Braveheart

Author Brent Hartinger doesn't patronize young adult readers or pretend that adolescence doesn't come with complicated issues. He's a storyteller, not a crusader. Still, talking straight takes courage.

Brent Hartinger doesn’t look threatening. Seated across the table from me at a crowded Tacoma Italian restaurant, tucking into a vegetarian entrée, he is a lean, athletic man of medium height dressed in polo shirt, jeans and tennis shoes. He has an aura of vulnerability and projects a passion for his profession as a writer. In person, he draws you in just as he does on the page. When I read his stories, it’s as if a close friend is whispering in my ear: “You’ll never believe this one.” Now, in the restaurant, I want to reach across the table and hug him.

Photograph by Aaron Locke

He is nonetheless a controversial — some would say a “dangerous” — person. Hartinger, forty-three, is the author of nine books mostly geared to readers the publishing industry classifies as “young adult.” While mainstream fiction sales are slipping, YA fiction is hot. “Young adult and fantasy are the two genres that are growing,” Hartinger says, noting that mainstream writers like Michael Chabon, Carl Hiaasen and Sherman Alexie have hopped on the YA bandwagon.

Hartinger has written YA novels in genres ranging from psychological thriller (Grand and Humble, 2006) to fantasy (Dreamquest, 2007). But he’s perhaps best known for frequently portraying gay teens in honest and unsensational terms.

There are perils for the intrepid YA writer, as Hartinger’s career proves. Despite receiving accolades — the U.S. independent booksellers association put four Hartinger titles on its list of the nation’s most important books — he has had to defend his work against censorship. His books have been challenged around the country and, in some places, even banned.

His 2003 book, Geography Club, was banned in Tacoma’s Curtis high schools after parents complained about two of its characters who meet through an Internet chat room. In the novel, the teenagers subsequently start a secret gay-straight alliance at their high school.

School officials insisted that it was the dangers of Internet hookups that they objected to, not a perceived gay theme. But Hartinger says that parents initially complained that the book would “turn straight kids into homosexuals.” Actually, a fair reading of the book leads you to conclude that its greatest danger might be turning straight kids into friends of homosexual kids. Hartinger describes the book as “the Will & Grace of YA lit.”

Hartinger and many supporters wrote letters to the school board and local newspapers. Geography Club was returned to the Curtis Senior High School library, but not to the Junior High School library. To help writers facing similar challenges, Hartinger and several YA author friends founded an anticensorship group called Authors Supporting Intellectual Freedom (AS IF!). “It’s not about the individual book,” Hartinger says. “It’s about intellectual freedom and academic independence.”

Born in Olympia, Hartinger grew up in the Fircrest district of Tacoma. He had an attorney father, a stay-at-home mom and an older brother with whom he’s still close. “I had an idyllic childhood,” Hartinger says. “White-bread, safe, secure.” His mother, a child of the Depression, expected her son to pursue a “practical” career, maybe follow in his dad’s footsteps. But his father encouraged him to do what he loved. “That stuck with me,” says Hartinger.

He didn’t read much as a kid, preferring to play outside with friends. They made movies, built haunted houses and placed prank calls to the local convent where they went to Catholic grade school. The creative process, in whatever form it took, conferred on him a kind of euphoria: “The sense of opportunity and promise.”

When Hartinger eventually decided he wanted to be a writer, he worked at it long and hard. “I worked my butt off for fifteen years,” he recalls, “and my books kept getting rejected.” He scrambled to make a living, scribbling greeting cards, cartoons and screenplays that occasionally sold for small sums. “It’s like a slot machine,” he explains. “You win a prize, it keeps you going.”

At last, in 1996, when he was 35, Hartinger was awarded a grant for a work-in-progress co-funded by the prestigious Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators and trailblazing YA author Judy Blume. Hartinger’s success following the publication of Geography Club had publishing insiders predicting a bright future.

“He is going to be bigger than Judy Blume,” says Jennifer DeChiara, Hartinger’s literary agent. “He is going to be a household name someday.” Hartinger’s rich imagination and indefatigability power his success. The Northwest Playwrights Alliance staged his adaptation of Geography Club this year in its new plays festival; Hartinger is at work on a screenplay based on the novel. He has two books awaiting publication, Project Sweet Life, a caper comedy set in Tacoma, about three teenage boys’ get-rich-quick schemes, and Shadowwalkers, about lonesome gay teens who find each other through astral projection and are stalked by an evil shadow creature.

Hartinger also writes webisodes for a Web site that analyzes pop culture. He’s taught writing at Vermont College and Tacoma School of the Arts. He and novelist Michael Jensen, his life partner, film a popular weekly vlog called “Two Gay Guys” (afterelton.com). And he makes frequent appearances, online and at schools and bookstores.

The last book he wrote is always his favorite. “If my latest book is not my best work, I have to ask myself why I’m still writing,” he explains. “I wonder if I’m not challenging myself.” He knows that for a writer success is never assured. “Do plumbers or attorneys have this problem, where if they make one mistake their career could be over?” he laments. “Creative types are on an emotional rollercoaster. A friend of mine who had a New York Times bestseller and signed a $400,000 publishing deal figured out that over twenty years, he would’ve made more money as a postman.”

Undaunted, Hartinger continues to work, comforted by his growing book sales and a satisfying private life with Jensen and their two quirky cats, Thibodaux and Hugh. “I’m torn between dreaming big and being cautious,” confesses the narrator in Project Sweet Life. Hartinger’s doing both, maintaining a current of compassion and caring in everything he writes. •