B.A. alum Jeff Ayers, an English and creative writing teacher at Rogers High School in northwest Arkansas, recently published Skate the Thief, his first book in what will be a trilogy, The Rag and Bone Chronicles. We had the chance to visit with Jeff about his time as an English undergraduate, who/what all inspires his writing in the genre of Young Adult literature, his decision to focus on a young thief as the main character of his book, and his recommendation for YA texts that he feels have been effectively adapted to film.
Before getting your M.A.T. through the university’s College of Education, you completed your B.A. in English here in 2011. Do you remember a particular English course that you took that helped you decide (or further reinforced your decision) to be a high school teacher? Are there any particular pedagogical strategies you witnessed as an English undergraduate that you find yourself applying now in your own classes?
I remember being in Dr. Lyna Lee Montgomery’s “Grammar for Teachers” class and enjoying the work more than was socially acceptable to admit. I think at that point, I no longer had much of a choice in my profession. My biggest takeaway from my undergrad classes was that discussion was potentially the strongest weapon in a teacher’s arsenal, but that it relied on students’ having done the requisite readings. If you didn’t have your students on board for that, it wasn’t going to do you much good. I also learned the value of positive comments in reaction to student writing; a teacher told me one time that I wrote well in my analysis paper for a poetry class on Yeats and Eliot, and I still think about that.
You’ve been writing creatively since back in middle school. How has being a creative writer helped you as a student and also as a teacher? What 2-3 authors have been most inspirational to you or had the biggest impact on the development of your own writing style?
Despite hearing about it from teachers for two decades, I never internalized the importance of revision and multiple drafts until I started taking creative writing seriously. I’m still a terrible editor of my own work, but I’ve gotten better at it through creative writing. That insight has also helped me in the classroom, because I understand where the students probably are mentally and where they could be better now. My three biggest influences are probably J. K. Rowling (I know, cliché at this point, but it’s true), R. A. Salvatore, and George R. R. Martin. Stephen King gets an honorable mention.
Your first book, Skate the Thief, was published in June of last year. This book is the first installment in your series, The Rag and Bone Chronicles. So, you are a full-time high school teacher, a publishing author of Young Adult literature, a husband, and a father. Are your various other life experiences directly fueling your creative writing, do you use your writing to escape for a bit, or is it a little of both?
Writing is definitely an escape at this point. My daily life experiences right now are a cycle of waking up too early, working through a pandemic, taking care of the house and the kids, and getting no sleep. Memory of times past and imagination are all I’ve got for fuel when it comes to getting anything on the page, for now, sadly.
Your main character, Skate, is a young thief who is torn between her obligations to a crime syndicate for which she works and her affection for a powerful wizard who befriends her. How did you decide on this character to be the protagonist of your book?
I knew I wanted to focus on a thief and a wizard. After that, it became a matter of setting up a conflict. I remember having Faulkner’s adage about the human heart in conflict with itself rattling around in my head at the time, so I knew the most important conflict was going to be about the choices my main character was going to have to make. Skate didn’t take definite shape until that conflict did.
A lot of our current undergraduate and graduate students in the department are interested in adaptation studies since one of our faculty members, Professor Lissette Lopez Szwydky-Davis, teaches a number of courses on that topic. Since YA literature is being adapted to film all the time, I was wondering if you could recommend a YA book that you’ve enjoyed reading but which also, in your opinion, has been effectively adapted to film.
I think the biggest success story would have to be the Harry Potter films, right? Not perfect adaptations, but really solid and obviously very popular. I think the best movie adaption I’ve ever seen, though, has got to be Hayao Miyazaki’s take on Diana Wynne Jones’s Howl’s Moving Castle. I don’t mean that it’s the best shot-for-sentence transition of the exact story she wrote — it’s not that — but it’s definitely the best film adaptation I’ve ever seen of any YA work. I recommend both the book and the movie for two different but very memorable experiences. They both stick with you after you walk away.
Moving Castle, Recommended by Jeff Ayers