"Gun & Powder" at Signature Theater

Content warning: historically accurate racism (terms starting with d and m), sexual harassment, onstage pistol usage for armed robbery, assault with a deadly weapon, threatened murder, and suicidal ideation.

Gun and Powder is inspired by the story of two of one of the playwright's relatives. Family lore about them shifted.

The show uses the ensemble in a Greek chorus narration fashion and as they tell you at the start, you know how family stories are.

It's late 1800's Texas. Twin sisters Mary and Martha Clarke were born free, although their white dad scampered off before they were even born. They work with their Black mom picking cotton and it sucks, especially when a drought means they run short of their quota. Struck with inspiration they go off finding towns where their parentage and therefore biracial status are unknown and they can get into places where they can rob folks with decent amounts if money. At one point one character calls them Robin Hood, but the only folks they seem to be helping are their mom and themselves.

They arrive in an outpost for one last score and encounter Jesse and Elijah. Jesse is white, and the richest man in town. Elijah is one of his servants. Here the sister's goals diverge. Mary is enjoying the good life, being showered with trinkets, and getting the love of Jesse. Martha discovers that Elijah sees her softness, her caring, and also has noticed she is Black, as is he.

So, I'm going to try not to spoil too much, but it was in the second act I wanted the show to delve a smidge further. A clear case of loving the show enough that I wanted it to be a little better.  I am using the term biracial here, but at the time being biracial meant being Black or passing as white. There were no other choices. So Mary realizes the challenge is that marriage to a white man means a life of denial, a life of possible discovery.

And Martha realizes that loving a Black man doesn't quite solve everything either.

The cast, especially the two sisters and Elijah are amazing. The songs are both memorable and tricky, such that I wondered if another cast could do them so well. The costuming flirted with being period appropriate but there was a hoodie and a handkerchief hem. It worked, and fit the theme that this was more of a story about a time than a straight up historical.

My romance and closure loving heart wanted a little more from the ending, but it was a show and performance worth seeing. This cast and these playwrights are all amazing talents.  

NoVa Teen Bookfest 2019

The NoVa Teen Bookfest moved to a new location this year, but was otherwise as fun as before.  The Stand Up and Stand Out panel, has Sara Biren, Olivia Hinebaugh, Ben Philippe, Mark Oshiro, and Emily X. R. Pan talking about writing about pushing back, when there are adults who are good and adults who are not, and how having a good one - fictionally or otherwise - can help you understand the bad ones.  

The Lean on Me panel had Mia Garcia, Kevin Panetta, Carmen Rodrigues, and Jeff Zentner talking about writing friendships and relationships, along with a sidebar into "Titanic".  Mia also said she wrote her book chronologically, even though it hops from person to person.  

There was a lunch break Taboo, with quite a few authors, and some teen volunteers.  

On the Journey to the Past panel, Libba Bray, Katherine Locke, and Robin Talley talked about historical research - how it can help and help you procrastinate,  ways to do it even if you didn't love history in school, and also how history helps illuminate the present.  Robin also talked about how having a dual timeline in "Pulp" meant she was able to specifically ground the contemporary timeline instead of having it try to be out there, some vague time like now, and that that allowed for specific references in the way that you typically wouldn't do in contemporary. 

The Revolution panel had Tracy Bangart, Cinda Williams China, Dhonielle Clayton, Heidi Heilig, and Alex London talking about worldbuilding and figuring out what kind of fantasy world your character might need to fight back or burn down. 

I went to the mini-panel about "Toil and Trouble" with Jessica Spotswood, Robin Talley, and Lindsay Smith.  They talked about the stories they had written for the anthology. Jessica had been chatting on Twitter about how she didn't have time to edit another anthology but would love to see one about witches.  And Tess Sharpe had said she'd love to do one, but didn't know how to curate an anthology.  And their mutual agent had basically been like, yeah team up folks, I can sell this thing.  Both Lindsay and Robin enjoyed working with Jessica, and all three liked writing something that only needed a small amount of plot (compared to novel length).  

The Girls Run the World panel had Jennifer L. Armentrout, E.K. Johnston, L.L. McKinney, and Kristen Simmons talking about writing female protagonists, and how nice it was that there was space that strong female characters didn't always mean has all the weapons.  They also talked about female friendships and how they felt like a lot of media they'd seen growing up portrayed women as rivals, when they had friends they could count on.  Also they talked about how sometimes it's not your character fighting because they've been attacked, but because their loved ones have been.  

Libba Bray was the keynote speaker.  She had a list of twelve things, and I did not take notes but I remember one was "Let's go get pizza" is almost always the right answer.  But she also talked about how in the end the one thing you are surely really good at, is being you, so work on being the best one you can.  

It was a fun event, even with the new location.  

NoVaTeen Book Fest

This past Saturday was NoVaTeen Book Fest and well, I can't tell you which event had my side of the metro packed, but I ended up having to wait for a second train, and as such got there a little later than planned.  But, I made it to the Stranger in the Strange Land panel with Natalie C. Andersen, Leslie Livingston, Lindsay Smith, and Ibi Zoboi.  They talked about their characters straddling worlds and cultures.  Andersen's story is about a refugee, Livingston's a young woman who is kidnapped and enslaved, Smith a Japanese American young woman sent to Japan for the summer, and Zoboi's a young woman who has just immigrated from Haiti to Detroit. 

The (Don't Fear) the Reaper Panel had Zoraida Cordova, Brendan Kiely, Nina LaCour, and Lance Rubin talking about how death featured in their books.  Cordova's features a Death Day for each bruja, Kiely's was looking at the love that you remember at the end of your life, LaCour's story is about grief, and Rubin's is about a world where we get death dates in advance.  The death date idea led to soem really intersting discussion on the panel and in the audience. 

For the mini panel segment, I went to the Q&A with Jaye Robin Brown and Katie McGarry who both talked about their books and their process to publication.  McGarry also mentioned that she had written Pushing the Limits as a standalone, but the publisher wanted it to become a series and had proposed two characters they thought would be the next couple.  (These two characters did not fall in love in the series. As a huge fan of the series, I would say that this works out fine for us all.)

The Love of the Rocks panel had Julie Buxbaum, Katie McGarry, Rafi Mittlefehldt, and Caleb Roehrig.  There was discussion of who was into mushy, smoochy stuff, and who wasn't - Buxbaum really is. Roehrig came into this more from a thrille rbackground. I confess I have grown wary of audience questions, but the teens in this panel (and others throughout the day) had good stuff.  One asked if the authors with queer characters had worried about that.  They had not, and Roehrig and Mittlefehldt both said they found writing stuff that was meaningful to them worked better and was easier to write. Another audience member asked McGarry what inspired her to write female characters that were confident in their sexuality. She thanked them for noticing and said it was important to present female sexuality as a normal thing and that people are ready to explore it at different rates and times, and that she also wrote male characters who respected that. 

The Reflection panel had Jaye Robin Brown, M-E Girard, Tiffany D. Jackson, and Will Walton, talking about the role of the perception of others in each of their books. Brown's book has a teen moving to a small town her dad warns her will not be as accepting of her out lesbian self, Girard's book is about a genderqueer teen finding that she's hit the point where everyone around her wants her to stop being who she is, Jackson's book is about a teen who was convicted of murder at age nine, and Walton's is about a teen working on coming out as gay to his family. 

And Nina Lacour did the keynote about seeing yourself reflected in fiction, about how Walter Dean Myers' Hoops had spoken to her in ways she hadn't necessarily expected and that reading widely and learning about many different kinds of people makes us all better people, people who know that we need to stand up and fight for others. 

It really is an amazing event, and I appreciate the works of the volunteers who make it happen and keep bringing authors I knew about and authors I didn't know to have on my radar but now are new faves. 

NoVa Teen Book Fest 2016

It was NoVa Teen Book Fest this weekend and I was there in a tired state, (which was no one's fault but mine) which meant partway through I realized my phone charger was with me, but not the cord, so the phone went into airplane mode so I could take a few photos but posting had to wait for later.  There were more panels this year, which made some of the decision making a little tougher.  The first panel was called Creep and had Jon Skovron talking with Natalie C. Parker, Lisa Maxwell, and Holly Black about writing spooky or scary stories, and subverting expectations.  Parker said that one early reader had said that they didn't believe a girl from the south would know such big words, and she felt that was part of her job as a southerner to represent both the truth and the unfairness of some of the stereotypes.  Maxwell said that the original stories about Neverland have been sort of sanded down, in that people tend to talk of a place where people lose their memories and never grow up as magical now, rather than terrifying.  Black said that her job as a writer was to approach the stories with empathy but fully examine the truth inside.

I then moved to a breakout panel with some of the authors from the upcoming Tyranny of Petticoats anthology - Caroline T. Richmond, Robin Talley, Lindsay Smith, and Jessica Spotswood. They talked a little about the process for how they each selected their time period, and Spotswood talked about how it was important from an editorial perspective to make sure that there was a range of periods and types of stories, and that they wanted each story to feel specific to it's time and place.  (Guys, I'm so excited about this anthology.)

Then I went to one of the game panels with Jason Reynolds, Jennifer Donnelly, Sara Raasch, and Brandon Keily.  They played a variation of password and charades which was funny partly because, password was not really their strength, and partly because there was a group of teens sitting close who were very responsive audience members and who clearly had gotten most of the clues very quickly. 

After grabbing a quick lunch,I went to the History Has It's Eyes on You panel (Bonus point for the Hamilton reference) where Jennifer Donnelly, Janet B. Taylor, Kelly Zekas, Kathy MacMillan, and Eleanor Herman spoke about their process and what led them to the periods (mostly real or mostly fictional) that they made use of.  I will tell you that the moderator questions were great, the audience questions were mostly great, although we did get the stereotypical since you all are women, how did you figure out how to write men question.  And, I try to remember that every book even is someone's first book event, so they may not know how common that question is, how often it gets asked of women, how rarely male authors are asked that, and that particularly when we are talking about historical fiction, gender norms are not fixed and one would have to do just as much research into expectations for women (in fact many of the panelists had talked about their characters butting against such expectations), and that the question is quite honestly insulting. I don't think it was meant that way, but it's really tiring to see it keep getting asked.

Next up was that Do I Ever Cross Your Mind panel with Jeff Garvin, Kelly Fiore, Hannah Barnaby, Julie Murphy, and Charlotte Huang talking about contemporary fiction.  They each talked about what had led them to this latest book (or first, since these were debuts for some of them) and the research and introspection they had done. Kelly Fiore also mentioned "Intervention" and how watching that had shown her that the things she was experiencing watching her brother battle addiction were the same as what she was seeing family members in the show say, so the experience was bigger than her or them. 

And then there was the keynote with Holly Black.  Jon Skovron talked about how reading her book Valiant was what convinced him there might be a place for him as a YA fiction writer.  Black talked about how when she started writing fantasy books for kids, she was mostly talking about this with other kid lit writers or readers and so people got it.  Occasionally she would encounter someone outside the kid lit world who would wonder why she wrote for kids if she didn't have any, but that was about it.  And now she and her husband have a great kid (she showed a picture of him in a handknit sweater that she said the picture made look good because the sweater was made with love but is not entirely sweater shaped) and so she figured people would stop finding that weird.  But, as a mother one ends of talking with other parents and well, they find writing as a job a little strange, especially writing about fantasy or magic?  Why writer about that?  And it had been a while since she had been asked that.  And she realized that fantasy allows us to explore real life in unusual ways.  That her most recent story is about the difference between shared fan love for the same person, compared to actual love of the same person.  Or the idea that fan love allows you to project a lot of things onto someone that they may not be able to live up to.  And fantasy give you a way in to explore that that she finds really interesting and valuable. 

All in all it was a great time and my TBR pile got ever bigger, so thanks so much to all the wonderful people who put this together. 

NoVa Teen Book Fest 2015

Saturday was the second annual NoVa Teen Book Fest and I somehow left the house without my charger, therefore limiting the tweeting so here I am with a recap. 

I missed Jon Skovron's opening remarks, but he was a wonderful emcee in the main auditorium for the whole day, running a mike into the audience for folks to ask questions and generally being wonderful. 

The first panel was about books and characters operating in two worlds and had Tracy Clark, Matt de la Pena, Alethea Kontis, and Robin Talley. They talked about the challenge of writing characters straddling worlds or coming from opposite sides of things.  Matt mentioned that he had with other books had some librarians say something to the effect that they really liked his books but didn't really have students "like that" at their schools, and so he had made a conscious attempt to come up with a story that was something that still addressed the themes and such that he wrote about and yet could be spun broader.  Robin said that these days people mostly are not asking her and her book to places where they don't want to talk about such issues, but it was important to her to add to the total of books out there that included LGBTQ characters.  Tracy said the tension of writing opposites was really interesting.  And Alethea mentioned that she hadn't realized she was doing something groundbreaking by writing a YA book with a big family. 

I went to a breakout session after that with Lydia Kang and Jessica Khoury, who both wrote thrillers.  There were a lot of questions about their writing journey (I suspect the audience had quite a few aspiring writers).  Jessica also talked about her research trip to Africa for her latest book.  And both of them talked about the challenges of things like titles and covers.  The diverse books movement came up and Lydia said that people often assume that because she Asian, that she's got the diversity thing covered, but that she grew up in a town where most of the kids she went to school with weren't Asian, and reading books that primarily featured white kids, so it's easy to fall into that unless she makes an effort to really think about the world her characters are in.  Jessica talked about writing a draft without assigning ethnicity and then going back later and assigning that so she wouldn't fall into any stereotype traps.  (I don't know that that is her process every time, but it's an interesting exercise for people willing to build their characters on the back end.)

After lunch, I hit the breakout session about bravery with Sara Raasch, Morgan Rhodes, and Alethea Kontis.  They talked about building series, and what inspired them to write, and the things they love to read.  They talked about writing bad guys, and Morgan mentioned how depending on how far through the series you were you might have more thoughts on a particular character, and Alethea said she had realized that all her bad guys were women.  (I blame fairytales.) 

And then I went back to the main auditorium for Out of the Woods with Seth Fishman, Lydia Kang, Jessica Khoury, Sara Raasch, Morgan Rhodes, and Krysten Simmons.  The first question they were asked was, given the paranormal and/futuristic bent to their stories, did it given them more freedom to address certain issues.  The panel agreed yes.  Krysten (who Seth outed for making origami while she sat on the panel, something I knitting as I listened totally got) said that the idea of women being sold and traded, was sadly not even a little hard to find in our world.  They also talked about titles, Seth, Lydia, and Jessica talking about how theirs got changed.  Lydia's original title for Control was a spoiler for the book, although she did fight for Catalyst. There was one question from the audience for Seth which seemed to boil down to, why did he decide to write about a female main character when he was a male author.  (The questioner was female, so I think she wasn't against female protagonists, just wary of men writing them.) Seth said there was certainly research - like the difference between a sweater and a cardigan - that one had to do to write a character of a different gender, but all characters required research. 

Matt de la Pena wrapped things up with a wonderful keynote talking about his journey toward becoming the first college graduate in his family, and finally finishing reading his first book, (which he's talked about other places like here - this story moves me every time) and how books became the place it was okay for a tough guy to feel.

I skipped the signing (the line was intense!) but that's okay, my ereader is a little fuller now.  Can't wait to see the lineup for next year.

For Real

It's a rap. About Arlington.

Hat Tip to the Raveler who first provided this link.
And just for a complete contrast. The above may be the first rap about Arlington, but it is not the first song.
Emmett Swimming also has one*.
In the interest of completeness, there appear to be a number of songs titled Arlington. But most of them appear to not really be about the city itself.
*Sorry, embedding is disabled on this one.
Edited to add, I only just realized that DCist posted very similar links. I swear I came to this other ways, but great minds and all that.