The Children's Book Podcast · Matthew C. Winner

Emotional Rollercoasters with Alison Green Myers

·38 min·3 clips

What if a family struggles to open their amusement park after the grandfather's death, revealing grief's impact on joy?

A carnival story keeps changing shape. The guest remembers a book that started as a love story set inside a traveling carnival, full of teenagers, motion, and that slightly unstable feeling of never being parked for long. It did not quite behave. Instead of keeping the carnival everywhere, she begins to ask what might happen if the story stayed put. Knoebels becomes the answer. She knows the place as a worker, not as a tourist passing through, and that familiarity gives the invented carnival solid ground. Matthew picks up on the craft choice right away. This is not a neat little origin story where the author had one clean idea and followed it straight to the page. It is messier and more useful than that. The guest talks about trying versions, letting pieces sit, and trusting the brain to sort through memory until the book starts making sense. There is a lovely strangeness to the way she describes it, as if the story has to travel through the mind before it can become a manuscript. Even the point of view had to shift. She says the book once ran in third person while other chapters spoke straight to the reader, and that version reached her editor first. The conversation is quiet, but it has weight. It gives time to the part of writing readers rarely see: the trying, cutting, rethinking, and waiting while a story figures out what shape it wants.

As heard by us

A warm conversation about how a middle grade novel finds its shape through revision.

The episode is a warm, process-heavy conversation between Matthew Winner and Allison Green Myers about This Way to Happy. Its best stretch comes from following the book through several versions, starting with a carnival story and then shifting toward Knoebels, where setting and…

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Why you'd press play

Press play if you want a book conversation that follows This Way to Happy through its many lives.

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