Me at Maw Books!

Natasha at Maw Books Blog interviewed me here. Scroll down to the day before for a review of Losing Kei.

What’s in a Name? – Guest Post by Danette Haworth

One of the first things that attracted me to Danette Haworth’s debut novel, Violet Raines Almost Got Struck by Lightning, was the title.  Names of books – and characters and places – are important.  Here, as part of Danette’s WOW blog book tour, she writes about how she came up with the names in her novel:

 

What’s in a Name?

Danette Haworth

 

 

Any of us who are parents know how important a name is. A name has the power to shape the impression others have of us before they even meet us. Would you ever believe that someone named Bill Bailey would be a rock star? What if his name was Axl Rose? Could Eleanor Gow rock the cover of Sports Illustrated? She did, under the name Elle Macpherson. Who would you be more interested in: Paul Hewson or Bono, Cherilyn Sarkisian or Cher, Mary Cathleen Collins or Bo Derek?

 Planning your summer vacation? Why not visit Square Butte, Montana, or Elephant Butte, New Mexico? If those don’t sound good, you can go to Hell—Michigan, that is, about an hour west of Detroit.

 The fact is that which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, but if it were called, for instance, limburger, we might not ever partake of the fragrance; the name alone would scare us off.

 That’s a great deal of power given to us as authors. Being wordsmiths, it’s our job to bend words to serve the function we assign them. Character names and place names must do more than identify their antecedent; they must give us insight, whether subtle or blatant, for whom and what we’re reading about.

 Take Scarlett O’Hara of Gone With the Wind, for example. Scarlett was originally named Pansy, which even in the 1930s carried undertones such as sissy or effeminate. On the other hand, scarlet is red, the color of passion and a keyword in one of the best-selling novels of all time, The Scarlet Letter. With its implications of sex and forbidden love, Scarlett proved to be the perfect name for Margaret Mitchell’s southern vixen.

 All fine and good for Margaret Mitchell, you say, but how do I go about choosing names for my characters? Good question! Lots of people recommend starting with a book of baby names, but make sure you get to know your character first. When I wrote Violet Raines, I have to admit, her name just came to me; it was everyone else’s names I had to conjure up.

 Violet’s best friend lives in an old farmhouse and is the eldest of four girls. This girl has lots of chores and rules to follow, so I wanted her to have an old-fashioned name, something that would make her sound loyal, hard-working, and clean cut. As I gleaned the baby names, Charlotte stood out to me because I could nickname her Lottie, and that sounded just right to me. (I had no idea then that her full name would come into play later in the story, but that’s how fitting the name turned out to be!)

The new girl is pretty, blonde, and tall. She’s also from the city. For her, I wanted a soft name, no hard consonants, yet it had to have a contemporary ring to it to match the character’s personality. But now there were a few conditions to her name: it couldn’t end in ie, because I already had Lottie and Eddie (who came with his name); it had to have more than two syllables because Lottie and Eddie already took that rhythm, and even Violet sounds like a two-syllable word. It couldn’t begin with V, L, E, or R. Finally, the name Melissa leaped out at me from the baby books—soft, contemporary, pretty, and three-syllables—perfect!

 Last names were challenging, too. They had to provide rhythm, variety, and character. Nothing better than the white pages for last names. That’s how I came up with Violet Raines, Lottie Townsend, Eddie Brandon, and Melissa Gold.

 Spend time on place names, too, even place names that don’t have a big role in your story. The grocery store in Violet Raines was originally Parsley’s; I changed it to Parker’s after reading the story aloud. Parker’s is just easier to say.

 Violet lives in Mitchell Hammock. The town needed a name to denote its riverside location, yet it had to have a small town sound, something with a southern ring to it. (That’s why I didn’t use Riverside!) I resisted Mitchell Hammock at first; it’s actually the name of a road north of my area. I didn’t want to use real names because I wanted to put Violet’s neighborhood together the way I saw it in my imagination. Research showed me that Mitchell Hammock existed only as a road. There may have been a hammock called Mitchell at one time, but my search engines didn’t uncover it!

 My mom tells several different stories for how she came up with my name. These are big, grand stories involving people we don’t know and odd settings. One of the more boring stories is that she found my name in a book of uncommon names. “I wanted something French,” she says when she tells this version. Somehow, I believe her.

Into the Wardrobe with Me!

And here I am talking about children’s literature.

The Surprise

For some reason I have it in my head that Japan is big on family values, but loyalty to the group ( office co-workers, teammates, etc.) seems to trump family obligations.  To wit, yesterday was my daughter’s sports festival.  This is generally a family affair, and one of the few times when you actually see fathers at the deaf school.  This year we were thinking that Lilia’s father might actually get to see her dashing toward the finish line in her wheelchair, but our son had a baseball game on the same day.  Also, my husband was asked to be an umpire for the game.  Of course I wanted us all be to be together at the sports festival, but I understood that my son wanted to play in this game, and that the team expected him to be there. (He already missed one game because of YMCA Nature camp, which I’d signed him up for long in advance.) So we split up.  I went with Lilia to her sports festival, and my husband went with our son to his baseball game. I figured I’d be sitting there alone on the blue plastic tarp, but guess who showed up?  My mother-in-law! I hadn’t told her about the event (I don’t even have her phone number and I don’t know where she lives), but I guess she heard from her daughter.  It was nice to have her there.  I find that since we are no longer living together, I can be extremely magnanimous: “Lilia, tell Obaachan ‘thank you’ for the huge bag of junk food that you would otherwise not be allowed to eat!” Lilia was pretty happy to see her beloved grandmother, as well.

And another Interview…

Cristy Burne, former JET and author of the forthcoming children’s book Takeshita Demons, interviewed me on her blog. You can read the exchange here.

A Diary of an Ordinary Day in Yokohama

Last weekend I had the chance to hang out with Holly Thompson in Yokohama.   Holly discussed her essay “Two Versions of Immersion” at the SWET event honoring Call Me Okaasan. In her essay, she writes a bit about how her son was bullied in public school in Japan, but she assured us that he is now a happy college student, thriving in his new multicultural environment.  Holly contributed a short story to my first anthology, The Broken Bridge, and is the author of Ash, a wonderful novel set in Japan, and a picture book, The Wakame Gatherers, which features a bicultural family (white mother/Japanese dad).

Here, she shares a typical day in her adopted city:

All days start with laundry. I start the wash as I shower and dress, then hang the clothes by 7, the poles and plastic pegs on the laundry balcony still damp with dew. I eat a quick cereal breakfast while glancing at newspapers, go over plans for the day with my husband and daughter, and walk to the nearest train station in our Yokohama neighborhood, stopping at the local bakery for one of their combo sandwiches with sections of different fillings—chicken salad, pumpkin with raisins, burdock root and carrot, cucumber and egg. By 7:30 I board the train at the door that will let me off ten minutes later precisely in front of the down escalator at my transfer station. The crowd at my transfer is thick—students, office workers, laborers. I thread my way through the station and up a shopping street to another station. I catch a second train crammed with high school students and their large gym equipment and musical instrument bags; when I disembark a few stops down the line, I am in a sea of students headed to nearby schools.

 

At the university, all is still quiet though; few students take first-period classes. At 8:50 I teach a composition class. The new term has just begun; we read a descriptive essay, do pre-writing exercises, and review guidelines for typing a composition, including pointers such as where the Tab key is; despite the fact that all my students have achieved 500 TOEFL scores, few have ever written a composition in English. Second period is another advanced English elective—creative writing poetry. We workshop list poems they wrote for homework and go over basic elements of poetry, then I introduce them to narrative poems. We read Donald Hall’s “Maple Syrup” which requires too much explanation of vocabulary—cobweb, root cellar, saphouse, vat; I madly draw pictures all over the board, and the talk of sugaring makes me miss New England acutely. I assign them Gary Soto’s “Oranges” to read for homework. During lunch I have a cup of tea in my office, eat my combo sandwich, answer questions from students who drop by, and briefly Facebook chat with my son at university in New York. Third period I teach an advanced discussion class focusing on a Pacific War incident. By 2:30 I am finished teaching. For the next two hours I do prep work, then by 4:30 I leave the university.

 

On the return trip I stop at a stand for vegetables and fruit, and a grocery store for minced chicken, ginger root, and pickled eggplant. I am heading to the U.S. for a conference the next day, and I want a Japanese dinner. When I reach our house I find my daughter home, her gymnastics practice having been canceled because her coaches are competing at a meet. She and I talk about our days then we each put on running gear for a quick run. A teenager, she chooses a different route from me. The bats are already out, turning and dipping above my head as I jog through the park in the dusk with a few other runners and dog walkers.

 

Back home, my daughter starts the rice in the rice cooker and grates the ginger for our minced chicken and leek main dish. I prefer brown rice, but she, having attended Japanese elementary school, prefers pure white rice. We make spinach with sesame seeds and soy sauce, and put the pickled eggplant in a small bowl. It is a simple meal, but a family favorite. She and I eat together, not waiting for my husband who is working late. Except for our milk glasses, all of our dishes have been made by my husband, a weekend potter since we moved to Japan. After dinner my daughter is on the phone with a friend—switching lazily back and forth from English to Japanese, as they go over a school assignment.

 

When my husband gets home, we talk as he eats, then I disappear to pack and prepare for my conference—printing out the story I will read, the story I will have critiqued, the novel draft that I will be going over with a mentor I have been assigned. I don’t look forward to the jetlag, or the heavy food, but I’m eager to be at a conference with like-minded English-speaking writers, to be in rooms full of fiction writers.

 

Later my husband and I go over details—the neighborhood association meeting he needs to attend in my place, our daughter’s schedule, the vitamins I am to pick up in the U.S., the eggplant seedlings I want him to water. I settle into bed nervous as always whenever I will be across oceans from family members, but content with anticipation for the conference.

 

And then I remember that the laundry is still hanging outside, gathering the evening dampness.

Call Me Okaasan at Black and (A)Broad

Also, check out this review of Call Me Okaasan.

Violet Raines Almost Got Struck by Lightning – Book Review

 ”When Eddie B. dared me to walk the net bridge where we’d seen an alligator and another kid got bit by a coral snake, I wasn’t scared – I just didn’t feel like doing it right then.” So begins this mid-grade novel by first-time author Danette Haworth.  From the get-go, I was drawn in by Violet’s voice. Here’s a girl with spunk and sass. Violet lives in Florida, which is kind of a mecca for people from cold northern climes like Michigan. Growing up in the Western part of the state, where in winter the snow drifted up to the roof of our house, we always dreamed about Florida. So it’s no surprise that the new girl from Detroit, Michigan, who moves into Violet’s neighborhood has already been to Disney World.

This new girl, Melissa, is the same age as Violet and her best friend Lottie. But Melissa is more into make-up and movie magazines, while Violet loves to run wild in the great out-of-doors. One thing I really like about this book besides Violet’s voice is that the characters spend a lot of time outside. They gather bugs and explore hollow trees. They catch fish and then gut them and fry them. There is no mention of video games or cell phones or computers, which makes me think that this story takes place in the past. However, I hope it encourages modern readers to step outside their screen doors and take a look.

According to her bio, Danette Haworth grew up in a military family, and has lived in Turkey and England.  Sounds like she’s got plenty of material for her next book. Now she lives in Florida, the lightning capital of the U.S.A. where there are indeed alligators and coral snakes.

I was first attracted to this book because of its title.  I’ve asked Danette to write a little about how she came up with it, and the importance of proper nouns, and I’ll be posting that in a day or two.

A Winning Weekend

I spent most of the weekend in Tokyo attending and participating in writerly events. On Friday, I made my way to the Tokyo Women’s Plaza for the monthly event of SCBWI. I was awarded a plaque for my Magazine Merit Award for Fiction. and then listened to a presentation by literary agent Laura Rennert. I got to sit by Laura at dinner, too, and hear all about the film premier of the movie made of her husband’s novel. (That would be Rain Fall by Barry Eisler.)

Yesterday was the lauch party for Call Me Okaasan, sponsored by SWET. Shortly before leaving for the event, I learned that the book was named the winner in both the Parenting/Family and Anthology categories of the 2009 Next Generation Indie Book Awards AND that my novel Losing Kei was a finalist in the multicultural fiction category.

I thought that the event went quite well, by the way, especially since a little over a week before, no one had signed up for the dinner. I was a bit a panicked, but we wound up with a respectable number of attentive guests.  Leza Lowitz, Angela Turzynski-Azimi and Holly Thompson read from and discussed their contributions to the book, and then we had bentos (elaborate boxed dinners).  A big thanks to Kathy and any other readers of this blog who made the effort to show up!!

Also thanks to Jennifer for her lovely post on Call Me Okaasan which you can read here.

Review at Collecting Leaves…

And continuing our virtual book tour, here’s another thoughtful review of Call Me Okaasan.

Contributor Stacy Lewis also blogged about her favorite essays here.