{"id":35119,"date":"2014-05-21T20:57:55","date_gmt":"2014-05-22T00:57:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/?p=35119"},"modified":"2014-05-21T20:58:54","modified_gmt":"2014-05-22T00:58:54","slug":"ajet-connect-magazine-interviews-an-award-winning-saga-jet-author","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/2014\/05\/21\/ajet-connect-magazine-interviews-an-award-winning-saga-jet-author\/","title":{"rendered":"AJET Connect Magazine Interviews an Award-winning Saga JET Author"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"SagaAndreBook\"<\/a>Via the Saga JET Programme<\/a> website:<\/em><\/p>\n

This month\u2019s edition of AJET\u2019s\u00a0Connect Magazine<\/a>\u00a0features a double (DOUBLE) page spread interviewing current Karatsu City JET Andre Swartley<\/strong> about his award-winning book –\u00a0Leon Martin and the Fantasy Girl<\/em><\/strong><\/a>. If you haven\u2019t read this month\u2019s edition,\u00a0the interview and short review is below. If you want you buy a copy of the\u00a0book click here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Review and Interview:\u00a0Leon Martin and the Fantasy Girl<\/em><\/a><\/h3>\n

Leon Martin and the Fantasy Girl<\/em>\u00a0delves into cultural exchange on a level that most people never get a chance to experience. When a group of American high school students arrive at a small German town for a summer work-study program, they find themselves caring for a potentially illegal alien in a life-threatening situation.<\/p>\n

Leon and Autumn, a pair of teens staying with the same host family, are at the forefront of the action. Instead of spending their summer doing the work they traveled to Germany to do, they find themselves looking after a girl named Shin. Her presence is the glue that holds this story together, as well as what makes it so unbelievable. Shin\u2019s story is vague at first and takes its time in clearing itself up.<\/p>\n

The build-up to the second half requires readers to have some faith that that these characters will eventually find themselves in slightly more realistic situations, which they do. Spending a summer abroad in Germany is adventurous, but saving a fellow foreigner who should have been taken into custody from the beginning is a bit of a stretch.<\/p>\n

The main characters bring more than carry-ons to their host parents\u2019 houses in terms of emotional baggage. Most of these problems rank above average on a scale of teenage angst, and the issues that they face during their summer are resolved in rapid succession without any obvious connection to the broader storyline.\u00a0Leon Martin and the Fantasy Girl<\/em>\u00a0eventually comes together as a comprehensive story, but readers have to be willing to accept some recurring flaws early on.<\/p>\n

Although this book is about high school students on a summer vacation, the theme of living in a foreign country for work experience strikes a chord with people who have taught overseas on programs like JET. With the characters\u2019 ages aside, they are much like the new ALTs that fill the schools of Japan every summer\u2014befriending one another, testing linguistic waters, and adapting to cultural differences. Yet,\u00a0Leon Martin and the Fantasy Girl<\/em>\u00a0isn\u2019t strictly about adapting to a new home. It\u2019s about a couple of teenagers saving a Korean woman\u2019s life. If that\u2019s a plot that piques your interest, consider picking this title up.<\/p>\n

We got the chance to talk to Andre Swartley, current Saga JET and author of Leon and the Fantasy Girl, about his own experiences abroad and how the novel came to be.<\/p>\n

What prompted you to write a book about teenagers studying abroad?<\/em><\/p>\n

It probably also stems from the old advice given by every writing teacher ever: write what you know. I\u2019ve lived in four countries now and visited over a dozen, and some of my most formative experiences happened overseas. Plus, a teenager away from home for the first time\u2014and living overseas to boot\u2014is a great setup for an emotional conflict, which this story mostly is. Living abroad as a young person immediately makes you vulnerable and unsure about everything.<\/p>\n

Leon has a crippling disability. Why did you decide to give this to him?<\/em><\/p>\n

There was an urban legend back in the late 80s and early 90s that some kid had given himself arthritis by playing Atari several hours a day for a couple years\u2014I actually reference the urban legend in the book. Whether it was true or not, the idea stuck with me.<\/p>\n

The book takes place in St. Goar, Germany. Out of all the places in the world, why did you choose this town?<\/em><\/p>\n

St. Goar is a real place in Germany, but the town described in the book doesn\u2019t really exist. It\u2019s a combination of a few different villages I have visited along the Rhine River. I chose that region because when I visited there it was so beautiful, so postcard- perfect that it seemed almost fake. Like a huge theme park or something. And I wanted a setting like that for this book because so much of the story is about confusing fantasy and reality.<\/p>\n

Did you base any characters in this book on people you know?<\/em><\/p>\n

The most direct correlation between a character in the book and a real person is Leon\u2019s host father, Klaus. He is a version of my own host father when I lived in Germany, but simplified and distilled into a pleasant cartoon gnome. The only other person I \u201cknow\u201d from the book is Autumn, who is basically my muse. I can\u2019t tell you where she came from, but she\u2019s been living in\u00a0my head for as long as I can remember, telling me stories whenever I\u2019m willing to listen. But she doesn\u2019t wait on me either. She keeps her own schedule up there and doesn\u2019t care much if I write down what she tells me or not. I\u2019m a little bit scared of her, actually. This book is the first time she has written herself into a story.<\/p>\n

Congratulations on winning the Dante Rosetti Award for Best Young Adult Fiction! Although this book is geared towards a younger audience, is there a particular group of people that you think would enjoy your book the most?<\/em><\/p>\n

Thanks! Every writer probably says this, but I like to think the characters\u2019 struggles are universal enough that just about anybody over the age of 13 could pick of the book and find something in it to connect with. The Dante Rossetti Awards actually labeled my book as \u201cUrban Lit,\u201d because it fits pretty snugly into a niche of Urban Lit called Lad Lit, popularized by writers like Nick Hornby, Mike Gayle, and Danny Wallace.<\/p>\n

How did you write this? Do you type everything on a computer, or do you prefer to write by hand?<\/em><\/p>\n

I want to be able to write by hand. It\u2019s very romantic. I have a small collection of fountain pens and a beautiful leather-bound journal that looks like a prop from the Lord of the Rings that I\u2019ve tried to write in. But it just doesn\u2019t work. That leather journal is full of old chapters and story drafts, most of which I didn\u2019t even bother to type up because they were such garbage. Typing feels like a natural extension of thinking, while writing by hand feels like doing two things at once, and neither particularly well.<\/p>\n

How long did it take for you to finish this story?<\/em><\/p>\n

There are a lot of ways to measure that. This story actually started out as a piece of short fiction I wrote while I was student teaching in 2002. The story wouldn\u2019t leave me alone, so I started a draft of a full book version in the summer of 2009 and published it in the summer of 2012. According to MS Word, I\u2019ve logged nearly 5000 minutes (80+ hours) into the file containing the book.<\/p>\n

What other authors would you say your style is most similar to?<\/em><\/p>\n

I\u2019ll pick three authors who have what I feel are outstanding characteristics that I try to emulate, but I would never be\u00a0so arrogant as to say my work is similar to theirs. Here goes: Kurt Vonnegut for brevity and weirdness; Stephen King for \u00a0image clarity and ease of voice; and J.K. Rowling for character, organization, and sheer imagination. It is no coincidence that \u00a0two of those three write commercial, mainstream fiction. I don\u2019t need to sell a lot of books, but I would much rather write an enjoyable page-turner than an \u201cimportant\u201d story that might appear someday in an anthology.<\/p>\n

Sterling Diesel is an ALT based in Nagasaki prefecture who spends her frequent road trips and cafe binges taking in a wide spectrum of literature. In between lectures and chapters of works by Alan Watts and William Gibson, she\u2019s usually planning her next excursion, or studying whatever new obsession she\u2019s found through Wikipedia.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Via the Saga JET Programme website: This month\u2019s edition of AJET\u2019s\u00a0Connect Magazine\u00a0features a double (DOUBLE) page spread interviewing current Karatsu City JET Andre Swartley about his award-winning book –\u00a0Leon Martin and the Fantasy Girl. If you haven\u2019t read this month\u2019s edition,\u00a0the interview and short review is below. If you want you buy a copy of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[390,40,408,304,282,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-35119","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ajet","category-books","category-jet-alum-author-beat","category-notable-jet-alums","category-jet-roi","category-writers"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pkZ7m-98r","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35119","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35119"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35119\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35124,"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35119\/revisions\/35124"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35119"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35119"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35119"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}