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And I love what’s happening in young adult literature, because it’s evolving so fast. It’s still in its infancy, I think. There’s so much that a writer can do with subject matter and with style. We just don’t have the kind of literary expectations that adult writers do. So that’s where I really wanted to concentrate and I think it was just dumb luck that I found my voice there. When I first started I was writing young adult literature, but there really wasn’t much of a market.… Fortunately I was able to stay in it long enough for that market to come back.

AE: What made you decide to write about gay teens?
JP: I did not choose to write a young adult lesbian love story. It was really my editor who came to me and said, “Why don’t you write a young adult lesbian love story?”

AE: Was this just in conversation?
JP: It was just in casual conversation….We were just having lunch, and we were talking about our families. She was going to marry her longtime boyfriend finally, after they had lived together for ten years, and Sherri and I…had just celebrated…our 25th anniversary. And Megan said, “Well, why don’t you write me a young adult lesbian love story?” And I said, “Are you crazy? Are you insane?” I said, “Would you publish that?” She said, “Absolutely. I would publish that if it was good.”

AE: How was Keeping You a Secret received?
JP: Even before it was released I started getting hundreds and hundreds of emails. I just never realized what a hunger there was for the literature.

AE: So kids knew the book was coming out and were writing to you before they had read it?
JP: Well, there were advance copies, and they were hearing about it, and they were passing around the reviewer copies. That was even before the book was released. Once the book came out I just got thousands of letters, I could not believe it. It kind of gave my writing a higher purpose, I think. Kind of a greater calling. And I worked through all my fears about doing it, because it’s just important. It’s important to get that literature out there…. I did have fears about being categorized as a gay author…and I would be expected to do more and more of that kind of literature, but I find that I really want to. I look at what we have out there, and we have so many stories that aren’t being told.

AE: What was it like being nominated for a National Book Award?
JP: It was a blast. It was so fun! That whole thing was like a Hollywood premiere…. I could not believe it. It was so incredible. It really was an amazing—it was a big deal to have that book so publicly acknowledged at that high a level. I just couldn’t believe it. I still don’t believe it.

The thing is I was sitting there at the awards ceremony, and Sherri and I both wore tuxes…and as I was sitting there and they were announcing the winner I was just thinking to myself, “oh, please please I don’t want to win, please don’t call my name,” because where do you go as a writer after you win the National Book Award? What could I aspire to after that? So I was so happy to lose. My publisher wasn’t very happy that I lost, but I don’t care. Everybody was so disappointed, yet I was cheering on the inside. All I could think was, but wait till you see my next book….

AE: Tell me about your next book, Between Mom and Jo, which is about a boy who has two lesbian mothers and will be published in 2006.
JP: I wanted to look at same-sex marriage and relationships from the child’s point of view…. I think a lot of times it’s more of a burden on them than we think it is.… So I have this story about a boy with two moms, and he’s put in this position where he has to choose between them. And…the one that he feels closest to is not his biological mom…. On a universal kind of level, it’s a divorce story, and it’s about parents getting over that drama…to make sure that what they do for that child in the long term is the right thing.

AE: And after that you have a book of lesbian erotica for teens? This sounds really adventurous.
JP: (Laughs) How far can I take this literature? There were books out last year that had fairly graphic sex—

AE: Heterosexual sex?
JP: Yeah, it’s always heterosexual sex…. With our literature it’s always, well, the waves wash in and you just have to imagine what happens. I thought, well what if we don’t have to imagine what happens? What if we really did have a graphic sex scene? Of course, for me it would be invested in a love relationship…. And so I was working on…some short stories that are called “grl2grl,” so it’s about all kinds of girl-to-girl relationships. The feature story is one where the girls actually have a sexual relationship, and it’s for the first time. It’s very graphic, it goes through the whole thing. I’m actually using the “C” word, you know. (laughs) So I thought, I don’t know if my publisher’s going to be able to handle this. But you know what? They didn’t have a problem with the graphic sex; they had more of a problem with, “Oh, short stories are really hard to sell.”

AE: But Little, Brown has decided to publish the short stories anyway?
JP: Right. It’ll be a couple of years yet before those come out…. The other thing with this literature is that it’s not only for gay teens, for lesbian teens, because straight readers are reading these books too. And I don’t think publishers would be putting out these books if there wasn’t really a viable market out there…. Now we have GSAs, and so many straight kids are allies, or they have friends who are gay or families who are gay, and they like these books…. I’ve always felt that I was kind of suspended between these two worlds, the straight world and the gay world…. I need to have more trust and faith that readers will read…deeply enough to find their own resonance in these stories, and they do. It’s not just for gay teens anymore.

AE: What do you mean when you say that you’ve felt suspended between straight and gay worlds?
JP: Well, I’ve always sort of had this awareness that I’m writing these books for mainstream, that they have to appeal to the mainstream…and so I’ve always kind of had this awareness about oh, is this too gay? Will readers actually understand what this is about? And some of my discussions with my editor are kind of on that level.

AE: You’ve said that in Far From Xanadu you wanted to dispel the myth that small towns were homophobic. Do you feel that way about the town that you live in?
JP: I think that when you grow up in a community, any kind of community, and you grow up there, you go to school there, and everybody in that neighborhood knows you, whether it’s in a small town or in a neighborhood, that they don’t look on you so much as being gay…they look on you more as being a human being. So in this book I wanted to tell a story where being gay was not so much central to who this person was but incidental to her character…. I hope there’s always room for coming-out stories, for love stories, because I just think that’s where teens are in their developmental process….

They’re so unique, our coming-out stories, that we have to kind of learn to love and accept ourselves at the same time that we’re falling in love with somebody else. I just think that is an interesting phenomenon. I hear a lot of librarians and editors say, “Oh it’s just another coming-out story.” But those are important stories for teens. I think we have to acknowledge that that’s where they are in life. And you know, how many straight love stories are there? Come on, we can afford to have four or five.

For more information about Peters and her books, visit julieannepeters.com;
you can also order Far From Xanadu, Keeping You a Secret, or Luna directly.

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