Month: June 2014

{6888th: honoring Millie Dunn Veasey}

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June 23, 2014

9:51 am

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Book News

millie dunn veasey

I loved the”world”I made in MARE’S WAR, full of half-remembered relatives, masquerading as characters and old names and older times. Its fictional boundaries constantly urged me to track down real survivors of time and age. My own grandmother passed away when I was nineteen – quite prematurely – and when I’d tracked down the names of several members of the 6888th closer to me, I found that they, too, had all passed away. I was happy to discover this week that Millie Dunn Veasey is still with us, and still remembers the work she did for the War effort, the sounds and the scents and the whole experience – which informed the rest of her life, I’m sure. She’s honored this week in the Raleigh News Observer. Thank you, Ms. Veasey, for your service.

A hat tip to Liz Wein for sending me the article.

{YES. This.}

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June 16, 2014

12:07 pm

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Essay Musings

Equality and justice NOW AND FOREVER.

When we were very small, my two older siblings and I wanted EXACTLY THE SAME EVERYTHING. We all wanted five cookies if that was what was on offer, we all wanted the same amount of milk, the same amount of raisins in our cereal, and the same everything. It drove my mother crazy — but the human brain is always categorizing and weighing and comparing. We’re geared and hardwired to believe that we’re not getting our due if we don’t get as much as someone else.

But, the truth is this: there’s really no such thing as a “level playing field” unless some people wear shoe lifts and stand on blocks. Fair is everyone getting what they need, not getting all the same thing. This is a big truth that MATURE kids learn. Now, let’s try it with adults…

(Hat tip to Tu Books tumblr.)

{poetry friday: desert places, by robert frost}

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June 13, 2014

9:35 am

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Poetry Friday

Desert Places

by Robert Frost

Snow falling and night falling fast, oh, fast
In a field I looked into going past,
And the ground almost covered smooth in snow,
But a few weeds and stubble showing last.

The woods around it have it – it is theirs.
All animals are smothered in their lairs.
I am too absent-spirited to count;
The loneliness includes me unawares.

And lonely as it is, that loneliness
Will be more lonely ere it will be less –
A blanker whiteness of benighted snow
With no expression, nothing to express.

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars – on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.

I ran across Frost’s poem this week referenced in Shannon Hale’s slightly plot-crazy but ultimately fun novel DANGEROUS. This poem isn’t taught as much in high schools, but to me is the PERFECT companion piece to “Stopping By the Woods on a Snowy Evening.” The language of that poem invites the reader into a place of solitude and thoughtfulness, in the empty landscape filling with snow; this poem presents a claustrophobic terror of the featurelessness of the white wasteland — benighted snow with blank expressions and nothing to express is a kind of horror. One poem is somnolent, with its indolent inertia, the other is on the edge of sleep, but jerking awake, and having night terrors. I love the contrast, how both parts are of what humanity is made.

{dear j.j. abrams, this is why we can’t have nice things}

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June 8, 2014

12:08 am

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Fantasy Letters I Will Never Send

Dear Mr. Abrams:

Okay, granted – so I’m a year late, or whatever, with viewing your last film. You’ll accept my apology for not seeking it out; I’ve not even seen the first Star Trek reboot, and only sat through the second because it was Netflixed while I was visiting here in Portland. It was not rented by me under the umbrella of “Bad SciFi Night material, so I’ll tell you straight – STAR TREK: INTO DARKNESS gave me an unexpected and jarring headache. There were any number of reasons, including the continuation of the role of James T. Kirk, Professional Lothario (a female weapons specialist in the plot and in her bra for him to skewer with his rapacious male gaze? Really? that’s all she was? Leg broken, shot, bashed around – notice she was so very, very, very, very pretty, the whole movie long. Also: when SPOCK had radiation burns, he died. In an unattractive and burnt-looking way. How did we avoid that this time? Oh, it was Kirk. Forget it, my bad.); the whole Khan-as-Sikh-Latino-Englishman thing… (how hard would it have been, really to find a South Asian actor??), the pivotal members of crew reacting instead of acting, Spock so DEEPLY out of character, shouting “Khan” (WAS. THAT. NECESSARY.), the manipulative faux “tender” moments, the TRIBBLE — all these things were completely migraine-triggering.

But the biggest and most annoying difficulty with this movie for me is WHAT HAPPENED TO THE LITTLE GIRL???

What little girl, you ask?

Oh, THAT ONE. The one which we see all in white, with her crinkly hair combed down, the one we see looking perfect and quiet and still and … apparently forgettable to everyone, in a weirdly oblique way.

Here she was apparently important enough for the entire film to start with her parents silently agonizing over her no-tubes-in-her-she-still-lookslike-she’s-just-sleping illness, the catalyst for her father to destroy a major portion of Star Fleet intelligence in exchange for her life (and pray, what proof did he have that she got well, or would continue to do well? What father would put in some strange liquid in an IV and just go off with a “Welp, that’s done it, I’m gonna go hold up my end now” ? How could he sell his daughter – and expend the lives of his countrymen – without assurance?), the reason to believe some random Caucasian savior who says he can cure her – one man, when an entire hospital has tried? – here’s this apparent medical miracle that occurs, AND HER STORYLINE JUST VANISHES?

Seriously, Mr. Abrams, did I miss something? I looked for that girl FOR THE REST OF THE MOVIE. Wasn’t she saved for a reason? Isn’t she going to, you know, do something? She was a convenient prop, and just… abandoned with a two-dimensional role, as were the other brown people in the movie? (Klingon: there to be killed. Uhura: there to be capricious, female, and hot. Oh, and brown. Sulu: Actual Role. Phew. Brown guy in away team/lady on the bridge: there to show up in two scenes and have maybe a word, and maybe a name. /End ethnically diverse character list.)

So, this little girl’s father judged her important enough to kill 42 people, and you decide she’s so unimportant that she doesn’t even matter? We don’t even get her name?

You might argue that this is a small point upon which to founder my respect for your storytelling, but it’s the point where I could go no further. I think the absence of anything but the broadest strokes of action and jingoism, grandstanding and self-aggrandizing behavior left a film full of holes. It kind of makes me sad, because …well, because I loved Star Trek once.

Once, it was important enough for Martin Luther King, Jr. to tell an actress to keep playing a part she thought was small and unimportant. Once, it was important enough to make Whoopi Goldberg think, “Wow, there’s a black lady on that show. I could maybe be an actress, too.”

Once, it was important. And, you have all the roots of the concepts with which Gene Roddenberry infused the show, and somehow, important is the one thing it’s not.

And, all we can do is ask ourselves why.

{remembering READING THE WORLD}

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June 3, 2014

10:34 am

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Diversity in YA/Children's Lit, Ethnicity and YA Literature

We have been vewwwy, vewwy quiet in this house lately, because it’s Paper Grading Time for the first paper of the summer semester, and Tech Boy, in his disguise as Dr. Tech Boy, is experiencing his first bout of grading for a class he’s teaching. There’s a lot of muttering. It is Not Good. So, we sidle down to our office in the basement and stay there, while he mutters and writes acerbic margin copy and pretty much makes me glad I’m not his TA…

Have you had a chance to hear what went on at BookExpo America (BEA) this year? This morning I listened to a podcast of the diversity panel at BEA made up of Ellen Oh (PROPHECY Series), Aisha Saeed (Written in the Stars, 2015), Marieke Nijkamp, founder of DiversifYA, Lamar Giles (Fake ID) and Mike Jung (Geeks, Girls, and Secret Identities). Special Guests included acclaimed Authors Grace Lin (Where the Mountain Meets the Moon), Matt de la Peña (The Living) and Jacqueline Woodson (Beneath a Meth Moon).

The panel was moderated by I.W. Gregorio (None of the Above, 2015). Each of the authors got a chance to talk about the first diverse book they’d read that had changed how they thought of books (IF IT HADN’T BEEN FOR YOON JUN, by Marie G. Lee, published in 1995 was mine), and they reiterated, for those who didn’t notice, that Lee & Low/TU Books has re-announced their NEW VISIONS AWARD:

“The NEW VISIONS AWARD will be given for a middle grade or young adult fantasy, science fiction, or mystery novel by a writer of color. The Award winner receives a cash grant of $1000 and our standard publication contract, including our basic advance and royalties for a first time author. An Honor Award winner will receive a cash grant of $500.”

WOOT!

This panel was full of great, brilliant people with plenty to say, and really good questions… but it was way, way, way too short. This was my objection to it at the start – BookExpo, America, peopled an entire thousands-of-people NYC conference with only Caucasian presenters, in an effort to represent “America,” and then had a single, hour-long panel on diversity. Granted, it was vital and necessary conversation, but a single, hour-long panel in a tiny corner of BEA – filled to standing room only, with people turned away at the door for fire safety reasons – was simply not enough time to really get into the topic of children’s literature, diversity, or anything. One thing that was said which stood out to me, however, was that there’d be a Diverse Books Festival sometime in 2016, in Washington D.C. Yay, right? It is to be “the first of its kind.”

*needle scratches on record*

Wait, what?

Anybody else remember the University of San Francisco’s Department of Education putting on Reading The World?

What you may not know is that USF chose to get involved in this after a similar Cal State Hayward (CSUH) conference had ended after a nine year run. Beverley Hock, who had started the one day conference as a graduate student, finished it as a doctoral candidate, and her time in the area had ended. Disappointed that there was no other venue to talk about diverse children’s books, from 1998-2009, under the skilled direction of Dr. Alma Flor Ada and her education graduate students, USF started READING THE WORLD.

This two-day event brought education students, librarians, authors, teachers, and the community together to interact with an impressive list of authors including Ashley Bryan, Nikki Giovanni, Yuyi Morales, Peter Sis, Rosemary Wells, Lady Jane Yolen, Arnold Adoff, Virginia Hamilton, Joseph Bruchac, Naomi Shihab Nye, Rita Williams Garcia, Jack Zipes — the list of luminaries goes on and on. READING THE WORLD was utterly fantastic — it was a thrill to attend, and to rub shoulders with all of these amazing authors who were Out There, Doing This Amazing Thing. Especially as there are only one or two children’s literature conferences west of the Mississippi, these gatherings were a little taste of heaven for those who were apprehensive about “multicultural books” as diverse books were called at that time, and how they would work in their classrooms and libraries, how they would sell and be accepted by the community, and what they needed to be. There were presentations on all kinds of things, including cultural identity, folklore, gender identity, social justice, storytelling, and more. It was brilliant, and even without social media, people knew about it and attended and came away with SO MUCH. I wish they could have gone on hosting it forever.

I just want to give props to Dr. Alma Flor Ada, all of those graduate students over the years, and all of the people who threw their backs into this. Before Twitter hashtags made information sharing quick and easy. Before Facebook — in the days of MySpace. Before iPhones. Before social media was a “thing.” THANK YOU, READING THE WORLD. You were amazing.

Time moves on, funding gets cut, faculty and students move on. Dr. Alma Flor is a professor emeritus now; the torch has been passed. Though hardly the first to dip a toe in serious celebrations of diversity, #WeNeedDiverseBooks is nevertheless taking the challenge East of the Mississippi. But, things are awfully quiet around these parts. Maybe the West Coast doesn’t think we need to really talk about diversity – because we’re pretty diverse out here, and more comfortable with it? Not gonna lie: there’s a need still, and I’m disappointed that my graduate school hasn’t taken my – a JCity, Aquafortis and a few others’ good advice – and get a program going at Mills College. But, there’s still time. And, there’s considerable excitement surrounding the KidlitCon’s plan to have diversity be our central theme this October. I think we’ve got plenty to talk about, and a little more time in which to do so. Hope to see you there.