quick, robin, to the book cave!

The School Library Journal has a story about how a school library in Liberty, Missouri decided to entice more boy readers by building a “cave” space. There is a photo, but here is the description of The Cave from the article:

The space is outfitted with modest furnishings, including chairs made from milk crates and padding, designed by Rosheim, and a brand-new beanbag. Fabric is tacked to the ceiling to provide a cavelike aura. A life-sized Wimpy Kid poster, donated by Abrams Books, the series’ publisher, is personalized with a message that reads, “This Way To the Cave.” And, of course, there are books.

Fabric on the ceiling, milk crate seats, and a lone beanbag do not a cave make. Points for effort, and I can appreciate schools being tight on funds and all, but it misses the mark.

What makes a “cave” is that it has a feeling of isolation, a place where you can get away from outside world and hunker down. When grown men make their getaway caves they aren’t light, aerie spaces, they’re basements and garages, paneled in dark wood and full of comfortable furniture where the act of sitting can become a nap. They are permissive places, indulgent, and yes, a little clubby.

I’ve known teens to build their own rooms into caves: walls painted black or a dark color, furniture to a bare minimum, mattress on the floor, colorful print fabrics hanging like partitions against prying eyes and the outside world. It’s a claiming of space and a recognition of a need for sanctuary. Sometimes there are multiple media involved, a TV on while doing homework, or muted with music playing. Let the outside world criticize, but the space is user-created both as an experiment in and an expression of freedom.

In late 2007 author Sara Lewis Holmes posted something on her blog that generated a discussion about what the ideal space would be for teen readers. I wish I could find the original thread, but I remember clearly a number of us tossing around ideas and I threw in my two cents about a retail environment that was perhaps in a basement, with more floor space for lounging and reading, monitors showing movies of TV shows (sound muted), perhaps a cafe bar… basically a full-service cave. (I remember the discussion because out of it a number of us got together and created the review site Guys Lit Wire, dedicated to suggesting books for boys.) Since then I’ve seen stories like this one, of libraries actively looking to create spaces that are more inviting, less like a library. My own town library turned the periodical room into a teen room.

The problem isn’t necessarily that boys need to have their own space to entice them, it’s that the space needs to feel like something they can take ownership of, and by they I mean boys and girls. Input is great, but why stop there, why not let the kids design the space themselves? Build a scale model of the library and the furniture and have them push it all around until they have something they can all agree on. You do this with a committee of an equal number of boys and girls and I guarantee there will be not one but two and possibly many cave-like arrangements in the design. Just like on the playground where groups of kids will congregate on their own patch of territory, why not let them do the same in a library? Let there be five or six “cubicles” of space that different groups can claim (or sign up for, as they will become popular) and see if the library doesn’t start getting more use. They might even want to paint it black and hang Indian print fabric from the ceilings to create partitions that screen out the world. Do it.

But don’t perpetrate the hard gender classification of books. If a kid reads something they like they will go back to the well looking for more of the same. Diary of a Wimpy Kid isn’t a boy book, it’s an illustrated middle grade book (some would say a graphic novel, but I disagree) and should be shelved with similar books for browsing. I mean, really, are we going to start separating boy sci-fi from girl sci-fi? Who gets Harry Potter? Who gets The Hunger Games? When you start segregating the space in the library and organizing books by gender you reinforce the idea that “these books are good, those books aren’t” to the detriment of both reader and book.

But a cave, a cave is good for all. The more the better.

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where do boys go to find stories?

Every once in a while I find myself writing a short story. It starts as a lark, a seed of an idea that suddenly sprouts and FOOM! there it is. I have a stable of characters I like to write about which allows for this sort of thing to happen, and they’re a lot of fun to write because the seem to come from that part of my brain that still remembers how writing is supposed to be fun. Supposed to be, as opposed to writing novel-length stories that require plotting and thinking about craft and a time commitment. I find these short stories, when they come, are over before my brain has finished sharpening the pencils and filling out the forms necessary for a larger undertaking.

Okay, so the story is done, and I read it over. They tend to be humorous stories, so I laugh, which is a good thing. Not laughing at my own jokes, but still liking what I’ve written enough to be amused. Then I frown. I’ve just written another humorous story with solid boy appeal and don’t have anything I can do with it.

And I’m left wondering: where do boys go to find stories?

I start thinking, What sort of stories are like the one I just wrote? The first thing that came to mind is the story Gordie tells in Stephen King’s novella The Body about the kid Lard Ass and the pie eating contest. It’s a revenge story, simply put like a campfire tale, and the type of story boys like. But suddenly it occurs to me that even the mighty Stephen King knows that the only way he’s going to get a story like that published is by including it within the context of another, more traditional story.

Because you just know there isn’t a magazine alive aimed at a kid audience that would touch that story with a ten foot pole.

Anthologies exist that cater to humorous boy stories – the Guys Read series of course, and the David Luber Campfire Weenies books – but when a boy is in the mood for some light reading (okay, let’s be honest, bathroom reading) where does he go?

Where did I go?

Eventually I ended up reading National Lampoon, which might not have been the best literature around, but it feed my hunger for funny stories. Occasionally, rarely, I would come across some humorous fiction in The New Yorker, but when it came to finding something short to read I was at a loss. There had to be something more sophisticated than Boy’s Life, less obnoxious than National Lampoon, and not as stiff as The New Yorker, but if there was, I couldn’t find it.

Last fall I was riding public transit and there were three high school boys talking. One of them was telling the other two about this “wicked, sick” story he’d read, and as he went on I realized he was recounting a story by George Saunders from the recent issue of The New Yorker. His friends were attentive, but I could see in their eyes that once they’d heard the story from their friend they wouldn’t hunt it down and read it. It might have been the story itself, or the way the boy told it, but what I think really dulled the fire in the listening-boy’s eyes was when the teller admitted where it came from. Unspoken in those looks was the fact that the story had come from a magazine lying around the house that his parents subscribed to. Very uncool. If he’d lied and said he read the story in FHM or Details it’d be a different story, but then the conversation would veer into fashion or the latest tech gadget or, most likely, the cover model.

Because I thought I was missing something obvious I went to the library to check out the various writer’s market books. One of them (which I won’t name) had a subject index in back and under ‘humor’ there were a couple dozen magazines listed. When I went to check them out almost without exception they stated ‘no juvenile’ in their listings; the exceptions, and there were four listings with this problem, explicitly stated ‘no humor’ which doesn’t speak so well of the copyediting or indexing skills for that title. Almost all of the juvie titles listed were for younger ages than I write for, whose idea of humor most decidedly wouldn’t include pranks, bodily functions, or subversive behavior.

I’ll keep looking for the perfect home for these stories, but I suspect they’re just going to collect over the years until I’ve published several other “real” books and a publisher is willing to humor me by putting out a collection. Perhaps this is one of those “if I won the lottery” situations where I say that if I had the money I’d start a new digital and in-print magazine of humor. Old school thinking, I know, but a boy can still dream, can’t he?

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poetry friday: haul-o-ween

First, I want to thank everyone for dropping by last week when I was hosting Poetry Friday. It was a bit of a crazy weekend, and it turned out that the computer problems I was having behind the scenes were, indeed, part of a very real and very large problem. Anyway, that was fun!

So last week I shared my tale of woe as a kid in a computer costume that just. didn’t. work. A few years later my friend Marc and I hatched a plot to come away with the largest Halloween haul in the history of trick-or-treating. No false modesty here, we pulled it off, much to the horror of our parents. Two pillow cases, full to the point they nearly didn’t close, each.

red and orange
leaves of fall

two boys scheming
candy haul

making costumes
planning route

counting houses
lotsa loot

right at sunset
halloween

house to house
two boys careen

pillow cases
weighted down

“we musta hit
half the town!”

kitchen table
piled high

candy mountain
year’s supply

picking favorites
making trades

parents tossing
things homemade

tightly rationed
(sneak a lot)

mid-november
candy? naught!

“next year we won’t
mess around,

next year we take
the WHOLE town!”

I think the worst part is when you’ve already eaten all the “good” candy and all that’s left are banana taffies and waxy hard butterscotch wrapped in cellophane. Question for you commenters: what is your least favorite candy? Or what candy do you like that no one else does that guarantees no one will try to take it from you? For me, I can’t stand sour candies, and I’ll eat the Necco wafers. Bonus if it’s an all-chocolate Necco pack. They aren’t my favorite, but I don’t have the same problems other people seem to have with them.

Want more treats that won’t ruin your teeth (at least I hope they don’t!)? Head on over to Jama’s Alphabet Soup where this week’s Poetry Friday is congregating.

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