Hope Nation

by Hope Nation- YA Authors Share Personal Moments of Inspiration (retail) (epub)

  With a single phone call, the dreadful summer of 1991 turned. Gone was the wallowing and drinking coffee in my cubicle (I don’t even like coffee!), replaced by the competitor I always believed I was (Are you really going to let these people break you?).

  It was time for an attitude change. I didn’t wait for the editors to speak to me. I pitched stories to them. Linda Eberle, the paper’s graphic designer, was always friendly when I had to submit assignments, so I hung out in graphics a little more than in the cold newsroom. Linda taught me how to juggle (a skill I still have . . .). Slowly, the thaw began. Another reporter, Mark Beach, was huge into blues and jazz, and he started me on an appreciation of the music that has never left. And then there was the sports editor, Bill Fisher, with whom I spent several lunches talking sports. Our conversations were so good, he told me they belonged in the paper, and I wrote an essay for him.

  Most importantly, I went out and did the job, finding stories that were interesting but also sometimes hard. Dig into life. Learn about people. Don’t just see the world, but feel it . . . I flooded my editors with ideas. It turned out that because Lancaster was between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, an unusual amount of drugs were trafficked through this little, quiet town. As such, idyllic Lancaster County of trees and farmland had at that time the highest per capita rate of AIDS in Pennsylvania. I told my editors I wanted to write about it. They were reluctant because they did not want Lancaster reflected poorly, but ultimately I got to do the story.

  I went to the local AIDS clinic and interviewed about a half dozen patients, all of them emaciated, unhealthy, and clearly aware that they would soon die. I was twenty-two years old. Many of them were not much older, yet from years of drug use and the effects of a deadly disease killing them every day, they looked much older.

  Many of their stories were the same. They felt like outcasts. They felt like no one cared. They never believed there was hope for them. The word itself was so foreign, it was like it belonged to everyone but them. Some came from tough upbringings, but not all; others grew up rich. All ended up in the same place, convinced they would be dead within ten years—and all of them are almost certainly dead now. Most had a good sense of humor and even joked a little about what the diseases were doing to their bodies. As the patients told their stories, one said something that stayed with me. “Forget everything around me. I don’t blame anyone else. If I had loved myself more, I would have never been in this position. I would have never been here. If only I had loved myself more.”

  If only I had loved myself more. How profound is that?

  Later that summer, the Ku Klux Klan held a white supremacist rally in town. I asked to cover it, but my editors, fearing for my safety, wouldn’t let me near the rally, and instead of the biggest story in town, I got sent to write about college moving-in day. For reals.

  Certainly, there were people in the building who still treated me like Kryptonite. The editor, Dave Hennigan, never liked me, telling me when the summer ended that “there was more to the job than just giving a good interview.” Ouch. Earlier, that might have hurt, but by the end of the summer I didn’t care. People like him didn’t matter anymore, and it wasn’t because he was hard on me. I knew I had a lot of learning to do, and, news flash: The learning never stops.

  Yet I had already learned about focusing on the work (after all, that was why I was there), the good people and the good stories about people, lost and maybe forgotten, stories that maybe hadn’t been told before. Learning that I was maybe tougher than I thought and didn’t quit carried far more lasting value than the odd judgment of a guy I’d never see again in my life. William Raspberry’s inspirational words have always stayed with me. Find the people who take an interest in your success. Spend time with them. Learn from them.

  And from that lesson came another: Help people. Whenever I need a reminder, I just think back to the dreadful summer of 1991 and how I felt when nobody was willing to help me—and how everything changed when somebody did.

  DAVID LEVITHAN LIBBA BRAY ANGIE THOMAS ALLY CONDIE MARIE LU JEFF ZENTNER NICOLA YOON KATE HART GAYLE FORMAN CHRISTINA DIAZ GONZALEZ ATIA ABAWI ALEX LONDON HOWARD BRYANT ALLY CARTER ROMINA GARBER RENÉE AHDIEH AISHA SAEED JENNY TORRES SANCHEZ NIC STONE JULIE MURPHY I. W. GREGORIO JAMES DASHNER JASON REYNOLDS BRENDAN KIELY

  ALLY CARTER

  The Two Types of Secrets

  IN 2005 I BECAME A published author. That book, an adult work of “chick lit” called Cheating at Solitaire, isn’t even in stores anymore. It sold approximately ten copies (most of them to my mom), so it wasn’t exactly a huge professional success. But personally, it was a massive accomplishment, because it marked the moment when I became a published author—when I became the thing I’d wanted to be since I was twelve years old.

  Ask any author what question they get asked most often, and the winner may very likely be “Did you always want to be a writer?” or “What made you decide to be a writer?” For me, the answer is pretty simple.

  I grew up on a small farm outside a small town outside an even smaller, very rural community in Oklahoma. That’s home—always has been. Always will be. The nearest big city was Tulsa, so when I was in middle school and started reading a book set in Tulsa, I thought it was pretty cool—I’d never read a book set in a place I’d actually been before. When my dad saw me reading that old paperback copy of The Outsiders, he told me, “You know she’s from Tulsa, right?” and two things about that sentence totally blew my mind.

  First, that the book wasn’t just set in Tulsa—the author actually lived there. (I could have seen S. E. Hinton at Walmart! At the mall! I could have eaten a corn dog beside S. E. Hinton at the Tulsa State Fair!) This fact was simply amazing, because at that point in my life, I was pretty sure all books had been written by dead Europeans.

  But the second part of that sentence was the one I was still thinking about days and even weeks later: She’s from Tulsa. She.

  In hindsight, twelve-year-old me must have been pretty sexist, because it had never even occurred to me that S. E. Hinton might be a woman. And when I learned that she’d actually written The Outsiders when she wasn’t much older than I was . . . well, that was it. I was going to be an author. Why? Because that was something girls from Oklahoma could do.

  So that was what I was going to do.

  I just didn’t tell anyone.

  Ever.

  I mean no one. Not my friends. Not my teachers. Not even my sister. I’m pretty sure my mom figured it out, because she was an English teacher and I kept asking her writing questions and asking to borrow her word processor (the old-school precursor to a laptop), but it was still something I didn’t talk about.

  Now I talk about writing all the time. “I’m a writer” is something I end up saying almost every time I meet someone new. Or fill out a form. I put it on my taxes, for crying out loud. (And there’s nothing more official than taxes . . .) So I’m not exactly sure why wanting to be a writer was something I was so secretive about so early on.

  Maybe I didn’t need one more thing to make me stand out at school—one more reason for kids to label me a kiss-up or a snob because I needed to get good grades and all the teachers knew me because my mom worked just down the hall.

  Maybe I didn’t want any of the extremely hardworking grown-ups I knew to hear about this far-flung fantasy profession and tell me that writers don’t make very much money (which most don’t), or that there was no way I would ever meet someone who could help me get published (which I didn’t). Or that it was time for me to grow up and get a practical dream—that my dream was silly or stupid or frivolous or one of a dozen other adjectives that kids, especially girls, are taught to fear at a very young age.

  Maybe I didn’t want someone to tell me not just that I shouldn’t do it but that I couldn’t do it. If someone had read one of my essays or looked at my grades or judged my work ethic and found me wanting . . . If just one person had told me that
I didn’t have what it took . . .

  If those discouraging words had hit me at a bad moment during a bad day, that might have killed my dream right then and there. It might have killed it before it had really had a chance to begin.

  I wasn’t a published author yet and I was far from an expert on publishing, but I was the world’s foremost authority on me, and I knew that about myself. I knew that I don’t just take criticism—I take it to heart. And this dream was so tender and fragile and precious that it wouldn’t have taken much to kill it.

  So when I was twelve years old, I decided to become a writer.

  And for probably a decade, I didn’t tell a soul.

  When I graduated from high school and left my small farm and small town and small community for a significantly larger university, I still kept my dream to myself. Sure, by that point, a friend or two might have figured it out, but my dream was still just that: a dream. Every semester my school would release a new schedule and I’d look longingly at the course catalogue, at the dozens of writing classes that I really wanted to take. But couldn’t. Didn’t.

  Because even though my writing dream was still alive inside me, a part of me was still terrified of letting it out—of watching it die.

  But the good news was that this was about the time I realized that you don’t actually need a writing degree to do this for a living. You don’t have to be a writing major to check out those textbooks from the library. You don’t have to sign up for a program or get assignments from professors or belong to a club or a critique group.

  If I wanted to be a writer, all I had to do was to write.

  And there was no one who could stop me. Or judge me. Or tell me I was making a huge mistake.

  So that’s what I did. At night and on weekends. On my own and largely in secret. I was able to get a degree in agricultural economics, a very practical field, all while keeping my (seemingly impractical) dream safe and sound inside me, where no one could hurt it.

  I did this through college.

  I did this through graduate school.

  I did this for years while working at my very practical day job (that I’d gotten thanks to my very practical degree).

  I kept writing because, as the saying goes, that’s what writers do. But it was more than that.

  I kept writing because that was my dream, and dreams matter because of what you do about them—not because of what you say about them.

  For more than a decade, I didn’t talk about writing. I just wrote. For more than a decade, this was my secret dream, and that made all the difference.

  Another question that writers get all the time is “What do you do when you aren’t writing? What do you do for fun?” Well, I, personally, love to cook. All kinds of things. I’ll cook pretty much anything, but I’ve recently gotten into making homemade breads and hot rolls and pizza dough and all kinds of fun things that require yeast. Even though I’ve always loved to cook, it’s taken me a while to work up the nerve to tackle these things, because yeast is really, really tricky.

  Why? Well, you see, unlike most of the things in your pantry, yeast is alive. It might sit dormant in a package for months or years, but if you put it in some warm water—maybe feed it a little sugar or honey—it will activate. Pretty soon those little brown specks will start to grow and bubble, and if you do it just right, they can turn plain old flour into really yummy things. Which is awesome, but also terrifying. Because yeast is alive, which means it can also die. If the water is too hot, or you waited too long, or a whole host of other problems.

  Hopes and dreams, I’ve decided, are a lot like yeast. They can sit dormant for a long time—years, maybe. Decades, even. And then with a little heat and a little nourishment, if you’re lucky and smart and work with them just right, they might grow and expand and bubble—they might turn ordinary things into far better things.

  I don’t know what your thing is. Maybe, like me, it’s writing. Or maybe it’s science or math, music or dance. Maybe you dream of safer, happier communities or better schools or a world without bullies. Maybe your dream is one you can activate right now—start providing a little heat and a little food and a little time. Maybe this is your time to make something bubble up and grow.

  But if it’s not . . . If you’re afraid that it might not be the right time for your dream and it might need to stay secret a little while longer, then that’s okay too, because, like yeast, hopes and dreams can die along the way if we take them out under the wrong conditions or in the wrong environment or at the wrong time.

  I think I knew that in middle school when I read The Outsiders and my dream was born. I think I knew that in college when I was taking agricultural economics classes during the day and writing up crazy stories at night. I knew it every time I scribbled frantically in a notebook and someone asked what I was working on and I said, “Nothing.”

  And I think a lot of you know it too.

  For the last few weeks I’ve been taking writing questions from teens all over the world for a project that I’m working on. Some of the questions are what you’d expect. (“Did you always want to be a writer?” “Where do you get your ideas?” “How do you get your book published?”) But I’ve been surprised by how many of the questions are about exactly this.

  “What should I do if I show my writing to someone and they laugh at me?”

  “Were your parents supportive of your writing, and what should I do if mine aren’t?”

  “When do you know if you should just give up?”

  “I live in a really small town, and no one here can help me publish my novel. Should I even try?”

  It’s so incredibly easy for teens to feel powerless. Hopeless. Silly for dreaming of bigger or better or different. In many, many ways it probably always looks faster and easier and less scary just to do things the way they’ve always been done, to just follow the clear, obvious path.

  Sometimes the only way to keep our hopes and dreams alive is to also keep them secret—dormant for just a little while. Sometimes the most powerful things we have are our secrets.

  There’s a line in my book Don’t Judge a Girl by Her Cover that says that “there are two types of secrets: the kind you want to keep in, and the kind you don’t dare to let out.” This is by far the most-quoted line I’ve ever written. I see it on Twitter and Tumblr and Instagram all the time, and the more I think about it, the more it makes sense that this is the line that most resonates with readers.

  For most of us, our hopes and dreams are that second type of secret. They take root inside us first, sometimes really deep down. And sometimes the scariest thing in the world is to let them out.

  Sometimes—for some people—our secrets are the most powerful things we have.

  Sometimes—for some hopes—we need times of quiet stillness for them to be cultivated and grow.

  I don’t know what your hope is or if you feel the need to keep it secret. Or why. But I do know that you are the world’s foremost authority on you, and if keeping your dream secret—if keeping your dream private—is the best way to shelter and protect it and let it grow, then that’s okay. And no one can take your dream away if you don’t let them.

  But remember: that doesn’t mean now isn’t the time to work, to prepare, to plan and collect the skills that you’re going to need down the line. Because your time is coming. It’s up to you to decide when to bring your dream out into the light, but it is also up to you to provide the heat and the nourishment. It’s up for you to be ready.

  There’s a power in secrets. Secret identities. Secret missions.

  Secret dreams.

  And no matter what your dream or your secret might be, I can’t wait to see how it turns out.

  DAVID LEVITHAN LIBBA BRAY ANGIE THOMAS ALLY CONDIE MARIE LU JEFF ZENTNER NICOLA YOON KATE HART GAYLE FORMAN CHRISTINA DIAZ GONZALEZ ATIA ABAWI ALEX LONDON HOWARD BRYANT ALLY CARTER ROMINA GARBER RENÉE
AHDIEH AISHA SAEED JENNY TORRES SANCHEZ NIC STONE JULIE MURPHY I. W. GREGORIO JAMES DASHNER JASON REYNOLDS BRENDAN KIELY

  ROMINA GARBER

  Born in Argentina, Made in America: The Immigrant Identity

  WHEN I WAS FIVE YEARS old, my parents uprooted our family from Argentina to the United States.

  I can still remember the terror I felt before my first day of kindergarten in Miami, Florida. My most pressing concern was how I would tell my teacher when I needed to use the bathroom.

  Yet the instant I walked inside the classroom, worry gave way to awe: My classmates welcomed me into their world with shiny stickers, colorful candies, and greeting cards, and everywhere I looked were paper hearts and flowers and chocolates. I knew then my parents were right: This was the American dream.

  I came home that afternoon in a delighted daze, harboring my delicious loot and gushing to my mom about how happy everyone was to have me here—so happy, in fact, that they’d decided to throw a huge party in my honor.

  She didn’t have the heart to tell me the truth.

  It was February 14 . . . Valentine’s Day.

  On my second day of school, I was removed from regular classes and placed in the English for Speakers of Other Languages program so I could learn English. Until then, I’d been used to impressing the grown-ups around me—my parents were always sharing anecdotes from when I was a year and a half because by then I could speak Spanish in full sentences—but in this new country, for the first time, I fell behind.

  I rejoined my classmates when I was eight, but I had trouble reading, and I grew anxious anytime it was my turn to recite a passage in class. One day, my third-grade teacher, Ms. Balaban, noticed my struggle, and I’ve never forgotten what she did.