Like everyone else “in the know” in high school, I looked to Blake Nelson’s Girl like it was my bible. All the confusing feelings and twisted emotions I was having as a nonconformist teenager were documented perfectly in this book. My friends and I passed around our one collective copy, each signing it like it was a sacred artifact.

There’s something about Blake Nelson enthusiasts, but Girl and now Dream School fans in particular—you can spot them from a mile away. Like there's an underground code, a secret handshake, a fight club without the fighting. I ran into my old friend Tyler the other day on the subway and I held up my book for him to see, wondering if it meant anything to him. He seemed like a would-be fan. He held up his own copy of Dream School and we laughed. I wasn’t surprised.

I recently got the chance to interview Blake Nelson over email and his responses were yet another reminder of how much I love his work, his decisions, and his characters. Warning: If you haven’t read the book yet, this interview may contain a few spoiler alerts. And, uh, what are you waiting for?

Jesse: Andrea left Wellington on a pretty abrupt and dramatic note. Did you have a similar experience at Wesleyan?

Blake: Yeah, I left Wesleyan kind of hastily. My situation was more based around the band I was in. We were always getting into trouble. It reached a point where we needed to not be there. So we left.

Jesse: In general, how similar was your Wesleyan experience to Andrea’s at Wellington? Did you have a Vanessa, a Carol, an Andrew, a Paul?

Blake: It’s somewhat similar, not those actual people though. The thing about her not finding her own people at first—that did happen. When I first arrived at Wesleyan I thought it was going to be all these East Coast hipsters. But most people had, like, Bob Marley posters in their rooms. It was, like, this prep school time warp. It took until my sophomore year to find ONE person who was into the same stuff I was. He was wearing a Bad Brains button. What a relief that was . . .

Jesse: When you first started writing the book, did you know Andrea was going to wind up leaving college early, or more importantly, that she was going to leave feeling “unchanged” to a certain degree? Like, changed, but not changed in the end-all-be-all way she had anticipated?

Blake: No, I just started the book and let it flow and take me to wherever it was going to go. I didn’t even know she was going to be a writer! As for being unchanged, I think she was changed a lot actually. I’m not sure, if she’d gone to Oregon State, that she could have ever taken herself seriously as a writer. That was the secret benefit of Wellington. Because people at places like that take themselves so seriously. They think they could be writers. It makes it easier for someone like Andrea to do so well.

Jesse: Andrea is pretty comfortable with herself, confident in her decisions, and able to “go with the flow.” She doesn’t seem to sweat the small stuff or obsess over everything the way some girls her age might. Where did the idea for Andrea’s character, her sophisticated and wise attitude in particular, come from?

Blake: You think of her as wise? Ha ha. Well, that’s a compliment I guess! I think of her as . . . well, she’s from a small city, Portland, so she has that small town common sense thing. I don’t know if she’s sophisticated. She does feel grounded to me. But also naïve. She’s obviously some composite of me and other people I’ve known and the kind of people I enjoy meeting. But I don’t really make decisions about her personality. She just is.

Jesse: Another thought about Andrea’s character . . . I always thought (in Girl first, and now in Dream School) it was really interesting how she straddles both the punk and mainstream worlds so seamlessly. It seems like a very conscious decision on your part; why did you make it? Were you like that at all growing up?

Blake: Yeah I was like that. I’ve got the classic writer personality of being able to blend in and sort of exist in different worlds. I think for Andrea it’s more part of the process of becoming herself. She starts off being this totally normal person, on the surface, at least. And then slowly she makes the transition to something less mainstream. I love remembering people I knew in high school who made dramatic shifts. Guys who would show up at shows and be, like, the most normal nerdy types. And then they’d come back the next week and be totally punk or whatever. They would totally change in one week.

Jesse: This is kind of a predictable question, but . . . Why did you wait so long before writing the sequel to Girl? And had you always known there would be a sequel?

Blake: I wrote the sequel around 1998-2000. Then I couldn’t get my original Girl publisher to publish it, (it was a little late in their eyes). Over the next couple years, I brought it up with different publishers, but could never get the right fit. Then in 2008 I met Lauren Cerand who was this really smart media person and a Girl fan and she helped me find Figment, which is an online writing community for teens mostly but older people too. Figment was just starting and they were looking for something fun and interesting to help launch their site. They had the idea of serializing it, like we did originally in Sassy. When Figment saw the numbers of people who were reading it on their site, they decided to publish it. It was really a good fit, especially in that Figment is all about helping young writers find their voice and Dream School is essentially about Andrea finding her writer’s voice.

Jesse: Another popular question, I would imagine, but I still don’t know the answer . . . How do you, as an adult male, get inside the head of a teenage girl sooo well?

Blake: I don’t know. One thing: I don’t think it’s so much about gender. I think gender is overrated. I think boys and girls think most of the same thoughts . . . In my case, maybe I’m confident enough in my belief that gender is not that profound, that I can let Andrea be, and not try to make her overly “female.” I let her be a person first, then I sprinkle a little girl-ness on top.

Jesse: Todd Sparrow, ABlakeOne.jpgndrea’s hot rock star boyfriend in Girl, was obviously a hugely integral part to the book. Did you think about putting him in Dream School, or was it always clear there was no place for Todd Sparrow there?

Blake: Going off to college, she is pretty removed from Todd Sparrow’s world. So it seems natural that they wouldn’t bump into each other. Maybe he’ll show up in a future book. Todd Sparrow was always an enigmatic figure for me. I had trouble getting him clear in my mind as I wrote Girl. I solved the problem by remembering Courtney Love—a fellow Portland scene person. She could be so charming and funny even though she seemed like a borderline street person. So when I struggled with Todd, like, “Why would Andrea like him so much?” I would think of Courtney at her best, being brilliant and magnetic and having this quality of sweeping you away into [her] world, which was so much more interesting than the ordinary world.

Jesse: How did the movie adaptation of Girl come about, and what did you think of it?

Blake: A production company called Muse Productions—they had done Buffalo 66, which I had loved so I was hopeful. Some interesting people were involved at different times. Sarah Jacobson—who has since passed away but was this amazing figure in the indie film world at the time—was going to direct at one point. But they kept changing people. When they finally finished it, it wasn’t quite what I had hoped for. It was nobody’s fault; that just happens with movies sometimes. But it was shown endlessly on cable, and got the book a ton of publicity, so I was happy.

Jesse: Have you thought at all about further continuing Andrea’s story line still? Even if you never write about Andrea Marr again, do you feel like you have a sense of what happens to her after the book ends?

Blake: Yeah, I’ve thought about doing another book. I don’t know where she’ll end up or what will happen to her. I’m not sure that matters to me that much. I feel like her youth, like with most people, is probably the most interesting part of her. After that, she’ll get older. She’ll be like an old person. She’ll still be who she is but in a more sedate manner.

Jesse: Cheers to that.

From FIGMENT.COM

It’s official: the 90s are back in vogue. You know that Figment has recently published Dream School, the sequel to Blake Nelson’s 90s classic Girl, about Andrea Marr: grunge rock princess turned elite liberal arts student. As Andrea faces college–preps, professors, parties, and all–she’ll struggle to find her own path to cool. You can read an excerpt of Dream School for a limited time on Figment here, and you can read more about Blake’s inspiration and style below.

How did you come up with Andrea, the main character in Girl and now Dream School? How much did you know about her before you started writing, and how much did you discover along the way?

Originally, Andrea was just there to tell the story of Cybil, who shaved her head as an artistic/rebellious statement. But then as I continued the story, Andrea started to talk about her own life, and especially her relationship with a senior boyfriend when she was just a sophomore. This relationship, which I just threw in there to give her something to talk about, became the main focus of Andrea’s story at the beginning. Eventually, it took over. Soon the the whole book was about Andrea’s transition to indie coolness, which was actually more interesting than Cybil’s, because Andrea was a more ordinary person. She had farther to go.

You’re a guy writing from a girl’s perspective. What are the challenges in that? Did you ever hear, “You’re doing it wrong!” from female readers?

It has been pretty effortless for me. I really like doing it. I find that girl characters can be a little more honest than boy characters, since boys only really think about a few different things: Call of Duty . . . food . . . girls’ body parts. I feel freer when I am writing from a girl’s perspective.

Any advice for other writers looking to take the gender-bending leap?

If you feel lost or you don’t understand your character, start over using a different person. I feel like everyone has an alternative gendered person that they can talk through. You just have to find that character. Also, try writing from the perspective of someone you would like, or fall in love with. In fact: let yourself fall in love with your character. That’s probably the best way.

Girl was made into a movie. Do you picture your characters differently after seeing them on the silver screen?

Yes, that’s why I didn’t see Girl (the movie) until after I wrote the sequel. But I think it’s up to the movie. Like in Paranoid Park (another of my books that was made into a film), that actor did such a good job that I always see him in my mind when I think of the book. The Girl movie didn’t stick in my mind quite so much. And I only saw that movie once. So it hasn’t affected me that much.

Describe Dream School in four words.

Cool kids at college . . .

Andrea has a lot of fun in college—did you draw on your own college experiences in writing it?

Yeah, I was like her, but I was in bands instead of being a film maker. But my favorite part of being in college was when my band traveled to all the other colleges to play gigs, and that’s what Andrea and her friends do. Andrea’s adventures in college are very close to mine.

We can’t help but notice that Dream School ends on a bit of a cliffhanger–any chance of another Andrea adventure?

My Figment editor, Dana Goodyear, brought that up, and we talked about what would happen to Andrea if she got her book published and went to New York and was part of the literary scene there. That would be really fun to write about. And make fun of!!

What does your ideal writing set-up look like?

Couches are my favorite. I like to put my feet up and balance my laptop on my lap. And then balance my coffee cup on the cushion beside me or on the arm of the couch, which drives people insane because they’re sure I will spill it, though I never do. I like having a lot of things balancing all around me while I write. I also listen to music. Often, a certain record or band becomes the sound track of a book, though I never really plan it. And interestingly, after a long period of never writing in public, I have found recently that I like to write in coffee shops and libraries and places like that.

For those Figment users who were barely conscious in the 90s, what are the 5 most important things to know about the decade?

1-It was a feminist period. Meaning that girls took themselves seriously as a group and a gender. They held themselves aloof from boys. Girls who were preoccupied with boys and getting a boyfriend were considered superficial and sort of lame.

2-People wrote letters. I wrote tons of letters, and got tons of letters. It was almost like a side career. They were long and super fun to write. You would spend a whole night writing someone a letter . . . especially if you were away somewhere, like in a foreign country.

3-The world was pretty dangerous. You didn’t tool around with a stroller in Brooklyn in 1991, unless you wanted someone to steal your baby.

4-You could still be gloomy. A lot of the art and music of the 90s was very dour and “miserabilist.” Nowadays everyone’s more cheerful. At least on the surface.

5-I was young and unknown in the 90s and was just starting my career and that’s generally the funnest part of your life!

NAOMI FRY !

NAOMI FRY'S PIECE FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES "T" MAGAZINE. (T stands for STYLE, for some reason)


The touchstones seem to be everywhere these days: the plaid-wearing, goateed bicycle messengers of “Portlandia”; the grunge heiress Frances Bean Cobain’s recent Hedi Slimane photo shoot; the chortling return of “Beavis and Butthead” to MTV. Yes, the ‘90s are totally back — so much so that some culture observers are probably busy deciding at this very moment that they’re already over again. And there’s no doubt that “Dream School” (Figment), Blake Nelson’s sequel to his beloved 1994 teenage bildungsroman, “Girl,” owes its publication, at least partly, to our current fascination with that halcyon age of mix tapes and Doc Martens. Nelson himself said, “I finished writing the book in 2000, but nobody would publish it, so it sat in my drawer for 10 years.”
Blake Nelson, author of “Dream School.”

Quite apart from the fickleness of retro-focused trends, and regardless of Nelson’s own nostalgia for the ‘90s (“I miss Feminism! The whole culture is so 1950s right now, so conservative and conformist”), “Dream School” is first and foremost an enduring account of what it looks, feels and sounds like to be young. While “Girl” told the story of the Portland, Ore., teenager Andrea Marr and her adventures in the Pacific Northwest’s indie rock music scene, its sequel follows her east to Wellington, a snooty liberal arts college modeled on Wesleyan, which Nelson also attended. Parts of “Girl” were published in Sassy, and the passages gave readers a first-person voice so realistic they might have had to remind themselves that not only were the excerpts fiction, but also fiction actually written by an adult man. Were the oft-missed magazine around today, it might have serialized the new novel as well, which is told in an equally convincing voice.

Despite the gender switch, “Andrea’s experience in college is very nearly identical to mine,” Nelson explained. Before he went to Wesleyan, he had “never dealt with entitled people before, and I didn’t fit in.” From its first chapter, in which Andrea arrives at Wellington and internally compares her ordinary luggage to her fellow students’ “nice” bags (“it wasn’t the most embarrassing thing ever, but it was pretty noticeable”), “Dream School” establishes its protagonist’s outsider perspective. She sees her classmates as “very eastern,” who seem “used to airports and being picked up and going to new places.”

Though Nelson’s uneasiness in college may have been spurred by his peers’ socioeconomic privilege, the book isn’t overtly political. Much like the author himself, “Andrea’s not ideological. She’s an observer.” Yet what “Dream School” may lack in pointed critique, it makes up for in Nelson’s spot-on, often tongue-in-cheek renderings of the minutiae that fill Andrea’s college experience: the pretentious girl in the creative writing workshop who keeps using the term “metafiction”; the eyeliner- and leather-coat-wearing, sexually confident dorm lothario; the forever cooler, laconic friend who makes an experimental film about ecstasy.

If “Girl” was a book read mostly by teenagers but still considered, Nelson said, “a very adult book, in the sense that people hid it from their parents, marked its dirty parts and frequently shoplifted it,” then “Dream School” straddles the same fine line between young adult and just plain adult. For one thing, it thankfully lacks the often heavy-handed moral arcs that so much teen fiction insists on. (Andrea experiments with cocaine but doesn’t need to go to rehab; she practices non-monogamous sex but doesn’t get an S.T.D.) What’s more, as the book ends, Andrea is in her early 20s and, much like Nelson at her age, is feeling the pull of Manhattan. Could there be another sequel in the works? “I’ll definitely think about it, if ‘Dream School’ does well,” Nelson said.

“Dream School” by Blake Nelson, $10. Go to powells.com.

FROM http://sarahspy.com/

Interview with Isadora Schappell-Spillman @ TEENAGE FILM

Why did you choose to revisit Andrea and write a sequel?

Weirdly enough, despite ending GIRL with a total sequel-suggesting ending, I never really thought about writing a sequel. And then many years later, I was sitting around and I just started writing it, mostly for fun, and to see what it would sound like. And then the first chapter turned out really good. So I kept going.



How do you write so convincingly in the voice of teenage girl?

I don't think of them as a teenaged girl. I just think of them as a person, who is in this one particular situation, dealing with the things they deal with. I think, in the privacy of our own heads, we don't have an age, or even a gender. We just are. So you start with that, and work your way outward.



Dream School deals with Andrea's realization of herself as an artist/writer, have you always felt like you were an artist or was there a specific time or place that encouraged you to become a writer?

I started to know when I was about fourteen. At first I was a musician and I did that for a long time. But something about that never felt quite right. And I was worried that I would age out too soon as a musician. I had to do an art form that you can do all your life. So when I was twenty-two, I quit music and switched to being a writer. Which was scary at first, because by then I was a good musician, but I could barely write at all. But I knew I had an artistic calling or whatever, a vocation, and in the end it wouldn't matter what medium I was in. It might even be better to do something that would take me a long time to get good at.



What was your college experience like?

Pretty much exactly like Andrea's in Dream School. I met a lot of cool people. But i was a little out of my element being at an elite college. I wasn't prepared for the "entitlement". But it was something I had to learn about, if I was going to live in New York City and live a life in the arts. So I got through it.



How do you feel like today's teenagers are different from when you were Andrea's age?

I think this current generation of parents is much more invested in their children than the parents of the nineties. The reason 90s Do-It-Yourself culture existed, was because you had to do things yourself because nobody was going to help you. Today's kids get lots of help. I don't know what that means down the road, but I think todays kids are generally healthier mentally then Andrea's gang. And better adjusted, and more positive and trusting and willing to give of themselves. They still have all the usual kids problems. But just in the most general terms, they seem happier and less introverted and sulky then the generations before.



What are some of your favorite books/movies/tv shows about Teenagers?

I love the book King Dork. I love the movie Splendor in the Grass. I don't really watch TV too much. I appear to be the only person in the world who didn't particularly like My So Called Life.




Why does so much of your work focus on the experiences of teenagers? I.E. what can you express through the voices of teenagers that you could not otherwise express?


I like teenagers. That's the main thing. I never get bored with them. They're so funny, and so wise, and their brains are like new cars. Don't let adults tell you otherwise: you are never smarter than when you're eighteen.

Another thing too.....the buddhists talk about keeping a "beginners mind", like trying to stay young mentally, keeping the world fresh, not getting stuck in habits or prejudices in the way you view the world. I think putting myself in the heads of teenagers, helps me do that, it is a form of doing that. Teenagers have the ultimate "beginners mind" and going there, refreshes my own perspective, it makes everything new again, which gives my writing a sense of exploration and discovery, and also just makes for a nice life for me.

--Izzy

I HEART DAILY INTERVIEW

I Heart Daily: What inspired you to write a sequel to Girl?
Blake Nelson: On impulse, I stuck a cliff-hanger, sequel-hinting ending on the end of Girl. I don’t remember why. I guess to force myself someday to write a sequel? I hadn’t really thought about what she would be doing… I just knew she would not be a typical college student, she would definitely have some sort of indie-alternative-artsy experience….

IHD: What was it like for you to follow Andrea to college?
BN: It was fun. And a little bit sad. And really interesting. It was like I was going back to college myself, remembering all the little details of that first day, first week, first month. I had never been anywhere when I left to go to college. It was a huge moment for me.

IHD: You say F. Scott Fitzgerald has had a big influence on your writing. How so?
BN: He did everything I want to do. He was romantic, but also coldly realistic. Also, his characters were so clearly the cool-kids of his time. The “fast” girls, the crazed overly romantic boys, the ambition, the class striving. My favorite of his books might be his obscure second novel The Beautiful and the Damned… the title kind of sums it up.

IHD: Are you surprised that the Young Adult genre has gotten so popular?
BN: Yeah, I am. And it’s also interesting to watch it struggle under the weight of that popularity. It seems to lurch around from one trend to another. First Vampires. Now Dystopia. I would like it a little better, if it wasn’t such a gold rush. But so many amazing books have appeared during the YA boom, you can’t complain. And there’s a lack of pretension that I really appreciate.