Interview: Graduate and Author J.A. White
Author Jerry White is a 1996 graduate of the Odyssey Writing Workshop. He teaches writing, math and science to middle grade students in New Jersey…
Why I Write Books for Kids by J. A. White
…While I don’t necessarily miss being a child, I miss being a child reader. I still treasure books, of course, but my enjoyment of them is somewhat hampered by an understanding of their origins, the knowledge that books are written by talented men and women who love to tell stories but also need to earn a living. This inevitable realization—that the once mysterious workings of the world are composed of mere practicalities—is one of the true curses of adulthood. As a child, the thought that an author was paid for his or her work never occurred to me; books were simply truths that fell from the sky, as mysterious as ancient doors leading to far-off kingdoms…
This Dark Matter Interview: J. A. White
As a follow-up our review of The Thickety, J.A. White has graciously agreed to an interview with This Dark Matter because Randi stalked him on Twitter…
Spring 2014 Flying Starts: J.A. White
…White has been a storyteller from the get-go. He first told stories about the pandas on his bedroom wallpaper, and in middle school he published his own stories, mimeographing them for the benefit of classmates. He read voraciously—Isaac Asimov, Harlan Ellison, and Stephen King—and favorite books included Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time and Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes. He was so enamored of Lloyd Alexander’s Chronicles of Prydain that he never read the final book (The High King), because “once I read it, the story would be over. I may read it on my deathbed…”
Life Lessons I’ve Learned from Reading Fantasy
Reading, for little me, was more akin to an actual experience than a recreational activity. I didn’t read about Narnia; I visited Narnia. The lessons I learned there felt as real and substantial as lessons learned in real life, possibly even more substantial for a daydreamy kid with his nose perpetually stuck in a book…
J. A. White defied conventional wisdom by selling his first novel – soon to be a trilogy – without selling one piece of short fiction to magazines. How did he do it? Also, how does he maintain page-turning tension without the reader suffering fatigue, how does he balance character development and world building, and how does he find time to write with so much else on his plate…?