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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& that goes for the both of me

well, the month of july began with a holiday, a rush to get the kids off for the summer, my residency for school, and then a relocation to a (much) larger home just a few blocks away from the place we’d been sequestered to for the last four years.

a lot has happened, and there’s no real way to address it all at once, so it’s just going to come as it bubble back up to the surface.

during the residency louise hawes had us do an exercise during her lecture (you’ll forgive me for not expounding on the lecture, the notebook is still in a box somewhere in the office) where we imagined a number.  not any old number like a conjurer’s trick, but the age of ourselves back at a specific point in time where we can go back and assure our younger selves that everything will be alright.

now before i go any further, just to show how perverse the universe is, when i came home i was catching up on some reading and i realized i hadn’t finished reading a new twilight zone graphic novel coming out this fall that i hope to co-review (sort of) with little willow over at guys lit wire. but the point of the tz story was a man goes back in time to his younger self to tell him that these are the best days of his life, that as an adult he can see that.  but his father (!) ends up telling him (in all his fatherly wisdom) that you can’t tell your younger self things like that, it’s something you have to learn.  well, duh.

but for the purpose of louise’s exercise we’re all picking numbers and i first write sixteen then cross it out and write eleven.  we spend a few minutes writing to ourselves and i find telling my eleven year old self things is sort of silly.  i mean, i don’t want to scare him that in five years the family goes through some major upheavals, and that school and whatnot are going to get a little crazy and that he’ll finally have a real girlfriend and…

five years.  eleven plus five is sixteen.  and then it hits me that all the stories i want to write feature protagonists or are aimed at kids, mostly boys, either eleven or sixteen-ish.  and the stories i want to tell for each are appropriate to the sort of things i would tell my younger selves, both of them.  i’d be telling the eleven year old me to keep having fun and not be afraid to do all the things i think about, and i’d be telling the sixteen year old that, yes, it’s all crazy, and then i’d lay out a scary fake future to make me do things differently and change the fabric of the universe.

but, whoa.  louise sprinkled some pixie dust and all of a sudden it’s as clear as day who i’m writing to and why.

i’ve always known i was writing for myself, and not just the “for the pleasure of it” writing for myself but the actual writing to the younger me.  or the both of me.  i’m not writing period (because, honestly, the 70’s have been made cliche) but it doesn’t matter because the issues i’m dealing with are pretty much unchanged.  boys behaving like boys and learning their lessons the hardest way possible, because they can be stubborn and have some pretty confused priorities.  that’s basically the difference between boys and girls, everything else is just detail.

so the settling in will still take some time, but the boxes are in the right place and slowly each is getting opened and finding a new home within a new home.  the writing is happened apace, each page like a box being opened, words finding their homes, a story settling in to become a new version of an old me in a new location.

and it feels good to be back at the keyboard.

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