Feedback on the Chats

We mentioned below that at the end of April through the beginning of May, we held aseries of chats where we hooked up six YA authors with five 11th grade English classes form a Lake Charles, LA high school.

There were glitches as you might expect. Because of firewalls and blocking software on the school's computers we couldn't use a chat forum and ended up using the comments of the blog posts introducing the authors. This meant that everyone had to refresh their screen constantly as they chatted. All the authors were very cool about this though they noted that it was a drawback. We are trying very hard to figure out a way that we can have the chats work as we would like them to.

While we hope to have another post giving you feedback from the high school end soon, this post will share some of the comments from the authors and tell you who they are. Do take the time to check over their books. There's quite a variety in subject matter and tone. There's bound to be a story here that you'll want to read.

In response to "What questions surprised you or impressed you the most," our authors said this and a bit more:

Julie Harford: Click here to see the chat.
I had some (the usual “what inspires you” and “what age did you start”) but some of them really caught me off guard (like “are you intimidated by other books” and “which authors are you most like” and “do you ever think it’s pointless to make another piece of literature.”




Jenny Han: Click here to see the chat.
One student asked me how it felt, as a writer, to be immortal. I never heard that one before! I just enjoyed chatting with some very sophisticated students—I got a kick out of a student who said he couldn’t think of a question and asked what I wanted to tell him.


Greg Neri: Click here to see the chat.
A poet asked what advice I had for poetry. I was just getting started and could have easily chatted for another 30 minutes to get into some real discussion. I know it’s limited to class times but an hour is best.





Judy Gregerson: Click here to see the chat.
One kid mentioned that I worked as a kid. I found it interesting that she/he picked up on that. [The chat] gave me a sense of what kids want to know about authors.




Bev Katz Rosenbaum: Click here to see the chat.
I had looked over one of the other chats, so I was prepared to talk about what books I liked as a teen, where I got my ideas, and how I went about writing a novel. Somebody asked which character in a novel I'd like to be. Showed imagination!





Jay Asher: Click here to see the chat.
Someone asked whether I’d had suicidal thoughts, and if that inspired me to write Thirteen Reasons Why. Honestly, I enjoyed the straightforwardness of that question, because usually people tap-dance around that subject even though it’s the main subject in my book that ties all the characters together.

We hope to have further chats between schools and authors. If you're an author and are interested in participating in such a forum, please don't hesitate to let us know. And if you're a teacher who would like to set up such a chat for your class, drop us a line and we'll see what we can do.

Cheers!