“Looking for Jack
Kerouac”
by Barbara Shoup
Aug. 12, 2014
Lacewing Books
“A relatable protagonist
managing a delicate balance between uncomfortable realities and fertile
possibilities makes for a memorable, mature coming-of-age story.” - Publishers Weekly Starred Review
BEAT
ICON JACK KEROUAC PLAYS NOTEWORTHY ROLE IN AWARD-WINNING AUTHOR BARBARA SHOUP’S
EIGHTH BOOK
A new young adult novel about self-discovery, “Looking
for Jack Kerouac” releases August 12
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. – Author Barbara Shoup’s newest young adult novel, “Looking for Jack Kerouac”
(August 12, Lacewing Books), whisked her away on a fascinating journey where
legends came to life more than 1,000 miles away from her hometown.
With the help of a grant from the Indiana Arts Commission,
Shoup embarked on a road trip that took her from central Indiana to St.
Petersburg, Fla., the same adventure taken by the characters in her latest
book. In “Looking for Jack Kerouac,” Paul Carpetti picks up a copy of “On the
Road” by legendary beat novelist Jack Kerouac during a class trip in New York
City. The book has a dramatic impact on Paul, changing his whole outlook on
life. But when he returns home from the city, his world crumbles. It’s 1964,
and Paul is dealing with the death of his mother. He needs to get away.
Paul hops in a car with his friend, Duke, and
doesn’t look back. The two land in Florida where Paul finds Kerouac, who turns
out to be nothing like the author he idolized. But, in the end, the writer
helps Paul in his journey to self-discovery in an unexpected way.
“Looking for Jack Kerouac” is a coming-of-age
tale with heart. Relying on notes she jotted down on her way to Florida’s Gulf
Coast, as well as extensive research on Kerouac’s life, Shoup writes with
intensity, passion and poignant reflection.
Shoup is the author seven other novels, including
a School Library Journal Best Adult Book for Young Adults, “Vermeer’s
Daughter,” and two others – “Wish You Were Here” and “Stranded in Harmony” –
selected as American Library Association Best Books for Young Adults.
She is the executive director of the Indiana
Writers Center and the co-author of “Novel Ideas: Contemporary Authors Share
the Creative Process” (2000) and “Story Matters: Contemporary Short Story
Writers Share the Creative Process (2006).”
To say Barbara Shoup is passionate about writing would be an understatement. The award-winning author has been recognized with multiple honors for her work, and in August, she will release her eighth novel “Looking for Jack Kerouac” with Lacewing Books, the young adult imprint of Engine Books.
Shoup is the author of seven other novels, including “Night Watch” (1982), “Wish You Were Here” (1994/2008), “Stranded in Harmony” (1997/2001), “Faithful Women” (1999), “Vermeer’s Daughter” (2003/2014), “Everything You Want” (2008) and “An American Tune” (2012). She is the executive director of the Indiana Writers Center and the co-author of “Novel Ideas: Contemporary Authors Share the Creative Process” (2000) and “Story Matters: Contemporary Short Story Writers Share the Creative Process (2006).”
Shoup
graduated from Indiana University in Bloomington with a bachelor’s degree in
elementary education and master’s degree in secondary education. She taught
creative writing to high school students for more than twenty years.
Shoup’s
short fiction, poetry, essays and interviews have appeared in numerous small
magazines, as well as in The Writer
and The New York Times travel section.
Her young adult novels, “Wish You Were Here” and “Stranded in Harmony” were
selected as American Library Association Best Books for Young Adults. “Vermeer’s
Daughter” was a School Library Journal Best Adult Book for Young Adults.
Shoup
is the recipient of numerous grants from the Indiana Arts Council, two creative
renewal grants from the Arts Council of Indianapolis, the 2006 PEN Phyllis
Reynolds Naylor Working Writer Fellowship and the 2012 Eugene and Marilyn Glick
Regional Indiana Author Award.
Shoup
has lived in Indiana all her life. She is married with two daughters and two grandchildren.
Praise for Barbara Shoup’s Writing
“Wish You Were Here” (1994/2008, Hyperion Books for Children/FLUX)
“This one is a classic, pure and simple…Consider this beach blanket reading of the smartest kind.” – Colleen Mondor, Bookslut
“Beautifully written…a touching, thought-provoking, and very candid coming-of-age tale.” – Book List
“…Shoup demonstrates a rare understanding of the pivotal role friendship plays in the lives of young adults – or anyone.” – The Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books
·
Blue Ribbon Book, Bulletin for the Center
for Children’s Books (1994)
·
American Library Association Best Books for
Young Adults (1995)
·
Midland Society of Authors Children’s Book
Award finalist (1995)
·
Elliot Rosewater Award for Young Adult
Literature nominee (1995)
·
Best Young Adult Books, Voice of Youth
Advocates (VOYA) (1995)
·
South Carolina Young Adult Book Award
nominee (1996-97)
·
VOYA, Perfect Tens (2001)
·
In a poll by the Children’s Book Council, a
project of the ALA-CBC Joint Commission, “Wish You Were Here” was chosen by
librarians, teachers, parents and kids as the book they would most like to see
reissued. It was reissued by FLUX in 2009.
“Stranded in Harmony” (1997/2001, Hyperion Books for Children, Guild Press)
“Shoup is able to amplify with clarity the stirrings of a young man’s soul.” –Chicago Tribune
“…readers will appreciate the book’s heartening awareness of two important facts: crossing over the threshold is hard and there is something better beyond it.” – The Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books
“In a highly believable manner, this compelling and highly textured novel weaves together yearnings for freedom, family friction, political issues of the '60s, and personal traumas…Shoup respects her readers' intelligence by not offering any easy outs or cardboard villains.” – School Library Journal
·
American Library Association Best Books for
Young Adults (1998)
·
Great Lakes Book Award for Young Adult
Fiction finalist (1998)
·
Children’s Literature Choice List (1998)
·
Eliot Rosewater Award for Young Adult
Literature nominee (1999)
·
International Reading Association, Young
Adults’ Choice List (1999)
·
Montgomery County MD “Character List” (1999)
·
South Carolina Young Adult Book Award
nominee (1999-2000)
·
Public Library of Cincinnati, Great Books
for Young Adults
·
Chicago Public Library, Featured Reading
List: Teen Edition
“Vermeer’s Daughter” (2003/2014, Guild Press/Ebook)
“Vermeer and his ever-increasing family live in his mother-in-law's house in the Papist corner of Delft. Tanneke, the cook, prepares broodjes and hutsepot, and poses for her master. His patron, Van Ruijven, eagerly awaits each commissioned work. Verifiable information about the artist's home life is sketchy, so Shoup has fleshed it out into a warm, compelling story, creating a loving, but chaotic household for her narrator, a fictional middle daughter, Carelina. Aware of her stern grandmother's preference for her sisters, lovely Maria and pious Elizabeth, Carelina slips out of the house to visit her adored father in his studio. As she learns to grind pigments and peers through his magical camera obscura, she listens to him discussing philosophy and religion with the great men of his time. She puzzles over the ideas, but is more concerned with the people who make up her world. When she has a surprise encounter with an old friend of her father's, she discovers the artist within herself. In this book, the smells and tastes of delicious Dutch food, the bustle and excitement of the Grand Market Square, and the luminous glory of Vermeer's masterpieces are brought vividly to life.” – School Library Journal
·
Best Adult Books for High School Students, School Library Journal (2003)
·
YA Top 40 Fiction Titles, Pennsylvania School Librarian’s Association (2003)
“Everything You Want” (2008, FLUX)
“Just thinking about how money would change everything is an intriguing place for a story to begin, especially in the hands of a skilled writer.” – Claire Rosser, KLIATT
“At heart, and in the best possible meaning of the term, this is a coming of age story…‘Everything You Want’ is everything that I want, as a reader, in a young adult novel. Highly recommended.” Jen Robinson, Jen Robinson’s Book Page
“…a surprisingly moving portrait of a young woman's efforts to find and accept herself.” – Booklist
“An American Tune” (2012, Breakaway Books, Indiana University Press)
“‘An American Tune’ is about the ‘60s, but it's about now, too. It's about a mother finding herself in her daughter, for better and for worse, and it's about generations of women forever realizing that even though we try our best to prevent them, our children were born to make their own mistakes. Nora will become your honest-to-God best friend because she reminds us of where we've been, what we're doing, and what we are looking for.” – Margaret McMullan, author of “In My Mother's House” and “When Warhol Was Still Alive”
Book Details for
“Looking for Jack Kerouac”
When Paul Carpetti discovers “On the Road” in Greenwich
Village while on a class trip to New York City, the world suddenly cracks open
and he sees that life could be more than the college degree his mother is
determined for him to achieve, a good job and, eventually, marriage to his
girlfriend, Kathy. But upon his return, his mother is diagnosed with terminal
cancer and his world falls apart.
Set in 1964, “Looking
for Jack Kerouac” tells the story of how Paul’s dreams of a different life
and his grief at the loss of his mother set him on a road trip with his rowdy
friend, Duke, that includes a wild night on Music Row in Nashville, an
all-too-real glimpse of glimpse of racism; and an encounter with a voluptuous
mermaid named Lorelei – landing him in St. Petersburg, where he finds real
friendship and, in time, Jack Kerouac. By then a ruined man, living with his
mother, Kerouac is nothing like the person Paul has traveled so far to meet.
Yet, in the end, it is Kerouac who gives him the key that
opens up the next phase of his life.
Q&A with Barbara
Shoup
Where
did the idea for “Looking for Jack Kerouac” come from?
A friend and fellow
writer told me about his idea for a screenplay called “Looking for Jack
Kerouac” with similar story line. I thought it sounded like a terrific idea for
a young adult novel and said, joking, “If you ever decide you don’t want to do
the screenplay, could I have the idea?” A few years later, he said, “Remember
that Kerouac idea? I’m not going to do it, so you can have it if you want it.”
“Cool,” I said. “Thanks!” But it was just an idea and I had a hard time finding
a way to make it my own.
Then, sadly, one of
my sisters died of brain cancer. Not long after her death, an image of her
behind the counter of a diner floated into my mind’s eye. There was Ginny! One
of the most painful things about my sister’s illness and death was watching her
two teenage sons go through it and, after I found Ginny (and the idea that I
could, in a way, bring my sister back to life through her), it occurred to me
that Paul might have had the same experience as my oldest nephew. At which
point the book became about a whole lot more than a road trip for me. It was a
way of processing my own grief about my sister and trying to better understand
what losing their mother had been like for her boys.
What
are the differences between the real Jack Kerouac and the man portrayed in your
book?
My
personal understanding of the real Jack Kerouac came from reading everything
he’d written, as well as reading biographies and memoirs by those who knew him,
which revealed a complexity that humanized the icon he’s become. He was
brilliant, driven, ambitious in his work. He was arrogant, difficult, reckless,
rebellious; generous, tender, sad, kind, wrecked. He was drop-dead handsome; he
was shy with women. He was free-wheeling and adventurous; he spent most of his
life off the road living with his mother, who did factory work to support him.
He was obsessed with baseball and, to his death, played a baseball card game he
invented when he was a boy. He admired the tenets of Buddhism and worked to
synthesize him with his Catholic beliefs, but by the end of his life he’d
reverted to Catholic beliefs so conservative that some called them medieval. He
craved and hated the fame that came his way. He died of alcoholism at the age
of 47, while sharing a small, cramped house with his mother in St. Petersburg,
Florida.
I tried to
make my fictional Kerouac as close as I could to what I understood the real to
have been. It was important to me that readers see him not as the icon, but as
a man whose life had not turned out happily, but whose generosity in
acknowledging a sadness surrounding an early loss in his own life could make a
real difference to a young man trying to find his path. I also wanted to paint
a realistic picture about the writing life and what the price of fame can be.
How
did you immerse yourself into the life of Jack Kerouac?
I did a lot of
research on Jack Kerouac, his circle of friends, New York in the ‘50s, and the ‘50s,
generally. I listened to music Kerouac listened to. Also, thanks to a grant, I
took Paul and Duke’s road trip from Indiana to St. Petersburg, Fla., noting
interesting details along the way and jotting down ideas for the story that
popped up because of what I saw. Once in St. Petersburg, I found the house
where Kerouac had lived with his mother and explored parts of the city where I
knew he’d hung out, and I began to see him there.
I also read widely
about 1964, which was a pivotal year for numerous issues, including the
immediate aftermath of the Kennedy assassination, civil rights and the war in
Vietnam.
What
was it like seeing Jack Kerouac’s home in person?
It
made me sad and brought a visceral understanding of how small and shabby
Kerouac’s life ultimately became. But it also brought the thrill I always feel
when I have the good fortune to be able to step into the world I’m writing
about. He lived there. He stood where I stood, walked up the path to the front
door, opened it, went in. There was the window of his front bedroom, through
which the sound of his typewriter could be heard on warm evenings. His cats had
skulked in shrubbery beneath it. The huge tree in the narrow dividing strip
between the sidewalk and front yard must have been a sapling then.
Visiting the
setting of a work in progress always generates new ideas for plot and scene—not
necessarily only at the moment you’re there. They enter the mix in your mind,
waiting to pop up when you need them. I take a lot of photos, which I use to
refresh my memory about small details. These, too, suggest new possibilities.
Writing the scene near the end of the book, in which Paul goes to Jack’s house
alone, at night, grew from seeing the house, the window from which Paul could
hear Jack typing.
What
is your favorite Jack Kerouac book?
“Visions
of Gerard,” a fictional meditation on the loss of Kerouac’s saintly older
brother, whose death from rheumatic fever at the age of nine profoundly
affected the way Kerouac saw the world and was the cornerstone of his work, in
which he so often struggled to find balance between exultation and sorrow. The
book triggered my fictional Kerouac’s response when Paul tells him about his
mother’s death: “And you will never get over [the loss of your mother]. It’s
not meant for us to get over that kind of sadness.” It unlocked a door inside
Paul that gave him entry into the next part of his life, in which the grief
could find a proportionate place to settle inside him. As I wrote the scene, I felt the grief I felt
about my sister’s death settle inside me.
“Looking
for Jack Kerouac” is set in 1964. In what ways will modern young adults relate
to the characters in your book?
1964
was a turbulent year in which Americans dealt with grief and confusion in the
aftermath of the Kennedy assassination that happened late 1963, increasing
racial conflict, and the escalation of the war in Vietnam. It was the year that
“ordinary” kids began to question the moral stance of our country on these and
other issues that would play out for the rest of their lives. Kids today are
not only living the consequences of those times but questioning current
political decisions that have created a new kind of segregation in our
communities and involved us in wars that many consider senseless and immoral.
Human nature doesn’t change, really. Reading about the past helps people of all
ages understand this, while at the same time encouraging them to consider ways
they can make their own small worlds a little better.
Even
though “Looking for Jack Kerouac” is billed as a young adult novel, it seems
like adults would also enjoy this book – and you’ve won awards in the past for
writing crossover stories. Was that your intention?
2014
is the 50th anniversary of the high school class of 1964. All over
the country, Baby Boomers will be gathering at class reunions, talking about
what it was like when they were young, wondering how in the world they got from
18 to 68. Looking for Jack Kerouac is
not only a book that introduces an exciting era of change to young people, but
vividly brings it back to those who lived and remembered it. Adults of all ages
who appreciate a good coming of age story will also enjoy the novel.
How do hope
the stories you write help young adults as they struggle to understand
themselves and the world they live in?
Many
years ago, I visited a high school class that had read my book, Stranded in Harmony. A lively discussion
ensued about the fact that the main character had had sexual relations with his
girlfriend, who he feared might be pregnant. Some students appreciated the honesty
with which I approached this part of adolescent life. Others felt that
fictional teen characters shouldn’t have sex because this implied that having
sex before marriage was acceptable. A few were okay with the sexual
relationship, but felt that the main character’s girlfriend should have been
pregnant as punishment for the immoral act. Near the end of class, a girl in
the back of the room raised her hand. “I’m pregnant,” she said. “This book
helped me understand the way my boyfriend acted when I told him.” The bell rang. She was gone. It totally blew
me away! It’s what we hope for, writing novels for people of any age—that it
makes a difference to them, somehow.
You
studied education at Indiana University and now you’re the head of the Indiana Writers
Center. Tell us more about the role that teaching plays in your life.
I’ve been teaching
writing, one way or another, for more than 40 years. I taught creative writing
to high school students for 20 years, which I loved, and I continue to visit
high school classes to talk about writing and the writing life. As the
executive director of the Indiana Writers Center, I teach people of all ages – from
kindergarteners to people in their 90s. Writing and teaching are inseparable to
me.
Everyone’s life is a
story and writing that story is a great gift to yourself and others – whether
you do it through fiction or simply writing down what you remember for family
and friends. Working with the Indiana Writers Center has made me fully
understand the truth and power in my belief that everyone has a story worth
telling.
You’ve
interviewed nearly 50 novelists and short story writers about the creative
process for your books, “Novel Ideas” and “Story Matters.” What was the most
important lesson you learned from them?
One
of my favorite quotes about writing comes from Iris Murdoch’s “The Black
Prince”: “I live, I live with a continuous sense of failure. I am always
defeated, always. Every book is the wreck of a perfect idea. The years pass and
one has only one life. If one has a thing to do one must do it and keep on and
on and on trying to do it better.” I know. It sounds so…negative. But the first time I read it I was so relieved because it
made me realize that I was not alone in the way I felt about my work. There is
joy in the process, of course. But it is also a huge and often daunting
emotional challenge to write well. Interviewing all those authors whose work I
admired made me feel part of a community of serious writers who try and fail
and try again (and again) to say something real about what it’s like to be
human.
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