Martine Leavitt’s speculative YA story Whenever You Are and Kristen McCallum’s debut YA contemporary novel Free Girls may seem different on their face, but they share a poignant through line: teens grappling with the stigma around juvenile detention. Clem, the protagonist of Leavitt’s novel, cherishes his friendship with fellow inmate Finn, and when Finn disappears, he questions what happened to him. In Free Girls, Jasmine struggles to adapt to life with her new stepfamily when her mother demands that she keep her time in juvenile detention a secret. Here, Leavitt and McCallum reflect on internal and external shame, their experiences as debut vs. veteran authors, and how their books can help teens in similar scenarios feel seen.

Martine Leavitt: Hi, Kristen!

Kristen McCallum: Hi, Martine!

Leavitt: May I just begin by saying that I agree whole heartedly with the praise in the front matter of your book? Jasmine feels so real and genuine and relatable, right from the start. I’m wondering if you’d talk about how this first novel came to be.

McCallum: That’s so kind of you. I worked really hard on making Jasmine feel as real as possible; she needed to feel like someone the reader could know or come across in their own lives. I was asked if I could write a book and I was immediately taken to a story like this. I’ve always wanted to write about this sort of character to work through some of my own experiences as a kid in a similar situation as Jas.

I’m also really interested in how you came to your novel, and additionally why you chose to write Whenever You Are in verse?

Leavitt: When I was a teenager a thousand years ago, I was a runaway and got involved in a risky lifestyle. I was a troubled kid. But I had something that kept me alive: writing poetry.

Reginald Dwayne Betts was sent to prison for nine years at the age of 16. He was just a little boy, and there he was asking himself, “What do you become after nine years in a cell?” And then someone gave him a copy of Dudley Randall’s Black Poetry. One of the poets in the collection had also been incarcerated, and it gave Betts a way out, and a way in. He is now a lawyer and a respected and beloved poet. He is probably alive today because of poetry. It just made sense that the story be told in verse.

What was the hardest part for you as you built your story?

McCallum: Honestly, it was the courage to just write and trust that the story I was crafting would be worth reading, even if it ended up in my drafts forever! Writing a book as a first timer is so intimidating, and a lot of my writing sessions began with a pep talk so I wouldn’t feel clouded by doubt that this story mattered, doubt that I was the one to tell it, and that I could even tell it. Writing through that was a lot. But once I got past it, by committing to the task and learning to enjoy it, I was good!

Leavitt: This is my 12th novel, but that sounds familiar. Every time I begin a book, it’s like the first time all over again: all the same dragons. The difference, I suppose, is that I know I’ve survived these dragons before, and I suspect I’ll survive them again.

The hardest part of this particular book for me was that my characters, these two boys that I love, were in a cell. It’s really hard to plot a story when the characters have no agency and they can’t do anything or go anywhere; it’s a nightmare for writers, not to mention the human beings in this situation. I finally came up with a narrative structure that put my viewpoint character on a journey of discovery, and it worked. Although our stories are very different, both deal with concerns about the juvenile detention system, and in particular the shame that these kids deal with. Even after they go home, the stigma can follow them around for many years. Could you speak to that?

McCallum: I can’t speak for everyone’s experience, but I think there absolutely is shame that’s automatically imposed. Turning the bad to good. It’s easy to internalize that shame because people look at you differently, and you’re thinking of yourself differently. It’s easy to forget that your identity is allowed to be bigger than that experience. But I think that’s true of a lot of centers youth find themselves sent to that use shame as a foundation of their rehab process. Writing this novel was a great opportunity to reflect on where my own shame would show up on the page as I crafted Jasmine’s world. It was enlightening.

Leavitt: My characters suffer not only from the shame imposed on them by society, but also by their own conscience. They can’t escape their sense of deep regret. Does that end when they are given this retributive incarceration? Does that make it even? When they are released, is it over? Someone said to me, they admired how I was able to make my characters empathetic, given what they had done, which would be hard to forgive. I thought, that’s the problem right there, isn’t it. Whose is the business of forgiveness? How do these kids live their lives going forward in hope for the future, if their crime must always define them? The problems with the criminal justice system are so pervasive and complex. I sometimes wonder what my little books can do to make a difference. What change do you hope your book might make?

McCallum: I try not to measure my book against something that big. It’s built for one reader at a time. And I believe that even a small book landing with the right person at the right moment can shift something for them.

What I hope for is smaller, and maybe more personal than “changing the system.” I want a teen going through something like this to read it and feel a little less alone in that they’re carrying and reacting to. If even one reader finishes it feeling like it’s okay to have complicated feelings, and that not having it all figured out is just part of getting through something hard, that’s the change I was actually hoping for.

Leavitt: As you said so beautifully, we can’t really change the world, can we? We can hope to make one reader ask a big question as a result of reading our book. Even if there’s no clear, easy answer, the fact that they grappled with the question is meaningful.

That said, every time I write a book, I hope it will change the whole world!

Free Girls by Kristen McCallum. Flatiron, $19.99 out now; ISBN 978-1-250-32026-1

Whenever You Are by Martine Leavitt. Groundwood, $19.99 Aug. 4; ISBN 978-1-77946-109-4