Tag: Literary Arts

Every good story needs an indomitable force that drives the narrative forward. In Pauls Toutonghi’s book Dog Gone, that force is a golden retriever mix named Gonker, who happens to be from this area.

“I first heard the story of Gonker when I went to my in-laws’ house for the first time,” says Toutonghi, the author of two novels, who lives and teaches in Portland. “I noticed dozens of pictures of the dog, more than of my wife, so I asked her about it. She said, ‘Whatever you do, don’t get mom started on that.’ Well, of course I did. And I could feel the emotion in it. I recognized it as a great story. It had very high personal stakes, a timeline and a great deal of drama to it.”

While it may have begun as a story about a single lost dog, as Toutonghi became part of his wife’s family he found an even greater depth to the story. As a result, the book spans across time and geography, from an Akita puppy in Japan in 1949 who becomes the constant companion of the neglected daughter of an alcoholic, to the yappy bichon frise in Washington, D.C., dyed punk-rock purple in the 1980s, and finally to Gonker, lost on the Virginia portion of the Appalachian Trail in 1998.

Gonker’s owner, Fielding Marshall, was an undergraduate at the University of Virginia when he adopted Gonker from the Charlottesville-Albemarle SPCA in 1992. By October 1998, Fielding and Gonker were living in Northern Virginia, when they took a road trip to the Jefferson National Forest and began hiking the Appalachian Trail. Gonker suffered from Addison’s disease, described by Toutonghi as “a disorder of the adrenal glands that, if untreated, is fatal,” and required a shot every month.

The tension in the story builds when Gonker bounds away in the mountains during hunting season and Marshall realizes, after hours of searching and not finding him, that Gonker has about 20 days left before the life-sustaining effects of his last treatment shot will wear off. As Marshall and his father, John, begin a search on the trail, Marshall’s mother, Ginny, sounds the alarm and the story is picked up in local and national papers.

Throughout the narrative, Toutonghi finds parallels of loss and salvation in the lives of a mother and her son, and explores human heartache and the healing effect of animal connection.

He says, “I feel like almost every family has a dog story. Often pets are the way we learn so many things about life, loving someone, caring for someone or even grief and loss.”

Local readers may feel a swell of pride for this area’s response to the family’s urgent cries for help, as well as for the beautiful and apt descriptions of rural Virginia in the fall. They might also get a kick out of some details about Charlottesville in the 1990s, like the fact that while the city now abounds with yoga studios, it was a near yogic desert in 1991 with only a single studio (housed in a barn).

Toutonghi says he took a similar approach to writing this work of nonfiction as he has with his novels. “I try to imagine myself into the scene, wherever it’s taking place, acting as a witness in that space,” he says. “The great thing about working with four people who lived this story was that I could contact them and ask them questions.”

While most narratives about beloved pets run the risk of being sentimental, the author, who grew up with a poodle mix and recently published an essay about two other canines in The New York Times’ Modern Love column, credits good editors and his ability to keep some perspective for helping him avoid this common pitfall.

“I’m a very sentimental person,” says Toutonghi. “So I had to be careful to rein that in, reminding myself continually, this is a single dog. Just look at our country right now and you will see any number of heartbreaking things. But, at the same time, the way that we care for one dog ends up being the story of how we care for each other. The way we care for the most vulnerable is the way that we care for each other. Look at who is victimized, anyone who is marginal. They feel the full effect of our society’s dysfunction. I had to be mindful that I was just writing a story about a lost dog, but in that story there were broader truths I could unlock.”

“Screw irony,” he says. “Earnestness is a value just as powerful as irony.”

Dog Gone highlights the impact the lives of canines have on humans charged with caring for them, as individuals throughout this region of Virginia become deeply invested in finding Gonker. Toutonghi explains why in his book: “…dogs are almost always decent—unchanging, unaltered, predictable. And their attitude toward us is unquestioningly kind. Dogs can make us more human—or more like what we imagine a good human to be. If we listen.”

Though books about dogs never go out of fashion, popular dog breeds change over time. After all, it wasn’t so very long ago that Labradoodles didn’t even exist and everyone wanted a dog like Lassie or Rin Tin Tin to help out in an emergency. A recent book by Bronwen Dickey, Pit Bull: The Battle Over an American Icon, explores one popular breed that has fallen out of favor in the past few decades.

One of her own dogs, Nola, prompted Dickey to begin researching her debut book. An introverted and loving pit bull mix, Nola nevertheless elicited strong reactions from neighbors and passersby, causing Dickey to wonder how these misguided stereotypes were formed in the first place. Along the way she wound up grappling with issues of class, race, scientific research and social politics across a wide swath of history.

“I knew that I wanted the project to have a fairly wide scope,” says Dickey. “The issue of race haunted me from the beginning, but more so as the research process progressed. The sheer number of people who (often unwittingly) brought up racial stereotypes when discussing pit bull owners was enormous. It didn’t take long before I realized that I wasn’t really writing a book about dogs…I was writing about how people perceive dogs.” In doing so, she traces pit bulls from beloved American icons such as Petey, the dog in “The Little Rascals,” to vicious stereotypes like Michael Vick’s fighting dogs. She also examines other breeds that have fallen out of favor for various reasons, including dachshunds that were believed to be spies and other surprising dog stereotypes.

By her calculations, that research continued for seven years, which led to four years writing Pit Bull. “No matter how much I learned, I never felt that I knew enough, so I kept searching for more and more obscure details,” says Dickey. This includes poring over articles and books about topics ranging from canine biology to human-animal relationships as well as interviewing researchers behind the work. “Every place I went, I also made sure to visit the local shelter and interview their training staff and animal control officers,” says Dickey. “Sometimes, I literally asked people on the street to stop and talk to me about their views on pit bulls. I was never there to judge anyone, I simply wanted to learn from them.”

The result is a book that explores the ways in which Americans’ relationships with pit bulls mirror social values that extend beyond the pet store or animal shelter. By uniting perspectives of the everyman with trained experts, Dickey brings compassion and a probing curiosity to the work. Her experience as a critical essayist and editor lend elegant phrasing and a detailed approach to the social history that she builds. “My background in travel writing helped a great deal in that it primed me to be on the lookout for sensory details that would help the reader envision what I was seeing, and it prepared me to take an anthropologist’s view on the many different factions of pit bull culture,” says Dickey.

That writing has taken her to the Great Smoky Mountains, Thailand, Belize and countless places in between; Dickey’s work has been featured in the New York Times, Slate and other publications. She is also a contributing editor at Oxford American, and Virginia Quarterly Review published an adapted excerpt of Pit Bull in the spring 2016 issue, accompanied by haunting portraits of the breed from photographer Erika Schultz.

Pit Bull: The Battle Over an American Icon has received a positive response from most readers and reviewers, but it’s clear that Dickey also struck a nerve by addressing an issue that is so divisive and emotionally charged that it’s practically taboo. “The most surprising part of the response to the book has been how upset and angry a small number of people have gotten without ever reading the book, which reinforces one of the book’s main theses: That these dogs are such powerful symbols to so many people that it’s difficult to have a calm, rational conversation about them anymore,” says Dickey.

She is quick to add that she never meant to take a side in the issue. “I don’t consider myself a ‘pit bull advocate,’ as fascinating as they are to write about,” Dickey says. “That would mean I somehow think pit bulls are more deserving of help than other types, and I actually don’t. The process of writing the book has inclined me to try as much as I can to look past breed and treat each dog as a unique member of the same species. If I advocate for anything, it’s science, compassion and better relationships between humans and animals.”

Pit Bull: The Battle Over an American Icon has received a positive response from most readers and reviewers, but it’s clear that Bronwen Dickey also struck a nerve by addressing an issue that is so divisive and emotionally charged that it’s practically taboo.

Throughout the last four centuries, publishers, editors and artists have created a vast range of textual interpretations of William Shakespeare’s works—from original printings and family-friendly versions to Romeo and Juliet translated into social media posts, complete with emojis. To commemorate the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, UVA’s Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library has created an exhibition called “Shakespeare by the Book” that includes these items and more. While we tend to think of books as static, permanent things, this exhibition on the history of editing and publishing reveals otherwise.

Special Collections Library curator Molly Schwartzburg and her students have designed the exhibition to guide the viewer through three stages (or acts) in Shakespearean publishing: the first printings in the 17th century, the second wave of printings in the 18th century and the rising role of editing, and the best of the extreme transformations of Shakespeare from UVA’s Special Collections.

The oldest item in the collection is the second quarto of King Lear, printed in 1619 and named for the sheets of paper folded into quarters. After the quartos came the first folio. A larger book with the sheets folded only once, it was compiled by publishers and members of Shakespeare’s acting company and printed posthumously in 1623. Before the early part of that century it was unusual to treat contemporary plays as literature. A fragment of one first folio is on display in the collection.

The fact that it’s a fragment is what interests Schwartzburg most. She explains that when later folios were published, the first folio was devalued.

“It’s important to recognize that we’ve constructed this veneration [of the early printings of Shakespeare] for legitimate reasons,” says Schwartzburg. “But it hasn’t always been the case.”

There are only 235 intact known first folios in the world today. For the month of October, the exhibit will house a complete first folio edition on loan from the Folger Shakespeare Library.

As paper was expensive and the folios were rife with errors, during the second wave of printings in the 18th century, editing began to be recognized as a professional role in the printing process. A 1709 edition on display is novel for printing the name of its editor and for providing a dramatis personae (list of characters), illustrations and a biography of Shakespeare.

One panel is devoted to “The Art of the Editorial Insult” as editors criticized one another within the text of new editions. “This was the start of a vibrant culture of editorial debate over who Shakespeare was, and what his writings should be, that gives us the canonical figure we know today,” Schwartzburg says.

Another exhibit details UVA’s unique role in the scholarship on the first folio. Before 1954, there were no methods of quickly comparing texts other than looking back and forth between them (the Wimbledon method). But in 1941, UVA professor Fredson Bowers and his graduate student Charlton Hinman joined the U.S. military and served in the same cryptology unit. There, Hinman got the idea for a comparison device to study two editions at once.

The Hinman collator, as it is now known, uses a complex system of mirrors to collate two images, allowing the brain to recognize discrepancies between the two. (A simpler version is on display so that viewers can see for themselves.) Hinman reviewed 55 different versions of the first folio and chose the best version of every page. His work revealed how textual differences came to be and who had printed them.

“It’s like forensic bibliography—reconstructing how the book was put together to make rational decisions about which is the best version,” Schwartzburg says.

Another panel uses a real-life example of bibliographical research from Schwartzburg and her team to explain how it works. They chose from their collection an edition of The Merchant of Venice with an unknown history, printed by H. Whitworth. Through their research, the team learned that the H. stood for Hannah. Although women were involved with printing since its earliest days, many have been ignored by history.

The final section of the exhibition grew out of the strengths of UVA’s collection: artists’ books, fine press editions and miniature books. The miniature collection, which is the second-largest in the country, includes some from the 19th century when publishers began printing popular pocket-size editions of Shakespeare for a wide audience. With the 20th century came the commodification of the Bard as certain miniature editions were printed solely to promote other products, such as the 1932 edition that was free with a newspaper subscription and another edition stamped with the name of a chocolate company.

A children’s section in the exhibition displays an 1807 edition by Henrietta Bowdler, whose surname is the root of the term “bowdlerize,” with censored adult material and references to Catholicism. Among the artists’ contributions is a miniature edition of Hamlet with a skull-shaped case, and the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet translated into text messages and attached to a case made out of a cell phone. Four hundred years after Shakespeare’s death, it is clear that his work remains universal and relevant, even as it is reimagined.

Hannah Barnaby’s second young adult novel, Some of the Parts, published in February, was “partly inspired by my own experience with sibling loss,” she says. Her brother, to whom the book is dedicated, died accidentally, and while the events in the novel differ greatly from Barnaby’s experience, she says the emotional journey of the protagonist parallels her own.

“I think many YA authors would say they write books they would have liked to read as teenagers,” says Barnaby. “This book would have helped me when I was younger when my brother died. Writing it was a way to share my experience but also reimagine it.”

The novel, which received a starred review from Publishers Weekly, opens as Tallie McGovern struggles to appear unchanged following her brother’s death in a car accident. (“I force myself to smile. I am my own marionette.”) Amid her parents’ silence and denial, she navigates her own survivor’s guilt, the arrival of a new student with a striking resemblance to her brother, encounters with her brother’s angry and seemingly bereaved girlfriend and her friendship with the irreverent Mel, whose weekend extracurricular activities include taxidermy. But when Tallie learns her brother was an organ donor, she begins seeking out those who have benefited from the use of his parts, likening them to pieces of a puzzle that will make everything whole again.

Before moving to Charlottesville four years ago, Barnaby lived in Massachusetts, where she was the inaugural writer-in-residence at the Boston Public Library from 2004 to 2005. That program offers the grant specifically to children’s and young adult authors. And because the Boston Public Library’s collections include archives of circus history, Barnaby pitched an idea for a manuscript that would become her first novel, Wonder Show, about a girl hired by a traveling carnival sideshow in 1939.

“It deals with questions of fitting in, community,” says Barnaby. “She finds herself in a place where being normal is a disadvantage. I pitched the idea without a sense of how to write the book. Then I was awarded the grant. It has a mixed point of view, mostly third person past tense, but first person mixed in for different carnival performers.”

“Every book is different,” she says. “You’ll be in a different place in your life, inspiration will be different.”

Now settled into life in Charlottesville, each morning Barnaby gets her three children ready for school and out the door, and then “warms up” by playing around with picture book ideas or making notes on a project. She aspires to write for an hour in the morning, and then work again before the kids come home from school.

“Most writers are not just writers, but also teachers, public speakers,” says Barnaby. “It’s always a juggling act. I’m most productive if I’m sharing my time with other things, eavesdropping, observing people, getting out of the house. I blog twice a month at Publishing Hub, with posts every other Sunday about the writing life. A lot of writers do a lot of marketing and publicity on their own, through social media and appearing on other people’s blogs. My writing group meets once a month, which is a social outlet but also a good time to talk to other writers.”

Barnaby, who is co-teaching an advanced picture book writing workshop with Anne Marie Pace at WriterHouse, has two picture books slated to be published next year and is working on a new YA novel.

“I’m not an outliner,” says Barnaby about writing her latest novel. “There are two schools: the planner or plotter, and the pantser—by the seat of your pants.” Barnaby is a pantser. She prefers to “get the raw material down and then shape it into something.”

“The whole first draft is about figuring out characters, getting to know them well enough that I can go back and structure the story, get the voice right,” she says. “The first draft tends to be pretty short. I start with the framework, then layer everything in, character relationships, dialogue. The ending usually changes once or twice, maybe not what happens but how it happens and the details surrounding it. It has to be unexpected but inevitable. It is very hard to hit that. I definitely prefer revision to drafting.”

Most writers are preoccupied by a single theme that they revisit and explore in new ways again and again in their fiction. It’s what makes their work distinctive, their style dependable. For local Young Adult novelist Kristen-Paige Madonia, that theme is the threshold of adulthood.

“All of my characters are 17,” she says. “It is a monumental year that is equal parts hardship and beauty.”

Her fiction has been labeled dark and gritty, but, she says, there is a strong element of hope. “My goal is to remind readers of that age you do end up on the other side.”

Her second novel, Invisible Fault Lines, will be celebrated this Saturday at New Dominion Bookshop. Inspiration struck while she was traveling in 2012 to promote her first novel, Fingerprints of You, and heard David Levithan read from his book, Two Boys Kissing. This sentence resonated with her: “How beautiful the ordinary becomes once it disappears.”

The quote now appears as the epigraph to Invisible Fault Lines, which is being called a hybrid novel because it is part realistic, contemporary fiction, mystery and historical fiction.

The protagonist is Callie Pace, a 17-year-old girl who collects foreign language dictionaries, plays drums in a rock band and hangs out in San Francisco coffee shops with her gay best friend, Beckett. Her father excavates construction sites for historical artifacts, a profession based on the one Madonia’s husband held for three years when they lived in San Francisco, before moving to Charlottesville in 2008. After Callie’s father disappears, and she recognizes him in a photograph from the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, questions about alternate realities arise.

While on her previous book tour, Madonia witnessed the huge draw that science fiction, fantasy and dystopian themes hold for teens today. Her first novel is grounded in realistic fiction, but for the second novel she wanted to challenge herself to explore other genres.

“I felt pulled to write for teens curious about non-reality,” she says. “There is a lot of interest in worlds outside of our own. I wanted to be challenged by the genre, but to also write that kind of book my way, staying true to realism and authentic human experience.”

Yet Madonia leaves the ending open to interpretation.

“I wanted to give the reader the opportunity to make their own decision. There are a lot of ways to grieve and manage loss,” she says. “Callie chooses an unconventional way. What I hope the reader takes away is that any way you choose to grieve is okay.”

She also wanted to write a book for teens that acknowledges we don’t have all the answers, that adult life is messy and parents aren’t always in control. It becomes as much a story about a lost father as it does about a mother and daughter rebuilding their relationship in the face of overwhelming loss. At one point Callie thinks to herself, “It crossed my mind that if she didn’t know how to make things right, and I didn’t either, there was a good chance the world might never feel normal again. It was that thought that scared me the most.”

Despite the fact that Madonia is no longer a novice, she says, “Having a second book published taught me that it doesn’t get easier. You have to embrace the messiness.” For Fingerprints of You, Madonia was able to write chronologically. But Invisible Fault Lines required her to write it out of order.

She is now at work on her next manuscript. It’s an odd place to be, she says, because writing is the best way to ease her anxiety about the publication of this second book and yet promoting the second book means being engaged with the publishing industry at a time when she needs to disengage in order to write.

“I’m trying not to feel rushed,” she says. This will be the first book she has written since becoming a mother, which has affected her perspective and certainly her availability. She used to have time for writing residencies, taking five weeks or so to write huge portions of drafts at once. Now she is creating a writing routine at home.

Madonia teaches through UVA’s bachelor of interdisciplinary studies program, a dual-enrollment course at JMU, and is a faculty member in the University of Nebraska’s low-residency MFA program, which launched a YA concentration prompted by the interest of the applicants.

She calls her entrance into the YA genre accidental. But now that she is immersed, she is inspired by the impact of the literature on teens, and by the teens themselves, whose stage of life continues to enthrall her.

*The print version of this article listed the wrong date of Kristen-Page Madonia’s appearance.  She will be at New Dominion Bookshop on Saturday, May 7.

IX Art Park is a place where Charlottesville gets up close and personal with art. The art is big; it’s bright. You can write on the warehouse’s exterior walls and touch many of the sculptures. So it’s no surprise that First Fridays at IX is a bit different from First Fridays at other Charlottesville galleries.

The city-wide event is “A foray into imagination, possibility and all that art can actuate in an evening,” says the park’s executive director, Brian Wimer. The fine arts galleries “do the carefully curated culture, filling folks with the wow and what-ifs, and we wrap it up with a celebration.”

IX is usually the last gallery stop on the art walk and it provides music, dance and theater performances, in addition to libations and a fine art show at First Fridays Finish.

This month’s show in the GallerIX space of the Dream Big warehouse features oil paintings, wax creations and straw sculptures by style icon, artist and writer Beatrix Ost. Much of the show’s work has been exhibited before, but not in the IX space. Ost says she’s mostly writing now and hasn’t made visual art in a while, but this show encouraged her to revisit some of the pieces she made years ago, particularly her straw sculptures from the 1990s.

Humanlike in form but faceless, the statues made of woven straw and draped burlap have an otherworldly quality. Ost says she sees something shamanistic in them, but it’s the medium—the straw—that moves her most. Straw is the husk left behind when the grain it holds is harvested for humans and other animals to eat. Ost says she wanted to use the “scrap material from the earth” to create art that shows how nothing has to go to waste, how everything is useful.

“Everything has its profound place, specifically on our planet, where we are so into destroying so much of it,” says Ost. “It has this circle of meaning, and I think that’s the force I fell in love with,” she says.

Ost will also show some of her designs for Article 22, a Laos-based fair-trade company that makes jewelry from pieces of detonated bombs. Ost points out that during the Vietnam War, Laos became the most bombarded place on the planet. Many of the deployed bombs did not detonate, and a portion of Article 22 jewelry sales goes to helping farmers defuse or safely detonate bombs so they can get their land back.

“We are turning the horror into beauty,” says Ost. “We are making a statement for this world.” Ost “uses her talents and her arts to speak to important matters for the planet, unity, hope and beauty,” says Lyn Bolen Warren, director and owner of Les Yeux du Monde gallery, where she exhibits Ost’s work. She is also partially underwriting the show at IX.

You never know what you’ll see—or hear—at an IX First Fridays Finish. Have you ever wondered what music from Arrakis, the fictional, harsh desert planet from Dune would sound like? Steven Archer of Stoneburner has, and it’s the inspiration behind the tribal electronic dance music that will fill the IX air on Friday.

The music is “dense, almost violent,” says Archer, a New York-based fine artist, writer and musician who has composed music for NASA. He also projects video collages of imagery he has “mostly gleaned from YouTube” onto five screens, all synced up to the music, and it’s just another manifestation of his creative energy.

Charlottesville belly dancing duo Fire in the Belly is scheduled to perform as well.

IX’s First Fridays events are “not art at arm’s distance, but up close and intimate, with warmth, pulse and purpose,” says Wimer. Part of that is using art to bring awareness not only to what’s happening around the world, but to what’s going on right here in Charlottesville.

That’s why IX, McGuffey Art Center and Second Street Gallery are partnering with Community Attention Foster Families to host a mobile installation, created by local artist Kaki Dimock and sponsored by Bryan and Jennifer Slaughter, intended to bring awareness to local foster children, parents and families.

According to the Virginia Department of Social Services, 231 children in Charlottesville, Albemarle and Green counties were in foster care as of March. That number fluctuates and is probably closer to 250 right now, says Marnie Allen, family services and recruitment specialist for Community Attention Foster Families. Dimock will create one bluebird for each foster child and place them on the lawn outside of McGuffey during the center’s First Fridays gallery show. Then, social workers and foster parents will “fly” the birds to Second Street Gallery and later to IX, representing the journey that many foster children make from home to home. Some will nest; some will not.

It’s important for foster children to remain in their community so they can stay connected to their biological families, to their school, their friends and the Charlottesville community, says Allen. If they stick around, their quality of life can improve drastically, despite the many challenges of living in foster care.

This foster art program goes both ways, says Wimer, as “artists support foster families with awareness and inclusion, [but it’s] also the notion of the community fostering art.”

Through its monthly celebration of all types of art, First Fridays Finish at IX lets us experience first-hand the many ways that art can move us. We can be entertained, we can be touched, we can be provoked to think. Maybe we will be inspired to take action and participate ourselves, either out in the wide world or right here in town.

–Erin O’Hare

The idea for the Origami Yoda series began when Tom Angleberger stumbled across an origami Yoda on the Internet. “I was a huge fan of Star Wars—and an origami folder,” he says. So he tried to replicate the origami Yoda he found online.

“The one I made was not as good as the one on the Internet,” says Angleberger. “Mine was simple and worked as a finger puppet and I thought, what if a kid took this to school to talk to people? I wasn’t thinking of a book to write.”

This Saturday, you can find the New York Times bestselling children’s author at Over the Moon Bookstore in Crozet for the launch of his new book, Rocket and Groot: Stranded on Planet Strip Mall!

Angleberger, who grew up near Staunton and ran cross-country meets in Charlottesville as a kid, now lives outside of Roanoke. He says he “started writing and drawing my own comics in the seventh grade and never stopped doing it. For a long time I thought I’d be a comic book writer and/or illustrator. Writing children’s books has brought me back around to where I’m writing about comic book characters.”

The anthropomorphic character of Rocket Raccoon first appeared in Marvel in 1976, while Groot, an extraterrestrial who resembles a tree, appeared 16 years earlier. Both are presumed to be the last of their kind, and someone, Angleberger says, had the idea of teaming them up together as members of the Marvel Comics’ Guardians of the Galaxy in 2008, on which the 2014 film of the same name is based.

He generates ideas by rethinking the characters he writes about. “I am very lucky that I’ve gotten to play in some really amazing sandboxes,” says Angleberger. “I wrote a total of eight Star Wars-related books and anytime you run out of ideas you just watch the movies again and think about how you would play with the toys. For Rocket and Groot, I had certain things I wanted to do and let my imagination run wild. Anything I thought of, I tried to just go with it. There are no rules with them.”

For example, the book he is working on now was inspired by headlines about self-driving cars.

“Anytime I get in my car and use GPS it gets confused, I get confused,” Angleberger says. “And I can’t figure out how the car can drive itself if the maps don’t work. So I just thought, ‘What if there was a planet where self-driving cars went crazy?’, like there was a giant glitch. Rocket and Groot go to a planet with crazy self-driving cars.”

This is how all of his ideas seem to begin, with the two important words, “what if?”

He also draws from his own experiences. I bring up the fact that on his website he lists Asperger’s as his superpower. “The whole [Origami Yoda] series is based on the experience of going through school being dramatically different, strange, annoying. Being so different, so weird, it all added up into these books. Even though it was very difficult going through it, it provided great source material.”

In the fourth and fifth books of the six-book Yoda series, The Surprise Attack of Jabba the Puppett and Princess Labelmaker to the Rescue, the middle school student characters protest standardized testing and the fact that their electives have been taken away. “I hate standardized testing,” says Angleberger. “I think it’s the worst idea ever. So I asked myself, ‘What if kids said: You know what? We’re not going to take the test.’ The kids would form a rebellion. Star Wars is all about rebelling against evil empires.”

All of his books contain themes of friendship, inclusivity, the pursuit of justice and the triumph of the underdog. There is also at least one strong female character in each of his books. I ask whether his wife, fellow children’s author Cece Bell, is the inspiration for these female characters. “She is a strong female character herself,” he laughs. “She is very funny and very determined. Veronica, the tape dispenser [in Rocket and Groot] is also funny and determined. I just felt like having a female character in the mix would open up things, and it really did. Now, there are no human beings in this book. People say, ‘The female character is a talking tape dispenser?’ But there are no humans, no men, no women. There are space piranhas, robots, a talking tree and a crazy raccoon. No rules.”

He is looking forward to revisiting the area and meeting the kids growing up here today. “The Charlottesville area is lucky to have a store like Over the Moon. We don’t have one in this end of the state. I think it’s awesome.”