Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Leaving Kent State
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1956?
WEBSITE: http://www.sabrinafedel.com/
CITY: Pittsburgh
STATE: PA
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
Married with three kids
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born c. 1956; married; children: three.
EDUCATION:Lesley University, M.F.A.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, novelist, and attorney. Works as a freelance writer and novelist; previously the CERCLA (superfund) attorney for the Judge Advocate General of the United States Army.
AWARDS:Work-in-Progess (WIP) Grant Merit Letter, Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators, 2014; Pushcart Prize nominee, 2017, for short story titled “Honor’s Justice.”
WRITINGS
Contributes articles to periodicals. Contributes fiction and poetry to online and print journals.
SIDELIGHTS
Sabrina Fedel writes essays, poetry, and fiction. She formerly worked as an attorney and is the author of articles on legal issues as well. Fedel especially loves to write stories for children and teenagers. In her debut young adult (YA) novel, Leaving Kent State, Fedel tells the story of a seventeen-year-old student who was at Kent State University when the infamous May 4, 1970, incident occurred in which National Guardsmen opened fire on students protesting the Vietnam War, killing four and wounding nine. The killing of unarmed protestors was considered one of the major turning points in the nation’s view of the war. “The idea for Leaving Kent State came to me while watching television … and ironing,” Fedel noted in an interview for the YA Guy website, adding: “There was a documentary-style program … about the shooting, and it struck me that it was really a story about young people clashing against their world order. I knew I wanted to write about it.”
To accurately reflect the times and experiences of both the national scene and Kent State during that time, Fedel conducted extensive research, beginning with reading nonfiction accounts of the shootings. Fedel also visited Kent State, where she became familiar with the campus and the surrounding town. While there, she delved into university archives and attended the annual memorial commemoration held on campus each year on May 4. “One of the neatest things, to me, is that KSU has an online oral history project about that day,” Fedel noted in her interview for the YA Guy website, adding that people who were there that day are free to participate. She noted in the interview: “I found these stories really fascinating and got a lot of contextual information that I wouldn’t have otherwise been able to experience.”
The story in Leaving Kent State is told from the viewpoint of seventeen-year-old Rachel Morelli, who lives in Kent, Ohio. Rachel has had a longtime crush on her neighbor, Evan Olesson, who has just returned from serving in Vietnam, where he lost most of the fingers on his left hand. Evan has not only lost his fingers but also sees his future dream of studying music as being impossible. While Rachel longs for Evan, he sees his neighbor as a friend only. Meanwhile, Rachel is ready for college, but instead of the local university she is trying to convince her father to allow her to go Pratt University in New York to study art. Her father, who is a professor at Kent State University (KSU), is vehemently opposed to the plan and wants his daughter to attend KSU.
Rachel’s dilemma is contrasted with the growing unease in the country concerning the Vietnam War. Protests are become more and more abundant. Meanwhile, the draft lottery for military service forces many of Rachel’s peers into the service as the body count in the war rises. Rachel herself has also become more sensitized to the country’s turmoils as she witnesses the effects of the war on Evan. She comes to realize that she really did not understand the letters he wrote to her while in Vietnam, missing the clues that the war was having a terrible effect on him and all the soldiers involved in it. Meanwhile, the nation’s unrest is depicted in detail as everything comes to a head on May 4 on the KSU campus. Both Rachel and Evan are at the college during the shootings and find themselves caught up in the day’s events.
“The strongest aspect of the book is how its characters use art as a form of resistance–Evan as a musician and Rachel as a visual artist,” wrote a Kirkus Reviews contributor. Amanda MacGregor, writing for the Teen Library Toolbox website, remarked: “This look at the effects of war, at a soldier returning from war, and at a weary nation is engrossing and well done. Rachel is a thoughtful narrator who grows a lot over the course of the story.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, July 1, 2017, review of Leaving Kent State.
ONLINE
Sabrina Fedel Website, http://www.sabrinafedel.com (May 20, 2018).
Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators Website, https://www.scbwi.org/ (May 20, 2018), author profile.
Teen Libarian Toolbox, http://www.teenlibrariantoolbox.com/ (March 1, 2017), Amanda MacGregor, review of Leaving Kent State.
YA Guy, https://theyablogspot.com/ (May 4, 2017), “YA Guy Interviews… Sabrina Fedel, Author of Leaving Kent State!”
About Sabrina
Hello! Thanks for stopping by to learn about me. Here are a few things that explain a lot about me:
1. As a kid, I was painfully shy. The kind of shy that makes people think you are stuck up because you never talk to anyone unless you are forced to talk to them. Thankfully, I went to a small school, so I had the normal amount of friends growing up. But I didn’t live near my school, so I didn’t see my friends very much. I spent a lot of time around adults as a kid and usually felt more comfortable with them than with kids my age. I’m still terrible at mingling.
2. I grew up in a house with lots of books. I mean LOTS. Like thousands. My dad was a readaholic and an academician whose field was Anglo-Irish literature (meaning not Gaelic literature). I grew up thinking it was normal for grown-ups to have dinner parties where people quoted Yeats and Shakespeare and Joyce while discussing world events and politics. I had no idea my childhood was weird. But I’m very grateful that it was.
3. I have written professional articles on legal issues, copy, essays, and poetry, but my favorite thing to write is stories. I especially love writing for kids and teens. I think because they are such a tough audience to please, it makes it all the more special when you write something they like. In January of 2014, I earned a Masters of Fine Arts degree in Creative Writing, with a concentration in Writing for Young People, from Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
4. I’m also an attorney. I used to be the CERCLA (superfund) attorney for the Judge Advocate General of the United States Army, where I negotiated clean ups of toxic waste sites with state and other federal agencies, reviewed environmental documentation, and advised my Army clients on environmental law issues. My favorite part of this job was being the back up attorney for Endangered Species Act issues because I love animals. If I weren’t a writer, I would want to be an attorney who protected endangered species. Or a wildlife vet. A wildlife vet is an insanely cool job. I would want to help marine mammals like sea lions and otters or I would want to help big cats like cheetahs and tigers.
5. I live in Pittsburgh with my husband, three kids, four cats, and one very confused dog. My house is always a mess because there are eight of them and one of me. I make pretty good cinnamon rolls and awesome chocolate chip cookies. When I’m not writing, I can usually be found at an ice rink watching a hockey game or practice for one of my kids. I have a love-hate relationship with hockey. Also with the United States Marine Corps. And with my son’s dog.
6. I was born with bilateral clubfoot (meaning both feet) and had to wear a special brace when I was a baby. And a lot of really ugly “corrective” shoes as a kid. My favorite shoes to wear now are Salomon trail runners. But I rarely run in them. I am often drag-jogged by the dog, though.
7. I eat ketchup on my mashed potatoes. I have a chocolate problem.
8. When I was a kid, I wanted to be a Blue Angel. I also wanted to be a veterinarian and an architect.
9. I have dyscalculia (a math learning disability). I’ve never been formally diagnosed, but it’s ridiculously obvious. I am terrible at anything that requires reverse thinking (like time planning, sewing, or carpentry).
10. I often wish I were the girl in a Hallmark movie. And that Scooby-doo was my dog.
If you still want to know more about me, you can follow me on Twitter
where you’ll see that I care about animals, human rights, women’s rights, education, art, and a whole lot of other bleeding heart kinds of things. You can also find me on other places like facebook, instagram, and pinterest. If you’d like to contact me, please visit my Media Kit page.
Thanks for visiting!
Sabrina Fedel’s fiction and poetry has appeared in online and print journals. In addition to winning LitPick 5-Star Review Award for her debut novel Leaving Kent State, she is a 2017 Pushcart Prize nominee, as well as a 2016 nominee for a storySouth Million Writers Award and a Sundress Publications Best of the Net ’16 Award. Sabrina holds her MFA in Creative Writing, with a concentration in Writing for Young People, from Lesley University in Cambridge. You can often find her on twitter @writeawhile, or follow her blog at www.sabrinafedel.com, and she loves pictures so Instagram is a favorite hangout. She writes from Pittsburgh, where she lives in a small house with lots of people and animals, some of whom think she’s funny.
My debut YA novel, Leaving Kent State, released on November 11, 2016, from Harvard Square Editions. My YA short story, Honor’s Justice, was nominated for a 2017 Pushcart Prize. a 2016 storySouth Million Writers Award, and a Sundress Publications Best of the Net 16′ Award by Antioch University Los Angeles’ journal, Lunch Ticket. My poetry and essays have appeared in various print and online journals. I hold an MFA in creative writing with a concentration in Writing for Young People from Lesley University, and am the recipient of a 2014 SCBWI WIP Grant Merit Letter. I teach English Literature at Robert Morris University.
ARTIST STATEMENT
I like stories with quirky characters and moments of lighthearted humor, but I think every good story should also pull the reader in to think deeply about a subject or the ways people interact. I want a story to keep me thinking about it long after I’ve closed the cover.
Thursday, May 4, 2017
YA Guy Interviews... Sabrina Fedel, author of LEAVING KENT STATE!
It's a little known fact that one of YA Guy's first novels was written when I was a college student back in the 80s. The tale of a college campus that's taken over by a revolutionary cabal, it was going nowhere until I decided to do some research into an actual college campus that was subjected to military rule. My research naturally led me to the shootings that took place on the Kent State University campus on May 4, 1970, forty-seven years ago today.
In my book, the historical research formed only the lightest thread in an otherwise boisterously absurd comic novel. But I've been fascinated by the history of Kent State ever since. And that's why I was so excited to discover Sabrina Fedel's debut LEAVING KENT STATE, a YA historical novel set in Kent, Ohio in the days before and during the on-campus massacre. I've reviewed this amazing novel here, and I was fortunate enough to have Sabrina visit the blog to talk about her book, her research, and her current works-in-progress.
YA Guy: Hi, Sabrina, and welcome to the blog! As someone who's intrigued by the history of the Vietnam War and the anti-war movement, I was wondering how you came up with the idea for LEAVING KENT STATE?
SF: The idea for LEAVING KENT STATE came to me while watching television (we can’t always be reading!) and ironing. There was a documentary-style program on about the shooting, and it struck me that it was really a story about young people clashing against their world order. I knew I wanted to write about it. I researched and found that there were almost no books that even mentioned the incident, and no YA stories. Because many YA editors don’t want to see a protagonist over 18, I made my protagonist a high school senior. It wasn’t difficult for me to imagine the rest of Rachel's story, as I was a girl who had to go to the university where my dad taught, even though I didn’t want to, just like her.
YAG: What was your research process for this novel? Did you uncover any unusual or out-of-the-way sources? What was the most interesting or surprising thing you discovered?
SF: To research this story, I started with non-fiction books about the shootings. When I felt like I had a beginning, I made trips to Kent. I studied maps and drove around looking for the neighborhood (and house!) that Rachel would have lived in. I saw where she went to school, where the Twin Lakes were, Main Street, and the campus of KSU. I dove into the archives there, reading the local paper for every day between October 1969, when my story starts, until the end of May, 1970. Every year on May 4th, KSU hosts a memorial commemoration, and I attended a number of those where I spoke to people who worked in the archives or who had been there that day. I went to the local historical society and talked with people there, as well.
One of the neatest things, to me, is that KSU has an online oral history project about that day. Anyone who wanted to come forward and describe what happened to them that day could participate. I found these stories really fascinating and got a lot of contextual information that I wouldn’t have otherwise been able to experience. I also went online to research speeches by President Nixon, and I read autobiographies and nonfiction books about Vietnam. Finally, I interviewed a Vietnam veteran who very generously helped me understand what it was like for him during his service and then coming home.
The thing that surprised me the most was that many people felt that the students deserved what happened to them. The vitriol against the students, even sometimes by their own parents, was horrific. One woman told me that her father was among those who said that the Guard should have shot them all. When she pointed out that she would have been killed if they had, her father told her it was what she deserved. That was really shocking to me. Another thing that surprised me was that during law school, I had lived VERY near to the grave of shooting victim Allison Krause. I learned that from the Vietnam veteran whom I interviewed, who had been a history teacher and had studied the shootings. When he took me to her grave, I thought it was very ironic that I had lived practically across the street from her little Jewish cemetery for a year and never knew it was even there.
YAG: That's an impressive amount of research, and it really shows in your book. At the same time, one of the things I love about LEAVING KENT STATE is that you never let the historical detail overwhelm the story. How did you make sure that didn't happen?
SF: Thanks! I tried to make sure that every detail had a purpose to the story so that it would feel organic. There were things Rachel had to explain, and sometimes I relied on the fact that her family was a bunch of avid newspaper readers to make that happen, or other times I would have it happen in conversations. I tried to keep to a minimum the times that Rachel explained things to the reader. I also tried to pick details that were special to that era, that spoke of it. I did a LOT of research into guitar and car models, the Billboard top forty lists, and double-checked when things that I believed were iconic to the 1970s happened. Sometimes I was surprised to find that things I associated with the period were actually popular later (like the cartoon character Ziggy, who didn’t materialize until after my story ended).
YAG: You mentioned earlier that when you first formulated the idea for LEAVING KENT STATE, you had to develop a high school-age protagonist so it would fit into the YA genre. What do you like most about writing for young people?
SF: I love writing for young people because teens who are readers want to know about other people and cultures. They are eagerly looking to find out both what separates them from others and what is similar. They want to know what it would be like “if.” I’m always fascinated by the way people live and the choices they make, so I think in that way I am a perpetual teen. I want to know the "why" behind things, and so do teenagers.
YAG: Based on that description, I think YA Guy's a perpetual teen, too! So what's the next project you're working on?
SF: I recently completed a contemporary realism novel about a hockey playing girl who loses her mother and runs away to Venice. It’s all about grieving and the meaning of family. I am shopping that now while I work on my next project, which is also a contemporary realism novel that is kind of The Breakfast Club at a psychiatric hospital. This one is in verse, so we’ll see. I haven’t written in verse before. But so far, I am happy with it.
YAG: I can't wait to read those books when they come out. Thanks again for visiting, and best of luck with your new projects!
SF: Thanks so much for having me visit!
Readers, if you want to learn more about Sabrina and her books, here's where to go!
About the author: Sabrina Fedel’s novel, Leaving Kent State, released in 2016 from Harvard Square Editions. Her young adult short story, "Honor’s Justice," has been nominated for a 2017 Pushcart Prize, a 2016 storySouth Million Writers Award, and a Sundress Publications Best of the Net '16 award. Sabrina teaches English Literature at Robert Morris University as an adjunct faculty member, and is a 2014 graduate of Lesley University's MFA in Creative Writing program, with a concentration in Writing for Young People. Her poetry and essays have been published in various print and online journals. You can find out more about Sabrina at www.sabrinafedel.com, or follow her on twitter @writeawhile. She also can be found hanging out on Instagram, Facebook, and occasionally tumblr.
Fedel, Sabrina: LEAVING KENT STATE
Kirkus Reviews.
(July 1, 2017): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Fedel, Sabrina LEAVING KENT STATE Harvard Square Editions (Indie Fiction) $22.93 11, 11 ISBN: 978-1-941861-24-0
The Vietnam War comes home as rising political tensions culminate in the 1970 Kent State University shootings in this debut historical novel. Seventeen-year-old Rachel Morelli is thrilled when her neighbor and longtime crush, Evan Olesson, returns to Kent, Ohio, from his service in Vietnam. She's surprised to find that he's lost nearly all the fingers on his left hand and that his dreams of studying music have disappeared. In a classic will-they-or-won't-they love story, Rachel pines for Evan, but he seems to view her as a little sister. Fedel balances this romance with an exploration of Rachel's artistic ambitions and her dream of attending Pratt Institute in New York City rather than local Kent State University. Behind the characters' ambitions, the novel pulses with cultural details of 1969 and '70: Rachel consumes Nestle Quik and watches Walter Cronkite on the news, and she struggles with what it means that women can wear jeans and that her older sister can be accepted into law school. The changing social mores create a colorful backdrop as Rachel and her peers begin to question everything they know. It all comes to a head with Evan's return to Kent, as characters grapple with the Vietnam War. Fedel shows the steps of radicalization and--through Evan's experience--how ordinary people can commit acts of violence. As the story moves ever closer to the infamous Kent State tragedy, during which Ohio National Guardsmen killed four students, the historical and political tensions grow. But the history remains grounded and never expository as Rachel tries to figure out how she feels about events as they happen. The strongest aspect of the book is how its characters use art as a form of resistance--Evan as a musician and Rachel as a visual artist; at one point, Evan explains that art is "fighting back in your own way, and when people see your art and they realize its truth, that's a protest." A love story that engagingly merges themes of art and anger.
1 of 2 4/16/18, 10:57 PM
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Fedel, Sabrina: LEAVING KENT STATE." Kirkus Reviews, 1 July 2017. Book Review Index
Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A497199544/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=2b8e0ec5. Accessed 16 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A497199544
2 of 2 4/16/18, 10:57 PM
Book Review: Leaving Kent State by Sabrina Fedel
March 1, 2017 by Amanda MacGregor Leave a Comment
Publisher’s description
leaving kentOn May 4, 1970, the campus of Kent State University became the final turning point in Americans’ tolerance for the Vietnam War, as National Guardsmen opened fire on unarmed student protesters, killing four and wounding nine. It was one of the first true school shootings in our nation’s history. A new young adult novel, Leaving Kent State (Harvard Square Editions), by debut author Sabrina Fedel, brings to life America’s political and social turmoil as it ushered in the new decade of the 1970s. Throughout the harsh winter of 1969-1970, Kent, Ohio, became a microcosm of the growing unrest that threatened the very nature of democracy.
Told from the viewpoint of seventeen-year-old Rachel Morelli, Leaving Kent State explores themes of the day that are strikingly similar to our own: terrorism, war, racial injustice, and gender inequality. As Rachel struggles to convince her dad that she should go to Pratt University in New York to pursue her dream of becoming an artist, Kent slips ever further off of its axis, in step with the growing discord across the nation. Caught between her love for her next door neighbor, Evan, a boy who has just returned from Vietnam, and her desire to escape Kent, Rachel must navigate a changing world to pursue her dreams.
“While our nation has largely forgotten what happened on May 4, 1970,” says the author, “it was a defining moment for the way in which Americans consider involvement in war. While popular sentiment initially blamed the students for the massacre, it became clear in the years immediately following that something had gone terribly wrong in our democracy for American troops to have opened fire on unarmed college students. In our own protest laden present, the shootings at Kent State remain a valuable lesson in the escalation of force during peaceful citizen protests.”
Amanda’s thoughts
I can’t think of another YA novel about the Kent State shootings. Can you? For me, as someone born in the 1970s, I grew up always knowing about this massacre—having it come up multiple times during college, especially, from professors who were college students at the time of the shootings and the Vietnam War. But do today’s teenagers know about Kent State? I’m not so sure. Should they? YES.
I am a broken record in my reviews lately. I keep saying how all of these books that deal with any sort of social justice issue are both timely and timeless; they speak to what is happening now, but also to what’s always been happening, and to what feels like it will continue to happen. To read about the Vietnam war, the protests, the organizing, the response from the administration and others in power, and the questioning of motives during this volatile time all feels very current. Yes, it’s the Vietnam War. Yes, it’s 1969/1970 in the story. Yes, there’s talk of 8-tracks and bell bottoms and other things that make it clear that we’re reading historical fiction, but the subject matter is still relevant. War and protest will always be relevant.
The summary up there does a pretty thorough job of telling you the plot. Rachel has been keeping in touch with her neighbor, Evan, his whole time serving in Vietnam. When he returns after 23 months, injured, she realizes that he’s changed—of course he has. He’s horrified and haunted by what he saw and did in Vietnam. He has PTSD. Looking back at his letters to her, Rachel begins to understand how much she misunderstood what he was writing her. He wasn’t fine there. He wasn’t okay. Now home, he still hangs around Rachel’s house all the time, but his dreams of music school seem impossible (he lost part of his left hand). Rachel, who’s been in love with Evan for years, tries to understand how he feels. At first Evan seems to only reveal his pain to Rachel’s dad, a WWII vet, but eventually he slowly begins to share more with Rachel about what happened over there. They grow closer than ever, but Rachel continues to wonder if he’ll ever feel for her what she feels for him, or if she’ll always be like a sister to him.
Meanwhile, she’s applying to Pratt knowing her dad absolutely does not want her to go. He’s a professor at Kent State and wants her to stay home and go there. And in town–and all around the country–there is growing dissent about the war, manifesting in rallies and peace vigils and sometimes riots. Rachel’s peers are getting drafted via the lottery. Their siblings and cousins and friends are being killed in the war. The unrest reaches a boiling point on May 4, when the National Guard opens fire on unarmed protesters. Rachel and Evan are both at the college when this happens and end up right in the thick of the horrific action.
This look at the effects of war, at a soldier returning from war, and at a weary nation is engrossing and well done. Rachel is a thoughtful narrator who grows a lot over the course of the story. The portrayal of Evan as a returned solider coping with PTSD (though it’s never called that—I suppose at the time it would’ve been called shell shock or a stress reaction) and readjusting what his life’s plan is is nuanced and compassionate. This story of an important and shocking moment in United States history is a solid addition to libraries and has a wide appeal.
Review copy courtesy of the author
ISBN-13: 9781941861240
Publisher: Harvard Square Editions
Publication date: 11/11/2016