A Day for Biographers

Today's guest blogger is Catherine Reef, author of Leonard Bernstein and American Music; The Bronte Sisters: The Brief Lives of Charlotte, Emily, and Anne; and Jane Austen: A Life Revealed.

I can easily conjure up little Eleanor Roosevelt suffering through her lonely childhood, or Helen Keller, on the cusp of adult life, announcing her intention to go to Harvard; both scenes were imprinted on my memory by my early reading of biographies.

Biography thrives as a literary genre because people love to read about other people. This is true for readers of any age. A good biography breathes life into a figure readers may have met only briefly in a classroom or history book; it takes them behind the scenes, where they get to know the subject in family life; it places them on the spot as the subject experiences triumphs and setbacks, sorrow and joy, and learns how to navigate life.

                  I still like reading about people, but today I like writing about them as well. Biography lets me do what writers love to do: tell good stories. Even better, through biography I can explore a character in depth and create a vivid portrait in words. But writing is a solitary task, so like many writers I welcome opportunities to mingle with other people doing the same kind of work, to talk shop and gain from others’ wisdom. This is why I was happy to discover Biographers International Organization, or BIO for short.

                  BIO is young (founded in 2010), but it has been strong and active from the start. Having as its mission “to promote the art and craft of biography, and to further the professional interests of its practitioners,” BIO presents the annual BIO Award to a distinguished biographer for his or her body of work. This year’s recipient is Stacy Schiff, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Véra and other notable works. BIO also hosts a terrific annual conference that always sends me home with many new ideas to think about and apply to my work.

                  At this year’s Compleat Biographer Conference, which will be held at the University of Massachusetts Boston on May 17 and 18, I will moderate a panel on young adult biography. On the panel will be two accomplished biographers, Mary Morton Cowan and Kem Knapp Sawyer, and a representative of the world of children’s book blogging, Dorothy Dahm.

Cowan received a 2010 National Outdoor Book Award and other honors for Captain Mac: The Life of Donald Baxter MacMillan, Arctic Explorer (Calkins Creek). She has also published numerous magazine stories and articles, a novel based on MacMillan’s experiences, and a book on logging in New England. Cowan has said about her work, “I am pleased and proud that these books give young readers a glimpse of relatively unknown history—dangerous and adventurous chapters of history!”

Sawyer’s recent biographies are of Mohandas Gandhi and Nelson Mandela (both from Morgan Reynolds) and Harriet Tubman and Abigail Adams (both from DK Publishing). “I try to figure out what gave my subjects the ambition and the drive to set out to change the world,” she said in a recent interview. “And I like to focus on what they were like when they were young, before they went on to become leaders.” Sawyer has written as well about current social issues such as the situation of refugees worldwide, and historical subjects such as the Underground Railroad. She also reports on youth in developing countries for the Pulitzer Center, an organization that supports journalism and education.

In recent years, book bloggers and online reviewers have become increasingly influential in the world of children’s literature. Dahm’s lifelong interest in biography for young readers led her to launch the Kidsbiographer’s Blog (http://kidsbiographer.com/), where she reviews new and noteworthy biographies for children and young adults and interviews their authors. A professor of English at Castleton State College in Vermont, Dahm has contributed articles and reviews to publications in the United States and Great Britain. I’m eager to hear what she has to say about the state of young adult biography today and what she looks for in a book of this genre.

Other conference sessions will focus on such matters of craft as creating suspense in biography and finding the right balance between a subject’s life and work, and on practical aspects of the writing life: dealing with agents, marketing, and the like. There will be plenty to interest biographers writing for any age level. You can learn more about the Compleat Biographer Conference from BIO’s website: http://biographersinternational.org/conference/. I hope to see you in May!

Hanging Out with Biographers

What do a bunch of biographers talk about when they get together? I found out last month when the Biographers International Organization--aka BIO, of course--held its second annual conference at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. On its website, BIO is described as "the first-ever international organization to represent the everyday interests of practicing biographers: those who’ve published the stories of real lives, and those working on biographies – in every medium, from print to film." My friend Catherine Reef, author of the wonderful Jane Austen: A Life Revealed, had invited me to be on a panel with her about writing biographies for young adults. Mary Bowman-Kruhm, author of The Leakeys: A Biography, completed our trio.

About 30 people showed up for our presentation, a pretty good turnout. (I always like it when the audience outnumbers the panelists.) They were a serious, note-taking bunch, which unnerved me a little until I told myself to think of them as 10-year-olds, my favorite audience. When I shared that with them, most of them smiled. "But I'm not talking down to you," I said, and then commented that good nonfiction books for children don't talk down to readers, either.

Later that day, while I was waiting in line for the restroom, a woman noticed my panelist badge and asked which panel I was on. "Oh, my friend went to that one and told me it was really interesting," she said. Just as I was beginning to preen, she added, "My friend said that writing for kids sounds so much easier than writing for adults that she wants to give it a try." Oh really? I started to bristle, then relaxed. One of our jobs as nonfiction writers for kids is to make complex subjects understandable. Obviously my co-panelists and I had succeeded in making our craft seem accessible. I smiled as sweetly as I could and said her friend should definitely give it a try. And I meant it. Let her learn how easy it is to paint a rich portrait of a human life in only 20,000 words, or in the case of my books, a mere 8,000. Heck, let her try writing a picture book biography!

To be fair, I don't think the woman in line with me was trying to sound condescending. And most of the other biographers I met were intrigued and genuinely interested in my work when I told them I write for children. It was a terrific conference, and I only wish I had had the opportunity to attend more workshops. Among the offerings: Dealing with Black Holes in Your Subject's Life; The Role for Fiction in Biography; How to Organize Your Research; Can I Quote That? Dealing with Copyright, Fair Use, Permission; The Art of Interviewing; Using Technology in Research; and Turning Research into Narrative. The keynote speaker at the luncheon was Robert Caro, two-time Pulitzer Prize winner for biography, who spoke about the power of place in biography.

The 2012 BIO conference will be in Los Angeles. Think about it. And in the meantime I'll leave you with these words from Cathy Reef's excellent talk: "A biography written at any level is so much more than a collection of facts about an individual. It is a work of literature, a portrait in words."