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owlectomyWe want your children: Writing to recruit
With Sharyn November, Sigrid J. Ellis, Naomi Kritzer, Nnedi Nkemdili Okorafor, Susan Ramirez.
Children's literature can be a powerful force for feminist ideas, and under some circumstances can fly right under the radar and into the hands of the children on the Other Side. How do you write subversively for children without turning the books into (boring) propaganda? What books are successfully bringing feminist or other progressive ideas to an unsuspecting audience even as we speak?
Read it because it has Sharyn November calling me out and striking terror into my heart! It's hilarious!
Typed up after the fact from notes. In the prepanel banter Sharyn November said that it was a stupid title for a panel and they were going to talk about different stuff.
SN: You don't write to recruit, you write a good book. What's offensive?
SJE: Left Behind. But also some of the books I loved in childhood -- Kipling, Oz. With my kids we're trying to read 50% books with people of color.
SN: Ozma of Oz is hugely subversive. A boy who turns into a girl.
NO: Twilight. It's hard to badmouth anyone, but I only got 100 pages in. The female character is offensive, and the people in color also. [Debbie Reese has written about the Quileute characters in the Twilight books at American Indians in Children's Literature.
SR: I don't read books like Twilight. They're boring. The books of my childhood are steeped in sexism. Narnia, The Sword in the Stone. I say, those men lived in a segregated society, hardly knew any women and thought weird things about them.
SN: The Twilight books are pulp romances. "Ooh, I smell like freesia!"
NK: A Christian knock-off of Babysitters Club. I found her the original BSC instead. Genre Christian books have this weird emphasis on the Sinner's Prayer as crucially important. And also, if you pray just right your prayer is answered.
SR: That's the plot of The Craft!
NK: [Because her daughter was reading far above her grade level -- this IS an issue I see a lot with advanced readers...] Older books are often gentler in content while being sophisticated, but they're also often politically objectionable. The Great Brain books are positive in regards to American Indians, but it's "What they need is a honky."
SN: What's good?
NK: The American Girl "Kit" books. Has a historically accurate representation of the first Thanksgiving.
SN: The offensive thing with those is...
NK: The expensive crap.
SR: The web comic Digger. There's no necessary reason for her to be female, she just is. She's a wombat woman.
NO: Tove Jansson, the Moomins. Those were the first novels I read. They're extremely strange books -- the Moomins are these hippo-like creatures with good manners.
SN: She has a marvellous memoir, The Sculptor's Daughter.
SE: Looking for chapter books... we're taking world mythology. Harry Potter, the Boxcar Children.
SN: What do your kids pick when left to their own devices?
SR: The girl will read anything. The boy likes what I like.
NK: Molly likes series books. They're comfortable. Harry Potter, over and over.
SN: Why does a person want to write propaganda?
SE: The myths we tell our children give them a map of people, of cultures, of possibilities. If you paint a world of male heroes, you're telling girls they don't have heroism in their future. Young children are devising their own personal plan of what their personal power is. We want to tell them there is nothing they can't learn.
SN: Will you be my mother?
What if you do all this and they still...
SE: Left to their own devises, the boy reads tech manuals and the girl reads pretty pretty princesses.
NK: Check out the Slacktivist blog for his critique of the Left Behind series. Left Behind is really badly written. My kids don't actually need to read that.
SN: Propaganda at its best.
NK: Fundamentalist Christians are trying to save your soul because they believe that you need to believe X or you'll go to hell.
SN: I'm not going to play devil's advocate. Overzealous leftwing advocates are just as bad. You're dealing with people who don't have a worldview yet so you have to be careful. It's hard to find contemporary fiction with girls who have power and aren't cutting themselves. It's hard to find fantasy that's not fake England.
SE: We read problematic books. We talk about why it's a problem. There are leftist homeschoolers trying to keep their kids in a bubble.
SN: I don't necessarily have an agenda.
NO: I'm thinking about the princess thing. You don't have a choice about exposing your daughter to that. There's this whole disney pantheon with no people of color.
SN: Princess is just an accident of birth.
NK: Some girls conceptualize "princess" as meaning a girl who has adventures while wearing a pretty dress.
SN: Subversion... children's games are enormously subversive. Keep creating the good books, make sure they get out there, represent characters and voices we haven't seen. Jewish characters, for example.
(The issue is raised that you basically only see Jewish characters in Holocaust books.)
Except for propaganda -- what the religious publishers do, they do a romance or a mystery and put a layer of religion on top.
(The topic shifts to Twilight.)
SN: It's like Alien. I don't know why anyone would read that and want to have a baby.
NO: I made up a world because I wasn't seeing any reflection of myself.
SN: If you have African-American kids in the city, they're shooting each other. Or, "Hello slavery!"
NK: There's The Watsons Go To Birmingham, Christopher Paul Curtis... 95% of it is this family comedy, it's like the Cosby show, and then there's this church bombing.
[My note: I think that this is a brilliant move, structurally. I think the book REALLY works.]
SE: I'm looking for comic books that represent people of color at all. I don't want my daughter to think I love something (comic books) that's irrelevant to her.
SR: I am a radical taking-children-seriously parent. Kids want what they need, even when they're watching Disney or reading Babysitters Club:
SN: No, will you be my mother?
As a publisher -- not a lot of people are writing them. [I didn't note the context. I think "them" is the books the panelists want to read -- especially, more people of color in their fantasy and science fiction.]
They're often crappy. I won't put crap out there. I want to put out a good book on X, not ANY book on X.
We talk about cover art. At this point Sharyn November says to me:
SN: EMILY.
EH: Yes?
SN: When is your book coming out?
EH: Summer 2010?
SN: What is the title?
EH: Totally Sweet Ninja Death Squad?
SN: Her cover -- it's a long title. It's a type-heavy cover, minimalist.
NO: On the first cover for Shadow Speaker, she was white. She's from Niger. She kept getting darker and darker on successive editions. They do listen.
SN: We're asked what we want on the cover. They're good with me. Elizabeth Hand's Illyria has this toy theater -- we got an artist who does toy landscapes. I'm adamant about getting it right. It's our last form of advertising... and they don't look past what will sell a book. Kelly Link's Pretty Monsters... the cover has to tell you what's inside. If you're 10 and the cover doesn't match the book, you feel betrayed. Everyone uses photographs because they're cheap. I like art.
With Sharyn November, Sigrid J. Ellis, Naomi Kritzer, Nnedi Nkemdili Okorafor, Susan Ramirez.
Children's literature can be a powerful force for feminist ideas, and under some circumstances can fly right under the radar and into the hands of the children on the Other Side. How do you write subversively for children without turning the books into (boring) propaganda? What books are successfully bringing feminist or other progressive ideas to an unsuspecting audience even as we speak?
Read it because it has Sharyn November calling me out and striking terror into my heart! It's hilarious!
Typed up after the fact from notes. In the prepanel banter Sharyn November said that it was a stupid title for a panel and they were going to talk about different stuff.
SN: You don't write to recruit, you write a good book. What's offensive?
SJE: Left Behind. But also some of the books I loved in childhood -- Kipling, Oz. With my kids we're trying to read 50% books with people of color.
SN: Ozma of Oz is hugely subversive. A boy who turns into a girl.
NO: Twilight. It's hard to badmouth anyone, but I only got 100 pages in. The female character is offensive, and the people in color also. [Debbie Reese has written about the Quileute characters in the Twilight books at American Indians in Children's Literature.
SR: I don't read books like Twilight. They're boring. The books of my childhood are steeped in sexism. Narnia, The Sword in the Stone. I say, those men lived in a segregated society, hardly knew any women and thought weird things about them.
SN: The Twilight books are pulp romances. "Ooh, I smell like freesia!"
NK: A Christian knock-off of Babysitters Club. I found her the original BSC instead. Genre Christian books have this weird emphasis on the Sinner's Prayer as crucially important. And also, if you pray just right your prayer is answered.
SR: That's the plot of The Craft!
NK: [Because her daughter was reading far above her grade level -- this IS an issue I see a lot with advanced readers...] Older books are often gentler in content while being sophisticated, but they're also often politically objectionable. The Great Brain books are positive in regards to American Indians, but it's "What they need is a honky."
SN: What's good?
NK: The American Girl "Kit" books. Has a historically accurate representation of the first Thanksgiving.
SN: The offensive thing with those is...
NK: The expensive crap.
SR: The web comic Digger. There's no necessary reason for her to be female, she just is. She's a wombat woman.
NO: Tove Jansson, the Moomins. Those were the first novels I read. They're extremely strange books -- the Moomins are these hippo-like creatures with good manners.
SN: She has a marvellous memoir, The Sculptor's Daughter.
SE: Looking for chapter books... we're taking world mythology. Harry Potter, the Boxcar Children.
SN: What do your kids pick when left to their own devices?
SR: The girl will read anything. The boy likes what I like.
NK: Molly likes series books. They're comfortable. Harry Potter, over and over.
SN: Why does a person want to write propaganda?
SE: The myths we tell our children give them a map of people, of cultures, of possibilities. If you paint a world of male heroes, you're telling girls they don't have heroism in their future. Young children are devising their own personal plan of what their personal power is. We want to tell them there is nothing they can't learn.
SN: Will you be my mother?
What if you do all this and they still...
SE: Left to their own devises, the boy reads tech manuals and the girl reads pretty pretty princesses.
NK: Check out the Slacktivist blog for his critique of the Left Behind series. Left Behind is really badly written. My kids don't actually need to read that.
SN: Propaganda at its best.
NK: Fundamentalist Christians are trying to save your soul because they believe that you need to believe X or you'll go to hell.
SN: I'm not going to play devil's advocate. Overzealous leftwing advocates are just as bad. You're dealing with people who don't have a worldview yet so you have to be careful. It's hard to find contemporary fiction with girls who have power and aren't cutting themselves. It's hard to find fantasy that's not fake England.
SE: We read problematic books. We talk about why it's a problem. There are leftist homeschoolers trying to keep their kids in a bubble.
SN: I don't necessarily have an agenda.
NO: I'm thinking about the princess thing. You don't have a choice about exposing your daughter to that. There's this whole disney pantheon with no people of color.
SN: Princess is just an accident of birth.
NK: Some girls conceptualize "princess" as meaning a girl who has adventures while wearing a pretty dress.
SN: Subversion... children's games are enormously subversive. Keep creating the good books, make sure they get out there, represent characters and voices we haven't seen. Jewish characters, for example.
(The issue is raised that you basically only see Jewish characters in Holocaust books.)
Except for propaganda -- what the religious publishers do, they do a romance or a mystery and put a layer of religion on top.
(The topic shifts to Twilight.)
SN: It's like Alien. I don't know why anyone would read that and want to have a baby.
NO: I made up a world because I wasn't seeing any reflection of myself.
SN: If you have African-American kids in the city, they're shooting each other. Or, "Hello slavery!"
NK: There's The Watsons Go To Birmingham, Christopher Paul Curtis... 95% of it is this family comedy, it's like the Cosby show, and then there's this church bombing.
[My note: I think that this is a brilliant move, structurally. I think the book REALLY works.]
SE: I'm looking for comic books that represent people of color at all. I don't want my daughter to think I love something (comic books) that's irrelevant to her.
SR: I am a radical taking-children-seriously parent. Kids want what they need, even when they're watching Disney or reading Babysitters Club:
SN: No, will you be my mother?
As a publisher -- not a lot of people are writing them. [I didn't note the context. I think "them" is the books the panelists want to read -- especially, more people of color in their fantasy and science fiction.]
They're often crappy. I won't put crap out there. I want to put out a good book on X, not ANY book on X.
We talk about cover art. At this point Sharyn November says to me:
SN: EMILY.
EH: Yes?
SN: When is your book coming out?
EH: Summer 2010?
SN: What is the title?
EH: Totally Sweet Ninja Death Squad?
SN: Her cover -- it's a long title. It's a type-heavy cover, minimalist.
NO: On the first cover for Shadow Speaker, she was white. She's from Niger. She kept getting darker and darker on successive editions. They do listen.
SN: We're asked what we want on the cover. They're good with me. Elizabeth Hand's Illyria has this toy theater -- we got an artist who does toy landscapes. I'm adamant about getting it right. It's our last form of advertising... and they don't look past what will sell a book. Kelly Link's Pretty Monsters... the cover has to tell you what's inside. If you're 10 and the cover doesn't match the book, you feel betrayed. Everyone uses photographs because they're cheap. I like art.
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(no subject)
29/5/09 01:48 (UTC)(no subject)
29/5/09 01:56 (UTC)i wanted people to know you had a book coming! which is awesome!
(i will reread this post of yours in a bit and see if i can clarify anything i said.)
(no subject)
29/5/09 02:36 (UTC)(no subject)
29/5/09 05:59 (UTC)Also I totally didn't know this:
On the first cover for Shadow Speaker, she was white.
AUGH.
(no subject)
29/5/09 13:10 (UTC)(no subject)
29/5/09 03:41 (UTC)I think that there's also a place for fiction that's entirely secure in its own assumptions. That's different from propaganda, because propaganda aims to convert. Some fiction is preaching to the choir and aware of that. We read those books for comfort and encouragement and affirmation, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. But you don't get to be Flannery O'Connor by writing that kind of book.
And now you've reminded me of "My Darling, My Hamburger." THERE is classic teen lit with an absurd title.
(no subject)
29/5/09 03:32 (UTC)(no subject)
29/5/09 12:55 (UTC)This sounds like it was an awesome panel. You're coming to WorldCon, right? RIGHT?
(no subject)
29/5/09 13:17 (UTC)I hadn't been planning on WorldCon -- I know, it's Montreal! And I might be able to convince the little sisters to let me stay at their place! But financially, logistically, I don't know. WorldCon is huge and intimidating -- I was at my Human Contact Threshold at a 1000-person con.