asking the right questions that led her to the novel-in-verse form.

Alex wrote me this ten-page letter that was so nurturing. It would say, “I love this poem and here’s why . . . and I loved this poem and here’s why . . . and then this poem made me wonder if you shared a bedroom with your sister. This poem made me wonder if your parents ever met your boyfriend . . . .” So she asked all these questions, and I was so thrilled and excited that my book was going to be published that I wrote fifty more poems in two months. I had a notepad next to the bed and I would say to the family, “Wait, wait, I gotta go write something down.” I was just in a state of exaltation and it was thrilling. [Alex] turned it into a novel-in-verse by asking me so many questions.

And then once I finished that book, I realized that that was a form I could really enjoy doing. I had written some love poems in that book or poems about falling in love and that’s what led me to wanting to write my second book, What My Mother Doesn’t Know, because that was all about firsts and I think firsts are so powerful for a teenage girl.

Roz Weisberg: Does the poem come first or the narrative?

SS: Each book varies. I would say the second book started out very much the way Stop Pretending did. I knew I wanted to write poems about first experiences, so . . . I just mined my own first experiences and then the character’s voice emerged. It happened with one poem. The first poem in the book “Nicknames”—after I wrote the poem, I walked around happy for two weeks because I felt like my character had walked up to me and introduced herself: “Hi my name’s Sophie and I have a sense of humor and I’m a real romantic and I don’t like to put up with any shit from anybody,” and as soon as I knew those three things about her I could write the rest of the book.

But you know three books, Stop Pretending, What My Mother Doesn’t Know, and The Hunchback of Neiman Marcus, are much more poemy than the other books. One of Those Hideous Books Where the Mother Dies, What My Girlfriend Doesn’t Know, and To Be Perfectly Honest are more narrative. The way that I realize it is, when I think about what poems I can read at readings, the ones that are more poemy are easier for me to pull and read out of context and can stand alone. The ones that are more narrative, it’s hard to just read one poem; I feel like I have to read four in a row or it won’t work. At first I was worried about this other kind of book, the more narrative kind, but I am a novelist so I have to let the story come first. If the story is the kind of story that needs more words and more dialogue, and feels less like a poem, then I’m going to do that. The poems may not like it, but that’s how it’s going to be.

RW: Do you have a preference?

SS: I do like the books to be more poemy, but if they can’t be, they can’t be. I have to go with whatever each book is needing. It’s like when people ask, “What’s your favorite book that you’ve written?,” and you say, “I don’t have a favorite, I love all my children . . . ” and that’s true so you just have to accept what gets born. My real kids are fantastic. My book, well, to put the amount of time into writing a book, you have to love it while you’re doing it.

The book I’m writing now, which is called Saving Red, it was so much easier for me than any recent book has been. It felt almost back to the first glory days. It was flowing out of me, but here’s what I did to trick myself: I set the book in Santa Monica, which is where I live, so I didn’t have to do any research because I knew all the settings. I did not allow myself to rewrite and rewrite and rewrite. Once I completed a poem I moved it to a file called “locked poems.” I was allowed to read the previous five poems that were in there, but then I had to work in a new file on my newer poem, and at the end of the day I could move the poem into the locked file. I wasn’t that strict, I allowed myself to tinker a little bit, but I tried not to look back.

My first draft of this book was 317 pages. I cut it to 264 pages instantly so I didn’t waste any time revising something that I later was going to remove. I left things sloppy for the first time. I even had notes in the margins asking if this word was right or to cut this stanza, but I left them that way ‘til I got to the end. So when I first went through it, I cut out all the stuff I didn’t need, and then got rid of all my notes and answered any questions that I needed to, and it saved me a ton of time by not revising something that was going to disappear anyway.

I also wrote an outline for the first time. It was interesting. I didn’t know the first thing about writing an outline and felt very at sea. So I looked online at Syd Field’s screenwriting book, and he had the three-act structure so I thought I’d see if I could put the three-act structure into this. I decided ahead of time that this is a story about this and this, and at the end of the first act this going to happen, and at the end of the second act this is going to happen, and this is the ending. So this time, I actually knew it instead of just writing a bunch of poems.

This book happens to be about a girl who has to do community service and she’s waited ‘til the very last minute, so her only option if she doesn’t want a bad grade is to help Santa Monica do their annual homeless count. There’s an annual homeless count they have to do every year. She goes out that night to count the homeless and she sees this one person who wakes up and is having a nightmare who’s only a few years older than her, and she’s very moved by this girl and thinks, “Wow, she’s just a little bit older than me and here she is living in Palisades Park and how terrible.” It’s December and her school break has just begun and she decides to make it her mission to get this girl back to her family in time for the holidays. That’s what she wants to do. It was so good knowing that and I discovered a ton of stuff along the way.

RW: You didn’t feel burned-out by the outline process?

SS: No, it was very undetailed so I didn’t feel like I’d already written [the book]. I just felt, “Whew, I know where I’m going.” And my husband is a writer, so right before I would begin each act, I would go to breakfast with him and tell him, this was going to happen and then this is going to happen. And he’d say, “That’s fabulous,” or “This part is great, but I’m not sure about that,” and it was so useful having someone I could bounce my acts off of.

RW: What was the inspiration for writing about homelessness?

SS: I thought about writing about a teenage girl who befriends a homeless person for years, but every time I pitched it to my husband or my agent, it sounded like a bad after-school special, it was maudlin. I originally thought the homeless person was a grown up, but once I realized she was 18 and my main character is 14 about to be 15, the whole thing changed for me.

The germ of this idea came from two different things. One, when I was sixteen and walking home through the Boston Public Gardens, and I saw all these people gathered in a circle around a crazy person who was spouting about our Lord and trying to proselytize to everyone that they should be into God. Everybody in the circle was taking turns making a joke about the person and what she was saying, and then everyone would laugh. I watched for a long time and my sixteen-year-old self was so horrified because my sister had a mental illness, and I finally got the courage together to stand up to them and say, “If you don’t like what she’s saying fine, then go away, but don’t just stand here and make fun of this person.” I actually said that at sixteen, and it was a powerful moment in my life that I had the courage to do it. I actually thought that moment would happen in this book and it happens, but in a much less brave way.

The other germ of the idea came from the fact that my sister does have mental illness, and as a kid I used to worry that she would end up homeless, that she would have a mental break down, that her medication would stop working and she would disappear because she lives in New York and I live here and she’s not married. She can go out of her apartment and then not come home and she can become a bag lady. That thought was really scary to me. This is kind of a fictionalized version of what I imagine could happen to someone like my sister because this girl who is homeless has mental illness. I’m sort of revisiting that theme in my own life, and how do we help somebody with mental illness, and how do we try to destroy the stigma against mental illness?

We talked about how Stop Pretending resonated for me as an adult, and how I wished I had the book when I was fourteen.

SS: That’s lovely to hear. I’m thrilled because that book was huge for me in terms of the amount of feedback I’ve gotten for years from readers, and that book came out in 1999. I still get these gorgeous heart-rending letters from people thanking me for that book.

I recently switched from Simon & Schuster back to HarperCollins, and my editor, just the other day, was telling me that they’re going to repackage Stop Pretending and reissue it even though it’s never been out of print, and give it a whole new look and a whole new push right when my new book comes out. I feel very glad about that because the more chances it has to be alive the better.

It occurred to me as we talked how Stop Pretending specifically, but also her other books as well, create a platform for teens to talk about difficult subjects that adults don’t know how to discuss either.

SS: It’s interesting you use the word “platform.” When I got the courage up to tell [my sister] I wrote this book about what happened I thought, if she doesn’t want her life exposed in the manner, which would be completely fine with me, it’s her private life, I’ll use a pen name. But as soon as I told her about it she said, “Oh, that’s so great. A book like this can be used to open up discussion about mental illness in schools.” And those were the first words out of her mouth, and she [had been] a public librarian for twenty years. After she said that I was so moved, and I feel like in some way the fact that that book is out there helping people has kind of redeemed her suffering a little bit.

I feel a responsibility when I write for teens that I leave them with a feeling of hope. I had two teenagers living in my house when I started writing those books, and my characters didn’t have sex because my kids hadn’t had sex yet and I didn’t want them to feel, “What’s wrong with me, the characters in my mom’s books are all having sex.”

RW: Speaking of teenagers having sex, What My Mother Doesn’t Know is on the most banned list.

SS: And there’s no sex, there’s no drugs, there’s no cursing, no alcohol.

RW: So what was it?

SS: People who ban books are idiots. I often will get a letter from a parent who says, “I read excerpts of your book and . . . .” They’re just reading two or three pages that someone might have pointed out as possibly objectionable, and they don’t ever read the whole book so they take it out of context. Here’s an example: In What My Mother Doesn’t Know, after the girl falls out of love with her first handsome, gorgeous boyfriend because she realizes he’s an anti-Semitic idiot, she ends up falling into an online relationship with a guy named Chaz. And the reason I put that in was it was the early days of internet chat rooms and I wanted to show teenage girls without being didactic that it was unsafe to go meet up with people who you don’t actually know, who you’re meeting because you met them online. Therefore, I had to make this guy do something horrendous to make her realize just in the nick of time, “I’m lucky I didn’t go meet him because he could have raped me.” He seems very funny and charming at first, and this is all done over email and online. Then he says, “What’s your favorite thing to do?” and she says, “I don’t know, what’s yours?” And he says, “I like to jerk off in libraries.” So, if a parent just reads the page where a boy says, “I like to jerk off in libraries,” they might think my book is smutty. If they read the whole book, they would realize it’s teaching twelve- and thirteen-year-old girls to be safe when they meet people online.

That was one issue, and another big issue was with the poem called “Ice Capades,” where it says, “Sometimes/on cold nights/I like to press my breasts against the cold glass of the window,/unbutton my nightgown,/and press my breasts/against the cold glass/just so I can see/the amazing tricks/that my nipples can do.” That poem with the nipple word in there, and the idea that she would press her breasts against the glass and her nipples would get erect, was more than people could handle. They couldn’t take it. They were freaked out. It wasn’t even a masturbation poem, it was a “first.” She was going through having breasts for the first time. “Oh what can they do?” And it wasn’t in the daytime, where anyone could see it, it wasn’t for an audience. It was at night, in the dark and she did this thing. I can’t tell you how many letters I got from girls telling me, “You made me feel like I’m not so weird.” It didn’t mean they were at home putting their breasts against a glass, but they were doing something else that they were feeling weird about, and then they don’t have to anymore because this character has done this thing. That’s why I left the poem in. After I wrote it, I told my husband I didn’t think I could put this one in there, and he said, “No, you gotta keep it in there.” I’m glad I did.

Sones explained the process that happens when there is “a challenge to a book,” the forms from the American Library Association that asks for the offense, and then how the book faces the City Council for public libraries or the school board.

SS: It’s actually a great thing, because the whole community has to come together and decide whether this person should have the right to remove the book, and kids will get in on it and say, “No, you can’t do it.” And I was thrilled that my book was one of the Top 100 Most Challenged Books of the decade. Because as a result of that, I often get asked to speak about why you shouldn’t ban books, and you can’t change an adult’s mind about that, but when you get out to a middle school or high school those kids may never have even thought about it, and so you get to them before a misguided adult gets to them and tells them banning books is okay. I like that I get to influence younger people.

I was at a middle school speaking, and it just so happened that Ellen Hopkins, who also writes novels-in-verse, had just been uninvited by a book festival because a parent found her books objectionable. I thought this is a good example of it, so I told the kids what happened and that some of the other authors in solidarity decided not to come and speak, so if you were one of those authors, what would you do? A girl raised her hand right away and said, “Well, what I would do is I would go, but when I got there instead of reading from my book, I would read from Ellen’s book.” What a fantastically subversive, brilliant thing. So it’s great to be able to talk about banned books with kids. The way I describe it in a nutshell to kids is if your mother doesn’t think you’re ready for a certain book, she has every right to say, “I’d like you to wait until you’re fourteen to read it,” but why should your mother be able to tell every other kid in your school they can’t read it too?

I wondered if she felt like she had to self-edit or reconsider how she approached the themes and ideas she was interested in as a result of the ban.

SS: It would be the other way around. I would be delighted if one of my other books was banned, but I think it had to do with the title. What My Mother Doesn’t Know made them perk up their ears and peek over their daughters’ shoulders and ask, “Wait, what does this character’s mother not know? What do I not know about my own daughter?” I think the title itself might have gotten it into hot water. One of Those Hideous Books got banned a little because two of those characters are gay, but no one had the nerve to say it was because those characters were gay.

RW: You’ve tackled mental illness, teen firsts, and homelessness. What’s next?

SS: I have a huge file, and I find when I’m writing I’ll often come up with a gillion ideas that seem so much more interesting than what I’m working on, which is just smoke screen. You’re putting things up in front of yourself to keep you from doing the job at hand, but rather than just throw those away, I put them in a file. I know I’ll find something good in there to write next, but I’m not allowing myself to think about it yet.

Roz Weisberg is an MFA Candidate in Fiction at Antioch University and the current Y/A Editor for Lunch Ticket. She serves as a mentor to teen girls at WriteGirl and mentors aspiring screenwriters at the Cinestory Foundation Retreat in Idllywyld, CA. When not developing stories, consuming pop culture, or planning her next adventure, she awaits March Madness and the underdog Cinderella Team that will inevitably break her heart.