“That’s the way to work, Slam!” the coach called to me. “That’s the way!”
Yeah. Okay. Maybe that was the way to work it. Maybe if I could get my game right, all my game, on and off the court, I would get over.
The coach called a play for Jimmy and he tried to post me, to push me deep into the paint so he could use his height against me. It wasn’t going to happen. He pushed back, and when he couldn’t move me he turned and gave me a look. I didn’t say anything to him, but he knew who he had ran into, somebody too strong to be moved. He had ran into Slam.
Walter Dean Myers (1937–2014) was the 2012–2013 National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature. He was the critically acclaimed New York Times bestselling author of nearly one hundred books for children and young adults. His award-winning body of work includes Somewhere in the Darkness, Slam!, and Monster. Mr. Myers received two Newbery Honor medals, five Coretta Scott King Author Awards, and three National Book Award Finalist citations. In addition, he was the winner of the first Michael L. Printz Award.
Walter enjoyed a lifetime affair with books. As a youngster growing up in the vibrant streets of New York’s Harlem community, he loved to read. “Books took me, not so much to foreign lands or fanciful adventures,” he said, “but to a place within myself that I have been exploring ever since. The public library was just wonderful. I couldn’t believe my luck in discovering that what I enjoyed most—reading—was free.”
Walter was born in Martinsburg, West Virginia, in 1937, and had, by his own admission, led a charmed life. After the early death of his mother, he was sent to Harlem to live with family friends, the Deans. It was an experience that would forever shape his life.
Because of his speech problems, school was not always an easy experience for Walter. The fact that he took out his frustrations with his fists didn’t help, either. Many of his report cards suggested that he “doesn’t play well with others.” One teacher, noting his embarrassment in reading in front of the class, suggested that he write something himself using words he could pronounce clearly.
“I began writing little poems, and the rhythm of the poetry helped my reading,” Walter said. “Short stories soon followed the poetry and I found I liked telling stories. My writing was about the only thing I was praised for in school.”
College was beyond the financial means of the Dean family. Walter stopped going to high school and started hanging out in libraries and parks reading and writing until his seventeenth birthday. On that day, he joined the army, where he spent three long years.
After the army, Walter worked in several factories, the post office, construction, and clerical positions while writing as much as he could. He began publishing at age twenty-two, but his writing career took off when he won a contest sponsored by the Council on Interracial Books for Children. The winning piece would turn out to be his first book, Where Does the Day Go?
“I’ve always written about teenagers,” Walter said, “probably because my own teen years were so hectic. My first young adult book was Fast Sam, Cool Clyde, and Stuff. That book changed my life. I had no real education and few prospects until then. I needed something to validate myself. I needed to find value, and publishing gave me that value.”
Although Walter’s writing career was on its way, he went back to school to pursue a bachelor’s degree. “In my forties, I finally earned a degree from Empire State College, mostly to please my father, who didn’t understand much about the writing life,” explained Walter.
In addition to having written more than eighty-five books, Walter contributed to both educational and literary publications. He visited prisons, schools, and juvenile detention centers to speak to children, teachers, librarians, and parents.
“As a child it was noted that I ‘didn’t play well with others,’” he said. “Now I create my own ‘others’ in the form of characters, and I play quite well with them.”
To get Walter’s story firsthand, read Bad Boy: A Memoir (HarperCollins, 2001). You can also learn more about Walter’s life and work at www.walterdeanmyers.net.
AN INTERVIEW WITH WALTER DEAN MYERS
In 1996, Scholastic Press published Walter Dean Myers’s Coretta Scott King Award–winning novel about a seventeen-year-old basketball wonder named Greg “Slam” Harris. Slam! was also named an ALA Best Book for Young Adults and a New York Public Library Book for the Teen Age. The editors at Scholastic Paperbacks asked Walter Dean Myers to reflect on the book and on his career as a writer.
Q: Talented, confident, and a little rough around the edges, Slam is quite a character. Were you anything like him when you were seventeen?
A: I was a mess at seventeen. I had just dropped out of high school and joined the army without a clue as to what I would be doing with my life. I had confidence on the basketball court, but unlike Slam, none off.
Q: Slam seems like he’s totally in control of some aspects of his life—basketball—but not at all of others—his grades, temper, and friend Ice. How did Slam’s story come to you?
A: Having played basketball for most of my life, I’ve known a thousand guys like Slam. I’ve seen a few succeed, but so many fall by the wayside as the dreams they held, many totally unrealistic, fell apart. I think young people are not given much accurate information about life and their own expectations. Sometimes people hold out promises to young athletes, already knowing they won’t come true. Slam’s basketball talents were obvious because he had the opportunity to display them. His talents were carefully and individually considered, and he was given the chance to use whatever skills he had on the court. Off the court, he was no longer an individual talent trained to play a team sport, but someone who had to fit into a system without the benefit of a personal trainer or one-on-one consideration.
Q: Though this novel is about more than just sports, there’s no denying that Slam is a basketball man through and through. Growing up, did you play or take a particular interest in any sports?
A: I like any kind of competitive sport. Although at 6’2” I was drawn to basketball, I also enjoyed touch football, volleyball and, later in life, tennis. When I’m in London I’ll watch soccer matches. In Taiwan or Thailand I go to kickboxing matches, which I love, and in Mexico I attend jai alai matches.
Q: Slam makes an unexpected friend in Ducky, who despite his small size isn’t afraid to stand up for Slam. Have you ever had a close friendship with someone you never thought you would?
A: I sometimes make unexpected friends through books. People get to know me through my characters and occasionally, I will meet and be friendly with these people. A funny aspect of this is that people who know me through my books often understand more about me than people I’ve grown up with.
Q: Speaking of basketball, what’s your favorite team?
A: My favorite basketball team is the NEW YORK KNICKS!!
Q: What was it like growing up with a love of literature and a father who couldn’t read or write?
A: My father cleverly hid his lack of education. I didn’t know he couldn’t read, so it didn’t bother me until I was being published as an adult. We need the approval of our fathers and when mine never praised any of my work, I interpreted his silence as disapproval.
Q: Who were your role models growing up?
A: Like most black boys, I idolized sports heroes. Living in a period of segregation meant that black celebrities were forced to live in the same community in which the poor lived. The baseball player Jackie Robinson was often in my neighborhood, as was the boxer Joe Louis. Another baseball player, Willie Mays, often played stickball with neighborhood kids. Although the poet Langston Hughes did readings at my church, I was not that interested in him as a kid.
Q: You go on an annual trip to London for several weeks at a time. Why do you take this trip and how does it help with your writing process?
A: In London, I hear my native tongue being spoken in different accents and different rhythms, which I find fascinating. It makes me more aware of language and th
e different ways people express themselves. I will also see, during my visit to London, a dozen or more dramatic performances. I see how playwrights use language and structure for effect, and this increases my own awareness of my craft. It’s like an annual crash course in Communication Arts.
Q: How important is it for kids to be able to “see themselves” in books?
A: In any good literature the reader can identify with either the author’s characters or the situation created by the story. In this sense, it’s important for the young reader to find some entrée into the material. It’s far more important that children do not see themselves as being excluded from books. As a child who loved to read, I scarcely found stories that reflected who I was. The consequence, since I understood that books represented the values that our teachers wanted us to adopt, was my acceptance that I was not as valuable as those children whose lives were reflected in the books. This also affected my early writing. I wrote material similar to what I read. Since in my school we mostly read European authors, and especially British authors, my early attempts at style were weak copies of these authors. This changed for me drastically when I first read “Sonny’s Blues,” a short story by James Baldwin. Baldwin was not only writing about American blacks, he was writing about my neighborhood. I later had a chance to communicate this to Baldwin, and he said that he had experienced the same Europeanization of his writing and style and had felt the same sense of devaluation.
Q: You’ve probably been asked this a million times, but where do you get the ideas for your stories?
A: I think, ultimately, that story ideas come from the willingness to let the mind wander freely and the ability to then structure anything interesting that it encounters into a story. For example, I recently saw a Muslim woman on a bus. Her face was covered with the traditional veil and she had a small child in a stroller with her, no more than six or seven months old. The child’s hands were decorated with henna. The woman must have overheard me mentioning how beautiful the child was to my companion, because she turned the stroller so we could get a better look at her proud accomplishment. Immediately I began to imagine what the woman’s life was like, what her day had been like, and what she was thinking. Eventually she will be the subject of a story.
Q: You’ve collaborated with your son Christopher Myers on a number of projects. What is that process and overall experience like?
A: I’ve been lucky working with Chris. Besides respecting his work as an artist, I like him very much as a person. There is, however, still a father-son relationship to wade through. I’m more critical of his work than I am of other artists because he is my son. Our discussions are usually good and remarkably civil for the two headstrong people we are. If we have differences in opinion I’m usually the one who changes simply because it’s easier for me to do so.
Q: Do you do a lot of research before you write a book? What does that entail?
A: Most books require research of some kind. You want to be comfortable with the facts of a story even if those “facts” make up a fictional setting. For me to realistically recreate a setting I have to “own” that setting. I do timelines for my characters so I have an understanding of what they have seen, heard, and experienced so that I get to know them well enough to offer them to a reader.
Q: What is your writing routine?
A: I write five days a week, usually quite early in the morning. By “writing” I mean sitting at the computer and turning out pages for a book or story. If we amplify the definition of writing to include all those mental processes that go into the creation of a book, then I am “writing” fifteen hours a day, seven days a week.
Also by
WALTER DEAN MYERS
Fiction
THE BEAST
FALLEN ANGELS
THE GLORY FIELD
HARLEM SUMMER
SHADOW OF THE RED MOON
SOMEWHERE IN THE DARKNESS
SUNRISE OVER FALLUJAH
Nonfiction
ANTARCTICA:
JOURNEYS TO THE SOUTH POLE
AT HER MAJESTY’S REQUEST:
AN AFRICAN PRINCESS IN VICTORIAN ENGLAND
MALCOLM X: BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY
MUHAMMAD ALI: THE GREATEST
This book was originally published in hardcover by Scholastic Press in 1996.
Copyright © 1996 by Walter Dean Myers. All rights reserved. Published by Scholastic Inc. SCHOLASTIC, SCHOLASTIC PRESS, and associated logos are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Scholastic Inc.
This edition first printing, May 2008
Cover art by Tim O’Brien
Cover design by Steve Scott
e-ISBN 978-0-545-36105-7
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher. For information regarding permission, write to Scholastic Inc., Attention: Permissions Department, 557 Broadway, New York, NY 10012.
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