The Awesome Narrative Vessel: A Shook Interview with Julian Randall

Sports!

The art to writing a good sports novel for kids is a talent many would kill for. Particularly if you’re going to include some actually character development and storytelling as well. It takes a skilled hand. It takes… a Julian Randall.

Do you know Julian? You may and just don’t know it. He’s the fellow behind the  Pilar Ramirez duology and The Chainbreakers. Those books? Fantasies. His latest book, Shook (out just this week)? Realistic contemporary fiction. Gotta hand it to the guy. He man has range. Look, here’s the plot synopsis:

Malik Page—though unless you’re his mama, call him “Shake”—dreams of making the Marshall Grove varsity basketball squad as an eighth grader. Then he’ll be on his way to joining the ranks of Chicago legends like his pops and late Uncle Kenny. But when Shake fractures his ankle in a championship game, he’s sidelined for the first time since his first dribble.

As his world is turned upside down, Shake feels like there’s ginger ale bubbling in his chest and sweat slicking on his palms. With a best friend who’s getting more distant by the day, a growing silence between him and his dad, and varsity tryouts fast approaching, Shake will have to cross up every obstacle to find a way back onto the court—and back to being himself. Thankfully in Marshall Grove, the sky is always full of hope.

Today we talk with Julian about his latest. Always a pleasure to speak with a fellow Chicago-area resident:

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Betsy Bird: Julian! Congrats indeed for your SHOOK realistic fiction debut (to say nothing of your highly complimentary Jason Reynolds blurb). And look at you getting starred reviews left, right, and center! So you were writing fantasy novels pretty comfortably for the last few years, but now you’re coming on strong with a realistic fiction sports novel. Tell us SHOOK’s origin story then. Where did this novel come from?

Julian Randall: Thank you! So I moved back home to Chicago in June of 2020 while I was finishing up the edits on my first middle grade novel. As you can imagine, there wasn’t much to do or indoor places to be so I was having a hard time finding good vessels for the intense anxiety I was experiencing. So, I went back to my oldest form of anxiety management, basketball. I’d bought myself a ball early in quarantine so I could shoot free throws in the park next to my house to pass the hours. Even after they boarded up the rim to stop folks from getting close, I was out there alone at all hours of the day just finding a way to touch the court nearly every day because, just like it had since I was a kid, it reminded me that today wasn’t yesterday.

I was also playing an ungodly amount of NBA 2K at the time, another thing that settles the anxiety in my hands, and thinking about how if I was doing the story for MyPlayer it’d be a player who, like me, was working his way back from an injury.

That’s the first flicker of Malik I can remember, but it didn’t become a true spark until I was hanging at North Texas Teen Book Fest with Jasminne Mendez, Amber McBride and Torrey Maldonado a couple years later. We were talking about poets and verse novels and the question I’ve maybe been asked more than any other in my career came up: When are we getting a verse novel from you? And I tried to shrug it off, but the homies are a persistent group at the best of times. I ended up pitching Shook to them for the very first time on accident right then and there on the conference floor. A point guard sidelined by injury learns that he has anxiety as he fights to get himself back on the court. I named him Malik Page because in 2k they often refer to your character as MP (short for MyPlayer) and I thought it would be nice if those were his initials.

BB: I find it interesting that folks were asking you to write a verse novel. There are a certain kinds of books that I think are particularly difficult to write. Mysteries are one kind. Sports novels another. So when you decided to go all in on realistic fiction, I feel like you set yourself up for a challenge. What’s your connection to the game? And what, would you say, are the advantages and disadvantages of the sports middle grade work?

Julian: My first time playing organized sports was middle school basketball, and I played for most of high school before I got injured in a pickup game junior year (knee hyperextension, different than Malik’s ankle but forever a source of inspiration as Shook came together). I went all in on football before I became a poet in college.

But I’ve always been a fan of basketball and when I remember being 12 my first thoughts are of my favorite rim near where I was living. Like many fellow 7th graders, I decided I was going to the NBA. And I could stay outside dribbling towards that rim. One mixtape layups, for hours. I was going to be the best Bull since MJ, couldn’t tell me different. I was blissed out and mildly sunburnt, taking fade aways until the street lights came on.

I think it would be a shame to not have any of that passion I felt ever show up in a book, I’m really proud that it came through in Shook. I think one of the advantages I found in making a sports novel for the first time is that writing sports action is an awesome narrative vessel. The stakes of each basketball scene came very organically and writing game action is really fun for me. Which ironically seeded the disadvantage, that Malik would have to undergo the injury and be isolated temporarily from the game and that kind of pace. Trust and believe, I put off writing the injury scene as long as I could. I went through every stage of grief about it. It was hard on me to put Malik through all that. A part of the tradition that the hero’s journey in sports is that you know they will win at the end, I mean Air Bud must be something like 27-0 by now? So how do you make that win feel earned at the end when you’re working against the supposition of victory from page one?

BB: Your publisher is describing this as a “love letter to Chicago”. It always has struck me as funny how few children’s books really focus and concentrate specifically on the Chicago area. So tell me what it is about SHOOK that is loving to the Windy City. And what do you, yourself, love about Chicago?

Julian: I live on the west side where there aren’t nearly as many children’s novels set as the children here deserve. I think the love letter begins in me having made up my own neighborhood, Marshall Grove, for Malik to grow up in. Chicago is never finished and sometimes that means new community centers and sometimes it means an intense gentrification can make a block unrecognizable in a handful of years.

I know I’ve loved this hood for as long as I have lived here since I moved back home in 2020. I know it has always loved me back. And of the many things folks get wrong about Chicago, this is one of the things that mattered most to me in Shook: rain or shine, summer or winter, this place loves us back. I wanted to capture a handful of what it is to be a Chicago child because you grow up knowing every inch of the place you are from is a mighty and generous place. I wanted a novel where kids out west could see people they recognized as important figures in a book. In some ways, the dark horse MVP of the whole story is a dude who sells stuff out of his car. My favorite early poem is set in a Dollar Tree. And all of this Chicago that I’ve loved and has loved me is in Marshall Grove, a little west side forever.

BB: I’ve noticed in a lot of kids, including my own, that in a world where so much is uncertain and the future can be so scary, they fight back by making detailed plans for their own futures. When those plans hit a wall, they sometimes spin out. Shake, in this book, finds himself in that position and it feels VERY prescient and current. Was any of that on your mind as you wrote this?

Julian: It’s one of those things that I found was also true about me as a kid. I think across the wonders of being in these classrooms all over the country the last five years, and hearing the kids’ own plans for their books and creative projects. I found that they had a level of detail I could relate to.

It’s one of the reasons I tell my nephew that he’s one of the coolest people I know. He’s always resisted the questioning of what he wants to be when he grows up; he knows that he is a kid right now and he’s steadfast on taking that time to learn and explore who and what he wants to be. By the end of Shook I think I wanted Malik to feel the kind of peace my nephew feels. I can’t think of a better gift for an anxious child than to feel as totally present as my nephew often does; I admire so much about him but probably that quality most of all.

BB: Did you have a clear cut sense of the direction that this book would go from the minute you started writing it, or did it change a lot from the first draft to this final version?

Julian: Generally clear from the beginning though I think the biggest change in shape was between Round 1 and Round 2 where we added the scene at the Bulls game. There hadn’t been a bridge before that in the book that both showcased the strain on Malik’s relationship with Kyla and also the strides and continuing challenges of having anxiety and experiencing panic attacks.

That whole part was such a joy to write because I was a Bulls season ticket holder when I began working on Shook so the United Center will always feel a bit like home in that way to me and him both! Plus, I got to write a poem about my opinions on stadium food, that’s the dream!

BB: Oo, yes. Related question, did you have to lose anything in the course of your edits that you really miss?

Julian: A Celtics Shaq joke that I was unreasonably attached to! Which is really a testament to Brian’s editing prowess because after four books together, I don’t think there’s anyone I’ve had a chance to trust more completely in a creative context.

The thing with me is that I grew up playing NBA Street Vol. 2 (a hood classic/greatest sports game maybe ever?) so Kareem Abdul-Jabbar on the same pickup team as Allen Iverson kinda informs how I think about basketball, as a very intergenerational conversation. I lean really heavily in early drafts towards the idea that kids are also experts and Brian is the eye I trust the most in terms of helping me find that line between trusting the reader and being too niche. We’re a team and without him there’s definitely some spots in this book where I wouldn’t sound like a person growing up now. Can’t just go around saying “How do you do fellow kids? I have some things to tell you about Kirk Hinrich!”

BB: Honestly, I’m just delighted that “How do you do fellow kids” is a common phrase now. So finally, what’s next for you? What else are you working on these days?

Julian: I think I’ve taken a shine to novels in verse and I’m going to make sure there’s more on the way very soon!

BB: Most excellent.

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Huge thanks to Julian for his answers. Thanks too to Morgan Rath and her team at Macmillan Children’s Publishing Group for helping to put this all together. Shook just came out this week so look for it on shelves near, far, and everywhere if you can!

Filed under: Interviews