Greg Howard’s newest middle-grade novel “The Travelers” follows Ben, a 12-year old boy who loses his mother and has to live with his grandmother in a house filled with mysterious clocks. In an interview, Howard told us, “I lost my mom when I was five years old, and I was not really given the tools by the adults around me to deal with that.” With “The Travelers,” Howard hopes to change that and more. Article continues below.
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Navigating Grief and Queerness
Howard, who turns 60 this year, said that characters like Ben didn’t exist in books when he was growing up.
“[Younger me] would have been surprised and shocked that it was just not an issue that Ben was gay,” Howard said. “In all of my books, my kids are at different points of the coming out process. And in this one, I just wanted the kid just to be gay and he’s comfortable with it. His mom was. So it is not an issue. It is not the story. It just is part of who he is.”
In The Travelers, Ben discovers a time portal at his grandmother’s house, hidden in the antique clocks scattered throughout the home. Through this portal Ben is able to meet his mother when she was his age and to investigate his family’s history and secrets.
“Ben has to jump in and figure out what is going on in this house and see if he can save his mom,” Howard said.
While he is searching for his mom and trying to learn the truth about his family, Ben also develops a found family. First with his grandmother, then through new friends and a father-figure.
“What I wanted to do in the novel was show the way we as gay people, through this 12-year-old boy, build families around us by simply opening ourselves up and being our authentic selves with new people,” Howard said.
Howard drew on themes from his own lived experience to think through how he wanted to approach writing about found family.
“When I left for college, I kind of just cut my family out of my life because they did not know who I was,” he said. “They didn’t know I was gay, and I just assumed there would be rejection and that they wouldn’t be able to deal with it. So for decades, I just didn’t let them be a part of my life.”
Howard noted “when they finally found out, of course, as it is with everything, I should have been worried about [half] and half of them I shouldn’t have.”
Publishing Challenges and Book Bans
This year, Banned Books Week will be held the first week of October. When asked about his own experience, Howard described a “soft censorship” from publishers.
“There’s nothing salacious going on in [my] books. They’re very sweet, wholesome stories, but just the fact that the kid is gay is too much for some of these people,” Howard said.
A common justification that anti-LGBTQ school board members and activists will use to ban queer books is to claim that the themes are too mature for middle-grade fiction. But Howard deftly shows why that argument doesn’t hold up.
“There are kids living this every single day,” he said. “I certainly lived it, and I know I’m not the only one; and I lived it at a much younger age, also knowing at that time that I was attracted to other boys.”
From his perspective, he said that librarians and school staff are stuck between providing students access to diverse books while having to fend off anti-LGBTQ school board members and parents.
“So it’s just easier to take those books off the shelves,” Howard said. “Which is so sad because it’s just taking those kids’ experiences and their stories and telling them it doesn’t matter.”
Howard’s novel “Middle School’s a Drag You Better Work” was targeted by Fox News and U.S. Representative Lauren Boebert.
He also shared about a disturbing email he received a number of years ago from a father whose son had brought home Howard’s novel “The Whispers.” The father accused Howard of grooming children and indoctrinating youth with a homosexual agenda. The message included a photograph of the book ripped up in the trash can.
“God, I don’t know if that son of his is gay or not; but if he is, he just saw his father throw him away and tell him he’s worthless,” Howard said. “And it broke my heart.”
In spite of this toxicity, some schools continue to persist in bringing diverse books and authors to their students.
A large Atlanta middle school will host Howard to speak to their sixth grade students, all 600 of them.
“They told me 600,” Howard said. “It is terrifying within itself. Just terrifying.”
While he’s excited about the event, he said he does prefer smaller settings. “I much prefer to be more one-on-one with kids. They tend to get more real with you. And when you’re in a smaller group, they will expose their heart to you.”
To learn more about Howard and his books, visit greghowardbooks.com. Buy your copy of The Traveler here.
