Mainstreaming, Misfits and Murder: An Interview with Josh Berk

This Saturday, February 27th, from 12-2, Josh Berk will join us in the shop for a special family event. Josh is going to read from his debut young adult novel, The Dark Days of Hamburger Halpin, answer questions, and sign books.

Hamburger Halpin tells the hilarious story of Will Halpin, an overweight deaf teen who spends his first year at a mainstream high school looking for love, failing Algebra, unraveling the school's social scene, trying to get invited to the greatest party ever … and, oh yeah, solving a murder. It's "part mystery, part coming of age, and just edgy enough to make the Hardy Boys very uncomfortable."

Emma: Hamburger Halpin takes place in coal country, Pennsylvania, and a lot of the action takes place in a former coal mine during a school field trip. What about this setting inspired you?

Josh: In writing the book I pulled from a lot of different sources -- dreams, my own life, something I saw once on MTV. The trip to the old coal mine is a piece that is directly from my own life. I think it was a summer camp trip and not a school trip, but I definitely remember visiting Lackawanna County Coal Mine as a kid. I was probably about ten years old and it always stuck with me as interesting and memorable. You got to ride in a coal cart, wear a miner's helmet, and chat with a fake old-timey coal miner. I loved it!

So when I decided I might want to write a mystery story involving a field trip I immediately remembered the coal mine. I felt that the part where you ride a few hundred feet underground and sit in total darkness might be a great scene in a mystery. The lights are on and there are 30 people in the room. They shut the lights, it's total darkness, and then when they turn the lights back on there are only 29...

Then the more I read about the region's history, lots of interesting things presented themselves -- cave-ins, strikes, ghost stories. I felt like an old coal mine was a great and spooky place and I've lived in Pennsylvania my whole life so I had a lot of experiences to draw from.

Emma: There are a lot of young adult novels that deal with "issues." Will Halpin faces his own set of unique difficulties (growing up Deaf, overweight, and at odds with his parents). However, very few of these books include a mystery caper like the one in The Dark Days of Hamburger Halpin. What drew you to the mystery genre?

Josh: It doesn't always work this way when I'm writing, but in this case the story and the narrator came as a package deal. The character of Will Halpin and the mystery storyline came quickly to me and I immediately liked the idea of a deaf character involved in a mystery at his high school. It's hard for me to imagine a different story with this character!

Also, writing a mystery appealed to me because I knew it would force me to stay focused (more or less) on a tight and interesting plot. Some of my early attempts at writing fiction might have had interesting characters but boring plots. So it was a sort of a challenge to myself as a writer to see if I could carry out a plot like this. And I hope readers enjoy it! Issue books are important to be sure, but I think everyone enjoys a good caper.


Emma: One of the most interesting things about the book is the way the narrator Will Halpin's deafness gives him both advantages and disadvantages as an observer. On your website, you write that the idea of a kid lip-reading on a school bus came to you in a dream, and that led to you doing extensive research on the Deaf community. Talk a little bit about what that was like, and how it came to influence your novel.

Josh: The basic seed for the novel did come from a dream. It was just a short scene of a kid spying on his classmates on a school bus in total silence. I woke up feeling scared and immediately decided that (a) something terrible happened at school and (b) he was spying on them by reading their lips because he was deaf. Writing a deaf narrator was exciting and terrifying at the same time. It was exciting because it opened up a different way of writing about, thinking about, and experiencing the world. But it was terrifying because I didn't know anything about the Deaf world!

At first it just seemed like an interesting exercise in fiction, and I felt like deafness could be used as a symbol for all sorts of things I wanted to say about isolation, identity, and the universal human difficulties of communication. But of course deaf people aren't a symbol -- they're real people! So I did a lot of research, read a lot of books, befriended a lot of deaf people online, and started learning about their world. The first thing I learned was, and this should not be a surprise, deaf people aren't that different from anyone else. This reinforced my idea that I didn't want to write a "problem novel," but rather that I wanted Will to pretty much be a regular kid. I wanted him to crush on girls, try to be cool, bicker with his friends, do all the things any 15 year-old would do.

Then I tried to take some of the particular issues within the Deaf world and weave them into the story. It was my hope to illuminate readers who might not know about this world and to try to create a realistic deaf character deaf readers could relate to. And indeed in writing a mystery it was very fun to think about things that might traditionally be thought of as limitations and flip them to be assets in our hero's quest to crack the case!

Emma: In your biography, you mention that your "early literary ambitions included writing a book about a magical place named Flarnia." Did you always know you wanted to be a writer?

Josh: I was in a serious Flarnia stage at around fourth grade. I definitely had great literary ambitions as a nine year-old. My parents were both librarians and I was definitely raised in a house that greatly valued reading and writing. I can't really claim that I always wanted to be a writer though, because through high school and college I didn't think about it that much. I played sports, picked up guitar, played in bands, traveled a lot, and went through a phase where I didn't think about writing very much. But it was simmering in the back of my mind I suppose because whatever else my job was I always found a way to make writing part of it. And I often daydreamed about being a writer even though I was too daunted to even dream it was a thing I could really be.

Emma: What do you like about writing for a young adult audience?

Josh: My interest in YA really started when I was in library school. I took a Young Adult literature class and felt such a strong connection to the books we read! High school was very vivid in my mind and I felt like maybe I could write my own stories about that time in life. It's such an exciting time. It's often horrible, yes, but it's so intense. You could, for example, have a great success in your career when you're 30 but it doesn't feel as epic and exciting as when a girl you like give you her number when you're 15. It's great fun to write about adolescence. And yeah, I'm sort of immature by nature so it's not much of stretch! I get along really well with teenagers.

Emma: What advice would you give young people who are interested in writing?

Josh: I'd say to read as much as you can! It's really the best way in my opinion to learn the craft. And then I'd say to have fun with it. You should enjoy writing and just write for your own pleasure and fun and not be too worried about making a career out of it. That, and I'd say to find someone who can read your work and be critical. It's very hard to put yourself out there, to accept criticism, but it's the only way you'll get better. Read, write for fun, let someone tell you how to get better, then repeat!

Emma: What were some of your favorite books and authors when you were a kid?

Josh: I actually didn't like the Hardy Boys very much, despite the fact that I reference them 9 million times in Hamburger Halpin. I did like Encyclopedia Brown! I read a million of those mysteries. And then I went through that C.S. Lewis phase where all I wanted to read was fantasy books. Lloyd Alexander was also a big favorite. By the time I was in high school I read a lot of adult fiction -- Salinger, Vonnegut, Hemingway, Orwell. I still love those guys! I also still like Narnia.


Emma: Any chance that you'll write another book featuring the characters in Hamburger Halpin?

Josh: I'm so flattered when people ask this question! It makes me so pleased that readers would like to hang out with Will Halpin, Devon Smiley, and company again. So maybe I will! Maybe I'll write one from Devon's point of view. Maybe The Return of Smileyman? It has a ring to it, no?

Learn more about Josh and his book on his website!

Read A Poem at Open Mic!

Here's some inspiration: Sylvia Plath reading her poem "Daddy:"



Wallace Stevens' "The Emperor of Ice-Cream:"



And something lighter: Edward Lear reads "The Owl and the Pussycat:"



What's your favorite poem to read aloud?

I wondered why the baseball was getting bigger. Then it hit me.

Reading Birds of America by Lorrie Moore (who published A Gate at the Stairs in 2009) has got me thinking about puns. Her characters produce them obsessively, in their heads and at each other during fights, for comic effect, aggressively, but most often for no particular reason. The puns give the usually somber stories another dimension. The characters' idle punning makes them seem distant from each other, bored with their relationships. Their lack of focus and digression from the narrative direction given to them actually deepens the themes of the stories. In the puns, secret links are uncovered, and tragedies are handled in the light, blank zone of language.

You're only average, he said meanly.

I like a good sled dog, she said huskily.

This hot dog's awful, she said frankly.

I have to go to the hardware store, he said wrenchingly.

Unfinished Novel by Joshua Ferris: The Expectant Virgin

Our humble bookshop was lucky enough to receive a special unfinished manuscript from an unnamed book world spy. Take a first peek at this slice of action from Joshua Ferris's upcoming blockbuster,


THE EXPECTANT VIRGIN!

He reached into the jar of cream with three curled fingers and drawing out a dollop of the greasy stuff, he slathered it liberally over the congealed and coagulated flesh of his paramour.

"Myron," she cried playfully. "Watch out. You'll tenderize me!" Myron chuckled and puckered his lips, ravenously lapping at Mildred's extended index finger until his tongue reached the emerald that he had bought her after their last standoff. He told her, "Listen Gladys, I mean Mildred, if this is going to work out, you're going to have to muscle up to the bar. I don't have the time to deal with boy-like girls. I'm a man's girl and mean to stay that way!" Mildred and Gladys both sighed and began to rub each other's special parts with an unguent of green. Myron laughed once again and did a cartwheel, but slipping on the cream, ended up in the fireplace. To mask his embarrassment, he cried "Ta Da!". But the girls knew different. They giggled in derision and Myron, removing the poker, stood up and with moist eyes, told them that they were cruel and that he had been a homeless waif at one time. "And you both know that!"

When the shooting was all over, they all lay on the floor playing dead. Those possums! I wish you could have been there. I was the fly on the wall, until the professional swatter came along, but I lived to tell this tale and so much the better for it. I can't think of when I had so much fun and that's the truth. Would I lie?

Unfortunately, now I lie prone atop the glistening heap of Ponds that dislodged from its jar, flopped onto the nightstand where I idiotically landed. Now what? Keep your fingers crossed. Myron may save me yet. He's not such a bad egg and he has been given a bum steer. More about that later.

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Gritting his teeth at Dorinda, Myron submerged his hand in the jar of coagulated blood and flung it at Velma's exposed forehead from roughly three meters to her left. "Now hold still, you wildcat, and let me get off that grease," he spat.

"I think you got some coagulated blood between the pleats of your pants," mewled Dorinda. "Perhaps I can be of service," she sang out musically.

Shaking her long, musk-colored mane, Velma sprang from her chaise lounge and landed in a heap at no one's feet.

"Herb and Humberto are less than two blocks away," Myron growled. "Get your hose back on and give me a kiss quick! Not you, Velma," he sang out tunelessly.

With the dream of a whisper on her lips, Dorinda sailed out from the apartment, her hose trailing behind her like twin legs.