The Former Anne Spollen's Author Blog Is Being Retitled to "Notes from Living Upghetto": Something About Teens

Sunday, May 4, 2008

Something About Teens

I am, quite openly, not much of a movie fan. I've never had the same quality of experience while watching a movie as I've had while reading. I endure most movies, but I cannot abide romantic comedy of any sort. Ever. So last night, after a really scattered week, I wanted to spend time with my two boys."Let's rent that movie, Something About Dan," they suggested. They had previewed a scene where Dan gets a couple of tickets, they said as I winced, and I should be open to new experiences. I shouldn't pre-judge. My own words coming back to me. A browsing Blockbuster customer told us the movied had gotten excellent reviews. The boys smiled smugly.

So fine.

A third into the movie, as the Disneyesque tribe of family gathered and played board games, ate amicably at a Viking-sized table, and openly discussed their emotions, my oldest son started laughing. "There's like nothing wrong with these people," he said, "all they do is get angry then frolic. It's a fury and frolic movie."

Thinking I had missed this genre, I asked him to explain.

"Watch. They get mad, then they go and put on a talent show or hop around on the lawn. No family is like this. No one gets drunk or stays mad or is really fat and weird. I never met a family like this. It's like a family made up by camp counselors."

"I think it's a lake house," I pointed out, "they all gather there."

"Right. And everyone gets along the whole time. No one messes up," my middle guy added.

"I think he likes his brother's girlfriend," I pointed out, "that's the conflict."

"So? That's the whole conflict cause like nothing else is going on. Right about right now, I'd like to see a bear come along or someone take out a gun and do something crazy," my oldest guy said, "you know he's going to get together with that girl in the end because nothing happens in this movie like it happens in real life."

"So what? Did you want him to kill his brother or something?" I asked. "Maybe take the grandma hostage?"

"Nah," Philip, my middle guy said, "just like mess him up or fight or insult him. And how come all of those kids get along so well? They do what the adults say almost every time. And they're all dorks."

"Yes," I said eagerly, "that's not at all like you two. They're so wonderfully obedient."

They both laughed. "Pull this crap," they agreed, "put something on that's realistic."

We ended up watching the last hour of To Kill A Mockingbird, the old black and white version where Tom Robinson's undeniable innocence falls victim to racism. The boys had no comments while watching this except to say it was pretty good.

Pretty good.

Perhaps that's the lure of YA literature: the audience has such a low b.s. threshhold that romantic comedy would never be a possible genre...

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Books

Light Beneath Ferns

"I have this strange sense that my silence is preparing me for something I can't name . ."

Elizah Rayne is nothing like other fourteen-year-old girls. More interested in bird bones than people, she wraps herself in silence. Trying to escape the shadow of her gambler father, Elizah and her mother move into an old house that borders a cemetery. All her mother wants is for them to have "normal" lives. But that becomes impossible for Elizah when she finds a human jawbone by the river and meets Nathaniel, a strangely hypnotic boy who draws Elizah into his dreamlike and mysterious world.

Only by forgetting everything she knows can Elizah understand the truth about Nathaniel—and discover an unimaginable secret.

Teen made trailer for Light Beneath Ferns.

Order Light Beneath Ferns here.

Foreword Magazine's Review of Light Beneath Ferns

Excerpt from THE SHAPE OF WATER

CHAPTER ONE
I discovered windows one afternoon and after that, nothing was ever the same. They had always been there, of course, glass panes shimmering in the color of rain, but that spring for the first time, I was able to open the windows in my room. For years, the locks had been painted stuck, and during the winter, heat from the radiator beneath my windows finally steamed off enough paint off the metal wings of the locks could be twirled open. Knowing that I could open the windows attracted me to them, and I began sitting under the windows, staring through the glass at the sky. From that position, on a chair in my room, the sky did not seem real; it seemed a place I was making up, so I watched it.
The white wood of the window panes acted as frames so the sky came to me slowly, and the huge openness of its space did not touch me. All the window glass in our old house had wavers and bubbles inside it, so at times the clouds moved like water, melting and blurring until they passed outside of the warp. After a few afternoons of sitting, the heavens seemed too quiet to keep watching so I began watching a small patch of woods next to our yard that housed little more than trees and a scatter of bony, mean-looking rabbits.
I started gazing at the sky and the woods in March when the branches were still wet and it was then, with nothing outside my window but trees and rain, that I noticed a shine inside darkness, I noticed colors glimmering within the darkness of the wood. I watched birds come and go, I watched rain nipple down from buds to the grass. The water dripping from branch edges and leaves created optical tricks; I could see that as I watched leaves melt.
Then one day I ventured into the space outside. I did not think about doing this much beforehand. I simply opened the window and dropped to the ground below, uncertain as to why this should be such a more satisfying exit than simply using the door; my father worked until seven o’clock and I could do whatever I wanted until then. But I liked the solid sound my legs made when I landed. Leaving via a five foot drop seemed so much more a decision than just using a door. The sense of escape made my heart pound, though all I escaped was the soundless spread of moss-colored light inside my house and the silence.
I had come to know silence well during those months after my mother died. When you sit in silence long enough, you learn that silence has a motion. It glides over you without shape or form, but with weight, exactly like water. Its color is silver. And silence has a sound you hear only after hours of wading inside it. The sound is soft, flute notes rising up like the words of glass speaking. There comes a point when you must shatter the silence, when you must shatter the blindness of its words, the blindness of its light. I did this by going into the yard. Once I stood there, in the grass next to the trees I had been watching, I found silence outside as well. But I was happier outside than I had been in the house, so I stayed for a bit. I stood beneath my bedroom window for a few minutes, looking up at the branches and the crooked pieces of sky colliding between the branches. I believed I could identify the scent of the sky as I stood there, a blue menthol fragrance similar to the scent of seawater that sprayed into my face when I first dove into the ocean. That initial scent smelled much more subtle than the ocean’s heavy, fishy aroma, a whiff of salt and mint that warned a more powerful scent would enter my nose just as I approached the water on a dive. It was the scent I dreamed in. And it was the scent of that spring sky as I stood in my yard.

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