 I would like to acknowledge that today we gather as a community on the ancestral home of the Avanaki people, which was taken unfairly and forcibly. We acknowledge the original inhabitants of this land, and we offer gratitude for the land and all those who have tended to it for generations. Welcome to year 32! So we hope everyone here is ready to start the day. We are incredibly excited to host everyone, and there are some people we agree that we'd like to thank. There is Megan, you know, wherever you are. So thank you so much. We'd also like to thank the wonderful Indian Committee, as well as Jerry Hearst, who's an English teacher at the London High School. There's a librarian at CBU. He's a jury of founders of Team Lit Mob, and this team have happened at that point. We're going to just go over some of the workshop options, with some despaios, but they're all in your handouts. You should have gotten them. So the first one we have is Working On Words, with A. R. Capetta in the library studio. A. R. Capetta is the writer of The Strange and Magical. Noble titles include A. R. Capetta, Award Winner at the Heartbreak Bakery, and the best-selling Once in a Future series. A finalist for the New York-England record, which they co-authored with their spouse, Lauren McCarthy, who is also here as a guest author. Other accolades for A. R. include J. L. D. Selection's Curious Best Book of the Year, Locust's Recommended Reading List, Public's Top Ten Horror Fantasy, or Y and L. A. L. A. Read the List. Our next workshop is titled Things that Go Bump in the Night, Horror Writing Workshop, by Ann DeVila Cardinal in Room 131. Ann DeVila Cardinal... Wow. Ann DeVila Cardinal is a New York and Vermont based novelist with an MFA in writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. She comes from a long line of Puerto Rican writers, including Father and Son poets for Hilo and Jose Antonio DeVila, and her cousin, Award-winning fiction writer, Tere DeVila. Ann has won two International Latino Book Awards, Best Young Adult Fantasy, an adventure for five-minute midnight, and best popular fiction for the storyteller's death. Ann lives with her husband in a lovely little house with a massively creepy base. The next one we have is T.L. Adams. So, the next one is T.L. Emma Bitlounge with Genesee Gallagher on the library floor. Genesee Gallagher is a librarian at South Wellington High School. She loves audio books and historical fiction set during time period she didn't learn about in school. This is her fifth year doing Team Lit Mop, and she thinks they're getting better every year. Memoir Fan Fiction Workshop with Cory McCarthy in the library and classroom. Cory McCarthy writes bold, weird, and affectionate stories. His works include Stonewall Honor-winning Manor War, Museum of Missouri, and his illustrated short story in the Michael L. Prince Award-winning anthology, The Collectors. The acclaimed picture book biography Hope is an Arrow about fellow Lebanese-American Khalil Kibrom and the best-selling space fantasy, the ones in Future Series, which, as we already know, was co-op by A.R. on a project which unaccompanied the world and called it a dream, me and living out loud with Kareena Pace-Mayer in the auditorium, here, which is this room. Kareena is a storyteller who creates art-centered spaces through workshops, community engagements, culinary food, and more. She intends to make collective difference within her local Vermont community and beyond one story at a time. She's honored to spread love, vulnerability, and affirmations throughout her various offerings. This is a small part. This is a writing workshop with Linda Urban in Year 128. Linda Urban has written many award-winning books for young readers, including the novels Almost There and Almost Not, A Crooked Kind of Perfect, Kind of Truth, The Center of Everything, and Talks Sanctity. For 10 years, she served as a marketing director at Romans, Clipstore, and Pasadena, California. Currently, she teaches in the Writing for Children program at Vermont College of Fine Arts. She has been visited by only one ghost, and he was not at all speedy. If you have any questions, please feel free to seek out a U-32 ambassador bringing a Team at Mod lecture. We're here to help make the day fun, so before we start, we're going to go over some ground rules for the events. Display respect for yourself and others. We all have responsibility for the safety and welfare of the Team at Mod community and our U-32 school. Be mindful of staying within the areas highlighted on the map in your bag but bag pocket pockets. U-32 is cell phone free. You can only use your phone during unscheduled times, such as passing times, lunch, and snacks. Phones may not be used during the keynote, workshops, and presentations at the end of the day. U-32 is a drug and alcohol free school, including vapes and drugs are installed in bathrooms in a full trigger. Aiding in the library is an exception to the rule today. Be mindful of taking care of the library and cleaning up after yourselves. The most important thing that we can do today is have fun and make connections. Team at Mod aims to connect team readers and creators to authors and illustrators, connect team for years and creators to each other, represent, honor, and affirm underrepresented voices and identities. Celebrate and encourage reading and creating the pleasure and promote a green mountain of color. The most team choice book will work. An environment that is rapidly creating restrictions and censoring voices and experiences. There is no small feat to gather in a public school or library to celebrate the past, fantasizing experience of each unique individual. Well, Vermont is on the better side of this spectrum and has no banned books. We would like to acknowledge that this is not the case everywhere. We must strive as our state's youth to make schools and communities equal and affirming for all. All individuals deserve to have the right to read and write with their own experience. Express gratitude to the Institute of Museum and Library Services, a federal agency through the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by the Vermont Department of Libraries. We would like to invite the Vermont Department of Libraries consultant of youth services Donald and Bob to the stage to share a few words. Hello. Good morning. So excited to see you all here today. The Vermont Department of Libraries is proud to support this fantastic event that brings together authors and Vermont students in a celebration of books and a celebration of you all. And you're really excited to support this fantastic event. And as mentioned, the Green Mountain Book Award committee is presenting today. You're going to be hearing their brand new list that just came out which is really exciting. But we also encourage you as mentioned it is the Team Choice Book Award and so if you have not yet voted for the 2023-2024 list, the current list there in the library there's a spot where you can vote for your favorite book from the list. So we encourage you to do that today if you have not already. And also all the books that you have today came our books that were reviewed by the committee that was sent out and we've gathered them up to give out to you today. So we're really happy to share those books with you and to be here to celebrate this fantastic event. And I am now going to introduce Ryan Newsfinger from the Vermont Humanities. Hi folks, I promise I'll keep it brief. I'm Ryan like you said, I'm from Vermont Humanities. Hi. I'm Ryan Newsfinger as well by the easiest way to describe what we do is we do stuff with books and reading and ideas. It's so great to see all of you here to see Melinda. We had a great time with her up in South Burlington last night. As you know, Melinda is the author of our Vermont Reads Book for 2023. Last night at the Telegraph Club you each have a free copy there to take home with you. You are welcome. It's our pleasure to announce our choice for Vermont Reads 2024. Before I'm done, I wanted to thank the people and groups who have helped Melinda come to Vermont this week and who support Vermont Reads, the Trout Lily Foundation, the Jack and Dorothy Byrne Foundation and the McClure Foundation and also thanks to Vermont Department of Libraries who supports bringing authors into schools like this throughout the year and also supports Teen Lit Mob. We're so excited to be here. I'll give some details after Melinda's presentation. She will be signing books. We'll talk about how we'll do that. But before I leave, I'm going to quickly hand this over to Mayla and Ella who will introduce Melinda. Thank you so much. Her novels, including most recently, a scatter is like Her novel, last night at the Telegraph Club won the National Book Award, the Stonewall Book Award, the Asian Pacific American Award for Literature and Michael L. Prince Honor and was in the LA Times Book Prize finalist. Her books have received 15 star reviews and have been finalists for multiple awards including the Andre Norton Award, the Lambda Literary Award. She has been honored by the Carnegie Corporation as a great immigrant. Melinda's short fiction and non-fiction have been published by the New York Times, NPR, Auto Straddle, The Horn Book and multiple anthologies. She lives in Massachusetts with her wife and dog. And Melinda will be giving our keynote speech and afterwards she will be interviewed by a panel of our students. And then after that Melinda will be doing book signing from 1030 to 1045. And we also have this poster for her that you can sign. So like sign your name or write a little note, but just be mindful of the space. Um, yeah. Welcome Melinda. Here today, I was wondering if we could start with a brief interactive activity. I was wondering if you would like to hold your copy of Telegraph Club up over your face. And then I could take a picture of you. This is so exciting for me. Okay. I'm going to count down. Okay, ready? One, two, thoroughly. Okay, here we go. Ready? All right, this is very exciting for me. Thank you. Thank you for that introduction and thank you to Vermont Humanities and the National Book Foundation for reading this year. I'm so excited to meet you all at Team LitMod. So, I'm a writer, obviously. Ever since I learned how to hold a pencil I've been writing down stories. So far I've published seven novels, here they are. I know all about queer girls coming to understand who they are. So my goal as a writer has been to take stories that have traditionally excluded lesbians and bisexual women and change them into narratives where being queer is normal. So my first novel was Ash, that was a static retelling of Cinderella. Huntress was a fantasy novel and a hero's asked about two girls who have to save their kingdom. It's a prequel to Ash and adaptation and inheritance are a science fiction and thriller duology inspired by my love for the ex-files. My most recent novel was A Scatter of Light. It's a queer coming-of-age novel about an 18 year old biracial Chinese American girl during the summer between high school and college. It is a companion novel to last night at the Telegraph Club which I'm here to talk to you about today. Telegraph Club is a historical novel set in 1950 San Francisco about 17 year old Lily Hoo. Telegraph Club is what I'm going to talk to you about today. So in this book it is 1954. It is the dawn of the space race and Lily really wants to be a scientist like her Aunt Judy who works at the Jet Propulsion Lab. But Lily is also starting to realize that she might be a lesbian and maybe her friend Kath is too. So Lily and Kath start going to the Telegraph Club which is a lesbian bar in San Francisco that features male impersonators. That's the 1950s term for what we would call drag kings today. So this book is set against the historical backdrop of the early atomic age and McCarthyism. But at its heart it is a coming of age novel. It's about Lily discovering her identity as a lesbian and most of all it's a love story. So I did a lot of research before I started writing this book and today I'm going to introduce you to a few of the main topics that I dug into starting with San Francisco. So let's take a trip back in time to 1954. Here is a map of San Francisco from that time period. These three rectangles outline the areas of the city where the book takes place. Most of Lily's life is centered in the red rectangle which incorporates the neighborhoods of downtown, Chinatown, North Beach, and Russian Hill. Here's a close up of the red rectangle. The numbers identify locations in the book and I'm not going to go through them all today, don't worry. But if you're interested in finding out more you can find this map on my website with all the details. So Lily lives at number one which is a third floor flat an apartment on Clay Street between Powell and Mason. Her flat is located on the very edge of Chinatown and I put it there because I wanted to show that Lily's family is in a social class of Chinese Americans who are right on verge of moving out of the ethnic enclave. At the time, racist real estate laws prevented most Chinese Americans from living anywhere except Chinatown. But Lily's father is a doctor, her mother is a nurse. Lily herself is a born in the USA second generation Chinese American and just like many Chinese Americans today she experiences a tension between her Chinese heritage and her American identity. So these are some photos of the neighborhood where Lily's apartment is. So for Chinese Americans in the 1950s this tension was particularly fraught because anti-Chinese racism was much more openly accepted at that time. This is just after the Korean War it was the time of McCarthyism when people who were suspected of being communists were openly harassed, investigated even lost their jobs. Chinese Americans were often believed to be foreigners and the People's Republic of China was a communist state as it is today. So Chinese Americans were often targeted and harassed by immigration authorities by the police of this time. So in order to fight back Chinese Americans tried to promote themselves and their community as quintessentially American and one way they did this was through the Miss Chinatown beauty pageant. So this is a photo of the 1954 contestants for Miss Chinatown. Beauty pageants at the time were really really big in the 1950s like Miss America and the Miss Chinatown pageant enabled the Chinatown community to show non-Chinese America that is white America just how American they were. Chinatown girls were asked to represent their community through the Miss Chinatown contest as models of American womanhood but they still had to show some exotic flair for the white judges in the Francisco community which is why they're all wearing these Chinese dresses. Chinatown also had to cater to white visitors who came to eat in its restaurants and shop in its stores. They had to make Chinatown suitably exotic but also safely American. One of the most famous Chinatown establishments at this time was a nightclub known as the Forbidden City. This is a photo of the Forbidden City in the 1940s. This place this nightclub featured an all Asian cast performing American song and dance routines. So during the 1950s variety shows like this were really really popular and this is the kind of performance that you would find at a lot of nightclubs including gay bars. So going back to the map do you see number 7? Right there that's just a few blocks away from Lily's apartment. That is the location of the Telegraph Club. It is fictional but it was inspired by the many lesbian bars that existed in San Francisco's North Beach neighborhood in the 1940s and 50s especially a bar called Monas which was located on Broadway. So here is a photo of Monas from 1942 on the right hand picture Monas is right behind that car and the left hand picture shows the block that it's on in the 1940s as well. So today the number of gay bars are really falling. There aren't that many left but from the 1940s to the 1960s there were dozens of them and many of them were located just on a few blocks in this neighborhood. So that does not mean that gay bars were safe spaces filled with pride flags at this time. They were often raided by the police because homosexuality was illegal in 1954. In September 1954 San Francisco police raided 12 Adler a bar owned by a lesbian named Tommy Basu. Several teen girls were arrested and the newspaper accounts really played a totally scandalous story involving drugs and cross dressing. This raid was one of many that inspired some of what happened in last night at the Telegraph Club. So interestingly although gay bars were often raided by the police these bars existed as kind of an open secret at the time. They even advertised in major newspapers like the San Francisco Chronicle. Here are two of these ads. So tourists often went to bars like Mona's and Finocchio's which featured male or female impersonators. So today we call female impersonators drag queens. So let's go back to the map of San Francisco real quick. Like I said much of Lily's life occurs in the red rectangle but five days a week Lily walks up Columbus Avenue which is that diagonal street on the map. She walks up Columbus to the blue rectangle through a neighborhood called Russian Hill to her high school which is here at number one. Her high school was called Galileo High School and in the 1950s it was the public school that served all the teens from Chinatown North Beach and Russian Hill. So when I was researching this book I visited the San Francisco Public Library's San Francisco History Center where I was able to read through several yearbooks from Galileo High School from mid-1950s. Here is one of those yearbooks from 1955. I love that their yearbook is called The Telescope. It really goes with the name of their school. Looking through these yearbooks gave me a really wonderful sense of what life looked like for teens in the 1950s. So when we think of the 1950s in America or when I started thinking about the 1950s the images that came to my mind were really pretty white so it was amazing to me to see so many Asian students in the Galileo High School yearbook. I think the student population was easily one-third Asian in the mid-50s. Judging by the names they were mostly Chinese but there were also Japanese and Filipino students. And here are some of them. These photos showed me that these Asian-American kids were just normal American teenagers. They dressed like Americans. They didn't wear those Chinese dresses. They wore skirts and bobby socks. They went bowling. There's the bowling club. They played in dances. These photos really showed me just how American Lily and her classmates were. So all of my research into teen life in the 1950s, San Francisco, the Chinatown community, gay bars was all part of answering one really important question. What was it like to be a Chinese-American lesbian in 1950s San Francisco? This is the hardest question I had to answer because there is such little historical record about queer Chinese-Americans and whenever I came across anything about a queer Chinese or Asian-American it was often mentioned in passing. It was almost enough to make you think that queer Chinese-Americans didn't exist back then, but I knew that could not be true. What has happened is that our experiences have been erased or marginalized. We have literally been shunted into the footnotes. So that meant that a lot of my research was kind of like detective work. I had to track down every comment or footnote about queer Asian-American person that I could find and to be honest, there weren't that many. I started with one sentence in this history book called Wide Open Town. The sentence reads, quote, San Francisco native Merle Wu remembers that lesbians of color often frequented Forbidden City in the 1950s end quote. So you remember Forbidden City, right? It was that nightclub in Chinatown. So I was so excited when I saw this sentence but unfortunately there was nothing else about Forbidden City in this book and there was nothing else about Merle Wu. But the footnotes told me that there was a tape recording of the interview that she did with this author and her interview was archived at the GLPT Historical Society in San Francisco. So I knew right away I had to go there and listen to that tape recording. Here's Merle Wu. She was Chinese-Korean-American. She was born in Chinatown in 1941 and she was growing up she wanted to be a nurse or a nun but things didn't quite work out for her that way. After she graduated from high school she got a job at a department store in downtown San Francisco. Most of the Asian women who worked at the department store were elevator girls back then. They used to have people operating the elevator instead of you didn't just go in and punch a button. But Merle Wu worked in sportswear on the second floor of this department store where she said that all the managers seemed to be lesbians. In the interview she says that wasn't a big deal everybody knew and it was fine. So after working at the department store Merle auditioned to perform as a jazz singer at the Forbidden City and she got the job even though she wasn't old enough to drink the cocktails that she sold to the patrons. But quote, every night was a party and many of the people who worked there were lesbians even though they never came out publicly she said there wasn't a doubt about it. So earlier in my research I had gotten a copy of a book called Forbidden City USA Chinese American Nightclubs by Arthur Dong, a community historian and documentary filmmaker. It's a history of Chinese American nightclubs. So in his book I found this amazing photograph. So to me this is a very queer photo and I imagine that this performance and this performer must have been known in the lesbian community at the time. So this performer's name is Toya Mar. There is no official confirmation that she was a lesbian but I did email Arthur Dong the author of the book and I asked him if he knew of any lesbian performers who had worked at Forbidden City. None of them were out of the time of course but Arthur told me to look at the top photo on page 59. Here it is. Do you see what I see? The two women there on the right side of the top photo are holding hands under the table. So that is Toya Mar along with an unidentified woman. I think they make a really cute couple. So when I saw this picture it was like finding visual proof that look queer Asian women existed then. And they were in some cases they were hiding in plain sight just like Lily in Last Night at the Telegraph Club. So you remember I said at the start of this brief talk that my new novel, A Scatter of Light is a companion novel to Telegraph Club. What does that mean? Well it is set 60 years later in 2013 and so although the main characters are different you will find out more about what happened to the characters in Telegraph Club. A Scatter of Light is a very different book but it is still a queer coming-of-age novel. It's also set in the San Francisco Bay Area. So if you've already read Telegraph Club or if you read the book that you've been given today and you decide you want to know if anything else happened you might want to read A Scatter of Light. So I just shared a ton of information with you but if you're interested in even more details if you want to see the pictures more closely you can look at my website. I have a whole series of blog posts on my blog where I explore all sorts of stuff including Chinese food in the 1950s male impersonation and the broader history of anti-Chinese racism. So you can find all of that at melindalow.com slash blog. Thank you very much for your attention and I am happy to turn it over to our student panelists for the Eclipse. I'm from Squalbing High School and I use the Eclipse. Ari, I use he and pronounce and I'm from U32. Congratulations. Pleasure about the Eclipse. Yeah, it was amazing. Did you all see it? Science and nature are incredibly inspiring to me and obviously I'm a bit of a space nerd. I loved it. It was amazing. I felt like when I saw it it was so stunning all I could do was stare at it and the longer, the more time that has passed since the moment of seeing the Eclipse the more I realized just how incredible it was. It was so incredible. I'm so glad that I had the chance to see it. I did write last night at the Telegraph Club I think you talked a little bit about what inspired you but can you talk a little bit more? Yeah, so last night at the Telegraph Club came out of a short story that I wrote called New Year. That was published in an anthology of historical YA short stories. New Year was inspired by two books that I had been reading. One was called Rise of the Rocket Girls which was about the women who worked as computers at the Jet Propulsion Lab in the 1940s and 50s. The other book I was reading was Wide Open Town that I talked to you about the history of San Francisco and in Wide Open Town I learned that San Francisco had all these things from the 1940s and 50s. So Wide Open Town and Rise of the Rocket Girls have nothing in common. They're not related. But in my head they kind of mushed together and they inspired me to discover the character of Lily who is a 17 year old girl who's kind of totally into rocket science and also ideal as we did. So that's where the seed of the book came from. Why did you choose historical fiction for this book? I think historical fiction chose me. I had I like to read historical fiction. I like to read all sorts of genres like you'll remember all my books are in different genres. But this story was clearly historical fiction because it was set in the 1950s. So I had to learn how to write historical fiction to write this book because I had never done that before and it was very challenging but I really enjoyed the process. To describe the settings. How do you have them in the places you described along the books? Thank you for that question, yes. I really think it's very important to give my books a solid sense of place. So place is more than only setting. It's about how the characters experience the place where they are. And I lived in San Francisco for about 15 years. So I love that city. I was writing Telegraph Club until after I left San Francisco to move to Massachusetts. So when I was writing Telegraph Club I then had to go back to San Francisco and I literally walked through every place in the city that Lily would go to to refresh my memory and to see what the city looked and smelled and sounded like. And I also watched a lot of movies that were filmed in San Francisco in the 1950s. So I could see how it differed or was similar to today. It was really fun. I love doing research into locations and setting. And the research that like all the research that you did for this book did how did it relate to your experience as a Chinese American? I have a very different background than Lily. She's quite different than me. I grew up in the 1980s and 90s in Colorado so like the opposite of Lily honestly. She had a very different upbringing than me. I think what is interesting is that I gave Lily's family kind of the opposite immigration history of my family. So whatever happened to my family I gave Lily the opposite of it. So it was a very interesting experiment and I think that Lily and I share certain characteristics like we are both lesbians and we're both Chinese American but there's so much variety and difference in each person's individual experience. There is no one narrative. So Lily has a lot more courage than I do. I didn't know what was happening when I was 17. Lily apparently knows what's happening to herself. So that's great. I had no clue. But one thing that you do as a writer is you use whatever kind of experience you have that is similar to your character and you imagine how that would feel for them. So you have to really get into the character and imagine their experiences and kind of walk in their shoes in your imagination. So that's how I created it. You mentioned New Year which I'm so excited you mentioned New Year. Do you have any more short stories that you might intend to turn into novels like you did with New Year? So I don't know. I've written some short stories I don't know that any of them would make good novels. I didn't think New Year was going to make a novel. It became a novel because I was having a conversation with my literary agent about the story and he said that could be a novel. And I was like, no. It can't be a novel. It's just a short story. I'm done. And he was like it could be a novel. So I kind of kept thinking about that and I realized that he was right. So far my agent has not said that any of my other short stories could be novels. So I do not at this point think that any of them will be. But who knows? If he says so maybe I'll think about it. And how does writing like a full-life book rather than like a short story how does that compare? Like one more than the other? Yeah, I'm definitely more naturally a novel writer. Short stories are confusing to me. I don't know how to make it short. It's very hard. Short fiction is really hard. I'm way more when I think of stories they're usually big and long. And so if you try to turn a big long story idea into a short story you're not going to work very well. But that's usually what I do because they don't work that well. Yeah, I just novel is a whole it's a giant universe and it's a way of life for years. It took me three years to write this. To write Telegraph Club and I'm working on a novel now that will probably take me a lot longer than that. And it's just novels are big sprawling things and you have to kind of get into them and explore the world that you're writing about digging to all the different little corners and there's many characters in a novel whereas in short stories there's usually only a few. So it sounds like novels might be harder but for me short stories are harder because you have to really know what you're doing with the short story and generally speaking I don't know what I'm doing. So with a novel you have time to like mess around and figure that out. It's short, I don't know, short stories are hard. Do you guys write short stories? Yeah. So I always write my books for me. My audience is me. I write the books that I want to read and it's wonderful to me that other people actually want to read them. This is sometimes still very shocking to me but yeah I do write the books that I want to read and I think it's very important as a writer to write the stuff that you want because you have to spend all that time working on that. So if you don't really like it and you're not that into it it's not going to work. There's so many characters you write in your books. Do you like any more than others? Oh yeah I always, I have favorites. I definitely have favorites. I think in Telegraph Club the funny thing is my favorites are rarely the main characters but maybe that's because you spend so much time with them. In Telegraph Club I think one of my favorite characters was Lana who is one of the adult characters who shows up later in the book. I love Lana. I think she's fantastic. I love spending time with her. My favorite character was definitely the main character. That was written in the first person. So I guess I knew her better than the others but in Telegraph Club yeah I really liked Lana. I mean I liked Lily, she's great and really liked Lana. What does your writing process look like? What advice would you give people that are just starting out? My writing process is different with every book. And I think that one thing you have to do as a writer is figure out how to write the book you're writing and unfortunately they often are different each book is different. So for writers who are just starting out I really encourage you if you're a writer to finish the thing you're working on because it's really hard to finish anything. But you cannot make it better until you finish the first draft and so many people never finish the first draft. I mean I wrote many books that I didn't finish. I didn't write any books. I wrote a lot of starts. For a long time all I could do is write starts and at some point you just gotta make yourself sit there and get to the end. And maybe it is terrible most of my first drafts are absolutely horrendous. You just have to keep going. Don't stop and try to make it better before it's done. I always advise people finish the first draft before you go back and revise it and try to make it better because finishing it will show you so much about what you're trying to do and you're not really going to know what you're trying to do until you have done it unfortunately. So finish the draft. That's my main advice. Who's your favorite author? What books do you recommend reading? Who's my favorite author? My favorite author has changed over time. When I was your age I read a lot of Madeline Olingel. I read a lot of Robin McKinley and then when I became an adult the first author I read who wrote stories about lesbians that I really connected with was Sarah Waters. So I love all of her books. I have definitely come to truly admire her as a writer. She does amazing things with storytelling about queer women. Right now who would I recommend? Well I recommend you all read the books of the audience who are here today. Thank you so much. Welcome to Carpean AR. I think Linda Urban is in here too. That's right. So I recommend all of our books, obviously. Who else would I recommend? You know whenever we'll ask this question, my mind goes totally blank. Thankfully I can see you all sitting right here. So let's focus on us too. What can adults learn from your novels to help them understand teenagers, especially your teenagers? Well I think it's so interesting because when I a lot of adults, I don't know if you all know this, but adults a lot of them have blanked out their memory of being a teenager so they have completely erased that from their memory and once they are past those years they tend to believe that teenagers are aliens who are completely whack and like weird and don't understand teens at all. And I'm like, adults need to remember they were one's teens and the teenagers are just human beings like older people, okay? I mean we have differences in Asian experience but we are all human beings who have feelings and emotions and dreams and hopes and I think that adults tend to forget that I have no idea why. I will not forget. This must be why I've written so many YA novels. So that's the one thing I wish adults would remember, that teens are normal human beings. I don't understand why they don't remember this. In terms of, you know, you could read YA books to remember that or to realize that but I really think adults just gotta look back in their memory and like don't disconnect from that part of your life. It's all part of you. All the adults who are here probably know this. This is a silly one. What is the most glamorous part of being a writer and what is the least glamorous part? The most glamorous part of being a writer I don't know I love it. So last summer I got to go on a tour of Germany with the International Youth Library. This is a library of young adult and children's books in Munich, Germany and every year they bring a bunch of authors from all around the world to tour Germany. So they bring us to high schools and I think I spoke to like 2,000 German high school students over the course of four days and so it's kind of glamorous because you're going to a different country but also there was a heat wave in Germany and there was no air conditioning in the entire country and there was no ice. So that was the least glamorous part of being a writer. I went to a Starbucks once in Germany and I was like an iced coffee and they gave me an iced coffee and I was like oh my god you have ice! I found no other ice in all Germany. I'm sneaking up here. So I think these awesome humans are finished with their questions. Can we give a round of applause for our audience for a few extra questions and if anyone in the audience has a question that maybe they are thinking of and I think what I'll do is I'm going to just sneak over here and if you have a question I will come bring you the microphone. I bet we have time for one or two from the audience. Is that okay? My question for you is what is the hardest concept for writing? Like is it getting ideas? Is it going ahead and finding out what the purpose is or what is the hardest concept? The hardest part of writing is different in every single book. So I think that a lot of people who are not writers think that finding a good idea is hard but once you are regularly writing and being open to creativity you will realize that ideas are everywhere. The hard part is figuring out which one is a good one. There's so many ideas but you got to pick one that is actually good. So that's one hard part and then in every single book there is one element that is really difficult that I find really difficult to deal with and in Telegraph Club there is a story about communism in there. I called it the communist subplot and it was really hard for me to figure out how to do it. Like this is not going to make sense unless you have read the book but probably readers don't even really care but as a writer I had to figure out how to integrate that storyline in a way that made sense that was not too in your face and that also interlinked everything in a fluid way. That was really hard for me. That was the hardest part of this book. Do you use for getting past writer's block? Strategies for getting past writer's block. Yes, I do have strategies for that. So one thing you can do is realize that when you're writing and there is a blank page in front of you there is no guarantee or expectation that the words will come. Do not start from the assumption that it will be smooth flowing creativity. So a lot of times I sit down to write. I'll give myself a goal of like a thousand words or one hour and I'll sit there and for the first like if I'm supposed to write for one hour chances are for 55 minutes I'm like I don't know what to do, I'm a terrible writer this would never happen everything I write is horrible this is the worst idea I've ever had I can't do anything but I just sit there for the entire time period I am designated to do it and sometimes in the last 5 minutes I would do all the writing So one thing to remember is that you cannot don't expect it to come easily like if you're going to designate an hour to do it sit there for the whole hour turn off the internet do not let yourself get distracted just sit there and it sucks and it can be really really boring but it will become so boring that you will write something just to entertain yourself so that's one strategy and if that doesn't work that's like a daily practice kind of thing to do it the easier it is to write but also I'm a big fan of taking a break and going for a walk doing something that is not writing if you like to bake some brownies or go do something physical that is not staring at your phone so going for a walk is good just to clear your brain and separate yourself from that mental state of frustration and a lot of times it helps you when you're doing that other thing thank you we have time for two more but I'm sorry I have to make it quick Peter will you mind Farine Paris our last author just arrived I'm Avery I was wondering I assume that last night at the telegraph club has some kind of a meaning for you like a deeper meaning behind the actual like would you say it's possible for a book to have to not have a meaning behind like that is more than like reading because it's fun and would you ever write a book that doesn't have a meaning besides that it is fun to read well I think that if an author is trying to write a book that is fun to read and that's the whole point of it that is perfectly fine and that's a good enough meaning you know that we need we need things for entertainment and joy as much as we need deep complicated analyses or you know thoughtful interrogations of periods so we need all of those things and I think that writing something for fun is perfectly valid and great I am a big nerd and I love research and I'm excessively serious so that's not something I could do I tried to do that once and it was a bit failure we have one final question Hi I'm Stuti from Brooklyn High School what inspired you to start writing I don't know if you had opportunities like us to go to Teel & Mob like other places where you could meet with writers but what inspired you to start this journey to be a writer what inspired me to be a writer the thing is I've always wanted to be a writer I sometimes feel a little bad when I can ask this question because I don't have a big like life ball moment ever since I would learn how to write I have been writing stories my grandmother when I was very little she was a writer too and she and I would make up stories together I have memories of this when I'm very little so I've always been telling stories and I have just always wanted to do this it's literally the only thing I've ever truly wanted to do it took me a long time to get here so this is a long journey if you want to be a writer and a lot of people will tell you that you can't do it but if you truly want to do it you should go for it thank you so much we're going to get a giant round of applause we're going to transition a little bit hi I'm Jory Hurst I'm one of the team at Mob organizers I'll have so many books a couple quick notes and then I'm going to transition us to signing if you came in right at the end and you have not yet gotten your book bag don't get up yet but in a minute you're going to head out the door and Peter is going to wave right so you have it right now the other thing that's happening right now is anyone who would like to get a Melinda Lowe book sign she is generously going to sit up here and hang out for a little bit and sign books for you we're going to do that first because she will not be here all day our other authors will sign at the end of the day but Melinda Lowe is going to sign for us right now and I don't have any other announcements to make Meg or Peter am I good I'm going to hand it over to Ryan thanks here's how we'll do this we have until I think it's 10.45 to get your book signed and once you do get your book signed but we're going to do it in an orderly fashion and I'll tell you how we'll do it if you'd like to get your book signed we're going to go section by section and please line up on the stairs over there and Melinda will be down here in front so I think I'm going to set a timer for five minutes per section so if you are in this section here right to my right if you can get in line on the stairs go to the next section alright, thanks so much also we are giving you post-it notes so you can write your name to make it easy for Melinda to sign this so you can just write your name on the post-it note and we'll try to keep it moving so probably no selfies with Melinda unless it's really super thank you