It helps to have interesting friends! My high school pal Kathleen is married to a tall ship captain, Jamie. (In both senses: he is the captain of a tall ship, and also literally tall.) He helms the Manitou, a replica of an 1800s schooner sailing out of Traverse City, Michigan. A week ago Heather and I took Lucy and Ingrid for an overnight sail on the Manitou, and I highly recommend it! (You can book your own trip here.)

It was a twenty-four hour trip, sailing out on Friday afternoon and coming back Saturday afternoon. We particularly enjoyed how passengers were invited to participate in some of the physical work on board such as hauling ropes to raise the sails—it makes you feel like you’re part of the crew! In the galley, the chef Lexi made delicious breakfast, lunches, dinner, and snacks, and I was surprised at the elaborate meals she managed to create in such a small space. The cabins were similarly cozy:

It was fun and relaxing to hang out with Jamie and Kathleen and the crew, as well as all the other passengers. There’s plenty of time to chat, and the vibe was very chill. Relaxing under the stars at night was a treat. (Living in the city, I don’t often get to see so many stars and the Milky Way . . . plus four shooting stars!) Captain Jamie gave some talks that helped us understand the history of the boat and the history of the area. We sailed to Power Island, and hiking around there was a great way to break up the trip. Here’s Jamie and Lucy on the island:

Kathleen and I have known each other since we were freshmen in high school. We even went to the Homecoming dance together! Here we are, then and now:

As I wrap this post, I recall that the very first post of this blog mentions Kathleen and Jamie—when they came to Chicago on his then-current ship, The Pride of Baltimore II, and Heather and I took our niece and nephew Freya and Theo onto it. As I read that old post, I’m struck at how much has changed since I started this blog in 2008. Freya and Theo are both adults now. Back then, I was in my band Brilliant Pebbles, and most of the post is about that—being in that band had been such a huge part of my life back then! That was before Lucy was born, and before Ingrid was born, and none of my books had come out yet, and I hadn’t yet even conceived of the 90-Second Newbery Film Festival. And of course so much more.

So much has changed in the first sixteen years of this blog. I wonder what will change in the next sixteen years?

It’s the first LIVE show of the Secrets of Story podcast! We recorded it at the Book Stall bookstore in Winnetka, IL, with a live audience mostly of folks from the North Shore SCBWI (Society of Children’s Books Writers and Illustators). Thanks to Robert Macdonald and the staff of the Book Stall for hosting us, to Andrew Atienza for the ace recording and production, to Anny Rusk and everyone in SCBWI for putting the event together, and to Ruth Spiro for the picture above!

In this episode, Matt Bird and I join his wife Betsy Bird, who is a famous children’s librarian with the influential kidlit blog A Fuse #8 Production and an author of children’s books in her own right, most recently of A Long Road to the Circus. I met Matt through Betsy, actually—she contacted me after she noticed this goofball Newbery Medal-related rant I wrote on my blog back in the day, and soon after she interviewed me on Fuse #8. After that, our friendship was off to the races!

Here Matt, Betsy, and I discuss different techniques of how to represent the experience of childhood in writing. Matt argues that novels that feature truly authentic kids are by definition not children’s books, which is just the first of the many hot takes in this episode. Folks, it’s a banger, and you can hear it here:

Wait, did I say there were hot takes? Yes! You’ll hear claims that “Beverly Cleary isn’t really on Ramona’s side,” that Diary of a Wimpy Kid is a deceptively sophisticated and multivalent text, and how kids nowadays don’t seem to vibe as much with the classic “unlikeable” characters in books like Harriet the Spy and From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. We’ll bring in examples of representations of childhood from sources as varied as Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Louis Sachar’s Sideways Stories from Wayside School, Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, Auberon Waugh’s autobiography Will This Do?, Annie Barrows’ Ivy and Bean books, Daniel Handler’s recent memoir And Then? And Then? What Else? (which I recently reviewed for the Wall Street Journal), and more. We talk about kids’ flexible sense of truth and reality, their generously cartoonish sense of the possible, their attraction to weirdness and arbitrariness, their comfort and perhaps even preference for a whiplash switching of tones, and so much more!

This is an all-time great episode with a guest who really knows her stuff (and knows how to keep Matt and me from fighting). Give it a listen!

It’s another episode of my podcast with Matt Bird, “The Secrets of Story”! This time we have on guest Douglas A. Burton, who wrote a book about storytelling structure called The Heroine’s Labyrinth. You can listen to the episode here:

So what’s the Heroine’s Labyrinth book all about? Well, we’ve all heard about “The Hero’s Journey” structure, in which the hero typically leaves home, ventures out into a wild world of adventure, makes allies and enemies, undergoes some crisis, defeats a powerful villain, and returns home having changed. (This hero can be male or female or whatever; it’s just a structure.)

But something bothered Doug Burton about the Hero’s Journey. He noticed that some stories that we know and love, whether they be Oscar winners like Everything Everywhere All At Once, blockbusters like Titanic, cartoons like Tangled and Frozen, or classics like Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre don’t really follow the Hero’s Journey formula. Yeah, maybe you can contort or misrepresent their structures into a Hero’s Journey scheme, but it doesn’t feel like a natural fit.

So how are the stories of Little Red Riding Hood, Dorothy Gale, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Clarice Starling, and Bella Swan different than the “hero’s journey” stories of Luke Skywalker, Indiana Jones, Conan the Barbarian, and such? Doug contends that they follow pattern that he identifies as “The Heroine’s Labyrinth.” (And again, that’s just the name of the structure. The heroine doesn’t have to be female. Movies like The Shawshank Redemption, Total Recall, Fight Club, The Truman Show, and many others are more accurately described by the Heroine’s Labryinth rather than the Hero’s Journey.)

The thing I liked best about Doug’s book is that he makes a lot of bold, specific claims about what constitutes a Heroine’s Labyrinth story. There’s lots of “news you can use” for writers. Just as the Hero’s Journey has specific tropes like the Refusal of the Call, the Belly of the Beast, the Special Weapon, etc., the Heroine’s Labyrinth has its own concepts like the Masked Minotaur, the Sacred Fire, the Captivity Bargain, and more.

Intrigued? I definitely recommend this book. I’ve bought it for other writer friends as a gift. You can get your own copy here, and of course you can listen to Doug describe his original and compelling ideas in discussion with Matt and me on the podcast here.