Terri Libenson, JUST JAIME

[1:35]Zibby Owens: this is Zippy Owens and you're listening to the award winning podcast Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books. I'm also the host of Moms Don't Have Time to Lose Weight and I'm the editor of the anthology which you should run out and buy, called Moms Don't Have Time to: A Quarantine Anthology. All proceeds of that book go to COVID nineteen Vaccine Research. And I'm the editor in chief of Moms Don't Have Time to Write, a new publication on Medium, and we're accepting submissions, so please send your personal essays there. And if all that isn't enough, you can follow me on Instagram at Zibby Owens, and my website is zibbyowens.com. Okay. Now back to this amazing podcast. Listeners, if you enjoy this podcast, I promise you will love my new audiobook for moms don't have time to a quarantine anthology. It's not about the quarantine, but a lot of the essays were written during that time about other things that moms don't have time to do or other busy people, things like reading, eating, working out, breathing, having sex. And 60 bestselling and notable authors wrote essays. All those authors have been on this very podcast. So if you like to listen to my conversations, if you want to get to know these authors better, I read the audiobook myself. Check it out on Audible, Moms Don't Have Time To, a Quarantine Anthology. Again, Audible audiobook. Go listen to it. It's like sixty minute podcasts. I hope you enjoy. I'm really excited to present this episode with Terri Lebensen, the author of Just Jamie, because it's part of the Washington Post's Kids Post summer book club, which I already did one episode about and I'm really excited about that. And now this is the second in the series. And if you haven't checked out the Washington Post kids post in general, you definitely should. And especially you can still join their summer book club which is all about friendship and is a great way to get your kids reading and talking about friends. Teri is the best selling author also in addition to just Jamie of Invisible Emmy and Positively Izzy. She is the Rubin award winning cartoonist of the internationally syndicated comic strip, The Pajama Diaries, and was a longtime writer of humorous cards for American Greetings. She lives with her husband and two daughters in Cleveland, Ohio. Welcome, Teri. Thank you so much for coming on Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books to discuss Just Jamie. Thank you so much for having me. And I have to tell you, so this is part of the Washington Post Kids Post Summer Book Club. And when I read about the book club, I ripped it out of the paper right away and went running to my 14 year old daughter. And I was like, this is great. You have to do this. Which books do you want to read? What do you think? And she circled yours and one other. And I was like, great, maybe I can read the authors. So here we are. But it turned out, yes, she enjoyed it, but my younger kids also loved it. They're almost eight and six and a half and they loved it. So I don't know. It's a, it's a crowd pleaser around here. So thanks Oh, for that's great. Six and a half. What a precocious reader. Wow. Well, read, no, I read it out loud to them. He does. He actually is an amazing reader and has been reading for like two years. He's insane. But, you know, fourth kid, I don't know. That's so incredible. Yeah. That's so incredible. So would you mind telling listeners what Just Jamie is about and how you ended up writing not only this, but the whole Emmy and Friends series?

[4:52]Terri Libenson: Sure. Well, let me start with the Emmy and Friends series. It was an interesting way of going about it. I actually was a syndicated cartoonist for about fourteen years. Had to actually end it a bit earlier than expected because the books took over. But because I have that cartooning background, it was sort of a natural extension to write these books. It's almost like writing comics, but in long form. And it's just an easy way, not an easy way, but it's kind of a natural way for me to work with the images and text. So I tried my hand. Wait,

[5:31]Zibby Owens: so let's go back then even further. How did you start being a syndicated cartoonist? Oh, You're going way back. Going way back.

[5:39]Terri Libenson: Yeah. Oh, I've wanted to be a newspaper cartoonist since college. So we are going quite a bit back. But I've always loved cartooning. I used to do my own comics when I was a kid. I used to love reading them. We didn't have graphic novels like these, but we had comic anthologies, and like collections and comic books, Mad Magazine, all that stuff. That's what got me hooked. And so, yeah, I just made it my goal and a mere ten years of trying. And I got my big break back when my kids were really little. So I think that was about 2006 when it launched. It's called The Pajama Diaries. You can actually read it online from the beginning now. It's in reruns on Comics Kingdom. So if you go to Comics Kingdom, you can read my strip. And I love doing it. Absolutely love doing it. I wrote very autobiographically. So that seems to be my strength. And about, I don't know, maybe five or six years ago, while I was still doing the strip, I had some cartoonist friends start to do graphic novels and illustrated novels, those types of books. And I tried my hands at it and I got in right before the big boom, before they really exploded. So it was great. And I wrote Invisible Emmy. There it is. I got my stack of books. This is my first one, Invisible Emmy. And I wrote it very autobiographically as well, just like the comic strip, except I wrote from my viewpoint as a 12 or 13 year old instead of as an adult. And that seemed to be a really natural way for me to write because I, weirdly, I can still remember how I felt then. So it was great. And I just kind of wrote organically. I didn't have a story in mind, but as I wrote from this particular voice, so then me, the story formed and the plot thickens and everything kind of worked out. Then, yeah, now I'm working on the sixth one. It's been a ride. Yeah. And I love these books. They really they really took a while. Names of the other ones? I see your whole stack sitting there. Yeah. Well, some of them are actually advanced reader copies. Oh, tell me about those too. Yeah. Yeah. Well, Invisible Emmy is the first. I've got to see. I didn't put my stack in order, unfortunately. We've got Positively Izzy, which stars Emmy's best friend, Brianna, in front there and another made up girl named Izzy. And just Jamie, the one you were holding up. And this is my advanced copy. I don't know where I put my regular copy, but this is There you go. This is my third. Then two others. Oh my gosh. Got Becoming Brianna and Truly Tyler, which just came out in May. And I'm writing the sixth one now. And it's yeah, it's quite a ride. It's quite a ride. So what when you said it was autobiographical,

[8:36]Zibby Owens: particularly the first one, part,

[8:39]Terri Libenson: like, tell me what happened in your own life that inspired it? Oh, well, like I said, I just kind of wrote from the heart, just kind of wrote from my own voice and the story just kind of formed. I will say that an embarrassing incident happened to me in fifth grade that became sort of the turning point in the book. You know what? As I tell kids all the time, don't worry about anything embarrassing that happens to you because it could work out in your favor later on. That's exactly what happens.

[9:07]Zibby Owens: There's- It can become a graphic novel in thirty to twenty years. Exactly.

[9:12]Terri Libenson: Yeah. And now I have no shame. I'm willing to write about it. It works out. But yeah, there was a funny note incident. I don't want to give it away. Yeah, don't give it away. Yeah. Yeah. It definitely helped drive this whole story plot. So why did you not give up? Why did you keep going for ten years to try to achieve? You say it so flippantly, like, oh, it's just my goal. But, you know, that's a big deal to not give up and to keep trying. And why didn't you give up? I know perseverance is the key. I think it's because I just wanted it so badly. And luckily, I had heard that it just it takes a long it can take a very, very long time to break into that business. At the time, I think so newspaper syndicates are the ones who distribute cartoons to newspapers all over the country. And they kind of act like an agent as well as a distributor. And they only pick up at the time I was trying to get syndicated, they were only picking up maybe two or three comic strips at the most, especially now that newspapers are dwindling. It's even less. And so they said it's actually harder to break into than to break into Hollywood as an actor. So it could take a very, very long time. And it was just something I really wanted, but I didn't do it ten years in a row. I sort of did it on and off over the course of ten years. I was trying to develop ideas as I went along and I did it in steps. I actually got a weekly strip launched even before my daily strip. So it kind of nice baby steps along the way. And it actually taught me a lot too, as I went through it. So it was very helpful.

[10:48]Zibby Owens: So let's talk a little more about just Jamie. Sure. Where did this plot line come from? Obviously, this feeling of being a girl and having girls sort of gang up against you and the strains that get, you know, the tie I I'm viewing this as like, you know, a a line, like a tug of war line that's growing more and more taut and frayed over time between best friends. It so often happens when they get older and their loyalties seem to shift every day and it's also unpredictable. I feel like it's just super, super relatable. But anyway, how did you come to this? Thanks. Yeah, that was a great way of putting it. Definitely a tug of war of feelings and tensions.

[11:24]Terri Libenson: So this was taken directly from something that happened to my older daughter when she was in eighth grade. It's loosely based on her incident, but I thought, oh my gosh, what a relatable universal thing. So my daughter gave me permission to talk about this book. She's in college now, so it's fine. She's in college? Oh my gosh. You look so young. I thought you had like tiny kids. So how old are your kids? I have a 19 year old and a 21 year old. Oh my gosh. Yeah. The one in college is going to be a senior, which just astounds me. But yeah, it goes like that. I'm sure. Do you have kids yourself? I have four kids. Oh, okay. Okay. So you know how quickly. They're between 14 and six. So yeah, Doctor. We've got a while. It's got a while. But it does, it goes by in the blink of an eye. It really does just as they say.

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[14:35]Terri Libenson: So, yeah, my my older daughter, when she was in eighth grade, she was brutally excluded by her friend group. She was dumped through a group text message and they listed all the reasons why they didn't like her anymore. It was Girls are so mean. Horrible. Gosh. Was bad. It was bad. And to top it all off, that happened the night before we were going on a twenty hour car ride. You're driving from Cleveland where we live down to Florida to visit my mother. And so there's this enormous car ride with the four of us and my daughter who's just in emotional pain. And I have to say she was a trooper. She was a total trooper throughout that trip. She was trying to kind of put it behind her a little bit. And it worked out for her because her old friend group from elementary school kind of took her in after that happened. They thought it was awful what happened to her. Some of them are still her best friends today.

[15:42]Zibby Owens: The ones who wrote her in the group text? No, the ones who kind of

[15:48]Terri Libenson: No, she had a clean break with the other girls. Oh my gosh. I was like, no, don't let her go back to them. No, no, no, no, no. And you know what? It was funny because my husband and I throughout her whole up and down friendship with those original girls who dumped her, the whole time we were thinking things were just off. It just wasn't a good fit for her and these girls. So it did work out in the end. But it just goes to show how friendships can be strained and how friends can break up with other friends, just like boyfriends and girlfriends and etcetera, who can do that, couples. So yeah, brutal. And I kind of took that story and loosely based the book on it. But I also thought, like after getting some distance from it, I also thought, you know, because these books are usually from the perspective of two different girls, I wanted to get both sides of the story and just kind of show it through the eyes of the excluder and the one who is excluded. And so I thought that made it a little more interesting. And that's where you have the two best friends, Jamie and Maya, and all the tension surrounding them and all the peer pressure. Maya obviously is more affected by the peer pressure and Jamie, because she's the one who does the excluding. And Jamie is the one who is caught up in everything and is left out. And it just shows Jamie's strength throughout all of this. Yeah, yeah.

[17:24]Zibby Owens: It's a ride. It really is. You know, they should really prepare kids more and even parents to be on the lookout because, I mean, that is like as bad as it gets as a kid is when your friends turn on your who you thought were your friends, I'll turn on you. And, you know, and and as you sort of show here, not it doesn't mean all of them are bad people. Right? But the group collective decision to exclude someone else to bond the one the other the remaining people together, you know, it's like this game of survivor that that middle aged middle school girls play. And it's Mhmm. It's really devastating. I mean, I you know, you're like, I it's funny. I remember the feelings. I remember the feelings like I had them yesterday from being excluded as a kid. Like, it's heartbreaking, you know, and it depends where you go, you know, like, why were the girls at camp mean to me, but the girls at school were nice. And like, it doesn't matter. It's like scarring. So I don't know. I feel like I hope kids out there know that this happens to so many kids and you end up being growing up and being totally fine.

[18:28]Terri Libenson: Absolutely. That's actually one of the biggest reasons why I wrote the book. Just want kids to know, they're not alone. These things happen all the time, unfortunately. Well, not all the time, but enough. You never know. I mean, my other daughter was absolutely fine throughout middle school.

[18:46]Zibby Owens: You never know. And enjoyed.

[18:50]Terri Libenson: And my older daughter was actually fine too up until this moment in eighth grade. This was toward the end of eighth grade. She was almost in high school by then. And up until then, she was fine too. So it's yeah, it's universal, but it also doesn't have to be, like you said, it doesn't have to be the end of, you know, your social life by any means. I actually had the opportunity to sort of

[19:13]Zibby Owens: confront a childhood bully in my life who I had not had anything to do with in, like, almost, I don't know, almost forty years, honestly. Yeah. Less than that because I'm not that old. But 30 I can't even do the math. Between thirty five and forty years. And, you know, I was like, do you even remember how mean you were to me? Like, do you remember that? Because that really stuck with me, you know? And she was like, I I do remember. And, you know, I was going through a lot in my own life at the time, and I'm and I'm really sorry. I know. Was like, okay, well, at least I have that sort of closure on that moment. But you know, anyway, I'll just say when even when I read Just Jamie, it's like, oh, for sure.

[19:53]Terri Libenson: Anyway, Brings it all up. I'm so sorry. No, it's okay. It's okay. It's good to work through it. It's good to work. Yeah, working through it. Oh my gosh. I know, I know. And you know what? I've actually I know I excluded one of my friends in the past and didn't even realize it. I think I completely blocked it out. It was so subtle. And so I hate to say that it almost happened naturally because I think we're just kind of going our own ways anyway. But I was definitely the perpetrator in that. Writing just gave me. It kind of came back to me. And I it's amazing what you can block out. True. No. I was like

[20:36]Zibby Owens: I feel like I was also the one in another setting Mhmm. Swept away, like, who felt compelled to dump someone else. And that's also terrible. And I also feel terrible about that, I wonder. Anyway. Okay. We everybody apologies. I know. Blanket apologies.

[20:50]Terri Libenson: How long does each of these books take you to write and illustrate? Well, they're all they're all pretty different. Just Jamie actually fell out of me. I think it was so palpable even then. This was years after the incident happened. So I probably wrote the book within like a month and a half, two months with very minimal tweaking. But I've had other books just take forever. Actually, last one I did, and when I say take forever, they don't really take forever because I'm on a yearly schedule with them. They've got to be in within a few months. But Truly Tyler, which I wrote during the pandemic, it's my pandemic, but it was wrenched out of me. And I must have rewritten it three times and then tweaked it a fourth time. And by rewrite, mean rewrote entirely storyline, even characters change completely. Was pretty gut wrenching. But I have to say, I love how it came out. And even the art, which I didn't have as much time for as I normally do during these books because it was just taking forever. That came out great too. There's a book within a book in it because the two characters join up and make their own comic books. So I'm having like four different art styles in here because the two kids doing their own art styles within their comic book and then my regular two different types of chapters. Each of these books are what I call a hybrid. They're not really graphic novels per se. They're part illustrated novel and part graphic novel. Each of the characters are, they're kind of stylistically, their stories are told stylistically differently. So it's very confusing. Wow.

[22:34]Zibby Owens: Sounds like a big challenge. So what's your plan? Like what are your next goals that you know, you've had your eyes set on this prize for so long. Now what? You must have something else brewing in you. Oh, sure. Sure. Many things. Well, I'm writing the sixth one and there will be seventh book coming after that. So the series keeps

[22:56]Terri Libenson: going so far. We'll see after that. And I'm just enjoying them. As hard as they can be, some of these books, it's also completely fun and enjoyable. And I'm also trying my hand at some younger kids books. So we'll see where that goes. I'm trying this may or may not go anywhere. I'm also trying a historical fiction graphic novel, at least the writing aspect. I'm not sure about the art yet, but that's more of, you know, many years long undertaking. I don't want to rush it too much because it just requires so much research. So yeah, that's what's going on.

[23:32]Zibby Owens: Awesome. I love it. Okay, so what advice would you have to aspiring authors, especially and illustrators? And, you know, what would you say to all the kids out there reading your book and about friendships since that's like the whole theme of the summer book club for The Washington Post? Sure,

[23:49]Terri Libenson: sure. Well, like we talked about, definitely, I think these types of stories that I write about or friendship relationships, it's so universal. And I don't, I want kids to know that they're not alone in their feelings that that sometimes they might feel like that. But honestly, are a lot of things that happen to a lot of kids that are very similar. And these are not like grand detrimental things that happen to kids. More like every day, almost under the surface thing sometimes with these friendship power struggles and just feeling left out, things like that. Advice to writers and creators and artists and artists. I think the perseverance thing is huge. You really have to keep at it. Writing and illustrating takes a lot of practice. And I always say if you to write your own book or graphic novel, I always start out by just doing large brain dumps, just doing it, just writing and going back and fixing things later or editing or whatever. But I think just getting your story down on paper, first and foremost, is really important. And I think one of the biggest pieces of advice that I like to give is it's great to step away from it too. I think especially with writing, I find that if I step away from something that's not working, if I approach it again, even a day later or sometimes a week later, whatever you can do, I see it with fresh eyes and I see what mistakes are made. I see what I can fix and it helps so much. It really helps so much. I could see it's about to storm again behind me. Well, that's perfect. I got the whole thing in. Awesome.

[25:40]Zibby Owens: Well, Teri, thank you. Thanks so much. Thanks for entertaining all my kids and raising some really good, important issues that it's good to talk about even before they happen. And certainly after for people who feel like it's some sort of shameful secret like you and me maybe.

[25:56]Terri Libenson: No, I'm kidding.

[25:57]Zibby Owens: Anyway, well, you so much for coming on and I can't wait to read the rest of your books with my kids. Oh, thank you so much. I hope they enjoy them all. I hope you do too. Thank you. All right. Have a great day. Thank you so much. Okay. Bye bye. Bye. Thanks for listening to this episode of Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books. Don't forget to follow me on Instagram Zibby Owens and momsdonthavetimetoreadbooks. Also sign up for my newsletter at zibbyowens.com and sign up for my virtual book club and meet lots of authors on Zoom every other week. Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan at Texture Sound for the sound editing, and thank you to Morning Moon Productions for providing this fantastic intro and outro music.