The Former Anne Spollen's Author Blog Is Being Retitled to "Notes from Living Upghetto": MG/YA Brains: The Divide

Thursday, January 20, 2011

MG/YA Brains: The Divide

Whenever my house seems dusty and cluttered, which is a lot, I put on some real estate show and look at the adults only kind of living with porcelain objects on tables and alien things like crystal and wine decanters. It's an entirely different world from mine. There, basketballs would never roll across a living room floor (we have a small Juliette balcony which sounds so lovely, but it is at the perfect height for a basketball toss) and you wouldn't have to think of a way to hide cat scratch marks on the sofas.

I love watching those shows. It's an escape that helps me come back and hurl rogue basketballs into the garage, pick up the fossilized socks under the sofas and start the laundry with renewed apathy.

I do that with work, too. A few days ago, I was writing curriculum for a course I am less than excited about teaching. So in the middle of a thrilling lesson on apostrophe usage, I went online and looked at new jobs. These jobs wouldn't be in my classroom where the windows don't open, ever, and the air conditioning kicks in the week before Christmas. These would be in new and shiny classrooms where the students didn't text while I was talking about Herman Melville and all the apostrophes would arrive in meticulously rendered papers. I just needed to find that job.

One really interested me. It was about an hour from here and it was teaching MG and YA writing. You had to have written and published at least one book, have a current manuscript and a bunch of other requisites that I already have. It sounded perfect.

Of course, it's impossible for me to do this job since I'm already overly committed for the spring, but thinking about teaching MG and YA was no different from my viewing of adult only houses staged for sale.

And it made me think, again, about those lines between MG and YA. They seem so definite in the bookstores and libraries. Yet books like The Hobbit confuse me - that was assigned in our seventh grade class, yet it is in the YA section in a lot of places. Number the Stars, also a book I taught in middle school, is in the YA section. Other than obvious subject matter, I'm not sure what divides them. I have an idea, though, now, after one of our pre-dinner conversations.

Christopher was saying something about sleep and the brain, and how dreaming is essential to survival. (Remember finishing your first semester of college psychology and all the stuff you found out?) The conversation went something like this:

Definitely a YA reader, with a semi mature attitude. I say semi mature because Christopher would also agree with this brain theory:

Emma, who was gluing feathers onto the cover of her report on cell function, (because cell function reports are dull) explained to Christopher that she knew, exactly, why we dream.

"When you go to sleep, your brain has nothing to look at and nothing to do. It's sooooo bored. So it makes up stories until you wake up. That's why you dream."

I think I had my answer to the difference.

11 comments:

Unknown said...: Haha--LOVE it, Anne. Your classrooms sound a lot like mine. Except in my classroom the ac never kicks on but the heat does instead--in April.; Thursday, 20 January, 2011
Anne Spollen said...: Yeah, what is it with that HVAC stuff? They never seem to get it right.

Good luck with the new semester, Lisa!; Thursday, 20 January, 2011
Bish Denham said...: I LOVE your daughter's explanation for why we dream!; Friday, 21 January, 2011
Anne Spollen said...: She was so convinced, too, Bish. She looked up, explained it to us, then went back to gluing her feathers on. She had that one flattened.; Friday, 21 January, 2011
Marcia said...: Wow -- at least half of me wants to say that makes total sense. :D I love it!

Maybe I'M muddled, but I don't think libraries know where the line is that clearly. Seems to me they slap YA stickers on MG all the time. Theory: Kids read up, plus the general public thinks anything not adult is "young adult." Therefore they'll get more circulation with the YA sticker? Also, the same book is often not classified the same way from one library to the next.; Saturday, 22 January, 2011
Anne Spollen said...: I secretly agree with Emma on her dream theory.

The thing with the MG/YA divide, Marcia -- one question - is there an MG section anywhere? In our library, in most libraries, there is a Teen Zone or a YA section, but never anything for the 'tween kids. Their books are lumped in with the chapter books and easy reader. Something for librarians to think about since I know a certain 'tween (and all her friends) who won't go to that section because it's "...like so baby."

I'm wondering if that's just here???; Saturday, 22 January, 2011
Glynis Peters said...: Love the post and Emma's answer! :); Monday, 24 January, 2011
Mary Witzl said...: I completely agree with your daughter. Dreams are crazy TV to keep us occupied when we're doing nothing but sleeping.

Here in the U.K., all sorts of things end up in the 'Teenage Lit' section. (They don't know what MG and YA mean.) Every library and book store seems to have a different idea about what books people from 13 through 20 want to read too. In the same section, I've found Sweet Valley Twins, books by Meg Roskoff and Mark Haddon, and Nancy Drew.; Monday, 24 January, 2011
Adrienne said...: I'm glad my kids are out of the tweens stage - it was so difficult to find appropriate reading then. And I'm impressed you had feathers handy to jazz up that boring report!; Monday, 24 January, 2011
Anne Spollen said...: Thanks, Glynis! Emma is in that precise margin of going from kid to 'tween, so she's got some interesting theories on life...

It's not that much different here, Mary. Everything seems lumped in one big sort of adolescent soup even though we pretend to separate them out.

Oh yes, Adrienne. We have lots of feathers in this house, glitter, sequins and shiny stars. Unfortunately, a lot of that stuff is in the kitchen and sometimes...well, you know.; Tuesday, 25 January, 2011
Anonymous said...: I see the MG and YA divide in bookstores, but I can't recall what libraries have.

I like to look at perfect houses too, but I know I'll never have one. I'm more of a writer than a housekeeper, and my cats destroy everything.; Sunday, 30 January, 2011

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.

***