We welcome Marcella Pixley to Cynsations. In this interview, Marcella talks about her writing process, including her habit of art journaling while drafting novels. She generously shares her behind-the-scenes work that goes into bringing a book to life. Her middle grade verse novel Neshama deals with family trauma and healing, and it releases on May 13, 2025.
What inspired you to write for this age group, and why did you choose to tell this story in verse?
Neshama is my second book for the middle grade audience. My previous book, Trowbridge Road (Candlewick, 2020) was a middle grade novel as well. Since writing Trowbridge Road, I have fallen in love with reading, writing, and teaching middle grade books.
There is something magical about the liminal age, right before teen years, when kids are on the threshold of transforming into adolescents. They are still young enough to have enormous imaginations. They can still play make-believe. They are still young enough to have fierce friendships and passions, but at the same time, they are old enough to begin understanding the complicated and heartbreaking world in which we live. And most importantly, they are old enough to make a difference. Both of my middle grade books are about eleven-year-old girls learning how to express their own complicated identities. My books are about being brave, finding your voice, and choosing to use it.
As an eighth-grade teacher whose students love novels in verse, I was excited to try my hand at a genre that has always intrigued me. I teach Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson (Penguin Random House, 2014), and my classroom library is filled with other gorgeous middle grade verse novels about finding identity, including Starfish by Lisa Fipps (Penguin Random House, 2021), Inside Out and Back Again by Thanhha Lai (HarperCollins, 2011), and many others by authors I love, including Chris Baron, Margarita Engle, K.A. Holt, Amber McBride, Jason Reynolds, Aida Salazar, Nic Stone, and so many others.
I noticed how my students (even my reluctant readers) were gravitating to verse novels over and over again. They love the engaging stories and open format that allows readers the ability to ponder one gem (a poem, a stanza, a line, a word) at a time, while still remaining engrossed in the story.
Like so many of the other middle grade verse novels in my classroom library, Neshama is about some heavy topics. Neshama deals with grief and intergenerational trauma as well as antisemitism and family crisis. But because the novel is written in verse, young readers can digest the hardships and bring their own experience and their own empathy to the page. So much of the verse novel takes place in the white spaces – the line and stanza breaks – the turning of a page. This format allows readers to enter into the story as active participants. It also models hope, insisting that there is beauty even during times of hardship.
Poem titles give us information in novels-in-verse, they often denote place and signal scene changes. Neshama begins with a poem titled, “Being Anna Means,” which gives a young reader direct entry into the protagonist’s life. How do you approach crafting of poem titles and do you have a favorite one in this book?
I have always found creating poem titles to be extremely difficult. They seem so final. Magically, somehow, they are supposed to cue readers about the mindset they should adopt as they enter the poem as well as other important sign posts such as place, time shifts, themes and key ideas.
In addition to all of these important qualities, my poem titles are meant to contain an additional quality that is more difficult to put into words. I want each of my poems to contain a crux or a moment of discovery. This is a place, usually towards the end of the poem, where the reader encounters the poem’s heart. Sometimes this comes in the form of a comparison or an image that allows the reader to understand something important. Other times it is a surprising word or symbol that suddenly opens the poem’s meaning in a deeper way. If the title is doing what it should, it should help to articulate, illuminate and express this discovery before the reader even enters the poem. First, the title is a doorway. The reader steps in with an idea of where they are and where they are going. Then the title becomes a golden light that illuminates the space in a new way.
“You might have thought /we were / spiderwebs, translucent as moths, / the impossible silk / of dandelion clocks. / Maybe then you would notice / how fragile and fine it is / to be alive.” When I read these lines on page 20, I get a mouthful of delicious assonance. What is your method of finding and refining the lyrical quality in your writing? Do you have mentor texts you use to develop poetic language?
It makes me so happy that you noticed this. I always whisper my writing out loud while I am composing, and I am constantly paying attention to the cadence, rhythm and repetition inside my lines. I do this as much for myself as for the reader. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that I loved it when people read out loud to me as a child, and I loved reading out loud to my own children. There is something so calming about the sounds of words coming from the lips of someone you love.
Reading out loud always sounds best to me when there are echoes – when the sounds within and between the words resonate into the still room, a bouquet of vowels and consonants singing themselves into being. I look for that attention to lyricism in the books I read as well, and when I find it, I am instantly hooked.
When I teach writing to eighth graders, I always use Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street as a mentor text to demonstrate this kind of lyricism. In fact, that is the book I’m teaching right now, and my students are learning how to notice the tools an author can use to make their story sing. Sandra Cisneros clearly listens to the sounds in her words and lines. Her work is filled with lyrical assonance and consonance as well as a very particular cadence that helps us to imagine a child’s voice speaking out loud to us. Every time I teach The House on Mango Street, I learn something new about how to craft a sentence. I think this one book has been the most formative for me as a writer.
This novel is written in dual point of view, poems from the ghosts begin in a collective voice using the pronoun ‘we’ and address the reader. You set up further rules for the reader later with a poem titled “Spiderweb Script” on page 111, “…we can write poems / back and forth like postcards / first my slanting cursive, / then Ruthie’s jagged cat scratch / scrawling across the page.” And you use different typefaces for both Anna and Ruthie the ghost girl so the reader is cued on to who is talking in the poem. Could you share your thoughts on how you arrived at this final amalgam to differentiate the voices?
My agent Victoria Wells Arms and editor Liz Bicknell from Candlewick Press helped me to come up with this method. In early drafts, one of my most important tasks was to make certain that the world of ghosts made sense to the reader. I began with a number of questions for myself. How would we know when the ancestors were speaking? How would we feel the collective nature of the ancestral poems so there would be the sense of a multitude of voices speaking at once as “we?” How would we know when a poem was spoken in Ruthie’s voice as a specific, differentiated ghost who comes forward to whisper into Anna’s consciousness?
Then there was the task of figuring out the rules for communication. How could I differentiate between their lyrical postcards and their silent conversations? These decisions became even more complicated when we added the dialogue of living characters who speak to each other in quotations within the poems as well as words that needed to be differentiated as Yiddish and Hebrew words in italics.
We decided that the best way we could differentiate between voices was to create different type faces that would be designated for different points of view. Every ghost in the novel has one type face and the titles of those poems have a lovely faded quality that cues the reader before they even begin to read that they are hearing the voice of a ghost. In this novel, type face becomes part of the world building. It is one way that the reader learns the rules of the Neshama’s mystical world.
How did you begin the process of drafting this story for younger audiences, especially drawing from your own culture’s mystic elements such as the Ibbur you mentioned in our conversation? Can you share how and why you chose the specific rituals that stitch together this story?
I wanted to combine Jewish ritual practice and folk tradition with a kind of wild, imaginative dance. (The working title for this book was “Dancing with Ghosts”). Throughout the book, the celebration of Shabbat is a bridge that connects both the living characters and the dead. When Bubbe lights the candles, we become aware of the generations standing together, each with their hands on the shoulders of the next. Ruthie’s desire to taste the sweetness of the wine and feel the warmth of the candles comes from her own yearning to remember what it was like to be a living person with a body who could feel those sensory parts of Jewish ritual.
There are also imaginative and mystical aspects to the sense of ritual in this book. Ruthie is a particular kind of ghost called an Ibbur that is mentioned in some ancient Yiddish texts. The Ibbur is different from the traditional Dybbuk in that the Dybbuk possesses an individual without asking, but the Ibbur needs to be granted permission, creating a partnership with the living person to complete a task that the Ibbur was not able to finish when they were alive. Even though the word “Ibbur” is never mentioned in the text, I wanted to create a ritual for the moment when Ruthie enters Anna that seemed like it could express this kind dynamic between asking and being granted permission. In the book, this ritual takes place as Anna and Bubbe are dancing on the shore by the tidal river in Gloucester. They are holding hands and spinning together, as though they were dancing the hora, when Ruthie, desperate to feel the glory of being in a body again, asks permission to join the dance.
What would be your advice for writers wanting to weave their folk-belief systems in a story for middle grade readers unfamiliar with those cultural elements?
What a wonderful question. My advice for any writer wanting to weave their folk tradition into a story for middle grade readers who may not be familiar with the cultural elements, is that you do your best to allow them to feel included. Write with the intention of sharing something that may be sacred and deeply familiar to you but that may be completely new for your reader. Your intention should be to welcome them into the description so that they can feel invited to participate.
You want your reader to feel that there is space for them at the table, and they should feel invited into every part of the cultural experience. In Neshama, I tried to do this by peppering the rituals with plenty of sensory details that I hoped would resonate for all readers.
I wanted my readers to hear the bubbling soup pot while Bubbe was making chicken soup. I wanted them to feel the steam rising into the kitchen. I wanted to warm them with the glow of the candles and sweet taste of a single sip of wine on their tongues. I wanted them to feel the closeness and the peacefulness around the Shabbat table.
I also wanted them to feel the difference between Shabbat and the ordinary days of the week marked by sunset. There needed to be a sense of boundary between the holy and the ordinary, and in Neshama that is performed through natural details of the sun going down as well as reference to high tides and low tides that signal the idea of time passing through a day, a week, a lifetime. By welcoming the reader in, you allow someone who may have no experience with your own cultural tradition to become a member of the family.
“I shove the journal / beneath the pillow, / cross my legs / and hold my hands / as though / I always sit this way, / all folded up / like an envelope, / safe, secret, and sealed.” As a reader “Interrupted” is my favorite poem in the book— its short nine lines set up the scene perfectly. Which is your favorite poem in this book and how many revisions did it take to get to the final print version?
Oh, my goodness, asking me what poem is my favorite is like asking me which of my family members I love most. I couldn’t possibly pick one. I do have a special fondness for the poem “The Soup Pot,” which is one in a series of poems that take place at Bubbe’s house in Gloucester. The soup pot in this poem is inspired by a real soup pot that belonged to my great grandmother and my grandmother, and now it belongs to my mother. One day, this soup pot will belong to me. The soup pot in Neshama becomes a symbol for the connection between generations and it acts as a doorway into the world of Jewish tradition and ritual than Anna craves so deeply.
The Soup Pot
“Bubbe lifts the lid / and lets the steam rise / into the kitchen, / this battered soup pot /dented from its journey / from an apartment in Brooklyn / to Bubbe’s old kitchen / in Gloucester Massachusetts, / where I stand transfixed, / watching the broth bubble.
Bubbe gives me a sip. / When you taste my soup, / close your eyes, she says. / Imagine my mama, / her hair covered by a kerchief, / stirring Shabbos / with a wooden spoon, / one generation / sipping the broth / of the one that came before.”
Here are other memorable lines from Neshama: on page 126, “The sun sets over the river / like a tablespoon of honey /dripping into a cup of tea.” And on page 272, “The wind / combs its icy fingers / through the marsh grass.” Can you share any exercises from your poet’s toolbox that can help writers with developing effective similes and metaphors?
I am always trying to teach myself how to create these kinds of vivid similes and metaphors. One exercise I use for developing figurative language is by reading mentor texts that have mastered gorgeous language very closely. As I mentioned earlier, The House on Mango Street has always been my favorite. I read with a pen in my hand and any time I see the author using a vivid simile and metaphor or a symbolic image I underline it and annotate in the margin. Sometimes I even draw the comparison so I can visualize the craft moves more clearly. I ask myself questions. Which part of the sentence contains the tenor (the actual literal thing that we are trying to describe). Which part of the sentence contains the vehicle, the part of the comparison where there is transformation and movement?
I also have always loved bringing an art journal into the space I am trying to describe. I sit very quietly for as long as I can, just observing the sensory details around me. I pay attention to the smells, the images, the sounds, the feeling of the wind on my skin. Then I draw or paint what I am seeing on a piece of loose paper before I start to write.
That sentence above that you quoted, “The sun sets over the river / like a tablespoon of honey / dripping into a cup of tea,” was written in one of these attentive journaling spaces. I remember, I was sitting on the dock in Gloucester, watching the sunset. I tried to capture the color and movement of the sun sinking into the water. At first, I wrote, “like a penny slipping into a warm, dark pocket,” but comparing the sun to a penny seemed too materialistic, and didn’t have the sweetness or the sense of natural familiarity that I was looking for. By comparing the sun to honey and the river to a cup of tea, I was able to capture the color, the sweetness and the comfort all in one simile.
You have been a middle school teacher for many years; how do you carve out time to write while holding this demanding full-time job? Has teaching impacted your own writing process in any way?
I often struggle to find a balance between my teaching and my writing life. I write my books as well as grade papers and create assignments late into the evening. In addition to writing and teaching, I am also the school drama-club director, so my life is always filled with preparation, planning, meetings and rehearsals. Usually, I can keep all of the balls in the air, but this becomes most difficult when more than one part of my life needs intense concentration and extra energy like during a book launch, or during production weeks – which happens to be the case right now!
Luckily, I have a wonderful, supportive, creative family. My husband, Steve, is a musician, teacher and children’s theater director as well, and we have always encouraged our kids (now nearly grown) to pursue their own passions. We each do our best to support each other’s pursuits, attend each other’s performances, and help each other whenever possible. Sometimes helping is just lending an ear, giving encouragement, and celebrating each other’s energy and creativity.
I am also very lucky that as a middle school teacher, I am constantly surrounded by students the same age of my protagonists. I have the chance to hear the language they use and learn about what is important to them about friendships, family, and learning how to celebrate your own identities. I stand by them when they are struggling and I cheer them on when they are learning to be brave. I try to make sure my classroom is a safe space for all students, but especially for those who feel different from the others. They know they can come to me to talk if they need an ear, or sit in my quiet room to read when the outside world is too noisy. I hope that my books provide a safe space as well. I hope that young readers will see themselves in my stories and find that reflection to be hopeful, loving and honest. I feel very fortunate to live and work side by side with my target audience. We are part of each other’s community and creativity.
Finally, what message would you like young readers to take away from Neshama?
I want young readers to come away from Neshama realizing they can find the bravery to express all the different parts of who they are. I want them to realize that the parts of themselves that have been silenced, that seem weird or different, the parts that don’t fit neatly into society’s norms, are actually the most beautiful and powerful of all.
Cynsational Notes
Marcella Pixley is the award-winning author of five novels for children. Her novel Trowbridge Road was a Junior Library Guild Selection. It was long listed for the National Book award and was a finalist in both the Golden Dome and Massachusetts Book Award. Trowbridge Road was named a best book of 2020 by Shelf Awareness, Reading Group Choices and Mighty Girls. Neshama is her first novel in verse. It has been named a Gold Standard, Junior Library Guild Selection for 2025.
Marcella’s earlier poetry has been published in literary journals such as Lilith Magazine, Feminist Studies, Poet Lore and Prairie Schooner. After years of writing lyric prose novels, she is overjoyed to find a return to poetry in the publication of Neshama.
Mitu Malhotra holds an MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. The 2021 winner of the Katherine Paterson Prize for Literature for Young Adults and Children, Mitu has also won scholarships from the Highlights Foundation, Tin House, and a writing residency at the Djerassi Program. Her short story “Toxins” is part of ELA curriculum. Her writing has appeared in Hunger Mountain, Thin Air Magazine and elsewhere. In previous avatars, Mitu was a textile and fashion designer, and has taught in India, the Middle East and the U.S. Mitu is an active member of CBIG: Children’s Book Illustrators Group, NYC. Follow her on Instagram @mituart or Bluesky @mitumalhotra.