Author Andrew Auseon Leans on His Imagination

Growing up in the suburbs of Ohio, Andrew Auseon developed his independent personality as the middle of three brothers.

“I was very imaginative,” recalls the 29-year-old author, who was raised in the town of Upper Arlington. “I was never a big person to play with other people. I’ve talked to a lot of other writers who were that way as well. It’s a little jarring to start a social life.”

Like any child, Auseon experienced his share of accidents. However, one such accident nearly cost him his life at the age of nine.

A riding lawn tractor that his dad was using came barreling down from the top of the hill in his backyard and rolled over Auseon while he was playing in a tent. By chance, Auseon just happened to put stakes in the ground even though he wasn’t really “camping out.” The stakes kept the tractor from completely “mauling him to death.”

“It’s one of those things that I can kind of hold over my dad’s head for the rest of his life,” says the Baltimore resident jokingly.

While he was off doing things in his “own little world” as a child, Auseon began developing a passion for writing, working first for his high school literary magazine.

“I actually took two years worth of English my final year of school because I think I was subconsciously building my skills,” he says. “I was messing around with storytelling in a lot of ways.”

When he went off to college, Auseon says he had a difficult time finding a good group of friends at Ohio University. However, once he did, he found himself surrounded by film majors who started casting him in their projects.

“It had so little to do with my skills as an actor,” he jokes. “I was terrible!”

While acting wasn’t his true calling, Auseon does talk proudly of one particular kissing scene with actress Piper Perabo, who happened to be a fellow student at Ohio.

“We had this scene where we had to kiss over and over again, and of course she has to go on to become this heartthrob,” he says laughing.

While in college, Auseon enjoyed a life-changing experience when he spent a semester traveling abroad with 400 other students.

“I think it opened to world to me,” he says of the experience.

His travels took him to a school for the deaf in Vietnam, remote villages in India and the streets of Jerusalem.

“It makes you realize the epic scope of everything that’s going on simultaneously as you’re going about your life,” he explains of his journey.

While living abroad in Taiwan, Auseon wrote what he calls “the ubiquitous great American novel” that a lot of people write.

“It’s something that I needed to get out of me,” he says of the 800-page body of work. “I don’t know if it’s ever worth revising. There are some gems, but making it work would definitely be a challenge. Who knows, maybe some day.”

When he returned to the U.S., Auseon was contemplating becoming a teacher when he decided to move to Washington D.C. with his girlfriend.

“That was the best decision that I ever made,” he says of following the woman (Sarah) whom he now calls his wife. “It was very impulsive and no one was really sure that it was ever going to work out, but I knew the whole time that I needed to be at the same place with this woman.”

Once he landed in D.C., Auseon’s career began to take off. He entered the Writing for Children and Young Adults MFA program at Vermont College, which Auseon refers to as the “Harvard of childrens’ books.” It’s a place where agents and editors roam looking for new talent.

“It was life changing because you end up being dropped into this community of amazing writers,” says Auseon. “You’re with people who are working every day as writers — people who are award winners. And people who have been doing this for 30 or 40 years and have seen all the trends come and go.”

During his final semester, Auseon was afforded the opportunity to work with one of the most sought-after faculty members at Vermont, award-winning author M.T. Anderson.

“He taught me the mechanics of writing,” Auseon says of his work with Anderson. “He knows his writing inside and out, the nuts and bolts to a science. What he taught me is that once you know that science inside and out, you can forget about it and write from the inside and then not worry about whether the writing is good.

“He also taught me confidence in my own style and my own sense of humor. I discovered that you don’t have to emulate anyone else or follow any of the trends.

“That was important because I’ve always liked to tell stories that I have in my head rather than trying to tell stories that have been told, but from a different perspective. I’ve always just had a way in which my world works and I like to go there to find my stories.”

Another early influence to Auseon was Ron Koertge, a well-known poet and novelist.

“He taught me both the joy and the pain of doing serious, serious revision,” Auseon says of Koertge. “One of the first things that he did with me was asked me to take 40 pages that I had written and cut it to 15. I had to figure out how those 15 were going to have everything that the 40 had. Once you do it, and you see how you can do it, you see how it improves the work.”

In the winter of 2001, Auseon wrote the first scene to a book for a graduate school reading.

“I wrote it from scratch because I wanted to read something that no one had ever heard before,” he says.

The scene centered on a main character who didn’t say anything, but saw the entire world going on without him as he was completely forgotten.

“As I wrote the scene, I just happened to mention that the main character was sitting on a phone book while he was at the table,” says Auseon. “I’m not really sure why that came about, but as I wrote the scenes, the main character kind of shrunk and shrunk because he was so overlooked and it became a size thing. So I decided to explore the connection between emotional growth and physical growth.”

Having what he calls a “guarding angel in the publishing world,” an editor just so happened to be in the room that night of the reading. That editor, Michael Stearns, would later offer to buy the book when Auseon completed the work late in 2003.

“He sent an email saying, ‘The revision was really kick-ass, I think I want to buy the book if that’s okay with you,’ ” remembers Auseon. “I wrote back and said, ‘I think it’s ok!’ ”

Auseon’s first novel, Funny Little Monkey, is a story about twin brothers, one of whom has a growth hormone deficiency that keeps him four-foot two-inches tall, which is all the more striking when considering his bullying brother stands six-foot one-inch. The novel details the relationship between the two brothers as they struggle to get along during their adolescence.

“I think that it’s probably the most autobiographical that I will ever get,” Auseon says of the novel. “A lot of the locations used were from my hometown, it’s set in a suburb in Ohio, and a couple of the actual scenes are taken directly from instances that happened to me.

“It was your typical first book. It was really rough. I rewrote it three or four times completely. It took me a long time to figure out what the story was and who the characters actually were.”

Auseon says that he still learning how to deal with both positive and negative criticism.

“You’re out there now and every other day is a good day or a bad day,” he says. “The main thing is you just have to make yourself happy.”

Just a few weeks ago, “Funny Little Monkey” was one of just six books nominated for Best Intermediate/Young Adult Book in the 2005 Borders Original Voices Awards. The honor is particularly satisfying to Auseon, who says that he enjoys writing for the younger generation.

“They are more willing to take risks and follow you wherever you want to go,” he says. “I like that. With young people, you have this great opportunity to always be trying something new. I think so many of my ideas stem from when I was a kid. A lot of my ideas are so off the wall and so dramatic and so strange, that I felt my ideas always came in a way that kids would like.”

Auseon says that it’s important for children and young adult authors to write in the moment.

“I think that a lot of authors struggle with trying to connect to an audience that is constantly changing at a rate that’s incredibly faster than any other demographic,” he says. “Some authors fall into the trap of trying to specifically address the use of the moment. I think that is troublesome, unless you’re writing a novel that’s supposed to capture an exact moment in time.

“I think that it’s always important to address the attitudes of young people, rather than the exact specifics of their daily lives now. It’s important to focus on the general things that we all go through as adolescents — the feelings, the fears, and the anxieties.”

The recent father of his first daughter also says that he is a strong advocate for getting childrens books into the hands of the people that need them most.

“High school teachers don’t assign these books because they have to do classics because of curriculum,” he says. “A lot of young people are missing great books that are written just for them to address the things that they are going through. David Copperfield, no matter how good it is, is not exactly what Frank in Wisconsin is going through with his parents at age 17.”

Auseon says that he enjoys interacting with his young fans when they contact him through his Web site.

“I think technology has been a great thing for authors, because young readers use the Internet so much for their own socializing,” he says. It’s great talking to kids that have read your book and they’re thrilled to hear from you, and you’re thrilled to hear from them. It starts a nice connection.”

As for the future, Auseon is currently working on two novels, one for Harcourt and the other for HarperCollins.

The Harcourt work is a realistic fiction novel set on a one-day long train ride from Washington D.C. and up into New England and Vermont. The mystery and suspense story follows a girl chasing down the man who stole her son.

“I’m pretty excited about it,” says Auseon. “It’s actually my graduate thesis and it’s one of those books that I started back before any of this publishing stuff happened. It’s requiring a lot of work, but I’m enjoying it too.”

Auseon is also working on a trilogy.

“It’s actually a hard one to describe, because even the people that approved it and are going to publish it don’t even know how to describe it,” he says of his work for HarperCollins. “I think that’s one of the reasons they’re excited about it.”

Probably best characterized as fantasy, it’s a love story set in Baltimore, but then continues into the afterlife when the main character is killed.

“I had decided to write this book about what it would be like to die and kind of take everyone’s expectations and beliefs into what happens when you die and sort of create my own version of that.”

Auseon says that he is hoping to finish both novels by the spring of 2007. In the meantime, he’s at peace having found his true calling in life.

“I think that I always wanted to do something where I was seen as somebody that had something to say,” he says, “even if I wasn’t quite sure what it was.

“I feel like a lot of people are trying to write to win awards and get in The New Yorker. I’ve done that and I’ve tried to write like that, but I just feel like it’s very uninspiring. I like to have fun when I write. If it’s going to be as much hard work as it is, you want to enjoy it.”

Be sure to visit the official website of Andrew Auseon – AndrewAuseon.com