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.

We took a two-week trip to Norway! It was a gorgeous and unforgettable time. In the picture above, Heather, Lucy, Ingrid and I are on a bluff overlooking Geirangerfjord (which I’m told is the fjord that some scenes in Frozen are based on?) Fun fact: the rainy night before this picture was taken, one of our windshield wipers FLEW OFF THE CAR in the middle of the downpour! Ack! A dicey situation, since we were driving on narrow mountain roads with precipitous drops, but Heather (who was driving) white-knuckled it through.

Here are more pictures:

One of the best things about the trip is that Heather has lots of family in Norway, some of whom I’ve met when they’ve visited Chicago. We got to meet up with Arne (that’s the first picture below, at the top of the ski jump in Lillehammer from the 1994 Olympics), and Lars Erik and his wife Ane had us all over their house for a shrimp and crawfish dinner (that’s the second picture), attended by the rest of the family—including Kristin who works for the Norwegian National Museum, and took us on a guided tour of it!

We also met a troll atop a mountain in Bergen. Below that, the girls and I hanging out near the scenic wharf in Bergen:

In Oslo and in Bergen, I was delighted to find copies of Bride of the Tornado at the Outland bookstores. I signed the copies and talked to the very kind and supportive staff. Here we are at Outland in Bergen:

In Bergen, it turned out our hotel was right across the street from the church where Heather’s grandfather was pastor, long ago. We went in and checked it out:

Speaking of churches, we visited a few of the famous wooden “stave” churches, which have a strangely witchy beauty.

In Oslo, Lucy and I visited Vigeland Sculpture Park, where there are more than 200 sculptures in granite, bronze, and iron of people in various curious poses. Photographs don’t do it justice; the sheer number and variety of statues is overwhelming.

And there’s so much else we did, like visiting the Edvard Munch Museum and the Norwegian Folk Museum, taking a boat ride in the fjord, meeting and hanging out with Heather’s extended family, fantastic food, beautiful and rewarding hikes, nights in a cabin in a quiet isolated valley or near a fjord . . . I really loved this trip! Goodbye for now, Norway!