"A Sea of Stories": A Conversation with 2003 ALAN Award Winners Norma Fox Mazer and Harry Mazer

Since 1974 the ALAN Award has recognized outstanding contributions to adolescent literature by means of a publisher, author, librarian, scholar, editor, or anyone whose gift to the ALAN community calls on the outside for recognition. For 2003 the ALAN Award co-winners are wife and husband, Norma Fox Mazer and Harry Mazer. Together or individually, the Mazers have published well above 50 noteworthy titles, mostly for young tribe Lori Atkins Goodson spoke with the co-winners (who chose to answer separately) by means of email:

Many young people who have said, "I've not at any time read a book I liked" changed their attitudes about reading when they read their first work by Norma Fox Mazer or Harry Mazer. on what account do you think that is?

Norma: I don't know. I'm real glad about it, though. Actually, I think lads respond to Harry's books upon one level because he's in like manner in touch with the stripling in himself and is able to deposit that out in a story. Okay, maybe the same can be said of the girl in me

Harry: I write because I'm excited abut something, a feeling or an idea about things that I'm trying to expres I write about troubl characters trying to find their way in a world they barely know. I write survival stories. In my lexicon, what story is not a survival story? Those are the stories that, one time they have engaged the reader, can't easily be bring aside.

Your collective well of useful stories never seems to go on dry. How do you explain that?

Norma: Luck? Work? Genetics? all of the above?

Harry: We live, all of us, in a sea of stories. Stories we're being told. Stories we count ourselves. Every day - with equal reason many moving, touching, god-awful stories. Norma and I toss stories back and forth all the time, at the table, without on the street, in bed at night. Is this individual for Norma? For me? For the sum of two units of us? We live in those stories. To live without stories, for us, is not to be alive.

Does censorship of YA lit continue to be a riddle or is the situation improving!

Norma: Improving? I doubt it. Without being pessimistic, I think there will always be that core of race who long to press us all into their be in possession of small, confined world, and there will always be those of us who resist.

Harry: The censors are always on the outside there. I don't know that they will at any time go away or even should. It's advantageous to know that there are family who take books so seriously they want to reduce to ashes them. Resisting censorship is part of the territory for all volume lovers, be they publishers, writers, parents, teachers or librarians. We ne to stand our surface of land There are more of us than there are of them.

You have written roughly 60 works separately and three or four together. by what means would you characterize the difference between writing together and writing separately?

Norma: When we're writing together, I can't earn as lost in the created world as when I'm alone. The dreaming is done more efficiently, if that's not a completely impossible and oxymoronic idea. in the way that that's a loss. But to balance it, there's the frolic of working together, although when we were writing our first work together, we snapped and bickered and disagreed a whole allotment and I was exasperated enough at the extremity to tell at least half a dozen family "I will never write a volume with that man again!" Ten years later, when our next to the first collaboration appeared, those half dozen remembered exactly what I'd said.

Harry: Writing for me is a actual mixed experience. I love the idea of the story. It's there, bubbling in my head. I regard with affection the voice of a character, on the contrary then language fails me. The words don't run easily. I resist writing the words. Are they right? Are they beneficial enough? Rub it out, erase. Start again. Language ensnares me The words sweep along or they don't flow. I don't write enough. I write too a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of I can't believe I'll at any time get the whole thing down upon paper. I get it done, on the other hand it's not easy.

When I write with Norma, little of this happens. The proces is different. We talk from one side the book, the characters, smooth some of the scenes. Then I write the draft and Norma revises it. The best part is when we sit down together to revise again. Sometimes, as it does when I'm working alone, the words are roiling around in my head, and Norma has to encourage me A little slap upon the back, an elbow, and the dam breaks, and I spit on the outside the words, come what may, and she writes them down. The work secures done without the blocks, the hesitations and doubts. In a word, working alone is hell. Collaboration is a joy

Copyright Assembly upon Literature for Adolescents -- National Council of Teachers of English Fall 2003

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