The Edina High School book club and creative writing classes celebrated an interesting birthday party on Tuesday, March 15. It was the birthday party of the book Exit, Pursued by a Bear by Emily Kate Johnston, otherwise known as E.K. Johnston, a Canadian award-winning author. “Heartbreaking and empowering, Exit, Pursued by a Bear is the story of transcendent friendship in the face of trauma,” reads the Goodreads synopsis. At this party, the EHS students were able to meet Johnston along with her publisher Andrew Karre, the executive editor of Dutton Books for Young Readers.  

Even before Johnston became an author, she had always been a storyteller. As a child, she would frequently dress up in her backyard to role play Star Wars in the Ewok village she had created and later, would write fanfiction, but Johnston didn’t actually write down her ideas until she participated in NanoWrimo, National Novel Writing Month, in 2009. “The Story of Owen: Dragon Slayer of Trondheim,” Johnston’s first book, was actually of product of her third NanoWrimo which she submitted to Karre in May of 2012, beginning the endless cycle of writing, editing, publishing, and book touring (sometimes all at the same time) that was to come.

Karre on the other hand, has never been interested in writing but rather the art of publishing. After studying English literature in college, Karre interned over the summer for the home arts department of a publishing company, dealing mostly with window dressing, cooking, and decorating. “I did not care a wit for the content, but with regards to making the books, I could have done it all day. That process of taking a mess, slides of photos and computer files of the text, and turning it into a book was enthralling,” said Karre. Later in his career, Karre realized a specific area of writing that especially intrigued him: adolescence. “Adolescence is an obsession of mine. It is mysterious, never boring, and endlessly fascinating. There are lots of ways to be teenage, but it is a distinct thing from being a child or from being an adult. And for the record, I think it is totally there in The Story of Owen,” said Karre.

For many, books, physically, may seem relatively ordinary, a story printed on a couple hundred pages bound together, but the creative process of building a world from words that readers are actually willing to pay for is anything but ordinary, especially in the case of Johnston and Karre. For example, in the case of Johnston, “My brother has a cottage that is in the middle of nowhere at the bottom of a bluff which means that it doesn’t get cell signal at all. I go up there when I’m on a deadline, and I need to get a lot of words done in a hurry. So usually about once a day, I drive up to the top of the hill, text frantically to let everyone know I’m still alive, and then I go back down,” said Johnston.

As for Karre, “I only have nine books to publish in any given year, so I look for a manuscript that surprises me like ‘I don’t know what’s going on here, but I can’t turn away,’ which is what I felt with The Story of Owen. I’m looking for leaning into my confusion. So let’s say it reaches that level. That’s halfway for me. Then I typically, if possible, I try to call the author. A book doesn’t come in fully formed, so I try to identify the highest point of achievement and articulate my vision of getting everything in the book up to that level of pure aestheticism. I’m also listening very closely to the author’s reactions to those things because the author can’t be trusted in that moment. Because it’s exciting, the authors will agree to anything, even a bad editorial match. Sometimes, when I’m on the fence, I allow myself to make the phone call, and the author just blows me away, so because they are such a fascinating person, I just want to have a front-row seat to this person’s creative process. Overall, I never really know a manuscript will be a great book, other than I know I am making myself happy,” said Karre.