Heather Mateus Sappenfield on Tackling Tough Topics in Middle Grade Novels

On an ordinary Monday, Rill Kruse left for third grade with a dad, but when she came home, he'd been stolen. By a river. One year and thirteen days later—on the first morning of summer vacation—Rill still insists he's trudging home. Her mom has become a practical woman. Her older brother, Eddy, now calls her baby and dork. Gus, second-in-command at Kruse Whitewater Adventures, Rill's family's rafting company, has gone from being her dad's “risk bro” to her mom's guardian angel. Joyce, company secretary, arm-wrestler, and mechanic, still calls Rill a fingerling, but, after learning what a cheater water is, Rill wishes she'd stop. When Rill's cat, Clifford, leads her to the family tree fort on the mountainside behind home, she discovers a stowaway, Perla. To help Perla, Rill embarks on an adventure that tests her understanding of the world, of loss, and of what it means to be a friend. In the end, what Rill discovers will nudge her—and all those she loves—toward healing.

What’s the inspiration behind this story?

In the mid-nineties, I taught high school language arts. Students who were new to America would turn up in my classes. Some of them were undocumented, yet I’d become a teacher to help anyone with a desire to learn. These students were a marvel to me because, despite knowing little, if any, English, and despite knowing few of the basics of daily life within the school, they managed to get by. Often admirably. Often while also working one or even two jobs after school.

Some mornings I’d walk through the school’s front doors to discover a group of them gathered in the lobby, crying and comforting each other because a family member, or maybe a few, had been rounded up for deportation the day or night before. I tried to imagine how that must feel: being left behind in a foreign country with no documentation and no family. Later, these students would be in my class, trying to concentrate, learn, and continue on. Their courage amazed me. When I started writing novels, I knew this was a story I would someday explore.

What does compassion mean to you?

This novel is a map of Rill’s journey to understanding compassion—how it feels, how to express it, how giving it to someone else can be a gateway to one’s own healing. Her teacher, Mr. Rainey, defines compassion as “a feeling of worry or pity for the suffering or misfortune of someone else.” The word pity, in its pure form, means sympathetic sorrow for one who is suffering, distressed, or unhappy. It can, however, carry the extra meaning of looking down on the thing you feel sorry for, and part of Rill’s journey is growing from seeing Perla as a “thing” to someone who is her equal and, ultimately, her friend. For me, that’s true compassion. I believe moments when we meet people who differ from us—in nationality, in ethnicity, in spiritual belief, in social strata—define us, and they have the potential to be among the most beautiful experiences available to us as human beings.

Who is this story for? Why explore immigration through a middle grade lens, rather than YA or adult? 

When I state that this novel is “A read for all ages. A read for our times,” I’m being honest. It’s written through an almost-eleven-year-old’s eyes because Perla’s predicament is happening to kids—here in the Vail Valley, throughout Colorado, across our nation, and around the globe. I hope this novel illustrates the costs of apathy or indifference and, through Rill stumbling along and making mistakes, guides young readers toward compassion. 

There’s an interesting dynamic that occurs when someone older reads a middle grade novel. Perhaps because these books are written and marketed for “children,” more mature readers tend to open the first page less guarded, and thus they’re unconsciously more susceptible to its messages. Middle grade novels are rarely simple, though. Young readers have agile minds, hungry to define their world, so these books are filled with depth and theme, irony and wit. Crafted to be easier to decode, there’s less filtering, so all this good stuff travels straight to the heart. I firmly believe every adult should read at least one middle grade book a year. It’s good for the soul.

From a craft perspective, how do you approach writing about difficult topics for younger ages? 

Crafting middle grade stories is much harder for me than writing adult, or even YA, books. I relish a succulently worded description or turn of phrase, but for kids, I must do this so deftly that it’s seamless, with little or no overt artifice. There’s no nostalgia or looking back; I must be fully with the protagonist, viewing the world in that moment through their eyes. The rule “show don’t tell” is vitally important, especially when writing about difficult topics. So my characters move, via action and thought, toward figuring things out. Making mistakes is important. And they often don’t understand what motivates them, so the reader treks with them toward discovery.

HEATHER MATEUS SAPPENFIELD loves adventures, especially in the Rocky Mountain landscape that’s been her lifelong home. As part of women’s teams, she’s won 24-hour mountain bike races and road bicycling’s Race Across America—San Diego, California to Atlantic City, New Jersey. She’s also competed in the Mountain Bike World Championships; ski instructed for Vail Resorts, and loves backcountry ski touring. Her toughest adventures, though, arise in the writing of stories. She is the author of two contemporary YA novels, The View from Who I Was and Life at the Speed of Us, a Colorado Book Awards Finalist. Her story collection, Lyrics For Rock Stars, released as winner of the V Press LC Compilation Book Prize, was nominated for the MPIBA’s Reading the West Awards, was a silver medalist for the IBPA’s Ben Franklin Awards, and was featured on Colorado Public Radio. Her most recent book, The River Between Hearts, runner-up for the Kraken Prize, is a middle grade novel about friendship and healing. For more information, visit her website.

Writing and Music — How Do They Intersect?

by Julie Scolnik

I have been a musician for all of my life. Ballet was my first love, but I realized at the tender age of 13 that it was my emotional response to music that made me crave a physical outlet for the deep stirrings it evoked.

So off I went to spend three idyllic summers at a music camp in Maine, where Beethoven and Brahms symphonies were broadcast through loud speakers to awaken us in our woodland cabins, as if the trees had burst into song.

I connected deeply with these young peers of mine, each day listening to friends rehearse Schubert’s cello quintet in the woods before lunch. When I played the recording at home when camp was over, my eyes filled with tears. And then I knew: Music would become my life. 

My career as a professional flutist over the past forty years has brought me to far-ranging jobs, both highbrow and low, (from weddings and funerals as a student, to pit orchestras of broadway shows, and finally to high-caliber freelancing as principal flute with opera and ballet orchestras, and as a regular sub with the Boston Symphony. Finally, at the age of forty, I founded my own chamber music series, Mistral Music, my dream job, what would become “my magnificent obsession,” for which I continue to serve as the artistic director.

I discovered that connecting with my community through an intimate concert experience was not only tremendously gratifying, but also the perfect outlet for me to share what meant most to me in life— not just music, but childhood, memories, and the mysteries of the heart. And this is precisely where the intersection of my life as a writer and a musician now takes place.

Besides what people have called our imaginative programming and virtuosic artists, I think that the success of my music series is due in large part to the rapport I have developed with my audience members through the personal stories I tell and the messages I write in the program booklets.

I often program music that has in some way altered my own sensibilities with the hope it will do the same for my audience members. I regularly introduce a piece by recounting a story about where I first heard and fell in love with it, and explain how hearing it every time conjures the memories and emotions of that moment in time. Like Proust’s madeleine. And my desire to share an experience I have had with a piece of music is very much like a writer’s desire to tell a story.

But beyond the role of artistic director, there are other analogies to be drawn between being an instrumentalist and a writer.  

As musicians, we’re taught to be vehicles for the composers’ music. The message we try to convey with our own playing should essentially be devoid of ego, as we strive to deliver the message of the composer. (Even if musicians imbue each work with their own artistic interpretation.) It’s a different story for writers, who tell stories which are uniquely their own.

But because music is innately abstract, the inner worlds that the same piece of music may conjure is different for every person. Although in some ways writing is the opposite, as it is telling one very specific story, it, too, will resonate with each reader a little differently.  

Other obvious comparisons between writing and playing music that come to mind have to do with communicating. Whether it is with words or notes, both writers and musicians use their medium to share a vision and paint a picture.

As a musician, one is constantly paying attention to beginnings and endings and the fundamental importance of beautiful phrasing. In the same way, rhythm and cadence matter on the written page, as well as the spaces between the phrases, the musical flow of a good sentence. I noticed recently that deciding how to end a chapter on a cliff hanger is very similar to how I might choose to end a movement, one that necessarily leads to and implies what is to come next in a new section of music.

I think that the (slightly urgent) desire to tell a story in writing probably comes from the same place as the desire to share a piece of music in a live performance. I recently discovered a beautiful quote from Maya Angelou, and I feel it encapsulates this same urgency to share art, whether it is a writer’s story or a piece that a musician yearns to perform: “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”

As for my own odyssey that took me over forty years to bring this memoir, Paris Blue, into world, I am beyond moved that the time has finally come to share it.

Julie Scolnik is a concert flutist and the founding artistic director of Mistral Music (www.MistralMusic.org), a chamber music series that since1997 has been known for its virtuosic performances, imaginative programming, and the personal rapport Scolnik establishes with her audiences. She lives in Boston with her husband, physicist Michael Brower, and their two cats, Daphne and Chloë. They have two adult children, Sophie and Sasha Scolnik-Brower, also musicians. All info about "Paris Blue" (trailer, endorsements, story, music in the book) can be found at www.JulieScolnik.com.

A Conversation With Radhika Sanghani, Author of 30 THINGS I LOVE ABOUT MYSELF

When Nina Mistry's life hits rock bottom, she decides to change her stars by falling in love...with herself—a hilarious, heartfelt story from outrageously funny novelist Radhika Sanghani.

Nina didn't plan to spend her thirtieth birthday in jail, yet here she is in her pajamas, locked in a holding cell. There's no Wi-Fi, no wine, no carbs—and no one to celebrate with.

Unfortunately, it gives Nina plenty of time to reflect on how screwed up her life is. She's just broken up with her fiancé, and now has to move back into her childhood home to live with her depressed older brother and their uptight, traditional Indian mother. Her career as a freelance journalist isn’t going in the direction she wants, and all her friends are too busy being successful to hang out with her.

Just as Nina falls into despair, a book lands in her cell: How to Fix Your Shitty Life by Loving Yourself. It must be destiny. With literally nothing left to lose, Nina makes a life-changing decision to embark on a self-love journey. By her next birthday, she's going to find thirty things she loves about herself.

Your novel was inspired after spending a night in jail, yourself. How does a feel-good story have roots in what one would assume is a negative life experience?

My night in a jail cell was completely unexpected. I was working on a journalistic story that went very wrong, and while I was scared of the consequences, my biggest fear was having to spend a night in a cell alone. I’d just had a break-up and was desperate not to feel how lonely I was. But I was forced to confront my fears, and it ended up being the best thing to happen to me.

I finally faced up to how sad I was instead of pretending things were okay and it was hugely liberating. I accepted I was heartbroken, wanted to quit my job and had nothing in common with most of my friends. That sparked a huge self-love journey for me that led to me going freelance, making amazing new friends and writing 30 Things I Love About Myself!

Nina Mistry goes on a similar journey in my book, and though her story is definitely light-hearted with lots of fun moments, it has its fair share of difficult low moments too. To me, every feel-good story needs its sad parts too, because that’s what makes it realistic. Every good thing in my life has come out of something tough so I wanted to reflect that in my book!

With everything going on in the world, lighter fare seems to be what people are reading. What about 30 Things I Love About Myself makes it a great post (we hope) pandemic read?

I think this is the perfect post-pandemic read because it’s all about a woman learning to be strong alone, and to heal her loneliness. So many of us were forced to be physically alone during the pandemic, while many others struggled with loneliness even when surrounded by people. Nina deals with both of these issues at different times, and her story is inspiring and positive. Whenever I talk about this book, I use words like ‘kind’ and ‘warm’ and ‘happy’ (as well as smiling as I do so!) and I think that says it all. Who doesn’t need more kindness and warmth in their lives right now?!

Body positivity plays a role both in the novel and in your real life. How can we all stick to positive thoughts about ourselves (and others!) with so much negativity swirling around? 

It’s so hard! But it is possible! I make a big effort to only follow positive accounts that make me feel good on social media, and to surround myself with positive people in real life as much as I can. That makes a big difference. The other huge thing you can do – which Nina Mistry does in the novel – is to befriend yourself and be your own source of positivity. If you’re able to get to a place where you’re kind about your body, or ideally, celebrate it just the way it is, then it doesn’t matter what’s happening around you. Because you’ll have you, and that’s so much more valuable.

As a journalist who tackles issues like racism and social issues, how do you see a piece of fiction carrying its own influence? 

I love fiction and think it really has its own power. A journalist writing about issues is always didactic, but when issues are covered in fiction, they can reach people in different ways. Sometimes it’s a message resonating with a reader in a way it never has before, or just that certain messages make their way to new audiences. But I think fiction has a huge influence and it’s one that shouldn’t be undervalued!

Radhika Sanghani is an award-winning features journalist, an influential body positivity campaigner and a 2020 BBC Writers Room graduate. Her latest novel 30 Things I Love About Myself - a warm-hearted story about a woman trying to find 30 things she loves about herself after hitting rock bottom - is out in January 2022. She has previously written two YA novels: Virgin and Not That Easy.

You can find her on Instagram and Twitter on @radhikasanghani