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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#poetryfriday: the boys in the picture

In my neighborhood growing up families came and went. The long block of apartments was where families came to save enough to buy a home, or as a place to stay before jobs whisked them away. The block was one long weigh station, some came and went so fast we never learned their names, others never left and the less said about it the better.

David C. was my first best friend. He came during the middle of the year and moved away before the start of the next school year. He is like a ghost because he was there, people remembered him, but he missed photo day and so no physical memory of him exists. Almost.

On the day he was to move away our moms pulled us together to take a few pictures, photos that stayed in the camera for months and eventually appeared out of the blue. We couldn’t be bothered to take the moment seriously because we lived in the moment and never imagined a future different from the present. We were, what, ten years old? What did we know?

we were going to
build a three-wheeled bike
from a shopping cart, miscellaneous parts
and a giant egg from a pantyhose display

we were going to
build a treehouse on a wall
so that our parents wouldn’t see us
sneak out the back side and go to the store
for candy

we were going to
race our bike so fast down the street
that when we hit the driveways we would fly
across the mostly-dead lawn
and skid a cloud of dust

and we’d call it “bosso”
and “bosso-keeno”
and “coolomatic”

we were going to
dig up treasure we were sure was buried
under the bushes in the park
because we kept finding loose change in the dirt
where invisible-to-us teen lovers
made out at night

we were going to
become champion four-square players
because we had secret moves
for getting other kids “out”
before they realized it

we were going to
make enough money helping old ladies
load their groceries into their cars
that at the end of the day we could buy
a remote-controlled helicopter

and we’d slap each other five
and slap each other ten
and say “right on!”

we were going to
spend the rest of our lives
telling each other the funniest jokes
that we could make up
whether or not the made any sense

we were going to
never get married and have kids
because then we’d have to work
and wouldn’t have time to spend
afternoons at the library

we were always going to
be those two boys in white jeans and striped shirts
smiling and flashing peace signs
and hanging all over each other
when our moms wanted serious photos

and we’d say good-bye
and we’d promise to write
and we didn’t understand anything

but our crying mothers understood

Poetry Friday. You know you want to. Check out the roundup this week at Picture Book of the Day.

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do we want teen boys to read, or not?

Sports writer (it figures) cum YA author Robert Lipsyte rattled the cages of the kidlit community this past weekend with his essay in the NYT Book Review essentially lobbing the teen boy reading problem back across the net into the “more boy books” camp. This naturally, almost assuredly, possibly deliberately, raised the hackles of those who feel that the problem isn’t books (don’t blame the books!) but in the way society raises the boys (we need to raise boys as feminists!). Here’s the one line that resonated with me out of the whole essay, the one most true, the one ring to bind them:

“We need more good works of realistic fiction, nonfiction, graphic novels, on- or ­offline, that invite boys to reflect on what kinds of men they want to become.”

Forget everything else Lipsyte said for a moment (especially if it bothered you) and think about everything this statement embraces.

First and foremost it recommends we need books. Define that how you will, I would love to hear someone argue the opposite side, that we don’t need books anymore.

Second, the modifier good is in there. We don’t just need more crap, we need quality, and again there’s a spectrum there.  Suffice to say we know good when we see it, what defines good isn’t at issue here.

Third, following the rule of threes, comes the type of good books that we need: realistic fiction, nonfiction, and graphic novels. Any naysayers out there? Anyone think we couldn’t use more quality nonfiction, solid realistic fiction, or good graphic novels? No? Let’s move on.

The next part is tricky: inviting boys. This gets tossed around and argued quite a bit, and it usually has to do either with cover designs or whether a girl is involved with the story. This is the “Ew, cooties!” argument, and the division is usually between “if it’s good, it shouldn’t matter” and “we need to teach boys to get over it.”  This is the point where I would think most pro-feminists would want to weigh in with just exactly how boys get to this stage of thinking. There’s an avalanche of advertising and marketing out there that is conditioning boys from a very early age to think of pink as a girly color and that stories featuring girls will contain content of no interest to them. There’s a ginormous world out there molding and shaping the ways boys approach their entertainment and free time, and you want to draw a line in the sand at books and dare boys to cross it? If we aren’t going to invite boys into books, if the stand is going to be pandering versus political, or if there’s just no desire to even bother, then how can we possibly imagine a world where boys even begin to come close to recognizing books as valuable?

Now comes the most interesting phrase out of the Lipsyte quote, to reflect. We don’t just want them to read for the sake of reading, we want them to find meaning and purpose in what they read, we want them to think. This is where I feel a lot more harm than good is done in the schools when there is a dramatic shift from reading for fun toward reading for meaning. I do think boys can and should be able to analyze texts and glean relevent meaning from a story, any story, but I don’t think books should be used to do this. This is where I get a little radical and run my post a little off a side track, but this is the crux of it:

Apply all the lessons taught about subtext and metaphor and literary devices via movies and television shows.

Why? Because we already know they spend more time with visual media than they do books. Because we need them to see that these lessons exist in the world outside the classroom. And because they will be better able to apply those lessons to books if we don’t remove them from the category of pleasurable pursuits. You can take any contemporary television sitcom and use it to teach racial and gender-based stereotypes for example – and there’s a LOT of examples out there, many of them hit shows, a lot of them negative – then have them read any work of fiction and they’ll spot them without effort. It doesn’t work the other way around however. Kids who are whipsmart at spotting literary devices in books view their favorite TV shows as somehow being separate or above all that.

Anyway, if we want our boy readers to be able to sincerely reflect on what they read in books we might have to actually teach them how to reflect somewhere else besides books first.

The last part of Lipsyte’s quote is a loaded gun: what kinds of men they want to become. You ask any boy what character from literature they would most like to be like, and what are the odds you’ll get a character from a fantasy novel, a hero with superpowers? Not very realistic. On the spot I can only think of one good example, and I don’t know that I’ve ever heard of a boy wanting to be like Atticus Finch. I don’t know if I’ve ever heard of a guy (outside of fellow writers) who said they wanted to be like any male, author or character, connected with books. There are great men to emulate in the world, politicians and athletes and movie stars, but these are all men of action who give no appearance of having read any books.

So if we want to invite boys to reflect on the type of men they want to become, and we want them to do it through good, realistic fiction, nonfiction, and graphic novels – and there’s nothing in that restatement I find objectionable – then we need more books that allow this to take place. This isn’t an argument of pandering versus bootstrap feminism, it’s about saying, simply, let’s put out more books like this and give them time to find an audience.

Boys and reading are like a teen driver and his broke-down truck by the side of the road. You can either give them a lift to the next town and help them one step further along the road to reading, or you slow down long enough to smirk at their choice of vehicle before driving off and leaving them in the choking dust.

We can argue all we want, but there are boys all over the literary map who need lifts into town.

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building better boy books, part 11

The end is neigh!  Today, the last of the NONs, the final element in what boys are typically drawn to in their reading…

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Non the Fourth: Nonsense

Boys love nonsense. They love wordplay and the fun of saying things just to hear them out loud. They actually love language so much – as opposed to talking – I’m almost certain they love it over girls. As a result, when it’s not flowery, boys do love poetry.

I would implore you at this point to reconsider the meaning of the word nonsense, as “trifling or insignificant,” and how often seemingly trifling or insignificant details are key elements to mysteries requiring a solution. What is fiction if not a collection of seemingly insignificant details that come to hold so much more meaning as the narrative unfolds?  Boys love puzzles and problem-solving, and it is this recognition of something that is out of place or not making sense that draws them in. Detective and genre fiction excel at presenting information that appears on its face as either foolish or absurd only to have it become hugely significant.

To those who insist that nonsense is folly and frivolity I need only point to Exhibit A: Lewis Carroll.  His two Alice adventures contain more nonsense than anything by Dav Pilkey or Daniel Pinkwater, and they are treasured stories boys enjoy despite having a female main characters.  I’ll address gender in my summary, but the fact remains that what draws boys into this book is precisely the nonsense of it all, the wordsmithery, the punning and poetry and gamesmanship.  And if you’ve been following this series along you might have guessed a few other elements that boys have latched onto.

While Carroll’s works can be dismissed as an anomaly – a classic that has slipped through the cracks – I’d like to linger a bit on this particular story a little longer to examine its lack of sense and what it tells us about boy readers.

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson was a mathematician and logician (among other things) with a love of poetry and puzzles, often one contained within the other. All you have to do is take a look at the Alice in Wonderland of The Hunting of the Snark, both annotated by modern logician Martin Gardner, to learn just how deep Carroll’s nonsense really went. Riddles and puns are enjoined by acrostic and secret messages and work on whatever level the reader finds accessible. But even stripped of all this, the stories and words themselves have a style and tone that engages readers, they revel in portmanteau words (a term coined by Carroll) to explain the words he invented for Jabberwocky. Kids today memorize and enjoy Jabberwocky to this day, some voluntarily, and they do so because nonsense contains a very crucial element:

The joy of words.

A lot of modern education seems to beat a lot of joy out of childhood, mostly unintentionally, but I think losing the joy of words is part of what sends boys packing when it comes to reading. Because nonsense verse is viewed as a frivolity, once poetry units become formalized it becomes necessary to teach to the curriculum, which tends to mean teaching meaning and structure and form and content via serious poems. When we teach Kipling’s “If” or Poe’s “The Raven” we trade away some of the joy previously found in Edward Lear or Ogden Nash or even Shel Silverstein and Dr. Seuss because… well, that the nature of things. We take out time to set aside childish things very seriously, and in doing so send the message that those nonsense verses are lesser poems. Every time the message is sent that what is enjoyed is somehow inferior it shouldn’t be a surprise that interest drops.

And it isn’t just poetry. Captain Underpants and Flat Stanley are tolerated because they are intended for emerging readers, but as elementary school trudges on books become more serious, and by young adulthood humor is merely entertainment.

Until I began to think about these issues with boy readers I hadn’t considered how one teacher’s allowance for nonsense in the classroom might have saved me from becoming a nonreader. In fifth and sixth grade I was part of a multi-grade open classroom (ah, the 70s) and we reported to different teachers for different units. For my Language Arts unit Don Mack had weekly packets that began with dictation that contained spelling, vocabulary, and grammar. The week began with him reading something aloud and us kids copying it down, later to correct and identify errors and for use throughout the unit. Sometimes the dictation was nonfiction, sometimes a timely news event, but my memory was that half the time it was poetry. At least that’s what he called it. Lyrics to Simon and Garfunkel’s “Sound of Silence” came up against Allan Sherman’s “Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh” and Shel Silverstien’s “Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout.”

I can still remember the subversive joy of hearing my teacher read this nonsense and legitimizing it as classroom instruction. In doing so I suddenly felt more comfortable checking out The Complete Nonsense of Edward Lear from the library to the point of memorizing it. I became so familiar with the rhythms of the Limerick that I began writing my own. Three years later I was so comfortable with poetry that I was writing parodies of classic poems for class assignments (and to this day I wish I had my lost-homework epic “Turn It In” based on Kipling’s “Gunga Din”). The point being that without having that spirit of nonsense honored and nurtured I probably would have lost interest in the so-serious literature presented in school.

And lets not forget puns. Groan all you want, but boys love puns. They love the duplicity of meaning and the commradery of the in-joke. Malapropisms and neologisms also feed their daily conversations outside of class, where they suddenly feel freed to speak their minds, free of the confines of what is “proper.”

This I think is key: nonsense is a doorway to subversion of authority, a way boys establish, maintain, or reclaim their sense of worth. Certainly among peers, where a revelie of clever nonsense can garner certain standing among friends.  But also we so often look at boys as not being expressive enough, and then when they are we dismiss their nonsense as a lack of seriousness.  But I would argue that we’re ever to have boys express themselves seriously they may need to get the nonsense out of their system first; if it’s never given a proper airing I don’t think we should expect boys to be better at communication when their sole “practice” is limited to what is proper, polite, and serious.

In books, then, I would advocate for more nonsense. It doesn’t have to be complete and utter – it could be a single character that behaves nonsensically, or nonsense slang – but it should be a component to the story. Beyond humor, a touch of nonsense adds an unpredictable air to the story, provides the reader with a curve ball that catches them off guard. Give the reader context and let other characters (especially girls) react accordingly.

I promise you, boys will love it.  Let them revel in the joy of words.

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Which brings us to the end of the material I originally prepared for a lecture at the Vermont College of Fine Arts a few months back.  Almost.  I do have some stray bits I want to share next week as a sort of summary and clearinghouse for things that didn’t fit.  Also, if there were any lingering questions out there I’m opening up the floor.  Otherwise, until next week on Building Better Boy Books, if you missed previous installments they’re all collected in one mammoth page at the top under the tab called “@ boy books.”

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confluence

It’s in the air.

Everywhere I turn these days I keep stumbling into discussions about boys and books and reading and literacy.  Either this is one of those situations where the universe is suddenly focused a sharp light in one direction and everyone is looking, or I’m seeing what’s always been there with the eyes of the newly awakened.

Just yesterday I got the go-ahead on my lecture topic for my January residency.  As part of fulfilling my graduation requirements I need to give a 45 minute lecture on the topic of my choosing to my fellow students and faculty at Vermont College.  This has caused me no end of anxiety because while most people are willing, content, and even excited to craft lectures from their Critical Theses,  am not one of those people.  As much as I learned and can share about the topic of accuracy in picture book biographies, the thesis was a personal exploration for me, a way of picking apart the sub-genre in order to not only understand it but to one day, eventually, write a few of my own.  One day.

But then one of my classmates asked a pretty basic question and it hit me like a tonne of soggy peat: what are you passionate about?

Huh.

Before I entered the program, while I was still mulling over unformed ideas about children’s literature, I considered pursuing a radical idea I had about non-linear non-fiction.  It was founded on the idea that boys are naturally drawn to non-fiction and the idea of a recombined narrative that came from a snippet of and article in the New York Times explaining how one can read and re/mis/interpret the Koran.  Yeah, I know, a little out there.  But it really came down to boys and reading.

And since then everything seems to circle back around to boys and reading.  Whenever people asked what sort of books I wrote the answer would generally be middle grade and young adult.  After a while that wasn’t good enough.  At residency a couple July’s back Louise Hawes had us do an exercise where our adult selves had a conversation with our younger selves, and in that exercise I was torn between wanting to talk to the 11 year old me and the 17 year old me.

And that, it turned out, was my audience.

So now when people ask I’m just as likely to say I write middle grade and YA books for boys, because that is ultimately who I envision as my audience when I write.  But how does one write for a boy?  Are their types and tropes and plotlines specific to boys?  Is it all action and no feeling?  What exactly is a boy boy book, and what can we as writers do to retain and encourage boys to read and keep reading?

And thus my lecture topic was born.

Four months.  That’s the amount of time I have to work this thing out.  I am finding new information and resources every day, but if you have a particular piece of wisdom, insight, or research to share, please, or if you know a professional who could be of assistance – teacher, librarian, bookseller, scholar –by all means, get in touch.

Boys, boy books, and boy-friendly reading.  Boys.  We’re gonna represent come Jaunary.

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the quintessential boy book

I got asked “What’s a quintessential boy book?’ yesterday from someone.  Quintessential, meaning he perfect example, the pure embodiment of something or someone.  It’s almost like asking “Who invented jazz” because everyone has that point on the groove that they mark with a big letter A and it might not be where everyone else drops the needle.

But in attempting to untangle what I thought were the typical elements that made one book be a “boy” book as opposed to a “girl” book (and if we have “chick lit” for girls does that mean we have “dick lit” for boys?), and in searching for authors who I think cut close to the bone of what boys like to read, I finally had to conclude that it came down to one thing.

Every boy book is another attempt to rewrite The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry FInn. If I’m late to the party on this observation, please forgive me, and if you would be so kind as to cite some sources so that I may continue my education I’d be most grateful.

I went on (and oh how I can go on) that Harry Potter is another version of Twain’s adolescent trio (Tom, Huck and Becky = Harry, Ron and Hermione), and how boys prefer action to exposition, and how every book we tend to think of as being for boys pits its main character against a stream of events to which they must react.  That great divide in movie dates is the boy movie versus the girl movie, the movie where things happen versus the movie where people talk.  It isn’t that boys don’t like dialog, because they do, but what they don’t tend to like is dialog about emotions.  Thinking, logic, reasoning, facts, analysis… these are topics for discussion.

You know where there are a lot of these quintessential boy books?  In genre fiction.  Mysteries and Sci-fi and Westerns, all about heroes (and they can be female) who have to reason and puzzle their way through their environment.  This is what the boys do, they tear apart their world the same way they tear apart a toaster to see what’s inside, then put it all back together until it makes some sort of sense.  But then why do we place these books in the ghetto of a thematic genre instead if with what is otherwise known as Fiction and Literature, as the chains tend to break things out?  Is there really a difference in quality between these books?

Yes, but the difference is that the genre books are often better written than some of what gets shelved alongside what we consider classics.  Seriously, is there a reason Dutch Leonard can’t be on the same shelf as Harper Lee?  Is Philip Pullman somehow less of a literary artist than Mario Puzo that they must be kept segregated?  I know this is getting away from the boy book idea, but the fact is that a lot of what would appeal to a boy is often at odds with what society (marketing? the publishing world in general?) considers “good”

So then that’s it, the essence of all YA for boys boils down to some variation of Tom Sawyer and Huch Finn. Boy on an adventure, figuring out their world, battling bad guys and hunting treasue, spelunking and prankstering, all in that unique first person voice full of character but ultimately not saying anything too deep.

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emasculating boys at guys lit wire, and an essay

Looks like things are getting a little warm over at Guys Lit Wire with regards to a recent segment aired on CNN’s Glenn Beck show. First, if you haven’t checked it out, go there now and read through the post and the comments. There’s no way I can summarize what’s going on, but it’s a fairly interesting discussion that concerns the idea of boys’ books and the need to return to what one of my high school English teachers once referred to as books “in the Hemingway tradition of the rugged individual.”

Among he comments you will note I mentioned writing an essay this semester providently focusing on three books that featured boys in the roles of protector over female characters. It was a difficult essay for me at the time — written under a deadline and not as organized as I would have liked — which is my lame-o way of saying that I probably should have gone back and edited it before doing what I’m about to do.

I’m posting it here.

So, adding a distant aside to the din on protective boys in teen fiction, here is the essay I wrote a few months ago. Warts and all. And it’s long.  And I have some follow-up comments at the end.  If you make it.

To The Rescue:
Three Portraits of Boys Protecting Girls in Young Adult Fiction
c. 2008 David Elzey

For this essay I had intended to examine the voice of boys, and was determined at the very least to come to some understanding, some grounding in what “works” with some writers. After searching through my recent reading I settled on three books that presented three different boys whose voices were strong and, in their own ways, unique.

Eric Calhoune in Chris Crutcher’s Staying Fat For Sarah Byrnes presents us with a senior on a mission to save a fellow outcast who has lapsed into a catatonic state. Eric’s voice is has the bitter edge of the underdog, the fat kid who has learned how to channel his anger into subtle forms of revenge and self-deprecating humor. In Neal Shusterman’s Unwind we meet Conner Lassiter, a runaway boy put up for retroactive abortion by his parents at the age of seventeen. Conner’s is a voice in hormonal rage, a boy with a strong sense of justice but he’s too quick to anger when strategy would suffice. An it-could-happen future is the setting for the dead and the gone by Susan Beth Pfeffer, where a natural cataclysm forces Alex Morales to assume responsibility for his younger sisters. Alex’s voice is one bound by duty, tradition, and a strong undercurrent of faith; all other emotions are held at bay as survival becomes the driving force. All three boys are moved to act by external forces, all three challenged to question what they know, or were taught to believe, all three struggling to make the right decisions for those they care about.

Three boys struggling to make the right decisions for those they care about.

Until I’d made note of that fact I hadn’t realized how strong a link this was between these three books. For all three, the force that binds them and drives them is the desire to protect people they love, and all of those in need of protection are female. Is it possible that this desire to protect is something uniquely masculine, something boys struggle to acquire on their path towards discovering who they are as young men? Since strong female characters in literature are no longer considered rare or unusual, are contemporary boy characters still wrestling with the complex societal expectations of being the protectors of the weak? To varying degrees, the answer in these three recent Young Adult titles appears to be yes.

Pfeffer’s the dead and the gone is a parallel sequel to her previous book Life As We Knew It, taking place in the same months that follow when an asteroid knocks the moon from its orbit. The sequel is set in New York City where events are viewed from the perspective of seventeen year old Alex Morales. Alex’s father has just left for a funeral in Puerto Rico, his mother has reported for late duty at the hospital where she is a nurse, and his older brother Carlos is a Marine deployed to Texas. The initial effects of the moon’s orbital shift cause tidal waves and flooding that Alex will quickly learn have taken his parents.

In the initial hour of the blackout, before Alex completely understands how bad things are, he returns home from his after school job and immediately assumes assumes his role as the head of the family. His younger sisters, Bri and Julie, have already found a flashlight but he instructs them to use it to find the radio so they can learn about blackout. Failing that, his older sister Bri defers to Alex asking “Do you think everything is okay?” “I’m sure it is,” Alex said (5). Alex has already taken control of the situation and the parental role of the soother. Later, when his sisters wonder about their brother Carlos, and whether their parents are okay, Alex doesn’t hesitate to answer “We’re all fine. By Monday everything will be back in order” (11). In the initial moments of a calamity it is easy to hope for the best, but the full weight of responsibility is placed on him by Carlos when he gets a moment to call in before being deployed: “Look, Alex, you’re in charge now until Papi gets home. Mami’s going to be depending on you” (16). Alex’s sisters not only accept his leadership, they defer to him when they ask if they are safe. “Don’t worry. Everything will be all right. I promise” (17). Mighty big words, and responsibility, for a seventeen year old boy.

Alex is constantly reasserting his role, or being reminded of it by others: “Because I’m trying to protect you” (33); “Who died and made you boss?” (69 and 88); “It’s for the best, he told himself” (87); “I’m in charge… Until Papi comes home, and you’ll respect me like you respect him” (99-100); “I’m going to do what’s best for you… You’re my responsibility” (100); “…I have sisters to watch out for” (142); “Julie doesn’t talk about it, but you’re responsible for her now” (164); “…you’re thirteen years old and you can’t look out for yourself” (211). Though it isn’t stated outright, there is an undercurrent that Alex’s role as protector is cultural. A Puerto Rican boy going to a private Catholic high school would carry with him the traditions and expectations of both cultures. And the girls would likewise expect Alex’s protection as well.

Beyond his initial scrounging for food, securing their apartment, and making sure his sisters continue their schooling, Alex protects the girls in other ways. When he discovers that bodies of the reclaimed dead are on display he doesn’t tell the girls he has an appointment to make an identification because, if their mother wasn’t among the dead, “They could keep on hoping then, but he hadn’t figured out whether that was a good thing or not” (56). Later, when he has a chance to send his older sister Bri away to a convent farm in upstate New York, he not only makes the arrangements but doesn’t tell her until a few hours before the bus is to take her away (92-98). During a food riot Alex is forced to walk over other people and ignore a fallen infant in the street in order to protect Julie(128). And in two separate incidents Alex protects Julie from being assaulted on the streets (216), and from being traded in exchange for safe passage out of the city (225).

Alex’s stoicism is consistent throughout — “I can manage on my own, especially if I know Bri and Julie are safe” (230). Only after he is felled by flu (275) and loses Bri in a fatal elevator mishap (295) does Alex finally feel the full weight of what he has taken on. Early on he allowed himself a moment to grieve “when his sisters couldn’t see him” (40), and then nothing more until he is confessing to his priest about Bri’s death to relieve the guilt he felt so they could see “how inadequate he was” (303), for failing to protect her as he promised.

The severity of events, and the constant reinforcement of expectations, forced Alex to exist almost entirely as a protector. Bri, the older but weaker sister, and Julie, the stronger but naïve one, clearly would not have survived without Alex’s efforts. His every waking moment is driven toward finding ways to assure Bri and Julie’s survival. Alex’s position is never seriously challenged or questioned by his sisters, he doesn’t even question his role until the very end. The book’s message isn’t necessarily that in times of crisis all boys revert to a mere protector-of-the-weak authority figure, but for Alex, in this book, that’s all he’s allowed to be.

In another speculative future, Neal Shusterman give us an America following a second civil war fought between pro-life and pro-choice forces. The result of these “Homeland Wars” was an accord meant to appease both sides, a compromise that outlawed abortion on moral grounds but permitted parents to have children between the ages of thirteen and eighteen “unwound,” essentially allowed to be harvested for their body parts.

Into this world, teens who know they are scheduled for unwind many attempt to runaway, including Conner Lassiter, a boy with a temper and a strong sense of social justice. After a double escape from authorities, Conner finds himself on the run with two other unwinds – Risa, a ward of the state who has outlived her usefulness, and Lev, a boy whose unwinding is part of his family’s religious tithing. Shusterman tells the story from multiple perspectives with each of these main characters telling their stories as they cross and join paths.

Risa isn’t initially in need of saving, as Connor himself notes that kids from state homes “have to learn to take care of themselves real young, or their lives are not very pleasant” (46). It’s Risa who actually takes care of Connor and Lev when they are first on the run by suggesting they change their clothes and identities (45), then schemes to make it happen (55). What changes their relationship is when, in a moment of combined weakness and rage, Conner saves an unwanted infant from being “storked,” the term for an infant dumped anonymously on a doorstep (62). It’s a foolish move for kids on the run to slow themselves down with an infant, but it provides them with the unexpected benefit of looking like a young family. Later, as Risa assumes duties as a surrogate mother, they discover the baby is a girl, becoming the first girl Conner saves (66).

Posing as a young family brings out the first glimpse of Conner’s concern toward Risa. “You okay about the baby?” Conner asks after it has been taken up for adoption (116). And when they begin the first leg of their journey in an underground railroad for runaways he puts his arm around her. “I’m cold too,” he says. “Body heat, right?” and she doesn’t rebuff his advance (117). As Conner’s concerns toward Risa blossom her hardness towards him softens, and the stage is set for him to protect her.

Warehoused in an airport hangar, where the runaways await the final trip toward a sanctuary called The Graveyard, Risa and Conner become aware of the manipulative behavior of Roland, a hulking military reject who see Connor as a threat to his perceived role as leader (146). It takes some convincing but Risa helps Conner see “A kid like Roland doesn’t want to fight you, he wants to kill you” (147). Cornering Risa in order to assault her is Roland’s ploy to draw Conner into a fight, playing on the idea that Conner would naturally come to her rescue. Using reverse psychology Conner not only avoids the fight but saves Risa as well (151). “(E)ven with all his troubles, she sees Conner as a hero” (152). What began as a shared interest in preservation has backed Conner into the masculine position of defending Risa against an almost biological predatory male encroachment battle. It’s a cold world that has a variety of names for dealing with children as objects but no mention of the emotion love. It’s no wonder unwanted teens like Risa and Conner can’t recognize their mutual attraction toward one another, but equally odd that they naturally revert to traditional gender roles.

At The Graveyard, Risa, Conner, and Roland are separated into job camps, though they occasionally have contact with one another. The roles they assume follow traditional gender lines. While Roland is amassing an army of followers to overtake the operation (soldier), and Risa is busy becoming a medic (nurse), Conner finds himself becoming the eyes and ears of The Graveyard’s leader, a man known as The Admiral (leader/politician). Conner passes along his suspicions about Roland (222) but lacking proof The Admiral cannot take action. Preparing to confront Roland himself, Conner cryptically warns Risa to avoid The Admiral to avoid becoming a target if his interrogation of Roland goes awry (233). Then he leans in and kisses her “in case something happens and I don’t see you again,” and she returns the kiss “…in case I do see you again” (234).

Their romance solidified, Conner is still unable to protect her when Roland manages to turn all three of them into the authorities. The police promise to have them all unwound for events surrounding Conner’s original escape, but Conner insists Risa “had nothing to do with it! Let her go!” (261). Shipped off to a body harvesting center Conner is received as a hero among other kids who have tried to escape, a legendary figure among fellow unwinds, one who might be their savior. Reflecting on his short life Conner considers how “The whole day weighs heavily on him – the way the kids think he can somehow save them, when he knows he can’t even save himself…. His one joy is knowing that Risa is safe, at least for now” (276).

A terrorist group, that includes Lev who has become hardened by his experiences on the run, sets off an explosion at the facility that knocks Conner unconscious and sends Risa to the hospital (309). Emerging from a two-week coma Conner’s first thoughts are of Risa (317). In an odd twist, it was Lev who pulled Risa from the wreckage and saved her life. Once they recuperate, Conner and Risa return to The Graveyard where Conner assumes operation of the facility following the Admiral’s departure: Conner can finally channel his outrage against the system to protect and save as many unwinds as he can (332).

Conner has grown slowly into his role as protector, first out of a general concern borne of circumstance, then out of affection, finally with a sense of purpose. Risa doesn’t start out needing to be saved, but as Conner’s natural leadership becomes apparent she begins to trust him enough to allow herself to be protected. Protecting Risa is a very delicate dance, one that comes with her permission, but it is genuinely appreciated in the end.

From its title one might assume that Eric Calhoune deliberate attempt at Staying Fat For Sarah Byrnes would constitute the oddest form of protection. While Eric does, indeed, spend a year trying to keep his weight up to prove to his best friend that he hasn’t changed (7), it isn’t until his friend Sarah disappears into a catatonic trance that he is moved to confront and protect her from the secret that has driven her to this state (138). The women surrounding Eric are not weak; his single mother is a respected newspaper writer who won’t stand for anyone manipulating her (164); his swim coach, Cynthia Lemry, runs a controversial class called Contemporary American Thought and has no qualms threatening administration from interfering with her instruction (213); and Sarah herself, badly disfigured by a burn incident when she was three, is easily the toughest character of all three books combined. That Eric must ignore Sarah’s direct instructions in order to protect her only proves that his desire to save her is stronger than any loyalty. “…I was her only friend. I’d rather have her hate my guts and be safe than love me and be alone” (180-1)

Sarah Byrnes is in a mental facility in a catatonic state, unable (or unwilling) to communicate with the outside world. The historical friendship between Eric and Sarah is seemingly uncomplicated as he initially presents his concerns to Lemry: “She’s my best friend and she’s dying. We became friends when I was as fat as she is ugly, and I promised her a long time ago that I would never turn away from her” (23). Unsure what put Sarah in the hospital, Eric is nonetheless determined to do anything he can to keep her from dying, to save her. This is tricky, as Sarah once made it clear to Eric that she considers outside help a weakness, especially help from adults (58). That Sarah will stand up to Dale Thornton, the school bully, and repeatedly take his physical abuse on principle is her object lesson to Eric in this matter (25-26) .

In junior high Dale accuses Sarah of lying when she claims her face was burned when a pot of spaghetti was spilled on her. In defending her against Dale, Eric initially misses a telling detail when he notes the rage these comments elicit (91). Sarah has never previously let anything people say about her looks have any effect on her. Sarah certainly doesn’t need Eric’s protection, or his defense, but in her anger and her inability to deny the accusation she opens a door for Eric to find a way to repay her unflagging friendship. As Eric begins to accept what is the truth – that her father inflicted Sarah’s burns – he becomes emboldened to action (99-102).

In order to save Sarah, Eric not only has to lull her into speaking to him in the hospital (138), and get her to confirm that her father is the one who burned her when she was young (142), he has to find a way to get Sarah safely away from her father (198). This proves difficult as Sarah’s father has threatened to kill Eric for his meddling (224). With the aid of his friend Steve, and through Lemry’s intervention, Eric is able to keep Sarah safe (201-204). But in a twist that echos Shusterman’s Unwind, it is another male character, the man Eric’s mom is dating, who subdues Sarah’s father and protects them all (284). Realistically, this makes sense because it would have been absurd to think a teenage boy could have taken on the homicidal maniac that is Sarah’s father, but to the extent that he could Eric did everything within his power to safeguard his best friend from harm.

Sarah isn’t the only girl Eric protects. For years he’s been mooning over Jody Muller, girlfriend of one of his swimming rivals Mark Brittain (78). When Mark and Jody move to drop Lemry’s class on moral grounds – Brittain is a holier-than-thou fundamentalist – Eric casually offers Jody liberation in the form a whispered joke: “If you ever want a boyfriend who encourages freedom of expression… dial 1-800-FAT-BOY” (104). The joke’s on Eric when Jody not only takes him up on the offer, but confesses that her unsupportive boyfriend got her pregnant in the past, forced her to have an abortion, and then denied it ever happened (147-153). It isn’t clear at first whether Jody is merely trying to deliberately hurt her former boyfriend by seeing Eric, but in the end Jody and Eric remain together. The simple promise of support is all it took to make Jody feel safe and protected enough to walk away from a bad relationship .

Though Staying Fat For Sarah Byrnes is the most realistic story of the three it follows the least conventional path of boys protecting girls. Eric’s evolution from wimpy fat kid to protector of women comes from his friendship with Sarah, the toughest person in the story who cannot see how best to save herself. In the cold-hearted future of Unwind the awakening of Conner’s protective nature matures when he is able to replace the rage he feels toward the world with his affection toward Risa. Having been a ward of the state, Risa is willing to relinquish her defensive stance and allow herself to be cared about, if not completely cared for. And in the cataclysmic landscape of the dead and the gone Alex has no other choice but to become the protectorate of his younger sisters. Through duty, family honor, and religious acculturation, Alex has little choice but to dedicate himself to making sure his family remains safe and alive to the extent that he can.

For two of these stories the boys in question – Conner and Eric – do not set out to protect girls who are clearly not weak, and in fact the boys have to work hard to gain enough of the girl’s trust in order to protect them. For Alex, his single-minded determination reads almost like a character flaw, an immaturity and weakness that prevents him from seeing little beyond his sense of preservation. Alex’s story almost becomes a game of trying to guess how and when he’s going to fail in his duties; for Conner and Eric it’s a only a question of how they will succeed.

In looking at the voice of boys what became clear in these books was a strong undercurrent of characters driven to protect the girls they cared about. Their voices, their thoughts and actions, are driven by a something that seems less like character and more biological in origin. Whether culturally influenced, bound by loyalty, or vaulted by circumstance, the boys in these books are pressed into service as heroes to the rescue.

Works Cited
Crutcher, Chris. Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes. New York: HarperTeen, 2003.

Pfeffer, Susan Beth. the dead and the gone. New York: Harcourt Children’s Books, 2008.

Shusterman, Neal. Unwind. New York: Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing, 2007.

If you have read this far, I salute you, you rock. If you feel that in my essay I managed to leave out my opinions in the matter then you will have noticed the fundamental problem at the heart of what still bothers me about it.

Where I fail to draw a conclusion about the meaning or importance of this particular phenomena of (over)protective boys let me say that a very large part of me hates this portrayal of boys as saviors I can totally see where some boys might enjoy this. The idea of saving someone you love or are in love with may be the closest boys get to the kind of stuff that appears in traditional romance novels. We don’t expect that women who read romance novels expect to be whisked of their feet by some ripped Scotsman on a horse; likewise, boy readers might night see these male protagonists rescuers as anything more than a fantasy image.

But the question remains: has our culture really emasculated boys, and can it be corrected through reading, or have we finally pried the pendulum from the patriarchal extreme and brought it closer to center where it belongs? If books really had as much power as Glenn Beck and his ilk believe to alter an entire gender, then what’s his excuse?

Oh yeah, he probably didn’t read much as a boy. That would explain a lot of his inanities.

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feeling slightly defensive

So about a week ago when I couldn’t sleep I was trolling the internet and found this site called LibriVox. It’s a site where people volunteer to read whole books or chapters from public domain titles which then free to download.  This hit me at the right time because the summer is when I traditionally start to think about picking up some classics to read.  I’d say that was all about conditioning – you know, assigned summer reading for the next school year – except that back in the dinosaur days when I went to school there was no such thing as assigned summer reading.

I happen to think that’s a good thing.  I dare you to ask me how I feel about homework. (One hint: What is the antonym for ‘useful’?)

Anyway, I got all excited looking over the list because I was thinking here’s another great idea for teen guys.  You’ve got some classics you want to get out of the way, and you can do it while getting to and from a summer job, or while you’re in the workshop tinkering with a vibrobot or whatever. And there’s even the opportunity to participate in the project.  I’m thinking, dang, if I had portable audio when I was a teen maybe I’d have “read” a lot more classics because sometimes those books are easier to hear than to read, especially since I was more a kinesthetic learner and could have been doing things at the same time.

So I blogged it at Guys Lit Wire.

I’m not going to make any excuses, except that at the time I was writing to post about LibriVox it was late and I was tired and I half wondered if I’d done a crappy job of it.  No, I finally decided, and hit ‘publish’.

Yeah, well, getting clever with the title I sort of forgot one of my own rules: never use a title that can be used against you by critics.  By saying Classics.  Audio.  Free. I felt like I was playing up an old advertisers trick of creating interest and then hitting with the most powerful word in the world of selling.  Then yesterday I checked the site to see how it looked and saw there was a comment. And this guy responded with

How about “Gripping. Audio. Free.” Instead of “the classics,” how about some contemporary books produced with great zest?

You know, I kinda take offense at the idea classics are somehow less gripping.  There’s this notion out there that classics are always boring, or of no interest to teen boys, and that’s just not any more true than saying all boys like sports. While we’re at it why don’t we just give in and say “boys don’t read, so why bother trying to ferret out what they like?”

That’s when I realized that I didn’t really “sell” the post the way I should have. I did do a crappy job because I left wiggle room for that traditional bias against classics.

I’m not against the new, far from it.  And I’m grateful for Mr. Cottonwood‘s pointer to newer works on audio for teens. But I learned not to take my blogging so casually in the future.  I’m not doing any justice to the blog or the issue by letting my personal exuberance get in the way of clear writing.

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Guys Lit Wire goes live!

Or is it hot when a wire has juice running through it? Anyway…

I don’t think it’s been any secret that a number of kidlit bloggers have been working behind the scenes for some time now (has it been six months?) getting ready to launch Guys Lit Wire. There’s a good chance that if you’re reading this announcement you’re either one of the many people involved or this is going to be, like, the fifty-first post about this. Nonetheless, today is launch day, the blog is officially open!

Guys Lit Wire!

The whole thing came about some time late last year, I believe, in the comments section over at Sara’s blog Read Write Believe. A bunch of us kidlit blogger types were hashing out ideas and fantasies about teen boys and books and ideal environments and then – WHAM! – the next thing you know there’s nearly two dozen bloggers scheduled to post reviews and interviews and whatnot every weekday for the rest of 2008!

Okay, so it wasn’t all like spontaneous combustion, it was the hard work of many people but primarily Colleen at Chasing Ray and Sarah at Finding Wonderland who did the heavy lifting. But the rest of us are in there, making lists and posting posts, talking amongst ourselves to make this the best dang thing of its kind. It’s serious, folks, we’re a dedicated bunch. Check out that contributors list!

And I say “we” because I am proud to be participating in the enterprise. Once a month I’m scheduled to share some of what I consider to be good stuff for teen boys, my first post will come a week from Wednesday on June 9th. What will my inaugural post be about? Well, you’ll just have to check it out then.

(hint: think NYC and dystopia)

No need to mark your calendar — you’ll be a regular to the site by then anyway, right? — but just in case I’ll be cross-posting with linkage so you can jump around and get lost in all that GLW goodness! Trust me, there are plenty of great people involved in this thing Head on over and read the contributors bios and you’ll see what I mean.

Right tasty!

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the social experiment

Let’s say I was in a position to run a social experiment that involved two groups of boys ages 14 to 16. The experiment would run for five consecutive days. Each of the boys would be placed in a comfortable room that contained an overstuffed chair, a nap-worthy couch, a bean bag chair, the ability to play whatever music they desired, and access to whatever type of food they wanted when they wanted it. They would be able to request the room be painted the color of their choosing, lighting would be plentiful and adjustable.

The room would also have a large work table that contained four milk crates: one filled with age-appropriate fiction titles, one filled with non-fiction titles on a variety of subjects, one crate filled with broken small appliances and electronics (toaster, cell phone, hand blender, &c.), and one crate filled with hand tools, hardware, glue and a soldering iron. There is also a spiral-bound notebook and a selection of pens, pencils and markers, a ruler and a pair of scissors.
There are no outside phones, cell service or access, televisions, or video games. There are no clocks on the wall and no watches allowed.

The boys have to check into their room for eight consecutive hours each day, their choice of time, and they are not allowed to bring anything but themselves into the room. One half of the boys are given the following instructions:

“We are doing a study on the perception of time in teens in a time-free environment. You are to spend eight hours a day in the room doing as you please. What you do is not our concern, you won’t be monitored. You may elect to keep a journal of your experience in the room or participate in a short discussion with our staff afterward.”

The other half of the boys are given the following instructions:

“We are doing a study on the perception of time in teens in a time-free environment. You are to spend eight hours a day in the room doing as you please. What you do is not our concern, though you will be monitored. Afterward you will be asked to participate in a short survey of your activities and a discussion with our staff.”

Of course both groups will be monitored, and for the study they will be asked some nominal questions concerning their perception of time, but that’s not the question put forth by the environment and the expectation. The question is, How many of those books will be read, which ones, and what percentage of their time will be dedicated to reading?

My amateur hypothesis is that the group of boys told they won’t be monitored, who are allowed the “out” of a journal or a discussion on their experience, are not going to read as much as the other group. The other group, knowing they will be watched and hearing the word “survey” will no doubt feel the need to read — or make a greater attempt — due to an expectation to have to justify their time.

In other words, how many boys see reading as an obligation to expectant adults?

There would be any number of curiosities that might come from the data collected. How many of the boys, for example, will keep a journal while others use the notebook for drawing or calculating information? Do the boys turn to reading out of boredom with whatever else they do to occupy their time? If they are also told that they can take home with them anything from the room after they have finished the study, what do they take?

I thought about this randomly walk taking a walk last night. How it got into my head, I don’t know. I was wondering partly what I would do in that situation, what I would choose. Would I feel free enough to start taking apart things and building something or would I have gone for the books? If given the choice I think I’d have preferred the more daunting debriefing rather than share a journal, which I know I would have kept. If I did read, and the non-fiction titles were the sort I grew up with — dry blocks of text, murky color printing, dull topics — then I doubt I would have touched them. If, however, among those books there were magazines like Make or some old Popular Mechanics, or perhaps some how-to books on film-making and photography, I might have found some inspiration to read a bit of non-fiction.

With all the data compiled I wouldn’t be surprised to find that the boys spent as much time reading and exploring with the junk as they did eating and napping on the couch. Eat, sleep, read, tinker. If these turned out to be the four-part cycle of a teen boy’s daily life then I wouldn’t mind seeing the integration of more tinkering into formal education, supported with reading that matched.

Schools used to include shop classes, or “the manual arts” as they were called in my junior and senior high school, classes that included architectural drawing, print shop, wood shop, metal shop, electric shop and, in high school, auto shop (and, yes, for the girls this meant typing, “business skills” (secretarial stenography), home ec and, in some places, practical nursing). There was a time when we felt that the mission of a school was to prepare emerging young adults for a world beyond school, and that didn’t necessarily guarantee or require a move toward college. Preparing a blue collar worker was just as important as preparing a white collar, the challenge to create a literate mechanic equal to giving a scholar the appreciation of a craftsman. If you want to know half of what’s wrong with American business you needn’t look any farther than the “back to basics” movement of the Reagan era.

My point isn’t political, at least not intentionally. My point is that we used to honor and acknowledge that part of an education included organized forms of tinkering. We used to send the message to all kids, boys and girls, that reading and history are important, but so is physical activity and learning how to properly use hand tools. I think we do many boys a disservice by not giving them the room to muck about and learn how to explore the world of physical things. By marginalizing their non-reading activities to be outside of the school environment we send the message that these things are less valid, less important, and as a consequence make boys feel less enthused with their education by telling them perhaps half of what they find interesting isn’t worth exploring.

The most radical thing we could do with regards to teen boys is let them regain their balance between reading and exploring. One without the other kills the love of both.

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