Blog Archive: July 2009

You may remember the Create Your Debut Album meme that made its way around Facebook a few months back, or the Create Your Debut Fantasy Cover meme that followed. Well, now Travis at 100 Scope Notes has created a new challenge: Create Your Debut YA Cover. Here's mine:

BLURB:
In a dystopian future in which "surplus" children are recruited as soldiers in an endless war (if they're lucky) or harvested for their organs (if they're not), third child Tal dreams of freedom. Following the gratuitously violent assassination of the Surplus Liberation Movement's leaders, Tal takes the movement underground—literally—only to discover an arsenal of ridiculously powerful nuclear weaponry in a conveniently abandoned subway tunnel. Aided by his comrades, beautiful yet preternaturally clever Wanda and ham-fisted yet sensitive Aloysius, Tal devises a plan to overthrow the government—though he just might blow Planet Earth to smithereens in the process. Can Tal save humanity without losing his own? On which side of the crumbling subway arch do the answers lie: on the surface or underground?
 

CREATE YOUR DEBUT YA COVER

1 – Go to “Fake Name Generator” or click http://www.fakenamegenerator.com/

The name that appears is your author name.

2 – Go to “Random Word Generator” or click http://www.websitestyle.com/parser/randomword.shtml

The word listed under “Random Verb” is your title.

3 – Go to “FlickrCC” or click http://flickrcc.bluemountains.net/index.php

Type your title into the search box. The first photo that contains a person is your cover.

4 – Use Photoshop, Picnik, or similar to put it all together. Be sure to crop and/or zoom in.

5 – Post it to your site along with this text.

Travis is collecting reader's contributions and has posted a gallery here. Oh man, they are wonderful. Some are hilariously awful, and some look like they could be on the shelves at the bookstore right now. Definitely work checking out!

If the name Munro Leaf rings a bell to you, it's probably thanks to that charming classic he penned and Robert Lawson illustrated: The Story of Ferdinand, about a bull who would rather sit and smell the flowers than fight in the ring. Apparently the book, first published in 1936, was banned in several countries for its pacifist, apparently lefty ways. Although it won no awards that I know of, it's inspired political change and works of art and remains a favorite more than 70 years later.

So, in a weeding discovery even more amazing than Isaac Asimov's little-known fascination with vitamins, I was shocked and awed to find this lesser known but still... um... great?... book not only written, but also illustrated, by Munro Leaf: Safety Can Be Fun, first published by Lippincott in 1936. This revised and expanded edition (in its sixth printing!) was published in 1961.

Were you wondering how safety could, possibly, be fun? Let me entice you with a few samples. From the introduction:

And now, a few of my favorite Nit-Wits. I dare you not to fall in love.

Amazing what a little spot color can do.

That's right. "When it eats and drinks the pills, powders, lighter fluid, soaps and medicine it has piled up for a party—it is going to be badly poisoned. Too bad!"

No, your eyes do not deceive you. "Then it played with knives, razors, scissors and an axe until it had cut off the end of its necktie, chopped its shoe and taken a nick out of its ear. So they had to tie its hands up."

And, yes, then there's the baby holding a stick of dynamite and pointing a rifle at its face. "So it will be a race to see which blows him out first."

So it goes, for 63 pages!

Okay. Let's just pause a minute and remember that this is the guy who wrote that sweet little story about a flower-sniffing bull calf—a story that has stood the test of time.

Something tells me that today's parents, even (and perhaps especially) those reading Ferdinand to their little tykes, are not going to dig Safety Can Be Fun.

Munro Leaf had a whole series of "Can Be Fun" books on everything from manners to grammar to geography. He also wrote a book called How to Behave and Why which, unfortunately, my library does not own. I'm not sure whether all these books took the "Nit-Wit" angle or not.

I've been feeling torn about whether to keep the book in our collection. It's such a perverse little gem. But you can see from the images that it's in pretty grody condition. And then there's the whole babies-eating-poison-and-holding-guns things. Oh, how times change. It may be time to say goodbye.

But you know that "Lippincott Life Binding" advertised on the cover? It's no lie. These pages may be yellowed, torn, and covered with gook, but they're firmly attached to the spine!

At Chasing Ray, Colleen has a fascinating post (and subsequent discussion in the comments) about writing diversity. She invited a number of YA/children's authors of varying cultural groups to share their views on writing the Other. Should it be done? Under what circumstances? It's a long but worthwhile read for the diverse stances and insights—diverse enough that I will not attempt to summarize them here. Check it out for yourself.

This particular comment from Doret of The Happy Nappy Bookseller particularly grabbed me:

It's not enough for an author to put African American or Black in front of the characters name. I need more. And I am sorry I can't tell you what it is, because there is no write by numbers create a Black characters guide because we are not all the same. But still I expect a White writers to make me believe in the Black characters they've created. If I don't I consider those characters Barbie Black. Under all the color of Black Barbie, she still has the facial characteristics of White Barbie.

It's an interesting and fuzzy question, this issue of getting the Other "right." In our society, we are so very fond of boxes in which to put people. On some dimensions, I'm in the privileged box (Anglo-Saxon Protestant heritage), in others the oppressed (female, queer). As a WASP reader, I readily admit that I don't know when authors (of whatever ethnic group) get a non-WASP experience "wrong." As a WASP writer, how could I expect not to get it "wrong" myself?

Because I know what Doret means. As a female reader, I have read books by men with female protagonists that just don't feel "right." Sometimes I can articulate the reasons, sometimes I can't. For example, I recently read Magic and Misery, by Peter Mareno, whose narrator is a teen girl. She quickly enters into a sexual relationship with her boyfriend, but there's virtually no discussion of emotional impact. It's just something she does. How can she not be thinking about this? I kept asking myself—really asking, How could any girl not be thinking about this? Meanwhile, I never could articulate what felt "wrong" about the female protagonist of Edward Bloor's Taken, except that she struck me as sounding too much like the male protagonists of Tangerine and London Calling.

Likewise, as a queer reader, I've read queer teen fiction by apparently straight authors that doesn't feel "right." There's one book in particular whose reliance on stereotypes, even jokingly, made me cringe upon reading it: The Bermudez Triangle, by Maureen Johnson. I hesitate to mention it because it was written by a bestselling author, and I think that kind of exposure is so important in normalizing queerness for teen readers. And it wasn't a bad book; it just struck me as inauthentic. It left me wondering, Why are we getting this when we could have more books by authors who have actually lived a queer experience?

(I would like to throw in here that Ellen Wittlinger is one apparently straight author who, for my money, consistently gets it "right." I don't know how she does it, but she's proof that it can be done!)

This is where it gets dicey, however. Unlike ethnicity or cultural heritage, ability differences, or even biological sex (intersex, genderqueer, and transgender persons being potential exceptions), sexual orientation is fluid and frequently invisible. That's why I used the word "apparently" above. I know Maureen Johnson isn't Chinese-American. I know she's not deaf. I'm pretty sure she's not Muslim. But how am I to know that she isn't actually bisexual? Maybe, because she's apparently straight, I'm wrongly projecting my assumption of Otherness onto The Bermudez Triangle and, as a result, sensing inauthenticity.

How do you define authenticity, anyway? It's as nebulous as Doret says in the same comment: "I can't explain was right is, like the always popluar adult industry, I just know it when I see it." Yet we agree that there's no one "white experience" or "black experience" or "female experience." I know darn well my experiences as a queer woman aren't universal, so is it possible that a story and characters I find inauthentic would ring perfectly true to another queer woman? Honestly, I do think it's possible. I am, at the very least, willing to entertain the idea that it is possible.

I have far too many thoughts and questions about this stuff to squash into one humble blog post, but I'd like to conclude with this: both readers and writers need to understand that "writing the Other" is not a balanced, two-way street. We are all immersed in the dominant culture(s) of our time and place. In America right now, that means European-American, Christian, male, straight, able-bodied, affluent... It's far easier for a member of an oppressed group to write a story of privileged characters than vice versa. It's easier for women to write authentic boy characters than men to write authentic girl characters, for non-whites to write white characters than vice versa, for queer authors to write straight characters, and so on, and so forth.

Does that mean I don't think privileged (in whatever way) authors should "write the Other"? No. But I do think that we need to recognize that privilege blinds us. You can't know what you don't know. I believe it's essential that books be vetted by individuals of the oppressed group represented—preferably multiple individuals, whose diverse experiences can help authors identify inauthenticity and stereotyping that privileged readers would not recognize.

ETA, 7/15/09:
On Facebook, someone commented on this post, "I wish you would rethink your use of the 'The Other' to describe people who are not of the dominant culture." Just in case there's any further confusion, I'll clarify: in this post, I'm not using "Other" to describe people of the nondominant culture; I'm using it to describe any Other -- anyone who is of a group one does not belong to. As I try to explain at the end of my post, it's easier to write the Other when the Other *is* the dominant culture, because we're all immersed in it, whereas it's more difficult to write the Other when the Other is an oppressed group whose challenges we have not experienced. But while I'm focusing on the latter (because that's when authors are more likely to get things "wrong"), I'm not saying some people are Other and some aren't. We're all Other to each other on many dimensions.

At this point, I've been to enough professional conferences to have a preferred method of navigating the exhibition hall. As I mentioned in my last post, I find exhibition halls as bad as shopping malls. And considering how much I hate shopping malls (there is no faster way for me to get blood-shot eyes and a headache than to step into one), that says a lot.

So, this year I made some commandments for myself:

1. Thou shalt not pick up any more tote bags, even if they are free. Instead, I carried my usual shoulder bag with a pocket-size (when stuffed) reusable bag for overflow.*
2. Thou shalt not pick up any cheap schwag. No keychains, no pencils, nada. Don't need it, don't want to carry it.
3. Thou shalt not swipe thy exhibit card, even if it will enter thou into a really cool raffle. More likely it will only get you promotional emails and snail mail for the rest of your life.
4. Thou shalt peruse only the publisher side of the hall. I don't make decisions about automation software or carpeting for my library, so why should I spend time looking at it on the trade floor?
5. Thou shalt not pick up any publisher catalogs. This is because my library orders trade originals almost exclusively based on journal reviews. Catalogs would be useful for ordering paperback reprints, but I'd personally be better off with a brief list of what's coming out this fall/winter.
6. If thou cravest ARCs, thou shalt ask publishers if any ARCs are available, even if they are not lying in plain sight. Especially as the conference draws to a close, many publishers have just a few remaining ARCs hiding under their tables. You won't know they're available unless you ask.
7. However, thou shalt only pick up ARCs that look like things thou wouldst want to read personally.
8. Thou shalt not stand in line for a signed copy unless thou really feels like it at that moment in time, no matter how cool the author is.

It worked pretty well. I didn't end up with more than I could carry. I didn't end up with anything I didn't want. And yet I still ended up with a goodly stack of goodies to read and, I hope, enjoy.

• ARC of The Monster Variations, by Daniel Kraus (Delacorte, August 2009). I'm very excited about this one, not only because Dan is a friend of mine but also because I heard him read a chapter at the conference. It is beautifully written, and I have the feeling people are going to be talking about it.
• Signed ARC of Ash, by Malinda Lo (Little, Brown, September 2009). Ash has been getting a fair amount of buzz and is pitched as a lesbian retelling of Cinderella.
• ARC of Solace of the Road, by Siobhan Dowd (Random House, October 2009). I have to imagine everyone who has read Siobhan Dowd's previous books (among them The London Eye Mystery and Bog Child) is heartbroken that she won't be writing wonderful books for the rest of our lives. Fortunately, here's at least one more.
• ARCs of Taken, by Norah McClintock (Orca, October 2009), Running on the Cracks, by Julia Donaldson (Henry Holt, September 2009), and David Inside Out, by Lee Bantle (Henry Holt, May 2009).
• Signed copy of Leaving Paradise, by Simone Elkeles (Flux, 2007), with the snazzy new cover. This was a gift from Flux; thank you!
• Signed copy of The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks, by E. Lockhart (Hyperion, 2008), which was one of my favorite books of 2008.
• Copies of Inferno, by Robin Stevenson (Orca, 2009), and Gravity, by Leanne Lieberman (Orca, 2008). Is it just me, or does Orca manage to publish more lesbian teen fiction than all US publishers combined?
• Copy of Frequently Asked Questions: An Unshelved Collection, by Bill Barnes and Gene Ambaum (2008). I bought a cute "read to me" Unshelved T-shirt, too! I was able to meet Bill—nice guy!

Now I just need some time to read all these books... but that's nothing new!
 

*My small reusable bag is something like this, but I got it at Whole Foods for about $3. I carry it in my shoulder bag. When unstuffed, it's about the size of a plastic grocery bag. In the two weeks since I bought it, I've used it at least half a dozen times. Highly recommended!

10. There are no clocks in McCormick Place. Anywhere. In a convention center where people are expected to hike, like, two miles to get from session to session, you'd think there would be a clock somewhere. But you'd be wrong.

9. The ALA conference is technically international, as a friendly young librarian from New Brunswick may prove to you on the escalator with his New Brunswickian business card.

8. The exhibition hall embodies everything that is horrible about shopping malls, including poor lighting, crowds of people not looking where they're going, and general overstimulation. However, your willingness to forgive will grow with each ARC and half-price book you add to your tote bag.

7. The Unshelved comic strip guys have the nicest people working at their booth—including themselves!

6. The best meal deal at the convention center is the salad bar. You can serve yourself a huge portion of salad, pasta, soup, and rolls and feel as if you are getting something approximating your money's worth.

5. Jacqueline Woodson is tall and gorgeous and happy to tell you where the elusive paper towels are in the Chicago Sheraton washroom.

4. Book cart drill team is the most beautiful, dorky, undercelebrated sport in the world. Every library should have one.

3. Susan Kusel is incredibly persistent, patient, and polite when it comes to meeting famous Newbery Award-winning authors. Fortunately, if you tag along with Susan, you will be rewarded by also meeting said author.

2. Meeting people face-to-face whom you've previously known only online is a great thing, especially if those people are librarian and lunch blogger Emily, Flux editor Brian Farrey, poet and 15-words-or-less-poetry host Laura Salas, and uber-librarian KT Horning.

1. You will need at least a week to sleep off the conference.