Yay for YA!

As I mentioned in my earlier post, I’m super-excited about truly dedicating myself to independent reading this year, especially the Reading Workshop format that I’ll be using with my sophomores. Over the past week, I’ve taken all four of my classes to the school library for “book talks,” and while I can’t say these book talks universally excited my students, I can say that they reignited my own interest in young adult literature. Not all of the books presented to them were young adult, but a number of them were, and I was pleasantly surprised by the variety of subjects and complexity of themes that some of the most cutting edge YA lit has to offer. In fact, I think I may go on a little YA binge myself (as soon as I finish trudging through the incredibly grown up Death with Interruptions by Jose Saramago. Brilliant, of course, but not very good at keeping me awake after these utterly exhausting September days…).

As a creative writing major and literature minor in college, I took a particular interest in young adult literature. I remember encountering Francesca Lia Block in one of my YA classes and sort of metaphorically clasping an armful of her gorgeous books to my chest, thinking, “Oh, if only I’d known about books like this to help me through high school!” Not that I had a tortured or traumatic adolescence (then again, what adolescence isn’t tortured and traumatic), but the books I read in high school fell into one of two categories: my mom’s V.C. Andrews books, which shocked me again and again with their complete audacity, or the classics like Wuthering Heights or Tess of the d’Urbervilles, which made me feel intelligent and wildly romantic at the same time. Indeed both of these types of literature tell excellent stories, but neither had very much to do with my actual life. Block’s stories–despite their tinge of fantasy and, at times, outrageous situations–at least address real issues that teens face, such as eating disorders, sexuality (real teen sexuality, not V.C. Andrews-style!), and drug abuse, just to name a few.

Thinking back now on college, I realize that I truthfully still was an adolescent and young adult literature still had all the relevance in the world to me. And I’m thinking…it still does. I spend the vast majority of my time with teenagers, and I’m wondering if immersing myself in some YA lit might not only be an enjoyable reading experience, but might also help me continue to examine my students’ various issues and struggles from a variety of angles.

In college and just after, I dreamed of being a young adult author. Somewhere along the way I decided that was only because I was, in fact, a young adult and so it was the most natural ambition to have as a budding writer. Now, I’m thinking about dabbling in it again. The thought terrifies me a bit, though. I fear that I would only be able to create cliched teenage characters or that it would be unfair to mine the experiences of my students for fictional material; I fear that I (ironically) don’t know enough about real teen culture to write authentically, that if I tried to write about young characters again, I would only be able to wrangle out something contrived or–worse–dated because I’m basing it too much on my experience of being a teenager in the mid-90s, practically the Dark Ages compared to what it’s like to be a teenager now. Plus, given the array of topics I heard covered in our “book talks,” I fear there’s nothing left to write about! Mad Cow Disease, school violence, anorexia, vampires, zombies, one-year-to-live stories, suicide, every futuristic situation that one can imagine…it’s all been done! I know, of course, this isn’t true and that these are just a list of excuses for not taking a risk; this is not the kind of behavior that I find acceptable in myself. And, so, right now I have a character sort of percolating in my imagination, someone insecure yet fierce, naive yet witty, tough-seeming yet fragile…we’ll see where she leads me.

In the meantime, I have a lot of reading to do and I’m hungry for recommendations, so bring them on! I’m also hoping to spend some time perusing the YA blogging world. I’ve recently rediscovered Laurie Halse Anderson’s brilliant blog (her recent posts on censorship and banned books are absolutely fascinating) and would love recommendations for others as well. Yay for YA!

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