“You Have to Love It.” Brittany Cavallaro on Writing for Young Adults

The Author of Wayfarers on Writing, Teaching, and Listening

Like Sylvie, the protagonist of my new novel, Wayfarers, I grew up in downstate cornfield Illinois, where I was an odd duck in a small pond. I was always reading, always writing. Poetry, and stories, and two-hundred page novels about Sphinxes and bottomless pits and killer tornadoes. I was terrified of tornadoes, actually—I think a lot of kids growing up in central Illinois were, and are—and so, in fifth grade, I wrote a novel about a civilization that had moved underground (literally). My teacher, Mrs. Madonia, saw me working on it, probably when I shouldn’t have, and offered to read it. I gave her this giant doorstop of a book, and a bunch of bad poetry about my middle school heartaches, and I remember her returning it the next day. You could do this, she told me. Be a writer.

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Now that I’m a teacher too, I think about her putting that giant stack of paper in her briefcase. Bringing it home over the weekend, to her house, and settling down on her couch with a cup of tea, or in her chair by the window. Carving out hours of her own time to read what, let’s face it, was definitely not the Next Great American Novel. And all because she saw me for who I was: a little girl who loved something, who needed someone else to tell her it was okay to love it. That it was good to love it.

After college, I spent ten years in grad school, taking writing workshops and teaching undergrads poetry and fiction. I loved those classes, but I lived for the summers, when I taught at a gifted program for high schoolers. Five weeks with the same class, eight-thirty in the morning until two-thirty in the afternoon. I’d have eight, or nine, or ten kids, from all over the country and, sometimes, from all over the world, and for those five weeks we would eat and breathe fiction and poetry. They wrote encyclopedias about the intricacies of their families and their imagined futures; poetry about love, and change, and the politics of having a body; stories made up of emails sent into the void, letters stuffed into the mailbox of someone not writing back. They wrote furiously, passionately, impossibly well.

If you want teenagers to read more, you have to steer them toward the kind of books that understand the complexity of their experience and treat it with respect. If you want to write for teenagers, you have to respect that duality. You have to love it, I think.

I took a full-time job teaching high school creative writing at Interlochen. I took their work home at night. I made a cup of tea, sat on the couch, and took out a green pen. Marked the lines that sung, the lines that could be tightened, the moments that made me feel like my students were somehow both sixteen and also, older than the universe. I loved the moments after class, too, and before, students running in to show me cat videos, temporary tattoos, new haircuts. Students waiting outside my office to ask a hesitant question that lead them to another. What should I do with my life?, or, Should I break up with my girlfriend? She kind of kissed my best friend, but she said it was an accident, or I think I might be a writer. I think I might be gay, or I think I need to move out, maybe move in with my grandma, or Everyone says we should hate the world right now, but I love it. I love it and I want to fix it. How do I? How does that work?

And always, at the end: Do you know any books about that?

The way they read, like words are trapdoors, like they’re honey, or like they’re air. The way they react when they finally find a book where they see themselves, or a part of themselves. It’s hard to be a writer around teenagers without wanting to write for them. My students are simultaneously cerebral readers and emotional ones, and those feelings can be at odds with each other, sometimes. If you want teenagers to read more, you have to steer them toward the kind of books that understand the complexity of their experience and treat it with respect. If you want to write for teenagers, you have to respect that duality. You have to love it, I think.

When I wrote my first young adult novel with Jeff Zentner, Sunrise Nights, we knew we wanted to tap into that feeling of the internal warring with the external, that sense that everything you are doesn’t quite line up yet. We came up with a hybrid form, what we call a novel in verse and conversation, where our characters’ inner lives are mapped out through poems, and then we drop them in a scene to see them banter and negotiate and bicker and hide things from each other that they’ve just revealed to the reader.

In Wayfarers, our most recent novel, we’ve used that same form to tell the story of Sylvie, a privileged girl on her post-graduation #vanlife road trip, running away from grief and guilt, golden retriever in tow, and Knox, who’s just extricated himself from the nomadic cult his mother dragged him into when he was a kid. On paper their backgrounds couldn’t be more different—Sylvie speaks fluent Gen Z; Knox emphatically does not—but in practice they’re both grown up way too fast and are harboring secrets they think they can’t share. After Knox rescues Sylvie’s runaway dog and breaks his arm in the process, she offers him a ride south to his grandmother’s house. On the road, there are secrets, and lies, and skinny dipping, and yearning, feuding roadside fortune tellers, and solar eclipses watched from the Walmart parking lot, and a lot of banter about wants and needs and whether we’re the sum of our experiences or if we can shape ourselves into something more. Also, kissing. Of course kissing. I’m not a monster.

Like all my young adult novels, I wrote Wayfarers for myself, for the girl I was, but mostly—I wrote it for my students. For every kid with burning eyes who came into my office and said, This is who I am. What do you have for me?

The world, of course. We have the world for you.

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Wayfarers by Jeff Zentner and Brittany Cavallaro is available via Quill Tree Books.