Some of us wonder about computer assisted anything in the language arts classroom. Well, Tom can help you with that. In the decade or so that I have known Tom, he is always thinking way out ahead of the pack in terms of technology and the classroom. Early this summer we had a great conversation about this topic. Take a moment to see want Tom has to offer.

Understandably, I opened The Duke of Bannerman Prep by Katie A. Nelson in the shadow of The Great Gatsby. Nelson’s novel was heralded as a timely re-telling of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic, set on a debate team at a California private school. At the book’s start, I understood the comparison.
 
In Bannerman Prep, we meet high schooler Tanner McKay who has a beautiful cousin named Abby who is eyed by the larger-than-life Duke even though she is dating the witless Blake. In Great Gatsby, we meet Nick Caraway who has a beautiful cousin Daisy who is pursued by Gatsby even though she is married to the brutish Tom Buchanan. 

​

​As someone who develops instructional methods to help students and teachers use quantitative literary data to explore and enjoy literature, I naturally turned to the data to see if it supported the novels’ initial parallelism. (To explore the data, I used an online tool on my new blog and website Plotting Plots. Plotting Plots is a free site “for booklovers who like data” complete with graphing and search tools for popularly taught books as well as blog posts about data science and reading literature.) The novels seemed to run in parallel: A look at the word frequencies of both Gatsby and Nick as well as the Duke and Tanner reveal comparable usage. There is even a similar dip in the frequency of character pairings between Chapters 1 and 2, for instance. 

​But as I continued reading Nelson’s novel, I began huffing in objection to the book’s title. Whereas The Great Gatsby is actually about a mysterious man named Gatsby, The Duke of Bannerman Prep is less about the Duke than it is about the story’s narrator, Tanner McKay. Say what you want about Gatbsy’s narrator Nick Caraway, he mostly maintained a disciplined narrative distance from the titular character whose story he told.
 
What makes Bannerman Prep interesting to me, however, is how its author chose to diverge from the book’s literary inspiration, a departure that was most pronounced in the original novel’s central love triangle.
 
When I have taught Fitzgerald’s novel, I often focused on students examining Gatsby through his love triangle with Daisy and Tom. With this in mind, I fixated on how the sadistic Tom would appear in Nelson’s young adult adaptation. So I examined the literary data for the love triangle in both Great Gatsby and Bannerman Prep. Using tools freely available on my website Plotting Plots, I plotted the names Gatsby, Daisy, and Tom across each chapter in Fitzgerald’s novel. I then plotted the names Duke, Abby, and Blake in Nelson’s retelling. Here’s what I saw. 

​In the Gatsby data, we see how Tom’s and Daisy’s names appear with similar frequency at the beginning of the book, that they diverge as Fitzgerald develops their individual characters, and as Daisy rediscovers her feelings for Gatsby. Arguably, Chapter 7 is the most powerful part of the book, both quantitatively and narratively, where the car accident occurs and Tom gains the advantage he needs to precipitate Gatsby’s fall. And look: Tom’s name overwhelms the story in that chapter, doubtless because of his clandestine affair with Myrtle before her demise and successive manipulation of Myrtle’s husband George to commit murder.
 
In Bannerman, the love triangle data tells a very different story. In fact, there are only two chapters in which the name of Tom’s counterpart, Blake, appears more frequently than the Duke’s. The first is in Chapter 7 where Tanner, Abby, and Blake attend one of the Duke’s Gatsbyesque parties. (Abby abandons the ever-imbibing Blake to find time with the Duke; Tanner covers for her.) Then, in Chapter 15, when the love triangle converges at a dance club on New Year’s Eve. In both instances, Blake might yell and shout, but that’s it really. One could hardly call Blake guileful let alone murderous.
 
Exploring the literary data focused my attention on Blake in a way I hadn’t expected. In my original reading, I identified Blake as Nelson’s version of Tom Buchanan. But that isn’t true. When I read the data more closely, I saw that Blake never really achieves the quantitative dominance that Tom does. The name “Blake” spikes, but never overwhelms. When the frequency of his name usage fades at the end of the book, which Tom’s name does as well, it isn’t in the wake of any real cruelty. Just a fight. Blake is a one-dimensional grunting oaf whose presence serves as color but never a catalyst for real character development.
 
So in the adaptation, what happens to Tom’s viciousness? Does it just disappear?
 
Kind of. Nelson redistributes some of Tom Buchanan’s traits in Bannerman Prep, but not into a single character. Tom’s oafishness can be found in Blake. But Tom’s capacity for violence is bestowed on Tanner himself when he steals his brother’s painkillers to repay a debt and successively sends Sam to the hospital writhing in pain. Sam’s suffering is the apex of agony in Nelson’s novel. Like Tom’s responsibility in the death of Gatsby, Tanner’s culpability is indirect: Tanner didn’t directly cause Sam’s suffering, but his actions ensured it would ultimately come to pass.
 
From a pedagogical perspective, it is unfortunate that Tom’s twisted elitism, his loud insecurity, his repugnant racism, his forceful misogyny, and his barbaric brutality are sanitized in the modern adaptation. Today, students need opportunities to grapple with the complexity of individual greatness in society, whether that greatness is driven by love like Gatsby’s or hatred like Tom’s. Readers won’t, however, find occasion to grapple very much here. The Duke of Bannerman Prep is an enjoyable read, a good read even. But, for me, not as great as Gatsby.  

In an interview with Shirley M. Jordan in 1993, Rita Williams-Garcia said, “Well, I’ve already told my editor, ‘I will not be winning any Corettas.”  Of course, that prediction fortunately did not pan out. To date, she has actually won four “Corettas,” and several other major citations.

Williams-Garcia is probably best known for her Gaither Sisters Trilogy which was bound together in Gaither Sisters Trilogy Collection: One Crazy Summer, P.S. Be Eleven, Gone Crazy in Alabama (2018). One Crazy Summer, a New York Times bestseller, won several awards, including a Newbery Honor and the Scott O’Dell Award. It was also named a National Book Award finalist and a NAACP Image Award nominee. Its two Coretta Scott King Author Award winning companion novels, PS. Be Eleven (2013) and Gone Crazy in Alabama (2015), are equally lauded. With all of the excitement about these books and the publication of her latest books, A Sitting in St. James (2021), a 2021 Boston Globe–Horn Book Award winner set during slavery, and She Persisted: Florence Griffith Joyner (2021), a biography, it is easy to forget that Rita Williams-Garcia has been writing for young adults for over thirty years.

 With all of the excitement about these books and the publication of her latest books, A Sitting in St. James (2021), a 2021 Boston Globe–Horn Book Award winner set during slavery, and She Persisted: Florence Griffith Joyner (2021), a biography, it is easy to forget that Rita Williams-Garcia has been writing for young adults for over thirty years.

In 1993, while talking to Jordan, the critical reception of her earlier novels was not as enthusiastic as it has been for her recent work, but I think critics missed the significance of Williams-Garcia’s contributions to YA at that time. Two of her earlier novels in particular deserve a fresh look: Blue Tights (1988) and Like Sisters on the Homefront (1995), which did garner accolades (i.e., It was named a Coretta Scott King Honor book, and it was chosen as an ALA Best Book for Young Adults and a Best of the Year book by ALA Booklist, School Library Journal, Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books, Horn Book, and Publishers Weekly.). 

Williams-Garcia says Blue Tights was originally titled Blue Tights, Big Butt and took nearly ten years to publish. The novel features fifteen-year-old Joyce Collins, who both seems in a hurry to grow up and pressured by society, including family members, to do so.  It doesn’t help that Joyce is unsure of herself despite being smart and a talented aspiring dancer. When her dance teacher points out that her voluptuous body type is not typical for ballet dancers, Joyce’s self-esteem plummets even further, and she begins to look for acceptance in relationships with her peers and older men before discovering her own worth, especially through her friendship with Gayle, the protagonist of Like Sisters on the Homefront, and through her participation in an Afrocentric dance troupe.

Like Sisters on the Homefront is 26 years old, but it is still timely, funny, and important. Protagonist, Gayle Whitaker has an abridged girlhood. At fourteen years old, she is a mother pregnant with her second child and forced to get an abortion. Hoping extended family will offer Gayle support and an understanding of who she is and where she comes from, her mother sends her to live with her aunt and uncle in Georgia. While there, she slowly changes, learns responsibility, and embraces her family, culture, and history.

​I like to think of Joyce and Gayle as precursors to Delphine, whose own childhood is shortened in a less severe way, as she tries to help take care of her younger sisters after their mother leaves the family. In Williams-Garcia’s capable hands, each girl whether, Joyce, Gayle, or Delphine, leans on family and community to find their way-- and to try to cling to the little bit of girlhood they have left. 

​References:
Jordan, S. M. Rita Williams-Garcia. (1993). In S. M. Jordan (Ed.), Broken silences: Interviews
with Black and White women writers (pp. 303-322). Rutgers. 

Until next time.

More than Just Setting: Reading and Writing Rural People and Places in YAL
by Dr. Chea Parton

If you read my guest blog on Ethical ELA, you know that I recently took a trip home to my folks’ farm in Indiana.

 Driving to the grocery store, to pick up takeout, to get my hair cut by a stylist that’s known me since I was knee-high to a grasshopper, to meet a friend for coffee, etc. – I was struck and amazed by how much changes and how much stays the same. It may be both a paradox and a cliché, but that doesn’t make it any less true. 

My sister and I have always joked that where we’re from is a geographical oddity (any O Brother Where Art Thou fans out there?) because it’s about 20 minutes from everywhere. In terms of the rural/remote spectrum, we’re definitely rural, having grown up on 80 acres with our closest neighbor a quarter mile away, but in terms of remoteness, we’re not that far from the nearest small city. On each of my trips into town, I found myself reliving other trips and the reasons for them. I could still name the families that used to live in the houses along the route I have always taken. The drive wasn’t only a physical and topographical journey – a journey in place, but it was also a mental journey through time and memories. 

Reflecting on this later, I remembered how my Grandma Jean would often have difficulty talking about where she grew up in East Tennessee, but as soon as we got down there, the stories started flowing from her like the Obey River she played in as a kid. They were all rooted and connected to the physicality of the place she was from and where they were formed. 

Even though I was both a rural student and teacher myself, I never thought much about it until I was working with rural out-migrant teachers (folks who left rural areas to settle in sub/urban ones) during my dissertation study. As I interviewed the teacher participants for my dissertation, I realized that who we were in our place-connected identities was inextricably tied to the way that we approached teaching literature – especially whether or not we knew about or chose to teach contemporary rural YAL. 

As I discuss in a previous publication, 

• Some of the teachers avoided contemporary rural YA in their own reading lives and classrooms because of the ways they have pushed back against and tried to escape the aspects of their rural upbringings and identities that they found untenable. 
  
• Others simply had difficulty locating or thinking of titles of contemporary YAL even though they had a few older texts.
  
• In general, they didn’t have many rural books and hadn’t thought about teaching rural YAL as integral to (or even part of) culturally sustaining pedagogy, and frankly, neither had I.
  

This had a profound impact on me. I started thinking about how this would’ve radically changed my approach to reading instruction if I were still in my role as a rural high school English teacher. I wondered what rural YA books are even out there and Googled in an effort to find them without much luck. The recently created Whippoorwill Award winners provided some ideas, but I knew there had to be more out there. 

In response to what I learned from the teachers in my study and its connections to my own learning and teaching, I started Literacy in Place as a way to bring awareness to the teaching of rural YAL and to provide a space where both secondary ELA teachers and teacher educators can find resources to support this teaching. ​
My work and the Literacy in Place website is built on three major principles: 

1. Rural stories are worth reading and worthy of study.
   
2. Rural stories are worth telling.
   
3. Rural cultures are worth sustaining, even in their imperfection. 
   

These three principles are addressed by specific sections of the website which I have designed to support teachers in their study and teaching of rural YAL which I detail in the next sections. (If you are a teacher educator and are interested in support and resources for preservice teachers, you can learn about that in my guest blog on Ethical ELA,.)

Rural Stories Are Worth Reading and Worthy of Study
​
Because of the dominant deficit narratives and representations of rural people in popular culture and media (especially most recently around COVID and the election cycle) there are certain stereotypes that prove to be barriers in viewing rural experiences as worthy of reading/hearing/learning about. As a result, rural YAL with a critical lens is often missing from ELA curriculum (Petrone & Behrens, 2017; Parton & Godfrey, 2019) This is true across rural, suburban, and urban schools and classrooms. Even in my own rural education, I read very few titles that allowed me to see my rurality reflected in nuanced ways that rang true for me. 
In order to help teachers learn more about and see that rural experiences are worth exploring in the classroom,  I have created two main spaces where I analyze and discuss rural YAL: (1) my Reading Rural Goodreads account and (2) the Reading Rural YAL YouTube channel. In both of these spaces I detail aspects of rural YAL that spoke to me as a rural reader, the important perspectives they bring to critical thinking about people and their connections to places, and ways they could live in teachers’ classrooms. 
These spaces are in their infancy and will continue to grow – hopefully with the help of good folks like yourself, dear reader.

Rural Stories Are Worth Telling
​
If rural stories are important to read, then we need to be telling them. Growing up, I always associated published authors with major cities. I never believed that a little podunk hayseed like me could be the next Suzanne Collins or Veronica Roth or <insert other big name here>. And if I did become a writer, I never in a million years thought I’d be writing about rural experiences. Who would want to read that? Turns out – I would and I do. I didn’t realize how powerful seeing yourself reflected back at you from the pages of a book could be until it happened to me long after I left the rural classroom as student and teacher. 
In order to emphasize that rural stories are worth telling, I started the (Non)Rural Voices blog. You may be asking why (Non)Rural. Well, because I wanted to be inclusive of rural out-migrant experiences. Scholars have written about and documented out-migration and rural brain-drain, but none of them have explored what happens to the leavers. Instead, they mostly consider what happens to the towns they left. It may be paradoxical, but it is possible to feel both rural and nonrural at the same time, and I want there to be space for those stories here. I envision (Non)Rural Voices to be a space where preservice and in-service teachers, teacher educators, and secondary students can have an authentic place to publish poetry, essays, short stories, etc. that capture their (non)rural experiences, further disrupting problematic notions of the rural as a monolith and illustrating the fact that rural stories are worth telling. 

No culture is perfect. That doesn’t mean that we should get rid of them all. Instead, we should prune to preserve. We should do better once we know better. And in order to do that, we have to look critically at those cultures in our own experiences and through literature. 
It is my hope that Literacy in Place and the books, reviews, book talks, and blog posts detailing the lives, experiences, and cultures of (non)rural people can help us do just that. ​

This Is a Collaborative Effort

I would love for all of these endeavors to be community-building and collaborative. 
Want your students to read rural YAL and write Goodreads reviews? Let me know, and let’s publish them to the Reading Rural Goodreads account (giving them credit, of course). 
Want your students to give book talks on rural YAL, reach out and let’s put them up on the Reading Rural YAL YouTube page. 
Do you and/or your students have (non)rural stories to tell? Let’s work together to publish them as part of (Non)Rural Voices. 
Would you like someone to come talk to your secondary or teacher ed class about rural YAL and/or teaching? I’d be happy to. Please reach out.
Have another idea you think would be helpful to teachers wanting to teach rural YAL, I’d love to hear it. 
For all of these and any other inquiries, you can contact me here. For more updates about the goings on of the Literacy In Place website, follow me on Twitter: @readingrural. 

Until next time.

I have been traveling. A couple of times a day I check Facebook and see if there is any crucial email I have to attend to right away. My wife and I just finished a six week car journey. We saw family -especially grandkids and stopped at various places to golf. Happily, my golf game got a bit better. I haven't been reading as much as I should have been. I will be in a better reading routine now that I am home again. Thank goodness that Gretchen Rumohr has been helping with posts and weekend picks.

I have also noticed several authors who books coming out soon. Thankfully, a few of those in ARC form were waiting for me when I got home.
​

​Anyone who has followed me on Facebook or Twitter knows I love the work of Jeff Zentner.  In fact, I think I have written reviews and/or articles about every one of his books.  I received the ARC for this book back in December and was nearly finished when my mother was hospitalized and fighting for her life.  With the stress of COVID and my mother’s eventual death, the book was sadly set to the side.
 
When I was finally back in the right “head space” again, I could not wait to finish Zentner’s book.  As I have expressed in previous Weekend Pick posts, I read to feel connected to others and to understand others’ lives of which I might not be exposed otherwise. I read to challenge my own thinking. And yes, this book checked all those boxes and actually added a positive outcome of reading I had never experienced before:  I read to heal. 

From the first page of In the Wild Light, I was in love with Cash Pruitt and felt at home in Zentner’s stunningly poetic writing and compelling development of characters, the two traits that keep me coming back to read more of his work.  Once I had my feet firmly replanted on the ground after the indescribable loss of my mother, I could not wait to get back to my friend, Cash.  I was shocked to find my ARC had expired, and I literally burst into tears.  Luckily, the author himself came to my rescue, and I was immediately comforted by returning to the pages of the book that transported me to the small Appalachian town of Sawyer, Tennessee.   
 
At the start of the novel, it is revealed that Cash has lost his mother to an opioid addiction and his Papaw is dying slowly from emphysema. Cash spends his summers mowing lawns and his one friend, Delaney Doyle, works at the Dairy Queen.  Luckily, these two found each other, as Delaney’s mother is in a downward spiral due to her drug use. The relationship between Cash and Delaney is heartwarming and real.  It reminded me of the importance of friendship during the darkest of times, and as the reader, I felt the love and strong connection between these two teens. 

Because of her dire circumstances with her mother, Delaney is determined to escape from Sawyer, and a scientific discovery (plus her incredible intellect and fiery redheaded spirit) gives her the opportunity of a full ride scholarship to an elite prep school in Connecticut. Because Delaney’s discovery is BIG (while with Cash on the Pigeon River, she discovers a mold that can eradicate bacteria), the prep school has agreed to allow her “assistant” Cash the opportunity to attend as well. Yet, Cash has the impossible decision of possibly leaving his grandparents, the two people who have stepped in to raise Cash after the loss of his mother or forego a free education at a prestigious school and lose Delaney, the one friend and person who understands him.

​What makes this Zentner book the best yet is he couples his already masterful ability to tell an important story with a new twist: a character who finds peace in the power of poetry.  Cash begins to write about his love of Tennessee and those people in his life who matter most.  As a professor and Director of the Emerald Coast National Writing Project, this is the book I will be using as a mentor text to showcase how Zentner brilliantly weaves his spellbinding narrative with the poetry of the main character, Cash. 
 
In the Wild Light is a must read when it is released this October.  It hits the mark in all the ways that reading can be powerful and lifechanging.  My connection to Cash and Delaney will always be a part of me.  Additionally, I learned about the small-town living in an Appalachian town and was able to experience “seeing” the beauty in this part of our nation.  I was reminded of the struggles of people outside of myself:  the struggle of addiction and living in poverty are two reminders in this book that allowed me to have an understanding that I did not have before.  The relationships of the characters that Zentner so masterfully creates in this book makes this my favorite of his, which is difficult to say since I love all his work, but for me, the best part of this book was that it brought me peace and healing during the most difficult time in my life—a gift I was not aware reading could deliver.   I needed this book, and it arrived at just the right time.  Thanks, Jeff Zentner!

Until next time.