I had to give a speech in New Orleans this summer when I received the Printz Award for "Looking for Alaska." (I would show you a picture of the Printz Award on my mantle, but my browser is cranky right now re. pictures. Incidentally, why is it that I just assume my computer will eventually 'feel better' if I just 'let it rest?') As you read this, it may be helpful to remember two things:
1. I was speaking to 500 librarians.
2. I had the flu. So imagine me sitting up there, looking very much like I was going to throw up about five minutes after my speech (which I did). Now, onto the speech:

Before I even say a proper thank-you, I’d like to begin tonight by asking you all to please lower your expectations. I have been pretty terrified of public speaking ever since I broke down in tears after losing the Audubon Park Elementary School oration contest to Julie Baskin on account of how she gesticulated more than I did. So anyway, I cannot promise a good speech. But I am going to gesticulate like crazy. [Note: At this point I gesticulated like crazy.]

I recently read in a book about speech-giving that you should right at the outset subtly outline the arguments of your entire speech, so allow me to subtly do that right now:

First, I am going to make the bold and controversial assertion that librarians are wonderful and I love them. And in doing so, I will hopefully say a little something about Looking for Alaska.

Then, after a lot of that, I am going to talk about my editor and my family. The main argument here—and again this will be a provocative position to take—will be that I have the best editor, and also the best family, but I’m going to try to make that argument without offending other editors and other families. This part may include a subtle jab at the publishing industry, but it will be very subtle, indeed.

Finally, I will try to patch things up with the publishing business while engaging in more librarian-praising, and then I will quote Faulkner.

But let us begin with librarians, and how wonderful they are. You may have noticed that every time a young adult author gets within shouting distance of one or more librarians, the author will start babbling on about how much s/he loves librarians, and how great librarians are, and how the very fabric of our nation would come apart at the seams were it not for librarians. YA authors talk about librarians the way that Republicans talk about rich people, and for the very same reason: We need you. You invented this thing—not just this award but the entire concept behind it. The very idea of _literature_ written and published for teenagers is an idea born and nurtured in the world of librarianship. For many years now, librarians have been making courageous collection decisions as part of their service to teenagers. And by putting high-quality books in their collections, and by getting those books to kids, who sometimes end up loving a book enough to buy it, librarians have pushed publishers toward a broader and deeper understanding of what it means to write for teenagers. Mike Printz was one such librarian. His is an extraordinarily rich legacy. I never knew Mr. Printz, but without him and other librarians pushing this genre forward, I never could have published Looking for Alaska as a young adult novel. So in that sense, this award—and every Printz Award and Honor—belongs to librarians as much as it does the authors, although if it is okay with you I think I will keep it at my apartment and then if you want to see it you are welcome to come over.

I would particularly like to thank the extraordinarily accomplished librarians who served on this year’s Printz committee, and YALSA, who continue the ALA’s long and storied tradition of, always and everywhere, using acronyms—and who also do so much for YA literature and YA librarians.

The idea for Looking for Alaska first occurred to me in the Fall of 1999, when I was working as a student chaplain at a children’s hospital. The way it worked was you sort of took classes and stuff during the day, and then about two days a week, you worked a 24 hour shift. We had these two beepers to keep with us during those 24 hours, and at the end of your shift, you handed the beepers off to the next chaplain. And so a couple times a week, I would sit alone in this little windowless room with these two beepers all night long. I would try to read or sleep, but mostly I just stared at the beepers and prayed they wouldn’t go off. And then they’d go off.

I’d follow the beeper to some horrifically sad event—because chaplains aren’t generally met with good news—and after it was over, I would go back to the room, alone with the beepers. And it was during those times that I began to think about questions of loss and guilt and forgiveness. When someone close to you dies, it’s very typical to feel guilt, to feel that you should have done something. And usually, you eventually realize that there was nothing you could have done—that the feeling is irrational, born of a desire to explain the inexplicable, to imagine that there is something you can do in this mean world to save yourself and those you love.

But then sometimes, it is your fault—not because you are evil, but because you are careless and dumb and generally human. I found myself wondering about that particular variety of suffering. So many other questions spun off from that one, but the initial question—of whether there can be hope in a world where people cannot help but be careless, a world where there is no chance of true justice—inspired Alaska.

But a lot of 22-year-olds have had a lot of ideas for a lot of books—and had I not left chaplaincy and landed as a temp at the Booklist offices, I might never have actually written the book. My job there involved a lot of retyping ISBN numbers, and so I became freakishly familiar with publishers’ ISBN prefixes, which will figure into the story later, but one of my first assignments was to retype the speeches given by the 2000 Printz Award winners and honorees. It was the year that Walter Dean Myers won, and honors went to Ellen Wittlinger, Laurie Halse Anderson, and David Almond. When my boss explained to me that the Printz was this new award given for “literary excellence” in young adult literature, I thought (but thankfully did not say), “What, like for the metaphorical assertion that the Sweet Valley High lies in the shadow of Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain?” I had never read YA literature. But after retyping those speeches, I went home and read Monster and Speak and Skellig and Hard Love—all wonderful books. I realized then that my book—my as-yet-still-imaginary book—was YA literature, too.

And here is where librarians re-enter the story. Because it was a librarian, Stephanie Zvirin, who gave me my first job and who gave me YA galleys she thought I might like. It was a librarian, Bill Ott, who took time away from his job as my boss’s boss’s boss to talk to me and treated me with respect and collegiality, even though as a 22-year-old I once remarked to him that someone who died at 50 could not be said to have died “young.” It was an extraordinary magazine created for and by librarians, Booklist, that helped guide my reading and purchasing decisions. And it was a librarian, Ilene Cooper, who changed my life forever by making me believe that I could write the book inside my head.

Ilene Cooper was the first actual author I ever met, and she worked just down the hall from me. She would come over to my desk and ask me to do something just like a normal boss, except she wasn’t a normal boss, because she wrote books. Ilene and I quickly became friends, because it is pretty rare in this life that one hypochondriac interested in the historical Jesus, Catholic saints, pretzels, the vast right wing conspiracy, books, and white wine meets another. And one day I mentioned to Ilene that I wanted to write a book. She said the idea sounded promising, although I doubt she figured she’d one day have to recuse herself from a committee over it. Ilene gave me a deadline: April 15, 2001.

When that deadline passed, I’d written ten horrible pages. I’d read you a selection from those pages, except various members of the Printz Committee might rush the stage and take back this award. The central problem was that I couldn’t find a structure to tell the story. And then September 11th happened, and that night I was alone again, this time in my apartment. Everyone on TV kept talking about how we’d see the world in terms of before 9/11 and after it. And I thought about how all time is measured that way—before and after the birth of Christ for Christians; before and after the hijrah for Muslims. Before and after is not the true nature of time, of course, but it's the only way we have of living through time. This, I realized, is how I would tell my story. Before and after. A year later, the manuscript was sent to Dutton.

Okay, so this is where the knowledge of ISBN prefixes re-enters the story. Five months and seventeen days after sending the manuscript, Dutton called and offered to publish Looking for Alaska. And literally, my first thought was, “oh. My. God. I’m going to be a 0 dash 525 dash!” (Note: This is a joke that only librarians and publishing nerds would get. But each publisher has their own ISBN prefix. All Dutton ISBNs begin 0-525-, so Alaska's ISBN is 0-525-47506-0.)

How lucky I have been to be a 0-525-. Dutton’s publisher, Stephanie Owens-Lurie, has done so much to support this book, as has Doug Whiteman at Penguin. The world of children’s publishing is increasingly dominated by blockbuster deals and mega-hits—and no, that’s not the subtle jab at the publishing industry; that’s still coming—but Penguin took a small book with the dreaded “questionable content” and they worked their asses off to get Alaska to readers, and I am so grateful for it.

But the very best facet of being a 0-525- is Julie Strauss-Gabel, my incomparable editor. In the contemporary world of YA publishing—and here’s your subtle jab—far, far too many books are acquired and then published after only cursory revision because there is so much pressure to churn out titles.

That might have happened to me, and I certainly wouldn’t be here if it had. But instead, I ended up with Julie Strauss-Gabel, who literally spent years working on Looking for Alaska. Fewer than half the words in the acquired manuscript appeared in the final book. We talked about Alaska at 2 AM on instant messenger; she sent me editorial letters longer than some Newbery winners; and when I felt like we’d done enough work, she pushed me still further. I continue to be inspired by her dedication to the craft of editing and her genuine belief in the importance of creating good books for young people. Looking for Alaska is a collaboration between myself and Julie, and I am proud to share this award with her.

There’s one more collaborator who needs to be mentioned here, and that is my wife, Sarah. Sarah and I attended the same high school—a place that bears some physical resemblance to Culver Creek Prep—but we never knew one another until just after I began revising Alaska in earnest. So much of her, and so many of her stories, went into this book. Alaska says one thing in particular that I stole directly from Sarah: On our very first date, Sarah said, “Imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia.” So I want to thank you, Sarah, for that line, for making each day of my life fun and invigorating, and for agreeing to marry such a nostalgic bastard.

I would also like to thank my parents and my brother, Hank. I had the astonishing good fortune of having my parents by my side when the Printz committee called to tell me about this award. I have an extraordinarily kind and funny and supportive family—in terms of their goodness, they are possibly even better than librarians—and I’m so glad to have my mom and dad here tonight. My greatest ambition in life is to make them proud.

I am often asked whether I wrote Looking for Alaska for teenagers, or whether I intended it to be a novel for adults and was just steered to a YA publisher. The answer is that I wrote it for teenagers, and my next novel is written for teenagers, and that I intend to write novels for teenagers as long as I am allowed to do so—although, to steal a line from Laurie Halse Anderson, I am really happy that the 12 adults sitting over there liked it, too. Writing for kids is the only kind of writing I know how to do that I feel is halfway noble. In his Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech, William Faulkner said, “The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, one of the pillars that help him to endure and prevail.” This is precisely why I write for young adults, and I think it’s why most people in the business do what they do. When you are a teenager, you discover that life is messy. Life is defined by ambiguity and confusion and unfairness and a pervasive randomness. It is in adolescence that you realize you are not safe, not in any sense the word, and that you never will be.

When I was a teenager, I remember reading a book by the sociologist Peter Berger in which he said, “The difference between dogs and people is that dogs know how to be dogs.” This is what we do as teenagers, and forever after: We try to figure out how to be people. I like writing for teenagers because they are still trying to figure out how to be people in un-selfconcious, forthright ways—because they are still open to the idea that a single book might change their understanding of how to be a person. It is my fervent hope that, at least for some teenagers, books can play a role in helping them navigate the labyrinth—that books can help show us how to choose the awful pain of love over the strange comfort of destruction, that books can be a pillar to help us endure and prevail.

I realize those are some rather grand sentiments, particularly coming from a guy whose first novel features a lot of jokes about peeing. But I really _hope_ that in some small way, my books will help teenagers to endure and prevail. I _know_, however, that your work does just that. So again: Thank you.