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.
***
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.”
***
Rick Riordan as patron saint of mythic
adaptations
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.”
