Dutton faces the risks of being 'Stranded'

Originally printed June 21, 2010.

"In Iowa City, there are Authors and there are authors," novelist J.T. Dutton wrote in a 2008 guest opinion for the Press-Citizen. "I mostly pass for the small 'a' kind, the kind you don't cross the street to ask an autograph of."

And Dutton should know. She lived in Iowa City from 2001 to 2008 while her husband earned his Ph.D. in the English department at the University of Iowa.

After arriving in town already armed with an MFA from the University of Alaska Fairbanks, Dutton had to settle for writing only in the small amount of free time she found between teaching at Kirkwood Community College and parenting two small children.

As her husband was finishing his dissertation, however, Dutton decided to be more aggressive in trying to find someone willing to publish a revised version of her MFA thesis. After some initial disappointments, she eventually found an agent who suggested that her manuscript -- which featured a teenage deadhead narrator -- might be better suited for the young adult market.

After additional revisions that led her into some unexpected new directions, Dutton published her debut novel, "Freaked," with HarperTeen in 2009.

Dutton and her family have moved on to Ohio, but it was her time in Iowa that provided the inspiration for her recently released second novel, "Stranded" (also with HarperTeen). While spending many hours driving on the Highway of the Saints and other byways across the state, Dutton became fascinated with a landscape covered with fields and dotted with anti-abortion billboards.

That's when she got the idea of telling the story of a baby who was abandoned and left to die in one of those fields -- a baby that the surrounding community comes to call "Baby Grace."

As Dutton honed the plot, she not only needed to invent a small town (Heaven, Iowa) and an otherwise straight-laced teenage mother (Natalie Sorenson), but she also had to find an outsider to narrate the story. She eventually came up with Kelly Louise Sorenson, Natalie's cousin from Des Moines, who has to move back to Heaven to live with her grandmother and Natalie because of the Baby Grace incident.

As the town's name suggests, religious themes and symbolism are abundant in "Stranded." If you were to pitch the novel as a movie, in fact, you'd probably say, "It's 'Juno' meets 'Saved.'" But in "Stranded," the hyper-religious, small-town teenager (who seems straight out of "Saved") has her baby and leaves it to die. And the secular, amoral teenager (who seems straight out "Juno") not only provides the novel's comic relief but also serves as its moral touchstone.

"I preferred my conversations with (my Des Moines friends)," Kelly Louise says when her mother chastises her for some mild misbehaviors while helping to cover up Natalie's tragic mistake. "They were much more sane and inane."

Kelly Louise's constant wit and confusion helps Dutton undercut her storyline's potential for melodrama. Not only is Kelly Louise named after Tina Louise, the actress who played Ginger on "Gilligan's Island," but Dutton also has endowed her with observational commentary as sharp and dark as anything the screenwriters could provide for high schooler Buffy Summers in TV's "Buffy the Vampire Slayer."

"When we reached the door and the sun streamed in, my eyeballs just about fell out," Kelly Louise observes while trying to navigate Heaven High School. "I wondered if my sunglasses had enough UV protection to help me deal with all the shining judgment. My guess was likely not."

And after losing her own virginity to one of the town's bad boy characters, the narrator accurately observes, "He and I were both in the same seminaked state, partners in our universal insignificance to God, who had dropped the ball in letting a tragedy like Baby Grace take place."

Dutton clearly is taking a big risk by writing a young adult novel that deals unabashedly with issues such as teen pregnancy, infanticide, religion, homosexuality and the underside of small-town values. But she also has read enough authors -- of both the capital "A" and small "a" varieties -- to know that good stories don't reinforce boundaries; they break through them.

"The publishing industry has been often blamed for putting dollar bills ahead of aestheticism," Dutton wrote in her 2008 column, "but I discovered some of the books that are getting published for teens are groundbreaking and complex. True, some indulge in happy endings, gossiping girls, traveling pants, boys with attractive smiles and double lives as vampires, but others are by writers who have crossed from the adult trade into the youth market in order to produce material that is bound to influence and be echoed in prose to come."

"Stranded" definitely belongs in the latter category.

Press-Citizen Opinion editor Jeff Charis-Carlson can be contacted at jcharisc@press-citizen.com or 319-887-5435.

Does 'The Oxford Project' count as Young Adult literature?

I’ve never thought about “The Oxford Project” (Welcome Books, 2008) as being a Young Adult book. It’s a work of photojournalism in which photographer Peter Feldstein and journalist Stephen Bloom collaborate to tell the story — in words and pictures — of how a small Iowa town changes over the course of more than two decades. I’ve always thought of the entire project as being extended, Iowa version of Australian writer Peter Carey’s short story, “American Dreams” (“The Oxford Project, Sept. 25, 2008).

But it seems that the people over at the Young Adult Library Services Association — a division of the American Library Association — read the book very differently. They’ve selected “The Oxford Project” as one of the 10 books this year they’re recognizing with an Alex Award, an award given to books that interest teens.

The award makes sense when I keep in mind how Joel Shoemaker described Young Adult literature in an interview last summer (“Getting books into teens’ hands,” Aug. 27). Shoemaker, the librarian at South East Junior High in Iowa City and a former president of the Young Adult Library Services Association, said he’s always looking for “something on the border, something on the edge, something that’s going to push the limits.”

In its blending of photos and transcribed dialogue, “The Oxford Project” conflates a number of different genres as it tells a patchwork of interconnected stories. The book doesn’t require a reader to plow straight through its hundreds of pages. It instead offers a chance for readers of every age to choose which stories and photos they want to know more about. And it provides teenage readers with a chance to contrast what people look like in their teens and what they end up like in their 30s — no doubt a very scary revelation to the adolescents skimming along.

Shoemaker’s comments also help explain how “The Oxford Project” could earn this award even if Feldstein and Bloom didn’t have a Young Adult marketplace in mind.

“When Robert Cormier wrote ‘The Chocolate War,’ he didn’t know he was writing a book that would change YA literature,” Shoemaker told me last summer. “He was a newspaperman from the east coast and was as surprised as anyone to find out he was a YA author. He spent the rest of his life writing critically acclaimed, interesting books that teens would read.”

The members of the Young Adult Library Services Association seem less interested in rewarding publishers who pander to teens and more interested in finding books that make a strong connection with readers who just happen to be teens. They’re working to recognize good books that can resonate deeply with adults and teens — albeit on different levels.

That’s what we want for literature,” Shoemaker said, “To change readers.”

Congratulations to Feldstein and Bloom for finding a broader audience than they may have intended, and congratulations to the Young Adult Library Services Association for constantly being on the look out for good books whatever their original audience might have been.