Writing toward teen boys—the conversation continues

A week or so ago, I posted a video by a bright young reader who was contemplating the How do we get teen boys to read more? question.  This weekend, the New York Times is pondering that matter as well, with this video conversation between Rick Riordan, James Patterson, and Pamela Paul, as well as this Robert Lipsyte essay.

Good teachers and interested parents understand that the best cure for reluctant readers lies in identifying the right book for the right readers—easily said, but not always easily done.  I had a hard time myself finding just the right books for my own son (a concern I explored in my memoir Seeing Past Z: Nurturing the Imagination in a Fast-Forward World), and even today, given a choice, this hardworking, curious, academically motivated, generous-hearted kid of mine leans away from books toward other media—except when writing his own stories.  It's then that he professes himself most eager to see what others do, and he's especially eager to read the work of his contemporaries—his classmates, published young authors—finding most relevance and meaning in the stories they tell. 

I spend a lot of time thinking about the relevance of my own work. I don't write toward trends, don't capitalize on them, and I'm rather ill-suited for a world like the one that Lipsyte describes in his essay, in which one Harper executive noted (in 2007) that "at least three-quarters of her target audience were girls, and they wanted to read about mean girls, gossip girls, fenemies and vampires."  I have none of that in me.  I would not know where to begin. 

But I can write more inclusively, and I am working on that now, paying closer attention to the male characters in my stories, listening and leaning toward them.  Now at work, as many of you know, on a book peopled by teen boys in late 19th century Philadelphia—a murdered, good-hearted thief, his animal-rescuing brother, and a rising careerist with journalism in his future—I find myself exhilarated by the self-generated task of writing a book of redemption and adventure that has at its center conflicted, complex young men.  Dr. Radway's Sarsaparilla Resolvent, which will be illustrated with original, edgy art, is a prequel to Dangerous Neighbors (Egmont USA), my Centennial Philadelphia story about twin sisters.  It is an outside-the-trends risk, as all my work tends to be.  But it is also, I think, a risk worth taking, a readership that deserves our attention.

The book's first page can be found here. 

Read more...

Seeing Past Z, Singapore, and what a difference time makes

Earlier today, while I was crawling my way back onto my feet, I was stopped by a letter originating in Singapore and come to me by way of W.W. Norton, New York City.  A handwritten, many-paged letter from a certain G, who was writing to tell me, among other things, that she had found my fourth book, Seeing Past Z:  Nurturing the Imagination in a Fast-Forward World, "at the corner of the library where suggested readings and new arrivals are placed—a very prominent place where every visitor would or could see." G went on, then, to tell me her story, about finding faith in the imagination within a country intensely focused on banking and finance.  It is G's story, and I shall not repeat it.  But I kept returning to the impossibility of this little book having made its way across the seas. 

How?

When I published Z with Alane Mason in 2004, we were both swimming upstream, and we knew it.  I was writing about the importance of free time in an era when most children had anything but—when resumes were being finessed at five, and when intra-kid competition ruled (there is only ever number one).  I was writing about the aspiring writers who wrote poems with me or talked Jack London with me or dared each other to listen well to scene-inspiring music.  I was writing about "wisdom over winning," about "contentment over credentials, imagination over conquest, the idiosyncratic point of view over the standard-issue one."

I was writing, it must be said, unpopularly.  I was, among some, considered foolish.

Slow parenting has ebbed in since.  Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman have written, as recently as last week, a Newsweek cover story entitled "The Creativity Crisis."  Many parents have at last taken their kids off the fast track so that the kids could leave tracks of their own.

It is six years and eight books later.  It is me, perpetually ahead of or behind the times, not grabbing headlines, not riding the trend waves, watching books I have loved go remaindered.  It is also, today, G, in a blue-ink letter, on black-lined paper—G from Singapore saying this:  Your words have found their home.

Read more...

Bring your Imagination: Alice in Wonderland

I was reading "Rabbit Redux," the Ramin Setoodeh piece in this week's Newsweek.

He was talking about the imagination—those who use it splendidly well—and I was remembering my friend, Cuileann, who is one of the most imaginative people I know (we met in San Francisco, late last summer). Oh, what she does with words and photographs. What she does with heart.

So I was thinking about her, and then I kept reading, and I was thinking about my own book about the imagination (Seeing Past Z: Nurturing the Imagination in a Fast-Forward World) and then I thought, I wonder what my blogger friends would say about these thoughts Mr. Setoodeh is expressing? So I put them out there, for your comments:

"The only way to understand Alice is to use your imagination. Do you even remember how to do that? In our society of Web links, Wikipedia, Facebook, and reality TV, everything and everybody comes with a label and an exhaustive definition. There's scant room for ambiguity and interpretation. The genius of the 145-year-old Wonderland is that it forces you to bring your own creative juices to the tea party....

"Compare Wonderland with the great children's stories of our time: the Harry Potter series. As inventive as J.K. Rowling's seven books are, they're meticulously detailed (the intricate rules of Quidditch, the class rituals at Hogwarts, all the wizard paraphernalia) to the point of being encyclopedic, which is why the movies work as well as they do—they're road maps of the plot."

Read more...

Does Only Nonfiction Count?

My son has begun reading one of my favorite novels of all time, Paul Horgan's The Richard Trilogy. Seeing my son bent over those pages reminds me of a scene from my fourth book, a memoir called Seeing Past Z. It reminds me of a conversation my son and I had some seven years ago, when most of what I wrote was true. That excerpt here:

He works, exclusively now, at the kitchen table, his own vast kingdom. Sometimes after school, sometime late on Saturdays, sometimes early in the morning, sometimes with me sitting across from him with my own stash of things. Today I have notes and research cards spread on my side, Jeremy has colored pencils and markers on his, and I am losing myself in my own project. It takes me a moment to realize that Jeremy is doing nothing. That he is just sitting at the table, watching me.

“What’s up?” I ask.

“I’m worried,” he says.

“Why?” I say. “About what?”

“Mom,” Jeremy says after a moment, “what I want to know is this: Is it only nonfiction that counts, that makes a difference?” He makes a gesture toward my side of things—my pile of New York Times, my dictionary, my research notes. Nonfiction.

“Only nonfiction that counts?” I repeat the question. Counts, I wonder. Counts? Jeremy is not asking about personal satisfaction, not wondering whether he’d be happier with another genre. He has used the word counts, and I don’t know what he means, what kind of answer my kid is looking for.

“I mean,” he goes on, this fledgling plotter of crooked story lines, this near-master of the absurd, this writer of verve and imagination, “can only nonfiction change the world? Change people’s hearts? Change what they believe?”

“Well,” I say. “Well …” and my mind trips back to the conversation we’d been having not an hour ago—a conversation about a story that had run a few weeks before in The New York Times Sunday Magazine. The story was about the death of a doctor who’d been saving lives in Africa, and the story—its very existence coupled with the power of its prose—had produced in the Times’ readers such empathy and concern that the readers had responded with a spontaneous outpouring of funds for the doctor’s family. “This is what a story can do,” I’d told Jeremy. “This is why it matters that writers give their hearts to what they write. Because stories like this can change the world sometimes, or at least make a bad thing better.”

“I’m right, aren’t I?” Jeremy says, because I haven’t yet responded. “Only nonfiction counts, doesn’t it? Only nonfiction can make good things happen for other people.”

“Well,” I say, and I am not stalling, I’m merely looking for the words, but he cuts me off with a sigh before I’ve produced a single fleck of counter evidence.

“Yeah,” Jeremy says. “That’s what I figured.”

“No,” I say. “Wait a minute ….”

But he’s already set his story aside and he’s packing up his things for school. We get in the car. I drive the familiar roads. We talk about lunch money and math, stay clear of his question. When we pull in to the school’s drive, I kiss Jeremy goodbye. He says, resignedly, “Love you, Mom.” Then he closes the door, and he’s gone.

Back at the house, I walk through our old few-room dwelling mulling over Jeremy’s question and kicking myself for my non-answer. Yes, I should have said, fiction too can change a heart, fiction can engender kindness and forgiveness, make someone out there care. Gut reaction. Point of fact. Politics. Fiction cures, redeems, and leavens; it preserves and it forgives. Your fiction has the capacity to affect another, I should have said. The best of fiction always does.

In Jeremy’s absence, I retreat to my long wall of double-stacked books, my own private version of a trophy shelf.... I pull some favorite volumes to the floor and sit among them. I think about all the ways I’ve been rescued by characters who only ever lived on paper. Rescued from loneliness. Rescued from boredom. Rescued from sleeplessness and sickness, tedium and trials. I think of all the sympathies fiction has generated in me, all the sudden swells of terror, heartbreak, hope, and calm that have come my way through novels, tainted my politics, held me somehow accountable to an idea or a dream, made me want to do something more extravagantly useful with my life. Fiction changes the world one reader at a time. And this is what I should have said.

Read more...

Slow Parenting

"Let the Kid Be." That was the headline topping Lisa Belkin's essay in this Sunday's New York Times Magazine. Perhaps, the piece suggested, we've at last moved beyond "Get-them-into-Harvard-or-bust parenting," perhaps beyond, even, the bad mother confessionals that Ayelet Waldman and a host of bloggers have lately been promoting. Indeed, writes Belkin, a "second wave has taken hold—writers are moving past merely venting and trying to gather the like-minded into a new movement" that some call "slow parenting" and some "free-range parenting" and, if one were to bottom line it, might be defined simply as giving children room to be themselves, as opposed to the resume-building, fear-rattled citizens of a dog-eat-dog world.

Just five years ago, when I published Seeing Past Z: Nurturing the Imagination in a Fast-Forward World, there was, I will be frank, little public interest in the argument that I made within those pages—that it was time to let our children be, that it was our job as parents to open doors, not prescribe pathways, that stories and storytelling were the gifts that we parents must pass on. "I want to raise my son to pursue wisdom over winning," I wrote. "I want him to channel his passions and talents and personal politics into rivers of his choosing. I’d like to take the chance that I feel it is my right to take on contentment over credentials, imagination over conquest, the idiosyncratic point of view over the standard-issue one. I’d like to live in a world where that’s okay."

Perhaps we've entered that era now. Perhaps, with new books such as The Idle Parent: Why Less Means More When Raising Kids (Tom Hodgkinson) leading the charge, certain freedoms will be granted—less Suzuki, for example, more afternoons spent wandering along the banks of the mud-rimmed creek. At least until, as Belkin points out, the next parenting movement edges onto the horizon.

Read more...

The Family of Things

I've never been very good at letting moments go. Not skyscapes. Not heartaches. Not eighth-grade talent shows or that moment at graduation when the caps are frisbeed to the sky and the dividing line has been drawn between the future and the past.

So that when I taught young writers for seven consecutive summers, I was, always, in my mind, with those young writers—traveling with them back and forth, trying to see past their page, thinking myself into their process and back out of it again—for their sake, in both directions. And when, today, I was joined on the second floor of a favorite local coffee shop by nine young women, I knew I'd go home with an ache in my heart—they'll all grow up; I'll never know where their lives now will take them.

Their talent runs deep, as does their capacity for thoughtful mutual critique. They listened—they heard—the fragments that I read out loud, some even asking later for titles so that they might read the wholes. There were among them the philosophical and poetical, the one who could write through time and the one who embraced the one moment, the one with a talent for original saturation, the one who knew how to suggest the possibilities of a character's life within the stretch of a single sentence. There was joy as we walked the streets with our cameras in hand. There was compassion for the child we found sitting near a grate, waiting for her mother to come to—well, what, we wondered: to rescue her?

Remain who you are, I urged them, at the session's end. Keep living: whole. And then I read them "Wild Geese" by Mary Oliver, a poem every true heart must know.

The closing lines:

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting—
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

Read more...

The Writing Minor

I could begin in so many places with this. I'll just begin here: A little past midnight two nights ago, my college freshman sent a long, jostling email full of joyous news and fine explorations (midnight volleyball games, a shot at field reporting for campus TV, an evening out that was just "so much fun"). He wrote the note and sent it; a half hour later, he wrote a second. Just after I sent you the last email, it began, I figured out that I want to minor in writing.

Yes. My heart stopped.

When it started beating again, I had to dance.

Today's email, then, is an open love letter to a guy who has taken this writing journey with me and who will now formally embark upon it on his own. I retrieve a bit of history, a passage from my memoir, Seeing Past Z: Nurturing the Imagination in a Fast-Forward World. In celebration of what was and what becomes.

Can you read the world like you read a book? Can you see in stalks and cows and sheep and rock a telling narrative? Can you teach a child? Can a child teach you? In southern France, we have been thinking of Thoreau: “It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.” We have been hunting for details, patterns, and surprises, making lists and trading them, working on our capacity to bear witness: Not just to the moon but to the haunting power of the moon. Not just to the dying of the sunflowers but to the fact of so many embedded seeds. Not just to the thick, stone, age-old houses but to the way those houses come alive.

I want my son to grow up poking his fingers through the web of mysteries, hoping for the unexpected, taking pleasure or conviction or understanding from what he finds. I want him to build the bridges we all must learn to build between the world we are taught and the world we read about and the world we will only ever guess at. Curiosity bolsters knowledge, and knowledge feeds intelligence, and intelligence helps us navigate our lives—that is the way it works—and so we are here looking for the cloud of flour above the baker’s shop. For the miniature dogs in the baskets of bikes. For the color of river water to change depending on the light. For the cows to crowd into shady wedges, for boys to head off with fishing poles, for the rain to come at night. We have gone from town to town in southern France, teaching ourselves to pay attention, to see—the domestic and the sacred, the glorified and the wasted, the crumble of a castle and the wedding in the street. Reading the world like a book so that tomorrow or the next day the stories we imagine, tell, act out, or write will pay homage right back to the world.

Read more...