Melissa Wyatt's YA novel Funny How Things Change is one of those stories with a protagonist readers fall in love with. Remy loves his home in West Virginia, working as a mechanic and living with his dad up on the mountain that has been in the family forever. His girlfriend Lisa is set to go away to college and Remy is going with her, because as much as he loves home, he loves Lisa too. Except, maybe he doesn't, or more importantly, maybe he doesn't want to love somebody who can't love what matters to him as well. There is a ton of soul searching in this novel, a lot of thinking about what you want to do with your life (is college always the best thing?) and a serious look at what has been done to the West Virginia landscape through mountaintop removal. In the end though it is all about Remy and the people he cares about and what choice he has to make to be happy. It's a wonderful coming-of-age story, one of the best I have read in a long long time that actually lives up the idea of just what it is that "coming-of-age" truly means. I wrote a short review over at Guys Lit Wire last month and the book will also be featured in my June column. Plain and simple, I loved it and it has my highest recommendation for YA literature.

CM: One of the things that really struck me about Remy was that he was not an under achiever (he works as a mechanic and is well known and liked/respected around town) yet even though he graduated from high school he has no interest in going to college. His dream of working on cars for a living is not a common one in YA lit (or in most national conversations about teens and education). Why did you create this particular character and how common do you think his aspirations for a non-collegiate but successful future are?

MW: I didn’t conceive Remy as a character who would carry this theme. At first, he was just a person in a situation that interested me. But as he grew and developed on the page and I got to know who he was and what was important to him, I began to feel rather fierce about him and—by extension—other people who make choices that don’t involve college. (Bear with me. I see a lot of em dashes coming in this interview.) From there, it became important to me to show that Remy’s path is just as valid as the “get up, get out, go to college” precept.

After all, college isn’t right for everyone. It isn’t even a guarantee of future success, yet it is often pushed in YA lit—and high school campuses—as the ideal choice while alternative paths are rarely promoted for YA protagonists. At a time when we are regularly discussing the importance of teen readers “seeing themselves” represented in their literature, you have to wonder what the shop kids and retail workers think of being left out of the conversation. I’ve got a nagging suspicion it doesn’t come up because the assumption is that those kids don’t read.

CM: Remy's best friend Jimmy is desperate to leave Dwyer and takes a job in a larger town at an unknown factory. He can not articulate anything about his future other than leaving Dwyer. He made me think of all those stories that end with the characters leaving home but we never know what happens to them - the leaving is supposed to be the happily ever after part. Jimmy clearly has no clue what will happen next. What do you think Jimmy represents and how common do you think his dream - simply to leave for anywhere and anything else - is among small town teens? Do you think we trap ourselves into small expectations in small towns and leave the big dreams/hopes only if we are willing to go to big cities?

MW: For me, Jimmy represents a kind of not-thinking about where you fit in the world. It isn’t something that has occurred to him because he is thinking in trivialities. He is thinking about things he has been made to believe are important but hasn’t stopped to consider whether or not they really matter to him, in contrast to Remy, who is being eaten up by those thoughts.

I think the idea that there’s got to be something bigger and better somewhere else is a common yearning among humans as a species. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have spread over the globe. Where we fall into a trap is when we fail to consider what it is we’re really looking for.

And again, the idea that “big” is better—big dreams, big cities—and small is lesser is one that I think many people don’t stop to examine. If you are miserable in a small town and only the bustle and crowds of a city are going to make you happy, then that’s where you should go. But heavens, the thought that everyone needs to do the same is just silly.

CM: There are a lot of misconceptions about West Virginia and the people who live there. Remy pushes back against some bad jokes about his state in the book but finds it hard to articulate sometimes what it is about WV that matters so much to him. You write a bit about mountain top removal in /Funny How Things Change/ and how it affects WV. Did you have trouble selling a book about teen from WV in particular who doesn't want
to leave and also how do you think mountain top removal is affecting the state?

MW: First, I have to admit that I had all of the expectations and preconceived notions about West Virginia that most people have. In fact, the impetus for the book was to answer the question that leapt to mind the first time I visited there: “Why would anyone stay?” To me, a suburban Mid-Atlantic girl used to gently rolling hills and cookie-cutter subdivisions, the mountains were too much for me. It took me awhile to get that extreme landscapes make extreme impressions on people.

While I don’t think it was the West Virginia setting that made the story a bit of a tough sell, I think when you have this kind of ingrained attitude about a place, it makes answering the question “Why would you stay?” significantly harder.

As for mountaintop removal mining…how much space do we have? I like having electricity as much as anybody and know that most of my electricity comes from a coal-burning power plant, but the problem isn’t only how that coal is burned. It’s how it is taken from the ground. Mountaintop removal is horribly, irrevocably destructive—loss of whole mountain ranges and ecosystems, destruction of important watersheds, the danger of coal slurry impounds—and there are no benefits for West Virginia. Mountaintop removal mining creates fewer jobs than conventional mining methods, and the money saved isn’t staying in West Virginia.

You have to wonder—when you consider the hefty social, economic and environmental impact of this particular method of mining and the lack of knowledge and interest outside of the region—whether we haven’t been carefully trained not to care about Appalachia, to think of it as a place that is less, that isn’t worth protecting.

Check out this site for more info: http://www.mountainjusticesummer.org/facts/steps.php

CM: The notion that Americans might have been socially "trained not to care about Appalachia" really hits me hard because it seems so true. Remy seems to be struggling with this notion a bit himself - that the best thing he can do is leave WV because nobody is supposed to want to stay in WV or respect WV or love WV (that bit at the family picnic where he overhears his cousin's wife really emphasizes this). The literature on Appalachia is usually historic or emphasizes the poverty. How do we, as writers and readers, change this social construct about Appalachia? There's a rich literary history in the south (another economically poor part of the country) - why isn't it there for Appalachia and what questions do you think we should be asking about why the region is so casually overlooked?

MW: There are some great Appalachian writers but they are writing against those long-ingrained stereotypes and American imagination of what they already believe Appalachia is. This is one of the last cultural groups in the US that it's still okay to make fun of. Why have those stereotypes been allowed to stand for so very long? I think they make it easier for the rest of America to think of Appalachia as a sort of non-America. That way, the problems of Appalachia aren't our problems and we can blame them on the victims, the people of Appalachia, instead of facing the complex causes of those problems. It allows us to trivialize what we can't--or don't want--to fix. Why care about the exploitation of a land and the people who live on it if we are taught to believe they are both worthless?

I think we change stereotypes by questioning why they exist.

CM: We talked a little bit in earlier email exchanges about heroic figures in teen literature. What do you think makes a believable hero in YA lit?

MW: In mid-grade lit, there is this underlying theme of discovering the wider world around you. When you move into YA lit, you start exploring the idea of stepping out into that world and figuring out how you fit into it. That’s what makes YA lit so exciting to write (as far as I’m concerned) and what makes a good YA hero—because that kind of thinking takes real courage. And it can be the courage to stay where you are as much as the courage to leave.

CM: Why do you think YA lit focuses so much on unattainable heroes - on sexy vamps like Edward for example. Remy is much more realistic - is this just the beginning of the Harlequin romancing of American women (from Prince Charming to Edward to big brawny cover models?). Not that there's anything wrong with fantasy romance (I went quite happily through a huge Harlequin phase in my teen years) but why set teenage girls up for failure? Any thoughts on what it was like to create a believable teen boyfriend?

MW: Oh yeah, nothing whatever wrong with the larger-than-life hero. It's an important fantasy, and I think we need to trust that girls read those heroes as fantasy and don't go out into the real world expecting to find their very own Edward, anymore than we believe they'll read a book about a drug addict and go out and try heroin. Reading--particularly for teens--is a safe place to privately explore all kinds of feelings, emotions you wouldn't experience and might not necessarily want to experience in real life, and our extreme hero falls into that category.

But, you know, I'm all for giving the regular guy his chance. Ordinary nice guys deserve some love, too! The challenge with Remy was to not mythologize his ordinary goodness to the point where he became extreme and unattainable in his own way. In early drafts, I found I had become his apologist in his relationship with his girlfriend. I was so intent on making him this uber good guy, I didn't want to let him be bad at all, and that was far from believable.

CM: I'd be interested to know how easy or difficult it was to sell Funny to a publisher. It's not what is commonly considered conventional YA lit (no vamps, no shopping, no one battling depression/suicide/abuse, no female protagonist struggling to find her way in the small town/big city). What kind of interest was there for Remy's story?

MW: There were editors who were interested in Remy but could not get past the “no college” idea. And then the question was raised as to whether or not Remy’s story was one that needed to be told. Was it really a hero’s story?

It’s an attitude that—as a parent of a teenaged boy—I know exists, but it surprised me to hear it stated so plainly, that there is one preferred path and if you choose something else, you are somehow less. Frankly, it kind of flipped me out, the idea that YA lit has to be aspirational in these specific terms. What on earth would happen if everyone went to college and all came out in suits, holding briefcases, standing around wondering why their cars wouldn’t start and the roads and bridges were crumbling and nobody was growing any food for them to eat? And yet, the people who do those things that are the backbone of life in this country are considered not worthy of having their stories told. Well. I think I have a permanent hole burned into the top of my head where the steam was coming out.

Is Remy a hero, with his greasy coveralls and his trailer where the plumbing doesn’t work half the time? I think he is. He tries, he cares and he thinks, and isn’t that what we hope for any teen? Or any adult, for that matter.

CM: And of course - what are you working on now?

MW: A total 180: Austenesque girly fun with a supernatural twist.

[Post pics all courtesy ilovemountains.org Think Progress.]