A Phone Call, Bathrooms, A Celebration, and Lies: The Passion of Dolssa and its ALA Printz Honor

Well. This is embarrassing. This is a blog post I wanted to write a year ago, about the The Passion of Dolssa receiving an ALA Printz Honor, a year and change ago.

In my defense, the reason it’s taken me this long to write it is that in the middle of the ALA summer conference, I moved. MOVED. As in, I put the last box in the shipping container in Boston, swept and locked my empty house for the last time, zipped my suitcase, went to the airport, flew to Chicago, put a nice dress on for the Printz ceremony, and another dress for the dinner, and then flew from there to LA to see my new home for the first time. After racing around setting up the new house, I embarked on an epic summer and fall of Very Much Travel, lecturing and speaking all over the place, which was super fun but fairly hectic. In airports and on airplanes, and in any spaces I could find in between, I feverishly read and researched my next YA novel, Lovely War (more on that very soon). The crazy wound down by Thanksgiving. From Black Friday onward until, oh, two weeks ago, I pretty much locked myself in my office and wrote like a madwoman. I wrote a couple of other books, too, in between there, and I’ll talk more about those down the road. But, It Has Been A Year, and then some.

Printz winners & honorees pose with committee members.

Now it’s July, and Lovely War has gone into copyediting, which means that, for the most part, it’s done. So NOW I can revisit summer 2017’s ALA conference in Chicago, and the whirlwind six months between getting The Phone Call and walking up onto that stage and praying for all I’m worth that I wouldn’t trip. (Because fancy heels are essential for rare moments like these, even if they did leave me with a Dolssa Blister afterwards. Not kidding.)  

The Phone Call was pretty awesome. This moment may never strike again in my life, so it’s worth reliving in some detail.

Enough people had said they thought Dolssa could be a Printz contender that I couldn’t pretend not to hope that maybe, maybe I might get a call. I try not to hope where awards are concerned, because that way madness lies, and there’s just no telling what book will ever win anything, but I’m nowhere near Zen enough not to have wiggled and worried and wondered.

With teacher/blogger Karyn Silverman @ Penguin booth

I was sure, though, that if a call were coming, it would come in the evening. I spent that Sunday afternoon at church, teaching my hilarious Sunday School class of 10-yo whip-smarties, with the ringer of my phone turned off. Class ended, and I escorted the kids to the larger room for singing time. At this moment, I surreptitiously sneaked a peek at my phone, to see if my husband, then living in LA, had sent me his usual Sunday “good morning” text. (Time zone difference.)  

There was no message from Phil yet, but there was a text message from a writer friend, whom I’ll call “Writer Friend.” It read, “Did you get a call yet?”

Oh, Writer Friend, I thought, don’t say that! It’s hard enough to stay sane as it is!

Only then did I see that underneath her text was a notice of two missed phone calls from Chicago.

I blinked. I gulped. My eyes popped. My stomach flopped. We just don’t have the right clichés for a moment like this.

I am not proud of what I did next. I was in church, for heaven’s sake, with the Sunday School children. I told them, “I need to go to the bathroom.”

Maybe it wasn’t quite a lie. I probably could’ve gone to the bathroom. I probably should’ve gone to the bathroom. What I did instead was slip out the door, go outside to the parking lot, dial the missed number, and then say, to the answering Hello-er, “This is Julie Berry. I just missed a call from this number,” in what I hoped was a relaxed, professional voice, as if I wasn’t bursting right out of my own skin like a baked potato.

Being, um, Neal's Angels? I take no responsibility for this. L to R: me, Louise O'Neill, Nicola Yoon. Recumbent: Neal Shusterman. 

The Hello-er put me on speaker, and told me that she was from the ALA Printz committee, and they were all present and delighted to let me know that The Passion of Dolssa had won a Printz Honor.

I’m not sure what I managed to say next.

The rest of the call was brief. On speaker phone, they cheered and applauded. They were eager, they said, to meet me at the summer conference. Congratulations, they said. Thank you thank you I can’t believe it oh my goodness thank you, I said.

With Kendra Levin, my editor at Viking.

And then I called Phil. That was, I think, the very best part of all. He was as joyful as if the award were his; more so, I believe. His delight in the Printz Honor meant more to me than my own.

Next, I texted my editor and my agent, something I would NEVER do on a weekend, and asked if, you know, they could maybe spare me a few minutes for a quick conversation. Those were fun calls, too.

Let us pray, for the sake of my immortal soul, that after that I did visit the ladies’ room. I really can’t remember.

I had to keep the secret from the kids for the rest of the day. If they noticed Mom being extra bouncy and cheerful, they never mentioned it.

The announcement was made the following morning, and the resulting flood of congratulations was a Facebook birthday times a million. In the following days, cards, flowers, and treats showed up at my door. The kindness of the kidlit community and of my dear friends is pretty spectacular. I really didn’t know what to do with it all. My cheeks hurt from smiling.

My bathroom renovation project.

The next six months were a blur of normal life, mom stuff, writing, listing my home for sale (sniff!), renovating its bathroom (glurg), selling it (whew), packing (gaaaah), and moving (ugh). But then I went straight to Chicago, which became, for me, a temporary fairyland. I met authors I’ve admired for ages. Rode in an elevator with Sarah Jessica Parker, and I was so chill, I said nothing. Ate fabulous Russian food and deep-dish pizza and posed for selfies with Phil beside The Bean (the Cloud Gate sculpture). And when the time was right, I put on those dresses and heels, smiled a lot, and gave lots of hugs, hoping I wasn’t sweating as much as I feared I was.

Phil and me at The Bean (Cloud Gate sculpture)

It was an honor and a thrill to be on the same panel as Representative John Lewis. We’d met earlier that year at the Los Angeles Times Book Festival party and ceremony, so now we’re practically BFFs. He’s as humble and genuine as anyone you could ever hope to meet. In the wacky world we inhabit, I’m grateful for heroes and leaders like him. It was wonderful to meet the other honorees: Nicola Yoon, Neal Shusterman, and Louise O'Neill. Any jitters I'd felt vanished once we started chatting on the panel. 

Nicola Yoon, me, John Lewis, Felicia Frazier & Nate Powell

One thing I don’t think I fully anticipated in Chicago was the enthusiastic welcome from the Printz Award committee. This was no cool, detached panel of people who made a decision and then gone home to floss their teeth. These were librarians who cared so desperately about young adult literature that they were willing to devote a year of their lives to reading and discussing hundreds of books. By the time they’d made their selections, I think they thought of the selected books, and by extension, their authors, as dear friends. I loved meeting them. One conversation, in particular, I’ll remember always, with a librarian telling me, in earnest, heartfelt tones, how much she loved Dolssa, and thanking me (thanking me?) for writing it. I never quite know what to say when I’m thanked for doing what I desperately wanted to do anyway. But I know how it feels when your heart sings with love for a particular and precious book. It’s humbling and almost perplexing to feel that a book I’m written might offer the same gift to another reader.

(Incidentally, I’m sure that the committee members DO floss their teeth. But they love books first. It’s the order that matters.)

This was waiting for me at my new home in LA. Good kids! 

It was a heady time. A thrilling year. An honor beyond comprehension. I’m grateful to have had this moment. There’s always an abundance of worthy contenders, and there’s almost no way to predict what way things will go. Another committee might easily have made other selections. But I knew I had worked harder on The Passion of Dolssa than on any other book to date, with my editor’s tenacious help, and to have that effort acknowledged felt pretty swell. Another year and another book may be just as effortful and worthy, and yet I won’t win, and so it goes.  

I was once the nerdy, slightly snobbish kid in school who made sure to read all the books with shiny ALA stickers on them. A sticker of my own is pretty great, and well worth a blister. Not going to lie about that, even if I might occasionally lie about the bathroom.