Rochel Burstyn: believability, layers, and the exploration of plain fun
The boundaries of typical middle-grades books are narrow, but Rochel Burstyn is blasting them open with bold and creative stories that captivate the most reluctant readers, while drawing readers of all ages. Her layered stories combine an out-of-the-box imagination with real emotion and dynamics that kids can relate to. Rochel Burstyn writes features, comics, and serials for kids of all ages in The Circle magazine. She has published more than a dozen books for early and middle-grade readers, including the recent Strange New World and Out of Mind.
Plus, see a link below for a holocaust reading collection that may come in handy during this season, and a quick poll to help us determine what comes next
Where did you grow up, and how did you express your creativity when you were younger?
I grew up in Melbourne and came to Detroit when I was 18. I used to play a lot with little mentchies and made up all these stories about them. I did that for years, until I was 12 or 13. I don't play with dolls anymore, but I still have made-up characters living in my head! Now I just write about them instead of play with them!
Growing up, I only read “normal” books about “normal” kids and families. Sweet Valley Twins, The Babysitters Club, The B.Y. Times, Bakers Dozen, all very pareve and relatable. And then one day I found a random book on the library bookshelf and came home with it. It was so different from anything I ever would've read, and if I had known what it was about, I don't think I would've read it. It was about a mind connection, and the story stayed with me forever. I always thought that it was a fun concept and thought that this should be made available for frum kids. It's a weird idea, but there's nothing wrong with it. And I was very fortunate that The Circle listened and gave their okay.
Your work is all about imagination and expanding the possibilities. Why do you think this is important for middle grade books?
I think it's kosher fun and there's nothing wrong with that. If we make everything have to have a moral, we're gonna look somewhere else for fun. Why can't kosher books just be plain old fun? Like sometimes we just go rollerblading and that's okay. The truth is all my books have a little point, not a huge pointed moral, but there is always a lesson or some growth, but nothing major that I'm hitting you over the head with. My point is, let's have fun guys!
All fiction requires us to suspend our disbelief to get absorbed in a story. Fantasy world-building is a fine line, though, because when not done properly, the reader is stuck with nagging questions of “How does this make sense” that prevent them from letting go and going along for the ride. How do you manage the balance of making sure you’re not getting lost in the tedious details while still making things believable?
I learned that you can make up whatever you want as long as the human emotion makes sense; if the human emotion is relatable, it makes the most unrealistic story believable. I read that in an author interview in the back of a book and it resonated with me. I also read in a writing manual that if you want to have something believable, you just need to make up one big lie, one big fiction piece. If everything else is true, especially the emotion, it becomes believable. So far it seems to work for me.
How much extra leeway do you have when writing for kids? I'm thinking of the Y2K bunker - a child who's reading it won't necessarily think, Why would the parents be so loony that they would go for this? Where was their Rav to advise them that it's time to get out? A child won’t think in that direction, but adults are so much more cynical. Do you feel like you could push the boundary further?
It's funny that you say that because I actually had a background for Strange New World all planned out, that the mother was a brand new Ba’alas Teshuvah, married at 18. She didn't have a Rav yet, and had some issues with her parents. When I ran it by Devorah [Cohen, editor of The Circle], she was like, “This is completely unnecessary, these are kids, they don’t care.” They just don't think about it. They don't want to know why they didn’t do this or think of that, they just want to know what actually happened.
[Read our conversation with Devorah Cohen here.]
My feeling is as long as it sounds like it makes sense and is basically believable, not everything has to be a hundred percent. For What Shevy Forgot, I did five minutes worth of research on amnesia and then I just made the rest of the stuff up completely, left, right, and center. I figured people know it's fiction. But maybe I’m the only one who’s so relaxed about that: when Judaica Press published the book, they made me add a medical disclaimer!
Out of Mind is a cross-genre teen novel that has so many different elements that mesh together seamlessly. The family dynamics, the social alienation, the science of the mind connection, the psychological mystery of it, and so much more. Which part was the kernel that got it started, and how did you go about pulling it all together?
I got the mind connection idea completely from that book I told you about, the one I read as a kid and couldn’t get out of my head. I credit the author in my dedication because I totally nicked it (borrowed it) from her. And then I needed something else going on. I don't even know where the family drama came from, Hashem put it in my head and I worked with it. I had originally wanted it to be that Tzippy’s aunt who raised her really did kidnap her. Devorah and The Circle staff really know what they're doing, they told me, that’s really scary, you have to take that out. And then I actually liked the way that they changed it, they made it much more gentle. So later when they asked me to add some extra stuff for the book, I was like, “Oh, I can make the aunt and Tzippy’s father get married!” And I dunno if they would've gotten married if she really had kidnapped the baby. I mean, there's no coming back from kidnapping.
Your newest serial in the Circle starts off on a somber tone, with a boy reeling from the changes in his life. Finally last week we met a vibrating motorcycle - can you give us a sneak peek?
I watched Chitty Chitty Bang Bang years ago, it's about a flying car. I recently read it to my kids and they enjoyed it. I kept thinking, this is fun, we should bring this to the frum world. But you can't just have a boring family, you need background and drama and interesting dynamics to make it compelling.
I also always incorporate whatever's going on in my life in whatever I’m writing. One of the side threads in Out of Mind was about the lady with Alzheimer's. At the time I had just read Still Alice, a book about a brilliant woman in her fifties who develops Alzheimer's, and I thought, “I want to incorporate that.” For Back of Mind, I wanted to touch on autism because I was dealing with family members who have autism and really wanted to share how important it is to be nice to kids with autism. So I threw that in as well.
I recently got divorced, and so I really wanted the couple in Hold on Tight, my new serial, to be divorced. Devorah was really skeptical about that at first and we had a bit of a discussion. The fact is that a LOT of kids today come from divorced homes and if divorce is never mentioned in frum fiction, they could feel alienated. In the end, we agreed that as long as I don't focus on it too much and as long as everything was with shalom, then it's fine, because most kids (hopefully) don't know so much about the parents' relationship and stuff anyhow. The funny thing is that this peaceful happy divorce I ended up writing about wound up being so unrealistic that I wonder if I defeated my own goal in the first place!
The main character is a boy, your other ones are all more feminine. Are you looking to bring this story to a different audience?
The problem is that the girls will read stories about boys or girls, but boys will only read about boys. I want everybody to read my stories, not just the girls. So I was happy to start writing about boys.
Science fiction and fantasy can get a bad rap for being too one-dimensional. It’s uncommon for a story to be cross-genre like all of yours are, whether it’s fantasy plus teen and family drama, speculative history plus mystery, etc. What is your process like to put all the different pieces together?
I start off with one main idea, and then come up with a dynamic; there has to be an interesting family. And I really like a third thread. Like Strange New World had the grandfather who could communicate with blinks. What Shevy Forgot had the thread about the girl who didn’t like her. Bundle of Joy had the stolen packages. There's always gotta be something small because not everything speaks to everybody. So if the family drama in Hold on Tight doesn't appeal to you, hopefully the flying motorcycle does!
Then I sit down and start writing it out and I see if it's smooth within a chapter outline, if it really makes sense, and if I can carry all the threads through. It's cool, it’s kind of like sewing, or like a puzzle. Once I actually start, it comes alive in my head. I don't know how writers can write one chapter at a time and send it off, I would forget. I zip through it and write nonsense, just typing, typing, typing. I’ve actually got probably three chapters left at this point of my current serial, but I didn’t send it in because I keep thinking, oh my gosh, he needs blah, blah, blah. And I go back to like chapter eight to add it in...
Genre plays out completely differently in picture books. There’s no such thing as fantasy - most kids' books are made up, and there isn’t even any world-building needed to convince a kid that Benny the Bus can talk and have feelings. How do you apply your imaginative approach to your picture books?
Benny The Bus and Azriel the Airplane are like Thomas the Tank Engine, kids love that kind of stuff. So that wasn't such a huge stretch.
I know from myself that if I enjoy a book, I'm more likely to read it to my kids. So many times they'll bring me a book and I'm like, no, no, that one has too many words, that one doesn’t rhyme properly. And sometimes I get rid of books because I just don’t like it and if my kids want me to sit down and read a book to them, I need to enjoy it too.
I actually enjoy writing chapter books more than picture books, especially writing for The Circle, which is so popular. With a picture book, it was surprising to me, but it took a lot of convincing and shopping around to the different publishers. I sent Where Are My Shoes to publishers 10 years before it was published and everybody had said no. And I just gave up on it. And then Judaica Press had some contest and I sent it in again. I guess at that point they were looking for new manuscripts and the time was right, it really is all from Hashem. They just told me what they wanted me to fix and then they took it.
Anyone creative knows that having lots of great ideas means not all will come to fruition. Can you remember any ideas you had or started working on that didn’t work out?
I really wanted to write about a person that shrinks, and all the crazy stuff he can get into. I read my kids anything that I enjoyed as a kid. The Mrs. Pepperpot series are about this little old Swedish woman who shrinks to the size of a pepperpot every so often without warning. I thought something similar would be a lot of fun. But apparently The Circle already had done something with shrinking, I think in a comic though. I still think it's a great idea!
I also wrote a picture book a few years ago, very similar to my shoes book, called Where Is a Pen?! I can’t be the only one who can never find a pen when I need one… but so far, this manuscript hasn’t found it’s place. I’m hoping it will get published one day. It’s exactly the kind of fun story that I enjoy reading to my own kids.
What's stopping you from trying adult fiction?
Oh, I don't like adults. I'm really enjoying kids. I mean, never say never, but yeah, I'm really enjoying it.
What books have you read recently that you can recommend?
I recently read Rocky Rhodes by Bina Scharf, I thought it was great, exactly my cup of tea. It was probably the first time I've ever read something light in frum fiction. I can't wait to read the second one. I loved Pride and Preference as well, I thought that was fantastic.
[Read our conversations with Bina Scharf and Barbara Bensoussan.]
These days, I need to read books that I can put down in the middle. Otherwise, like any bookaholic, I’ll just keep reading through the night and then the morning comes and I finished reading the book, yay, but now I can't get up and get my kids off to school. So I read very light books, nothing that will keep me up and wondering what’s gonna happen next.
I love British writers, and I like funny, so I love Jill Mansell’s and Sophie Ranald’s books. Also, The 100 Year Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared. I loved it so much that as soon as I read it, I read all the author’s other books, and I think they're all hilarious and so creative. I keep trying to think how I could bring something like that to frum kids, but I think you need to have some knowledge of historical stuff and I don't. I just make stuff up.
What books can you recommend to children who’ve enjoyed your books?
If they don't mind if it's not Jewish, this is what I read to my kids that I enjoy and my kids enjoy. Enid Blyton - it's old stuff and just so imaginative, like The Wishing Chair and The Magic Faraway Tree. But you believe it, because why can't it be true? And then the Mrs. Pepperport Stories is just magical and so much fun to read.
What's coming up next for you?
I would love to write part three of Out of Mind one day. There's the whole adoption part to explore, so I want him to be 12, and grappling with the knowledge of “I was adopted, people know my story.” And I also have the third in the Benny the Bus series coming soon, Shimon the Ship.
I have no idea what Hashem will put in my head next, what He’ll put in my journey that will spark something off. A year ago I had no plans whatsoever about Hold on Tight, and here we are. So who knows!?
Last year, we shared a collection of holocaust reading: the classics, the broader view, and new perspectives.
For some, Holocaust reading is part of a regular reading diet. For others, it is reserved exclusively for the three weeks, one time of year to dwell on the tragic parts of our history. Regardless, this week is an appropriate time to share a diverse collection of holocaust reads to inspire and fascinate, while connecting to the realities of our galus.
Find the collection at the link below. (No access? Hit reply to request a pdf version.)
And one last thing before we go - please take a second to vote in this quick poll and let us know what you’d like to see more of.