User:TheRealToddHasakLowy

Short Bio
My name is Todd, and I’ve been writing for about twenty years. I started writing books for adults, but now I write books for kids and teenagers, too. My most recent book is a narrative memoir for ages 9-13 that I co-wrote with Holocaust survivor Michael Gruenbaum called SOMEWHERE THERE IS STILL A SUN. Earlier in 2015 I published my first young adult novel, ME BEING ME IS EXACTLY AS INSANE AS YOU BEING YOUNG. My first middle grade novel, 33 MINUTES, was published in 2013. I’ve also published two works of fiction for adults: a short story collection, THE TASK OF THIS TRANSLATOR, and the novel CAPTIVES. In addition to writing fiction, I teach creative writing and literature at the School of the Arts Institute of Chicago and translate Hebrew literature into English. I live in Evanston, Illinois (just outside Chicago), with my wife, two daughters, a dog, and two cats.

Much Longer Bio
I was born in Detroit and raised in its suburbs. I’m the second of three brothers. All of us were born in May. Other than my immediate family, the most important part of my childhood was going to Camp Tavor in Three Rivers, Michigan. Tavor is part of a Labor-Zionist youth movement called Habonim-Dror. After high school I spent a year in Israel living on a kibbutz (sort of a collective farm). I worked in irrigation.

I attended the University of Michigan as an undergrad. I majored in Near Eastern and North African Studies. I knew by around age 20 that I wanted to become a professor, and I knew that I wanted to study Israel and the Middle East. But it took me a while to decide which field or discipline I wanted to pursue.

I wound up settling on Comparative Literature. I attended the University of California, Berkeley for graduate school, where I started in 1994. There I studied Hebrew and Arabic literature, though by the time I was writing my dissertation I was only working on Hebrew literature. The weird thing about being at Berkeley, especially at first, was that I really had no idea how to study literature. My major at Michigan had been interdisciplinary, with an emphasis on history. I had always loved reading novels, but had never done so with much systematic instruction. Suddenly I was attending arguably the top school for studying literature in the world, and I was lost. My first few semesters at Berkeley, were, needless to say, difficult.

But when I started making sense of fiction (and narrative in general), the payoff was huge. I still remember, sitting in my younger brother’s apartment (both my brothers moved to San Francisco around the time I moved to Berkeley), reading some comic or graphic novel that was clearly in the tradition of R. Crumb or Harvey Pekar. I was amazed how the author was able to represent an entire imagined world, and that this world was utterly specific and alive, and that the author was creating all this through some remarkable combination of decisions, techniques, ideas, etc.

I guess that may have been an epiphany of sorts. It was definitely, for me, a before and after moment. I suddenly realized in some way, Oh, this [this=writing stories] is really interesting, and somehow no longer 100% mysterious, and so maybe I could do it. I had always had a creative impulse (one that largely manifested itself from a young age with my behaving like a clown), but I never had a form or a medium to work in. Now I sensed I may have found one. I started writing a few months later, with the help of two novels (Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine and Yaakov Shabtai’s Past Continuous). These two works, each in its own way, offered me very particular models for forging my own prose. My voice as a writer, such as it is, came out almost fully formed right away. Sometimes you get lucky.

During the second half of graduate school (graduate school lasted a LONG time, eight years), I worked on my dissertation and—when I had both time and inspiration—wrote short stories on the side. In other words, most of the time I wasn’t writing fiction. I was fortunate to be put in touch with Simon Lipskar, who agreed to become my agent after seeing a few of my early stories. He helped me slowly put together a collection.

In 2002, I relocated with my wife and daughter to Gainesville, Florida, because I got a job teaching Hebrew language and literature at the University of Florida. Getting a tenure-track job was very gratifying, even if the University of Florida seemed like an awfully random place to be. I taught there for eight years and earned tenure in 2009. My second daughter was also born there. Oh yeah, and I published my first two books of fiction there. In 2005, my short story collection (The Task of This Translator) was published. In 2008, I published my first novel (Captives). In 2008 I also published a book-length academic study, Here and Now: History, Nationalism, and Realism in Hebrew Fiction. Those were good, productive years.

I started writing fiction as a direct result of my academic study. In other words, I never would have started writing (or writing anything worth reading) had it not been for my academic work, since that work taught me how to understand narrative and forced me to develop the kind of sensitivity to language all writers need. While I was writing short stories I felt that the two pursuits (academics and creative writing) coexisted in a productive tension. But by the time I started writing novels, which require a totally different kind of commitment, I started feeling like this arrangement wasn’t working so well. It began to feel like I needed to choose one or the other. I slowly realized I wanted to devote all my intellectual energies to my writing.

For this (and a bunch of other reasons) my family and I decided to leave the University of Florida in 2010. We moved to the Chicago area (Evanston to be exact) to be closer to our families. I now teach creative writing and literature here, primarily at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Though I’ve continued writing for adults since moving here, I now concentrate most of my efforts on writing for younger readers. I’m still trying to figure out exactly how that happened. Most of it has to do with my editor, Liesa Abrams, who first bought 33 MINUTES and then got me very excited about writing a Young Adult novel. So I did that, too (write a YA novel), and now–after co-writing a very special middle-grade memoir–I’m working on another YA novel. I somehow got a second agent out of all of this, Daniel Lazar. I have some regular novels for adults at different stages of completion, and I really hope to get back to them in the not-so-distant future.

Last thing. Somewhere in the middle of all this, I started translating Hebrew literature into English. This was a mildly terrifying project to take on at first, but I found that I really loved it. My translation of Asaf Schurr’s novel Motti came out in 2011. I guess I’m pretty good at that, as I won an international translation prize in 2013. My translations of Dror Burstein’s Netanya and D.A. Mishani’s A Possibility of Violence were published in 2013 and 2014, respectively.

So that’s me for now. Thanks for reading.

FAQ
(which have only ever been asked infrequently and which are mostly about 33 Minutes)

Q: Is 33 Minutes autobiographical?

A: Short answer: no.

Long answer: I had a best friend for a bunch of years starting around fourth grade. By eighth grade we were barely even friends anymore. But he didn’t beat me up, or even threaten to beat me up, and not a single other event that takes place in this book happened to me. But it is, I guess you could say, emotionally autobiographical. I was writing about what it felt like to lose your best friend for the first time, and that feeling was something I knew first-hand.

Q: 33 Minutes is structured kind of strangely. Barely any time passes and the chapters have titles like “11:41,” “11:45,” and “11:49.” Why did you do this?

A: So my honest (but also a little obnoxious) answer to questions like this (Why did you do something or What did you mean by something?) is to ask the asker, “Well, what do you make of it?” or “What effect did it have on you?” Because truthfully that’s what matters most. I don’t get to decide what my books mean, the reader does. But okay, I can still give you my version. But it’s a long one, so don’t say I didn’t warn you:

For some reason, I have a tough time writing books in a straightforward way. When I’m writing I’m trying really hard not to just imitate other books I’ve read. Part of not imitating is thinking up new character with new conflicts. But another way to get to someplace new is to tell the story in an unusual way. This is often where my books begin, with an idea of how to tell it. For instance, my next book is a young adult novel made up entirely of lists.

Of course, these kind of techniques (or gimmicks) only get you so far. You still need to have fascinating characters doing fascinating things. But for some reason these kind of strange techniques get me excited about writing a new story, and without that excitement it’s pretty close to impossible to write anything worth reading.

In the case of 33 Minutes, I thought it might be fun to start Sam’s story right near the end. I had a feeling that Sam would be at his most interesting when he thought he was about to get beat up by Morgan, so I open the book just a bit before that’s going to happen. That also (I hope) grabs the reader’s attention right away, since there’s immediate suspense and conflict and all those good things. The idea of starting a story near its end came from some advice I got once from the writer Michael Chabon, who I’m guessing got the same advice from someone else. But it was my idea to break it down into chapters that only last five minutes or so.

Writing chapters that only cover a few minutes (see, I told you this was going to be a long answer) also let me do something else I love to do when I write: describe a moment in great detail. So that’s what the chapters are, a bunch of moments magnified. That and a lot of flashbacks, because of course you can’t ever tell just the end of the story.

Q: How long did it take you to write 33 Minutes?

A: Around two or three months. But I didn’t write it all at once. I wrote a bit, sent that to my agent (or agents actually—it’s complicated—Simon Lipskar and Daniel Lazar, who are both incredibly good readers and not just absurdly good agents), wrote some more, took a break, worked on something else, went back to it, sent it back to Daniel (who’s the official agent for this book), etc., until we felt it was pretty much done.

Q: Two or three months. That seems kind of fast.

A: That’s not a question.

Q: Now I see why you made your protagonist a smart-aleck. Fine. Wouldn’t you say that writing a book in two or three months is kind of fast?

A: I guess, but don’t think that I always write that fast. Sometimes you get lucky. You get an idea for a story and an idea for how to tell it. You start writing it, and against all odds your ideas turn out to be good ones. Next thing you know you have a book. But that’s not usually how it works. Usually things take much longer, because usually not all your ideas are as good as you first hoped.

Q: Wait, you said something about the book feeling “pretty much done.” What do you mean “pretty much”?

A: Well, honestly, I don’t remember if I thought it was 100% awesome by the time we started sending it around to publishers (that’s how it works most of the time: you write a book and then your agent sends it publishers, hoping someone will want to buy it). All I know is that the insanely excellent editor Liesa Abrams at Aladdin bought it, but then she had what people call “notes.” “Notes” is code for “Um. .. this part still needs some attention.” So then there were lots of little (and a few not-so-little) things that I revised, and revised again. By the time Liesa was done with it, the book was much, much better.

Q: Did you do the drawings in 33 Minutes?

A: No, but they’re pretty great, if I do say so myself. A woman named Bethany Barton did them. I chose all the places where they’d go, plus I explained (in words) what I wanted everything to look like. Still, Bethany had to interpret my explanations. The great thing is she totally got what I was aiming for, and in a bunch of places she came up with some little detail that made the whole thing way better than what I had first imagined.

Q: Are you going to write more books about Sam Lewis? Or maybe a book about Morgan Sturtz? Or even Amy Takahara? Like some kind of sequel?

A: Right now I’m not planning on it. I had a story to tell, and I told it. I do think about Sam from time to time. And Amy, too. Morgan not so much. I wouldn’t rule out another book entirely.

Q: Will there be a movie of 33 Minutes?

A: I have no idea. I hope so, because when people say, “I saw the movie, but the book was better,” they’ll be talking about my book.

Q: What’s next? Do you have another book coming out?

A: My next book will be a young adult novel and will be published by Simon Pulse in Summer 2014. Right now it’s called Three Days and Darren Jacobs, but that title is going to change. It might be called All These Things & More or A Number of Absurd Complications or something else altogether. This is the book told entirely in lists. I’ve started another YA novel, but only very recently, so it’s still too new to talk about.

Q: You write books for adults, for kids, and for teenagers. What’s up with that?

A: I don’t know. It wasn’t really my plan to become a writer, let alone write for this or that age group. I just write. Sometimes writing for one age interests me, sometimes another.

Q: Well, what did you plan to become?

A: I planned (and became) a professor for a while. I was a professor of literature (modern Hebrew literature to be exact). If you want to hear more about that, check out my longer bio. I still teach, though now I mostly teach creative writing, which I love to teach.

Website
http://www.toddhasaklowy.com