Tales from the North Texas Teen Book Festival always figure among reader favorites. The 2020 festival in early March finished just before the country shut down for COVID-19, but 2021 is, as of this writing, good to go! In the meantime, please enjoy these highlights:
Tales from teen book fest – our safe place in
stories
First of all – is it possible to talk about “safe places” amid thousands of teens and preteens turned loose at a book festival? Aside from the abundance of hand sanitizer stations at last weekend’s North Texas Teen Book Festival in Irving, Texas, there was little evidence of worry about the COV-19 epidemic that occupies older minds. Worry about getting to the head of the line for favorite author signings, yes. And about grabbing snacks and restroom breaks between the dozens of panels and publisher events. Epidemics barely rated a yawn.
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| Image: Pixabay |
What really scared young readers was finding a place to fit in. Especially if they were (or felt) a little different from the characters in the books they read. Luckily for them, authors of, and writing about, diverse ethnicities, cultures, and body and genre types abounded. Like Roshani (“the ‘a’ is silent!”) Chokshi (Gilded Wolves series), Melissa de la Cruz (Descendants series), Hafsah Faizal (We Hunt the Flame series), Marie Lu (The Kingdom of Back), and Marissa Meyer (The Lunar Chronicles series) at the Flights of Fantasy panel discussion.
“How can stories be used as a safe place?” moderator/podcaster (Adventures in YA) Sara Roberts asked the group, whose ethnic diversity – Indian American, Hispanic, Chinese, multi-racial, and Arab, as well as identifying as white – offered a springboard for discussion.
“(Fantasies are) are safe places in that they do not minimize any emotion. That’s what I love about children’s literature,” Chokshi said.
That’s because readers can explore “while immersing yourselves in a whole new world,” Cruz said. “A lot of fantasy is metaphor.”
Lu noted, “The journey of discovery of yourself always applies. (But) there were a lot of holes in fantasy that are now opening up and giving way to other voices.”
For Meyer, reading fantasy as a young person was escapist, a way to explore new worlds. “there’s so much explanation mirrored in these epic quests.”
Given the benefits of trying on these new worlds, “How important is it for young readers to see themselves” in books, Roberts asked.
As an Indian American, Chokshi said, even after she began writing as well as reading, “I took me a while to realize I was writing myself out of my stories. These stories read with a lot more urgency when you see yourself in them.”
“Maybe the beautiful queen can have dark hair instead of blonde,” Cruz said.
“My first efforts were very white,” Faizal said. “I wrote all white characters because I thought that’s what I had to do to get published. . . (Once) I realized what was wrong and got myself into the story, it took off.”
“Early on,” Lu also admitted, “I never ever thought of putting myself in these books. Growing up, I never saw a story with a Chinese character. I can’t imagine what it would have meant to me as a reader.”
Surveying her fellow writers, Meyer decided to address the elephant in the room. “So, I’m white,” she said, a statement that drew delighted laughter from her very diverse audience. “I came to this through anime and realized that even in anime, which is Japanese, a lot of the characters are white,” sparking the possibility of diverse characters in even the smallest details.
And although many stories emphasize the difficulties faced by characters (and readers and writers) of non-white ethnicities, “It’s really great to have stories about ourselves that are fun!” Chokshi said.
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And here are the fest's followup posts:
Diversity goes to the big (and biggish) screens
Stories for (but not limited to) young adult readers have long been fodder for movie and TV adaptations. Nothing against Little Women, but the recent North Texas Teen Book Festival hosted a range of more recent – and sometimes harder-edged – books taking their places on the big – and small – screens.
Panelists Becky Albertalli (Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda), Max Brallier (Last Kids on Earth TV series), David Levithan (Every Day), Sarah Mlynoski (Upside Down Magic), Julie Murphy (Dumplin’), and Angie Thomas (The Hate U Give) joined moderator/podcaster Sara Roberts to talk about what it’s like to see their books come to life in a different medium – and whether they’ve brought new readers with them.
Responses ranged from Mlynoski (whose movie adaption is due this summer): “I don’t know yet but I learn people get a lot more into it.”
To Albertalli: “I’m not sure people knew it was a book,” of the Love, Simon, movie adaptation of her coming of age story, Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda. (Which didn’t keep festival teens from finding, and sporting copies of the original.)
To Murphy: “People tell me, ‘my dad’s seen your movie.’” (Dumplin’, based on the book of the same name). “Dad may not have turned into a reader,” Murphy said, “but I’m glad he’s getting the story.”
However, writers acknowledged that Hollywood can be slower to pounce on themes of diversity than publishers. Having movies about “a black girl (Thomas’s The Hate U Give), a gay boy (Love, Simon), and a fat girl (Dumplin’)” as Thomas noted, necessarily mean more traction for characters whose diversity mirrors that of increasing numbers of young readers.
“You have to ask the film people to make sure the world (on film) around your characters is just as diverse,” Murphy said.
When the session turned to Q&A, one young fan said, “I write, but about serious things and the problems of the world. But when I tell people, they say, you’re a kid, you should be writing about happy things, like ponies. What do you say to that?”
Authors bluntly favored the questioner, although not all responses were suitable for print. “I look forward to you signing a book for me one day.”
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It’s no secret that adaptations of classical myths are hot properties in literature for kids and teens. Middle-grade author Rick Riordan first primed the pump with his wildly irreverent takes on Greek divinities, but his Rick Riordan Presents imprint within Disney Publishing has expanded to feature a multitude of other cultural myths adapted to modern life.
The Rick Riordan Presents! panel at the North Texas Teen Book Festival drew on books by Indian American writer Roshani Chokshi (Gilded Wolves series), Cuban Carlos Hernandez (Sal and Gabi Break the Universe) and African Kwame Mbalia (Tristan Strong Punches a Hole in the Sky).
Rebecca Marsick opened the discussion with the observation, “All of your books involve other dimensions.”
“Every book is a thought experiment – what if this happens?” Hernandez said. The alternate dimension is this other possibility.”
“Portal fantasy and alternate dimensions are just cool ways to explain magic,” Mbalia said. “Things just are, and you’re free to explore the stories. We don’t have a lot of time to explain in books. We have to get to the meat.”
What, Marsick asked, did the writers’ personal cultures bring to their stories?
Or perhaps, Hernandez said, it was a matter of what they didn’t bring – the blanks he felt necessary to fill in. “One of the things I wasn’t seeing in the (Latinx) literature was the joy. It was beautiful, but it wasn’t happy. Things feel wild and magical all the time, even when we struggle.”
Chokshi also noted that a writer’s experience
with myths may vary, citing differences between the stories she and her husband,
from another part of the country, learned. “India is a big place (and) I’m not
trying to represent an entire country in a book. What we have to do is
celebrate these stories. Try to get the general strokes of the mythology and
then let it live.”
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