Page 1 / 2 / 3 / 4 - Next

Young adult author Julie Anne Peters was shocked when her novel Luna (2004), a story about a transgender teen, was nominated for a National Book Award. “I just couldn’t believe it,” she says. A self-described reclusive writer who lives in Colorado with her partner of 31 years, Sherri Leggett, Peters had written nine children’s books before her editor suggested that she write a young adult lesbian love story. That suggestion turned into Keeping You a Secret (2003), and changed Peters’s choice of career into a calling: to tell more stories about LGBT teens.

Her latest novel, Far From Xanadu, which will be published in May, tells the story of butch lesbian teen Mike from small-town Coalton, Kansas. When Mike falls in love with the new girl at school, Xanadu, she can’t stop herself from pursuing her even though Xanadu is straight. I recently talked with Peters about Far From Xanadu, straight girls, and what it was like to be nominated for the nation’s most prestigious book award.

AfterEllen: Tell me a bit about your writing process.

JP: You know, I think every book has a different process. Just when I think I have it down, the next book comes in a different way and I feel like I have to start all over….

I write in scenes, and I’ll have all of these scenes that aren’t chronological at all and then I just transition them all together. I know they have to be someplace in the book but I’m not exactly sure where. There’s some instinct that kicks in, after you’ve done it for a long time, and you understand that story process. But I like the intellectual challenge of doing it different ways every time (laughing)….

If we’re talking about Far From Xanadu, that book began as this topic that I wanted to explore: lesbian dating. I was getting a lot of mail from young readers who were talking about how they were in love with their girlfriends, but their girlfriends were straight. Their girlfriends told them there was no possibility of a relationship and yet they would sort of give them signs that maybe there was something there…. They like the attention that you give them; they think that’s flattering. And everybody wants to be desired, of course, and we feed on that so much…. So I’m always telling these girls, “Run!” Just run as far as you can from these people. Because there’s just—there’s distance that can’t be crossed, and we need to come to that realization at some point.

And then I have this friend who’s been in love with a straight woman for like 20 years. It’s just this obsession and she cannot let it go. Finally this woman got married and I thought, all right, that’s the end of it.

AE: The straight woman got married?

JP: Yes, the straight woman got married. I thought, now my friend can relieve herself of this self-imposed bondage that she has and commit herself to somebody who can actually return her love. But it didn’t happen! The married woman was calling her and saying “Oh, I think I made a mistake, I never should have married a man and I really miss you.” …(Laughing) It’s so pathetic!

But I see this in so many of our relationships…. I thought, this would make a great topic for a young adult novel, because really that’s where it starts. So I made this really evil straight girl, Xanadu.

AE: You did make her a little despicable, didn’t you?

JP: Totally! (laughing) If there’s anything even a little likeable about her at all it’s because I was forced to put it in there.

AE: By who?

JP: By my editor. She said, “Can’t you make her a little bit empathetic to readers?” I said, “Why? I hate her!” She’s the evil straight girl.

But…it’s a larger story, of course, because it’s about manipulation, certainly, of this girl. People who prey on the innocence and vulnerability of others, especially of young girls who don’t have the knowledge of the world—and obviously with older women too, who just can’t let it go. And also about our yearnings and obsessions, because we do seem to hold on to hope too long the way Mike does. She just can’t seem to let go and move on. So that’s what I wanted to write about.

Then I sat down and…this first sentence spilled out, about “After my dad’s suicide, the town council decided to remove the bottom portion of the ladder from the Coalton water tower.” And I went, what? What does that have to do with lesbian dating? (laughing) What? Is this the same story that I’m working on? And where is this Coalton? And a father’s suicide—what does that have to do with anything?

So I do what I usually do, which is, I’ll write the last chapter first, just to see where this is going. That at least has stayed constant in my process. If I don’t do that I’ll start writing and writing and the characters take over and the story veers and I can never get it back to where I originally intended to take it. So I’ll write this last chapter and it kind of gives me direction and focus.

(Laughs) But that was even worse because now I had all of these disparate elements in this book, like plumbing, for god’s sake, and morbid obesity, and Kansas! Kansas—I’d never even been to Kansas. And girls’ softball, which I love to watch, but I certainly don’t know any of the technical details of it. And poetry, and strength training—all of these things that I thought oh no, I’m going to have to research all of this, and then figure out how to pull these all together into some kind of cohesive system, a unit, and tie it into lesbian dating.

The thing that has been really fun about doing a novel is this kind of systems engineering that I think goes on. Which is what I’m good at anyway.

AE: You used to be a systems engineer?

JP: Yes, so this was really the first book [where] I thought, “A-ha, I’m really using those skills of systems engineering to pull this all together.” It’s a chaotic process, but that’s what I like about it intellectually. That’s what really keeps me going.

AE: I was really struck by how many of those details really do fit in so nicely. Mike was such an extremely well developed character. Did she just come to you as a completely drawn character like that?

JP: Well, the other thing that I wanted to do was, I wanted to have a butch lesbian as a main character because I really think they’re missing in the literature. They’re really hard to find. And I love them, you know; my partner’s so butch. And yet, I think there’s a vulnerability to them that is so attractive. They seem so strong, especially with Mike. On the inside she really wasn’t that strong. She was at the point where she’s building that internal strength. So she was a very vivid character to me, and she gave the story life.

Xanadu I just hated. She was the person I really had to work on most, just to give her any kind of redeeming quality. I hated to do it (laughing).

AE: So you really do feel that she was lesbian baiting?

JP: I do. I felt that this was a book about first love and obsessing on a person that you’ll never have, and them leading you on…and manipulating you, which is what I think young readers of all ilk are going to find in this book as the universal theme: people who manipulate them.

AE: Did you ever think about giving Mike a lesbian love interest in this book?

JP: You know, that’s not what this book was about. I always like to end a young adult novel at a new beginning. Hopefully she’s at a new beginning, at a place where she can move on from this and be a little more careful. She’ll have a certain wariness now. But you know, she needs to connect with someone who can return her love.

AE: So no sequels?

JP: No sequels, no. (laughs) I have so many readers who write “Please, please, we need a sequel,” but I think it’s because we have such a dearth of literature. It’s so hard to find anything that you can cling to, especially for young lesbians. There’s just so little out there for them. They just want more, they want more. More and more love stories.

AE: So you were a systems engineer, and then you decided to write children’s books. What made you decide to do that?

JP: I hated my job. (laughs) I guess it was a conscious decision because one day my partner came home—this was a Friday, and I said, “Sherri, I quit my job today and I’m going to be a writer.”

“What?” she said. “Have you ever written anything?”

I said, “No. No, but that sounds like a good life.” I would never have to travel, I would never have to deal with office politics. I would never have to talk to another person in my life. That sounded perfect to me! It has of course evolved into something else, but it was a long journey to get to where I am, and I didn’t really know that I had a voice at all. I wasn’t a literature major, I didn’t have any training in that. I took as little English as I had to to get by because I’m a math and science kind of person. Oh, that was terrible.

AE: Why was that terrible?

JP: (Laughs) I remember the first time I sat down to write I didn’t even know how to punctuate a sentence. It was this sentence of dialogue and I couldn’t remember where you put the quotes, you know—you put it after the period, or you quote the he said/she said? I really was starting at zero.

Of course I quit my job so I didn’t have money to go to school to learn how to do this. I actually didn’t even realize there were classes you could take, so it was all about just reading and practicing. So I would go to the library and check out as many books as I could carry and bring them home, especially young adult literature. I’ve always loved reading it. I really just love the passion in it, and I love transporting back to that time in life, when you did live passionately, you lived with velocity. Every day was such a drama. You could have lived your whole life every day, with so many ups and downs! I just loved that time of life. Not that I would ever want to go back there (laughing).

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

Page 1 / 2 / 3 / 4 - Next