![]() ![]() RW: In terms of Nickel’s plot and shape, I tried to focus on the way a school year unfolds - how things are new and exciting in the fall but can quickly become mundane and tedious as the year goes on if we are not careful. HL: Can you talk about how your time as a teacher inspired or allowed for the research-project element of the plot? ![]() Phoebe Gloeckner’s graphic novel Diary of a Teenage Girl and David Small’s Stitches are both honest and moving and treat their younger selves with a keen eye.ġ0 Great Teens In Contemporary Fiction: A Reading List I was also influenced by my daughter’s music recommendations of bands like Girlpool and Slothrust. Hempl Chronicles by Sarah Shun-lien Bynum. One of the best books written about high school is Ms. RW: My own students and my son London and his friends were the best protagonists for me, but I also love Christopher John Francis Boone in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, Holden in Catcher (of course), and many teen characters in Lorrie Moore and Antonya Nelson’s fiction. HL: Are there any other young protagonists that informed the way you wrote the characters of Coy and Monroe? I really carried all those emotions with me as I was writing Nickel. All of us are so beautiful and so broken. I have deep empathy for all the characters in the book - teens, parents, teachers. Each new school year reminds me how both fragile and resilient teenagers are. Seeing this kind of pain always breaks a teacher’s heart and you can only do so much to prevent kids from suffering. Every new academic year brings a whole new slew of teased kids or students sitting alone in the cafeteria or individuals feeling awkward class after class. RW: I have been doing a few school visits recently, and I tell students and faculty that being a teacher means experiencing a sad version of Groundhog Day, over and over. How did it feel to live in that space while writing the book? HL: The book captures a lot of the cruelty of teenage-dom, the kind of merciless way that these characters see adults, see each other, and see themselves. I took pieces of slang from what I’ve collected over the years as a teacher and father and tailor-made it for who Coy is and who he wants to become. My goal was to try to create a series of vernaculars for Coy to employ that shows how he navigates adolescence. Coy also has an internal slang where he plays with language as a way to figure out a rather complicated life. Coy speaks code to his best friend Monroe because they are a unit and their unique shorthand unites and protects them. I’ve studied my students’ slang for 25 years, not only in terms of their oral communication, but in their prose and poetry as well. This unique style of slang serves so many vital purposes and is constantly changing. Robert Wilder: All teenagers speak in some sort of code, not only to their friends but to themselves as well. How did you go about building his vernacular? He has a very specific way of articulating the world around him, and every sentence feels packed with allusions, puns, and slang. ![]() Hilary Leichter: You did such convincing work creating the maximalist, pop-culture-soup of Coy’s inner monologue. I spoke with Robert Wilder over email about metal poisoning and teenagers. As big as the outsize emotions of high school, and just as undervalued. But it’s the coin that kept popping into my head while reading - more money than a penny, but not enough to really get anywhere good. ‘Nickel’ is not only a coin, it’s the source of Monroe’s allergy. When Monroe starts getting sick, Coy’s world slips into harsh focus, raising questions about their friendship, and whether or not he can save it, let alone save his friend. They sit comfortably on the fringes of their school’s social scene, comfortable in their comfort with one another. Their lives are one long stream of jibs and jabs, a sort of zany Howard Hawks back-and-forth, madcap dialogue for the millennial. In the new novel Nickel (Leafstorm Press 2016), we meet Coy and Monroe, two best friends with hundreds of pop culture references at their fingertips. ![]()
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