On Winning the Newbery

some reflections on the medal, years later

Oh, hey, hello! It’s been a while. I hope you’re doing well, or as well as can be expected. I hope you’re taking care of yourself and finding joy.

I’m back to writing these again, so .. hi. Thanks for having me. ❤️

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On to my Newbery experience, thus far, in the form of a list—

Four years ago, days before I heard from the Newbery committee, I was listening to Norwegian pop and cleaning my apartment.

The Norwegian pop was because I had, in a brief fit of Duolingo madness, decided I was going to learn Norwegian (I did not learn Norwegian but I can sing the chorus to Sangen Du Hater.)

The cleaning was because I’d gotten an email from my publisher, and I needed a distraction. They told me, on Friday, that I’d won the Asian Pacific Award for When You Trap a Tiger, and the committee wanted to have a call with me on Sunday.

I wondered, How am I going to thank the committee? And also, What if they change their minds? And softly, beneath all that, a question I wouldn’t let myself think: Could this unexpected Sunday evening call be something…else?

I quieted those thoughts by scrubbing every surface of my apartment.

The inside of my brain smelled like Pinesol. When my husband asked if I was alright, I responded, Jeg vet ikke.

It was a weird time.

After the eventual call (which was—surprise!—actually with the Newbery committee), after an entirely sleepless night, after the announcements the next morning, Linda Sue Park, previous winner and personal hero, messaged me and said, Your life is about to change.

I remember thinking, Yay! And then, But change how?!

* * *

Now, this coming Monday, a new group of authors will get the infamous Newbery Call, and their lives will change, and the how will be different for everyone.

I’ve talked a lot about The Call¹, but I haven’t talked much about what came after. So here’s some snapshots. My life changed. Here’s how—

1. I spent a week taking back-to-back meetings with movie producers. Nothing ever came of that, but I felt pretty cool for a few days.

2. Kids started sending me emails and letters, which was better than hearing from Hollywood. They told me how they felt about my book. They told me about their own lives. They wrote stories and drew pictures.

3. I began to realize I could write for kids as a sustainable career, which is a luxury and a rarity—and that made winning the newbery the luckiest thing that had ever happened to me.

4. I did about a million zoom events (this was 2021), which was wonderful and amazing and also surreal. I would connect with so many educators and readers through my screen, and then I would shut my computer and be back in my covid bubble. It felt like the world through my screen was great and the world in real life was bad. Which was weird. The disconnect was not great for my mental health.

5. Going from zero to sixty in terms of attention made me nervous. I pulled back on social media and certainly here, in email letters. That summer, I wrote in a newsletter:

I've drafted three separate letters over the past few months², about the Asian American hate crimes, about covid, about life post-newbery.

But I haven't sent any of them.

I have felt raw and exposed, and while I am so incredibly beyond grateful for the way my career has changed in the past few months, I've never been entirely comfortable with attention. I often feel like a laundry list of flaws, and I'm convinced that if anyone looks hard enough they will see all of them.

I feel that way less now. Maybe because I think we’re all a laundry list of flaws, and that’s kind of beautiful. But I’ve always been a perfectionist, and the award and attention kicked those tendencies into overdrive.

6. I asked myself questions like, What did I do to deserve this luck? and then stressed about the answer, and then felt guilty about stressing, because people who get this lucky are not supposed to stress.

7. Rebecca Stead told me that the Newbery medal gets better and better the further away you get from it, and I did not know what she meant but I held her words to my heart because she is wise.

8. After finishing Jennifer Chan is Not Alone and Mihi Ever After, I ran into the perfectionism wall in my writing, too. I asked myself questions like, Is this Newbery level writing? as if that meant anything (it did not).

9. I stopped writing much.

10. People got vaccinated and some of the covid dread lightened and I thought that would fix everything but I still could not write.

11. Instead, I started taking life drawing classes. For many, many months, I learned to draw and I was bad at it and that did not matter. There, in that dimly lit room, with a few pencils and a stack of newsprint, surrounded by people who were willing to be vulnerable, I climbed my way back to creating. I learned to love making things again. I stopped caring if it was good enough. (Therapy helped too, ha.)

12. My friends’ eight-year-old became fascinated by solar panels, and so I became fascinated too, and all of a sudden I was writing a picture book about the sun. Awards and reviews and sales did not matter. I was writing for him, and for me.

13. When I was done with that book, I found I had more stories to tell. I started writing another middle school novel, about a book of prophecies and the memory of trees and three messy, passionate kids. It was a book that asked how do we live in a world on fire, and I took my time with it. I could take my time with it because the newbery bought me time.

(13a. You’ll be hearing more about this book in future letters.)

14. In asking how we live in a world on fire, I started engaging more with that world on fire. I learned more history about the place I lived. I started volunteering on weekends. I paid attention.

15. I reconnected with the writing community, too. I went to more events. I met other authors. I started teaching. I did more school visits and started using half my speaking fee to donate diverse books to Title 1 schools in the area, and I came back to my old question, what did I do to deserve this luck.

I hadn’t been wrong to ask it, but I’d been asking it wrong. The question wasn’t what I did to deserve it, but what I was going to do with it. Rebecca Stead was right; the Newbery does get better the further away you get from it, because I realized—

16. Getting to write for kids as a sustainable career wasn’t actually the best part of winning the newbery. It’s an incredible part, and I’m so grateful for it, but the best part is that it put me in a position to give back. I can celebrate and support my personal and professional communities. I can write in a way that shows up for kids and prioritizes them. I can give my time, money, energy, advice. Luck—a newbery, sure, but all luck, the luck of being alive—is better when you share it.

Really, everything’s better when you share it, success, joy, struggles, celebration.

I’m looking forward to celebrating books and writers and readers on Monday.

What a gift, all of it.

With care,

Tae

1. Reading this interview back, I can tell how breathless and sleepless I was. I was embarrassed about that at the time, but now I find it sweet.

2. This is why I’ve called this substack The Drafts Folder. Because at some point, it’s better to just send them. Better to set aside perfection in favor of connection.