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Reading MattersA YA novelist and indie publisher on books, |
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Doug Wilhelm |
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Early adolescence is a pivotal time: it's the bumpy, very often harsh and hard transition between childhood and our grownup selves. And this week I’m returning to the theme of What Our Children Are Reading: Hey your a skank that has Godzilla tits. How about you get a breast reduction.
Boy. “I feel bad for your parents, having a daughter like you. You are fat and ugly and need to learn how to sing.”
You are such a fat whale and whore.
I hope you die. Your a fucking retard.
go hang your self, okay, you will find some rope under your moms bed.
Random person, Xbox Live: You are fucking gay go die in a hole.
Go kill yourself fag no one loves you, they won’t miss you
Your a fat lesbian, go kill yourself
from a girl
Dirty slut go die in hell little whore.
-boy
boy to girl: you ugly fat fucking cunt
girl on YouTube: Your fat and ugly and you suck go die in a whole
I have been called a cunt and fat and a bitch
You are bipolar and gay. What’s wrong with you?
One recent week in a middle school (it could have been any school, anywhere), I asked a cafeteria full of kids to each write for me one nasty text message they had received recently, if they ever had. Some hadn’t. One wrote: I have never been hurt or bullied in a text message. I’m a boy. But the great, great majority had — and those above are only samples of what I collected. The running themes — fatness, gayness, go kill yourself, if you do it no one will miss you — suggest strongly to me that this digital onslaught is not only real, but that it's recurring all over the country, if not the world. Every day. So here are my questions, and lame stabs at answers: Is this why so many middle schoolers only want to read fantasy novels? Could be. If this is regular kid reality, would you want to stay in it? Why? Why are kids doing this? Good question. Why do countless so-called grownups post the most infantile, ignorant cruelty you can imagine online, in comment boxes everywhere, every single day? By giving everyone a voice, has the Internet only brought out the worst in us? Well, has it? Not totally, I don’t think. This is only a slice — the harshest, meanest slice — of what young people are sharing online. I also meet middle schoolers who post their films and original songs on YouTube, their writings on fan-fiction sites and teenink.com, their artwork on deviantart.com. But, when they do ... people post these comments. And here we are again. Are we evolving? Will we grow out of posting ridiculously negative crap all the time? We tend to forget how new the Internet is in human history. The middle schoolers I talk to are the first generation to grow up with it. The first. It’s not unreasonable to hope that we might all simmer down, with time, and stop posting so much stupidity. We might. The most optimistic indicators that I hear, for that, come from young people who say things like, “I used to be online [or texting or tweeting] all the time, and I got so tired of it.” A female college student said to me last week, “I am so over that stuff.” Will we all get over it? Maybe. We can hope. Can we please return to the present? What is this doing to early adolescents? That, I think, is one of the key questions of our time. How is all this posted and texted cruelty — the obsession with weight, the fear of homosexuality, the encouraging of self-harm — affecting kids at the very time in life that is, after early childhood, the most vulnerable and impressionable in their lives? As so many parents observe, young teens can often get swallowed up in this stuff. There are kids all over who don’t want to come off-line ever, don’t want to come out, don’t seem to want to do anything but post and skype and text, very very often with relentless negativity. I think in time there will be a new diagnosis, something like network-assisted depression, and it will be regarded as serious. Maybe there already is. Do girls do this mostly, or boys? Girls are the vast majority of recipients. Girls do this to girls, and boys do this to girls. It seems clear, to me at least, that boys are much less often the targets — unless they are seen as gay, which means, unless they are seen as vulnerably different and can be labeled as gay. And that does happen a lot. What can we do? I have no idea, really. I’m just posing here as someone who has a clue. But whatever we as parents or educators or counselors or school officials try to do, it’s very clear that digital connectedness has allowed young adolescents to do what they’ve always done — create an exclusive world of their own references and communication — and expand it into the new, enormously potent realm of universal connectivity. And we are all, going forward, going to live with the impacts of that, whatever they turn out to be.
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After an exhausting day, with all the tensions that come up between small child and parent, at last you make it to bedtime. There’s still some low-key power struggling, because the child does not want that light turned out and the parent longs for the blessed sliver of personal time that follows this ritual. And then ... Then you settle together into a picture book. And in that closeness of reading out loud, in the sharing of a story, the pointing to favorite places on the pages and the gradual shared relaxation, comes the redemption of everything. These times can be so warm and sweet that, years later, they’re almost too poignant for the aging parent to remember. And if you should one day spot one of those favorite books, or hear about someone else’s read-aloud memories, it’s like finding the memento of a long-ago love affair. Because, really, that’s what it was.
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Writing for young adults, and talking with middle schoolers on school visits, gives me glimpses like little windows into American life today. Early adolescents may not yet be paying bills or carrying mortgages, but they very often feel the crunch of family stress, and the tension between hope and fear or dreams and despair, more intensely than they ever will again in their lives. They see things clearly — often things they can only live with, that they have no power to change. Last week I shared some entries that middle schoolers had made in my pocket notebook, after I'd talked with them at their schools over the past year or so. Today I’m looking at a small stack of lined paper, each sheet the size of an index card. Eighth graders at a school in suburban-rural New Hampshire each wrote an idea for a realistic novel on one of these pages, after we talked recently. Their teacher then sent the stack to me.
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If you were to make another story Mr. Wilhelm I think I would be an interesting character because I am fabulous and myself. I am bold and out there. My name’s Nathan. I am friends with 8th grade girls middle popular. 7th grade popular girls, middle popular. I can’t ever be mean because I feel too bad after the fact. Guys that are jocks make fun of me and I am a good singer (decent), play trumpet, do drama, and that’s me. That’s written in purple ink on a slip of notebook paper. On a school visit recently, a boy came up after a classroom session and handed it to me.
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I write for middle schoolers, and here’s a sample of what millions of them are reading: honestly no one cares for you even your parents don’t want you, there gunna put you in care
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I’ve had the flu this week, and when I don’t feel well I turn to humor. Written humor, not YouTube videos (though I’m not averse to those, and I’m a regular online watcher of “The Daily Show”). I have a bookshelf that’s a collection of the American humor writers who have meant a lot to me, from Robert Benchley and James Thurber to Calvin Trillin and, yes, Dave Barry — but the guy I love most when I’m sick was English. P.G. Wodehouse.
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When I first saw that mindfulness, the practice of moment-to-moment awareness, can make your life suddenly snap to life, I was walking on a street in New Delhi on an ordinary morning, in the neighborhood near the railroad station where the travelers’ hotels are. I was 22, and I thought: I just figured it out. I had come to India, as was not uncommon back in the mid-70s, from western Europe by overland bus in the company of hippies, mystics and other motley travelers. Weighing down my backpack was a load of books on Indian philosophy and Buddhism and the like. (The backpack is in the attic now, somewhere. One of the books is still on my shelf.)
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Innovation and communication are keys to success in the 21st century economy, and employers consistently call for schools to develop these skills in young people. But among the toughest challenges that educators face is how to do that well — especially how to teach the creative process, the more so at a time of bone-cut curriculum budgets. As an author of 14 novels for young adults, and a self-employed professional writer for almost 30 years, working with the creative process to get stuff written effectively is what I do. Can I share what I’ve learned about how to do it? I think I can — and I believe I just have.
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Although he wrote and published 39 books, the Viennese psychiatrist, neurologist and author Viktor Frankl is known around the world for just one. He wrote that one fast, in the first months after he was liberated from three years in Nazi ghettos and concentration camps during World War II. The Holocaust had taken his wife — who died in Bergen-Belsen, as did Anne Frank — along with his father, his mother, and his brother. In its original German, the book Frankl first published in 1946 is called Trotzdem Ja Zum Leben Sagen: Life in Spite of Everything. Its English title is Man’s Search for Meaning. Fifteen years after Frankl’s death in 1997, Man’s Search for Meaning is ranked 193 on Amazon.com, where it has 900 customer reviews.
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I want to write about meaning. I know you’re not supposed to. You’re supposed to be ironic, to pretend you’re too clever for any direct discussion of meaning, for God knows what pitfalls might await if you ever went there. But as I’ve visited middle schools around the country in recent years, to talk about my book The Revealers at the end of all-school or gradewide reading projects, I’ve found myself talking about meaning — in front of a crowd, no less, of adolescents.
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I began to fall in love with sentences when I had my first writing job, as a young, deadline-dependent reporter on a weekly paper in New Jersey. For this burgeoning love I had a matchmaker. He was the same one lots of young American writers had. His name was E.B. White.
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This morning I got an email from an eighth grader in Ohio who had read my YA novel Falling for her advanced language arts class, and would get extra credit if she could get my responses to some followup questions. Falling is set in a real community, the place where I was living and raising my son when I wrote it — and this reader's questions related to the experience of developing a novel in, and about, the place where you're living.
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Yesterday I had a Skype session with seventh and eighth graders from Messalonskee Middle School in Oakland, Maine, which just finished a community read with both The Revealers and True Shoes. We had a great discussion! Then this morning, the teacher whom I worked with to coordinate the session and I had a quick exchange of emails on how it had gone. I mentioned that True Shoes is an independent publication — last year I created my own publishing imprint, Long Stride Books, to bring out this and future books. The teacher responded: "I had planned to ask you why you chose to publish True Shoes the way you did. Would you call that self-published? I just heard a segment on NPR about the self-publishing industry that has emerged in recent years and it was quite interesting." Here's my answer:
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Some years ago when I was covering Vermont for the Boston Globe, I shared an office in Montpelier with the editorial cartoonist and graphic designer Tim Newcomb. He and I went to Kenyon College together, and we know each other pretty well — and on more than one Friday (I wrote mostly for the Sunday paper), Tim said, “Must be deadline day! You’re cleaning the trash cans again.”
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Last week I was in the Detroit airport, between planes on the way to a middle-school visit in Bettendorf, Iowa, when I saw an article in the Free Press about new demand for old-fashioned printing. As a former newspaper person, I like to read local papers — and this issue’s Arts & Style page had a feature headlined “Making its mark again: Old-style letterpress becomes a trend for local print shops.” Four shops, I learned, have cropped up in Detroit to offer basically the moveable-type method of printing invented by Johannes Gutenberg in 1439. “There’s a strong impetus from the 20-somethings who have grown up in front of screens,” one shop’s “artist-owner” explained, “and ... want to do something spatial and tangible and honest.”
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The dream of writing and publishing your own book lives in people everywhere — and I hope it always will. For my first post of 2013 (by the way, happy new year!), here's the response I sent this week to a young writer who’s a first-year student at a university in Maryland. I met him last year at his high school in Virginia; he told me he was writing a book, and this week he emailed to say: I wrote it. What do I do now? Here's how I answered:
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Last Friday, I was inside a middle school in western Connecticut when the shootings happened in Newtown not far away. We didn’t hear about it; I didn’t learn what had happened until I stopped into a local hot dog place after school. Then, on Tuesday night of this week, as I prepared to give a talk before an evening gathering of parents and students in a middle-school gym in St. Louis, I had to think: What can I say about this thing? What is worth saying that isn’t already being very widely said? So let’s leave aside for a moment the urgent need to ban public access to military assault weapons and ammunition clips. Yes, that is the first thing that must be done — but, as the president said in Newtown, it can’t be the only thing. If our aim is to make school feel safer and be much safer for our kids, what else must we look at?
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The middle-aged life is not generally full of adventure, but this for me has been a year like no other — because after publishing 12 books for young adults through traditional, mostly New York City publishers, during the past 12 months I created my own new imprint and, with my 13th book, went out on my own.
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I visit a lot of middle schools, and in every one there is a room where everyone is welcome and kids of all types want to go. It’s a place where no matter what your interest is, something is likely there for you — and someone is there to guide you to it.
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I’ve never liked literary. Stories should be about life — about people and experience, drawn through the creative process. Literary is pretentious. This is a prejudice, I guess. But I have good company.
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