The Former Anne Spollen's Author Blog Is Being Retitled to "Notes from Living Upghetto": Happy Labor Day!

Saturday, September 5, 2009

Happy Labor Day!

It's Labor Day weekend - the last weekend of summer.That's a picture of our backyard, and it already looks empty to me.

I'm never sure what to do on holidays like this. I could invite my neighbors over for a barbeque, but they tend to like to catch what they eat from the lake or the woods so I think I'll pass. We'll probably go shopping for school supplies, but none of the schools here tell us what the kids need until the first day of school, which is Wednesday. We try and guess in the middle of the store, big binders? small, vinyl ones? book socks or paper bag covers? It seems like everyone else has these neat lists...

When the kids asked me why we have Labor Day, I told them it was an extra day so they could start their summer reading.

They always remind me I don't really have a job, except a few days a week at the college. They see me writing on the computer, but they associate computer time with fun and socializing.

The weird thing about being a writer is you kind of feel that you don't really have a job, or are part of the labor force because you are usually home when you are writing. Plus, you could always be working. Always. It's kind of like having perpetual homework.

But I feel like we should all probably think about what we do during Labor Day, or something connected to what we do for a living.

In the spring, there was an article in The NY Times that I have thought about for a while now. It talks about the responsibility authors have in choosing what to write about, especially authors who write YA (and probably MG) It's sort of an old question I suppose, but do you think writing about things like cutting, anorexia, shoplifting, all those behaviors encourages it? Or just exposes it? Should those topics be avoided? When we write about drinking or drug use, does it give kids ideas? Or do they just see a reflection of what they already know?

I remember sneak-reading a book (during algebra which might explain a lot) about these two girls who ran away from home and experimented with everything I had never done - or even come close to doing. It was my favorite book for a few months, far more interesting than the Boston adventures of Johnny Tremain. Sin is far more compelling than compliance. That book was a hot topic at sleepovers, yet I still have never done any of the things those girls did.

I don't have an answer to this. I do know that we can't write for the mentally fragile. I also know there is a fine line between avoiding topics and censorship.

In the end, at least for me, I think writing has to reflect what is true. If it's not authentic, it's just not interesting. And when I write, I don't want to feel parental since it's really one of the very few things I do that doesn't involve my kids.

I also know that my answer isn't everyone's. Do you avoid topics that are controversial? or ones that go against your personal beliefs? Do you think what kids read influences them so easily?

10 comments:

storyqueen said...: I think we can only write what somehow inspires us, compels us to write it. Yes, there is great responsibility, but that should lie within every profession I think.

Thanks for commenting on my blog!

Shelley; Monday, 07 September, 2009
Mary Witzl said...: There was a discussion about this on VK's, wasn't there?

I'm of two minds about this issue. Any kid worth her salt can smell moralizing a mile off, so if you write about bulimia or cutting with a 'Don't try this yourself, kids' line, you've lost them. I tend to believe that any kid who is going to try something daft because they read about it in a YA novel would always be able to find a catalyst for dangerous behavior. I've read about kids who flew their own planes and I have no compulsion to try this;; Tuesday, 08 September, 2009
Mary Witzl said...: Eek -- weird -- I don't know why blogger would not let me edit that comment!

I've got a bit in my MG/YA novel about hitchhiking: my protagonist wants to try it, to run away from home. I've tried to work in a subtle 'It's not safe' line, but I still think that kids who are determined to try this won't do so merely because I wrote about it.

When I talked about this with my daughters, their take on it was that only truly pathetic poseurs would try to copy dangerous behavior from books.; Tuesday, 08 September, 2009
Anne Spollen said...: Good point, SQ -- every profession needs to be responsible. I think it's put more to writers since we are involved with kids.

Blogger is occasionally haunted, Mary. Certain blogs it won't let me comment on at all.

Probably there are discussions all over the place on this b/c it's from May...but it always seems to come up again.

I think if kids are going to hitchhike, they will whether we tell them it's safe or not. But sometimes I wonder if kids aren't learning behavior (cutting, bulimia) from reading about their characters.

The older I get, the less simple it's becoming to make a decision...; Tuesday, 08 September, 2009
Carrie Harris said...: At my first job out of college, I ran teen risk behavior surveys. One of the saddest parts about it is that teens would tell me about their suicide attempts, drug use, and sexual experiences with pride but would refuse to tell me how much they weigh. But that's completely off topic, isn't it? I think the fact remains that there's very little left for them to learn from books. They've already seen it all, a hundred times over.

So I think that avoiding those topics is doing them a disservice. But I completely agree with Mary that trying to preach to them is a horrid idea. I sometimes wonder if those books do more harm than good.; Wednesday, 09 September, 2009
Katie Anderson said...: I have a hard time writing about something that ends up promoting or glamorizing something that I don't want my girls to get into. That may be wrong, but I can't bring myself to do it.

They are always in the back of my mind as my potential readers...; Thursday, 10 September, 2009
Elizabeth Bradley said...: I was just thinking about this subject today. Do we write honestly, about life and how it really is, or do we write about life as we wish it could be? I gravitate towards realistic stories myself, so that's what I usually write. Not that I write nitty gritty stuff, but I do see people as three dimensional, flawed, and interesting because of those layers. I am not out to write about perfect people. That's just not real. In the end, we have to remain true to our own instincts.; Thursday, 10 September, 2009
K.C. Shaw said...: I'm not sure about the tricky-topics issue either. I read all kinds of stuff as a teen and I never tried anything I read about, so I want to give kids the benefit of the doubt. Then again, I don't want to encourage anyone.

I guess the only thing we can do is not glorify destructive behaviors but--as others have pointed out--not preach to readers, either. Kids can sniff out a preachy book from seven leagues away.; Friday, 11 September, 2009
Anna Staniszewski said...: This is such a tricky topic and I can understand why people might want to avoid addressing certain issues for fear of inadvertently promoting them. I guess it's about writing what you're comfortable with and telling whatever story feels true to you.

It's funny because I tend to deal with dark issues like death in my books a lot, but when it comes to things like sex (and even kissing!) I have a hard time writing about it. For some reason it's just out of my comfort zone. So what's comfortable territory for one writer isn't necessarily okay for another.; Friday, 11 September, 2009
Anne Spollen said...: I think everyone is right -- and that's my problem.

Some kids don't get influenced; others might. It's up to us to decide what to include and not include.

I think the game changes when you have your own kids though.; Saturday, 12 September, 2009

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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