Been There, Done That: Writing Stories from Real Life - Softcover

Winchell, Mike

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0448486733 ISBN 13: 9780448486734

Verlag: Penguin Young Readers Group, 2016

Inhaltsangabe

Award-winning and bestselling authors turn their own real-life experiences into captivating works of fiction!

Where do authors get their ideas? And how do they turn those ideas into stories? This anthology looks at the process of taking real-life experiences and turning them into works of engaging fiction. The collection features award-winning and bestselling middle-grade authors who provide both original fictional short stories as well as the nonfiction accounts that inspired them. The contributing authors include Julia Alvarez, Karen Cushman, Margarita Engle, Dee Garretson, Nathan Hale, Matthew Kirby, Claire Legrand, Grace Lin, Kate Messner, Linda Sue Park, Adam Rex, Gary Schmidt, Alan Sitomer, Caroline Starr Rose, Heidi Stemple, Rita Williams-Garcia, Tracy Edward Wymer, Lisa Yee, and Jane Yolen.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Mike Winchell is a veteran English teacher and a secondary education curriculum specialist. He lives in upstate New York with his wife and two children, where he writes middle grade fiction and edits middle grade and young adult anthologies.

Eglantine Ceulemans was born in the flemish Belgium and lived there for 10 years. She then moved to France, where she currently resides in Lyon. In 2007, she joined the Emile Cohl School of Art there, transforming her passion for illustration into a vocation. She loves combining humor and sensitivity in a way that touches both children and their parents in her illustrations. Eglantine has been published in France and abroad for both fiction and illustrated books.

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WHAT REALLY HAPPENED
Love, Like Leeches
by Gary D. Schmidt
 
Probably the best job I ever had—the best job I ever will have—was a job at a summer camp on the maintenance crew. I had to deal with plugged up toilets and corn dogs and kids who threw up—mostly because of corn dogs—but I also built a new cabin and messed around in boats that needed repair and put in docks and planted gardens and built rock walls and assembled bonfires and did a whole lot of things I could never do in the suburbs of New York City. And when I wasn’t doing any of those things, I’d play baseball near high pines and swim in clear pools that emptied out in small waterfalls and lay down in the middle of a field to watch hawks circle on the thermals above.
 
I lived for those summers in the Catskill Mountains. When high school was what high school often is, filled with jerks and would-be jerks and locker rooms and meaningless homework and drama about not very much and social status crap, I thought of that camp, those mountains, and the friends I had up there who loved what I loved and still love: high grass and hawks on thermals and mountain pools and pines.
 
And camp had one other thing, the most important thing, the really, really most important thing: Mindy White. Mindy White had long dark hair. She had green eyes. When she laughed, her voice was like Poetry. When she smiled, her smile was like Beauty. When she looked at me, I wished more than anything that she loved me like I loved her.
 
But she didn’t. Because Mindy White was actually in love with another guy at the camp, a little older than me, who was an idiot. I tried telling Mindy White that Lee Buttface was an idiot, but she was too much in love. She talked about Lee while I did the dishes. She talked about Lee while I helped her peel the carrots. She talked about Lee while I fetched cabbages from the basement below the kitchen, or the lemon pies from the freezer, or the canned ravioli from the pantry. She talked about Lee while I scraped the burned oil and lard from the grill in the kitchen—the hottest and most awful job at camp, but one I took my time on, because she worked beside me. I scraped the grill with my shirt off—it was that hot—and I thought that might do something. It didn’t. She loved Lee Buttface.
 
For two years I listened to Mindy White talk about Lee Buttface, until I heard one day over the winter that Lee Buttface had broken things off—I told you he was an idiot. I was overjoyed. I was thrilled. I was filled with fathomless hope.
 
I went to the weight machine and began a program of lifting.
 
The next summer, Mindy White came to camp. Lee Buttface, too. And you know what? She still loved him. Really. She still loved the idiot. Even when he started going with someone else at camp. Even when I stood over the grill, shirtless and buff and everything, she still loved the idiot. She read me stories she had written, and in every story, the hero’s name was . . . well, do I even have to say it?
 
There was a set of falls near the camp. It was filled with black and leechy water. We swam there anyway, mostly because of the jumps—even though you had to puck the leeches off your skin every time you came out of the water. You could jump into the big pool at the bottom from a rock about twelve feet up. But you could climb to the top of the falls and jump into the small pool that gathered there from forty feet up. And that pool really was no bigger than your outstretched arms. No kidding.
 
One day I went there with two of the counselors—and Lee Buttface, who didn’t know that I hated him. The whole way there, Lee Buttface told us how he was going to jump in first, how he wasn’t afraid of any heights, how he figured he was going to dive in headfirst, how he had done stuff like this plenty of times.
 
When we finally stood on the ledge in brutal sunlight, the two counselors jumped, then I jumped, and then Lee Buttface stood alone and looked down. And looked down. And looked down. I have to say, I felt sorry for him. I could see he was about to wet his pants. But he looked down, and he looked down, and he looked down, and finally I called up and told him to climb back, he didn’t need to jump, it was fine, we’d come and do it another day, it was really fine.
 
He climbed down.
 
The whole way home, he explained why he hadn’t jumped. The water was filled with leeches, he said. He was allergic to leeches, he said. He could die from leeches, he said.
 
I wanted to tell Mindy White he’d chickened out. I really wanted to tell Mindy White he’d chickened out. But I never did. The next day in the kitchen, she read another one of her stories about wonderful, marvelous, amazing Lee, how he saved the day, how he was loving and kind and true and blue.
 
I kept my shirt on, and scraped the lard from the grill.
 
 
THE STORY
Falls
by Gary D. Schmidt
 
The best job, I mean, the really best job at any summer camp is maintenance—because after you’ve finished scraping corn dogs and baked beans off two hundred plates and after you’ve wiped corn dogs and baked beans off twenty tables and after you’ve swept corn dogs and baked beans off the floors beneath the twenty tables—which isn’t easy—you’re free until suppertime, when you have to set the two hundred plates on the twenty tables again. So you can hike to the falls below Napanoch Road, which I had never seen but which were supposed to be seventy feet high, and where once two kids got caught in the undercurrent beneath the falls and didn’t show up again until the next
spring.
 
I could hardly wait to see them.
 
The falls, I mean.
 
And it’s where I was heading right now, along with Mark Mann and two other guys who I didn’t really know from farms down the road.
 
But not with Mindy White—who I really wanted to swim at the falls with.
 
She wasn’t coming.
 
Did I say that I really wanted to swim at the falls with Mindy White?
 
Did I say that I had been in love with Mindy White since Camp Orientation?
 
She waved as the four of us left. I waved back, even though I was pretty sure she didn’t know my name. She had green eyes and long black hair. How could I not have waved back?
 
But she wasn’t coming with us, and instead I was walking to the falls with Mark and these two other guys who had the arms and chests that throwing cows and hay bales around will give you, I guess.
 
The July sun was brutal, and we took off our shirts and draped them over our backs, and our sneakers sank into the asphalt of Napanoch Road, and Mark said he could hardly wait to get under the water, and I said I could hardly wait, either. So when we climbed over the guardrail and down the bank into the cool of the hemlocks, I was ready to dive beneath the falls—who cared about undercurrents? I was really ready. And I could hear them, hidden as they were behind the trees, pouring gorgeous white water over the high rocks, cascading into a crystal pool speckled with sunlight, the cool mists coating the green and mossy shores, the pine boughs, the rocks, and
soon, me.
 
We slid down the last of the path—the pine needles were slick—and came into the white sunlight below the falls. I looked up at seven stories of water gushing down. At seven stories of dirty dark yellow water gushing down.
 
Dirty dark yellow water gushing down into a black and eerily still...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Penguin Young Readers Group
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2016
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0448486733
• ISBN 13: 9780448486734
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Zeichner: Ceulemans Églantine
• Anzahl der Seiten: 304
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Friedensallee 273; Hamburg; 22763; Deutschland