I am back from #NCTE19 and #ALAN19. My tenure of as the President of ALAN is over and I am overwhelmed with gratitude to the members of ALAN, the publishers, and the authors. Thank you! I also owe and incredible debt to my close friends and colleagues. Thank you! (If you were there, you know I lost my voice--still gone, and I am fresh out of offers you can't refuse.

I will recap #ALAN19 more next week. (Don't we all need a Thanksgiving Break?) If you have a short paragraph of one of your favorite moments, please send it to me as I prepare for next week. Adding a photo would help as well.

In brief, I am so thankful that Padma Venkatraman and Andrea Davis Pinkney for providing a foundation for Monday and Tuesday. All of the solo speakers were spectacular. 

Randy Ribay has made his speech public on this webpage. The title is Critical Lit Theory as Preparation for the World. It was an incredible speech. It validated the work I tried to do in the classroom. I thought for a brief moment that I should try it again. However, teachers in Randy's generation are figuring it out and modeling wonderful teaching. I will keep trying to prepare teacher who committed to the students they teach.

His work is fantastic. The novels are superb. I thought that the Patron Saints of Nothing was a fine selection for the short list for the National Book Award.

Check out the fliers for the Summit. We are updating the information soon; including the announcement that Matt de la Pena will be coming as a children's author (Wow! he has that and so much more). We will be have a few more surprise author visits to announce in the near future.

Until next time.

When most of you are reading this I am on the plane to Baltimore for #NCTE19. It is going to be great fun. Just below is a copy of my schedule. Come by. Join in with one of the sessions, sign up to write a blog post, or asking me about the 2020 Summit at UNLV on the Research and Teaching of YA Literature. I am so happy that Chea and Vickie, two graduate students at the University of Texas at Austin. They don't realize how much time they saved me this week by taking this on. Take it away.  

“[P]icture a place far, far less than suburbia and then imagine me, a few more rungs down that ladder living in a trailer rented from Fed-Me-Blueberries May Beth for as long as I’ve been alive. I live in a place that’s only good for leaving, is all that needs to be said about it, and I don’t let myself look back..” --Sadie by Courtney Summers

Sadie’s words reflect a frequent representation of rural people and places, invoking images of trailer-park poverty and the desire to leave it without a second thought. Vickie and I (Chea) are both from rural spaces and identify as out-migrated rural people, and though we recognize its lack of nuance and that its an incomplete rendering, there’s something about Sadie’s words and attitude that feel part of us too - that rings true in our bones. 
 
We left because we felt like we needed to. Because it felt like there was nothing there for us. Because the world felt too small. Because getting out felt like the only way to be successful. But now, working in an urban-focused teacher preparation program, we feel out of place and long to go back. But going back isn’t possible right now for many of the same reasons we chose to leave, so we make do with what we have, visiting home as often as we can.
 
In our lives as rural-identifying teachers and researchers, we’ve wondered about the opportunities (non)rural young people and preservice teachers have to interact with various and nuanced representations of rural identity in young adult literature. We’re also curious about how rural readers seek out or take up those representations because Chea has a hard time remembering reading any books featuring the rural and wanting to, and Vickie never really felt the need to. It’s these questions and experiences that have led us to consider how teachers might approach engaging their students in critical discussions around place in YAL.  

​Scholars have written about how the contextualized experiences of rural places and people are often underrepresented and essentialized, rendering rural places and people into stereotyped “single stories” (See Chimamanda Adichie’s “Danger of a Single Story”). To read more about these ideas, we recommend Dr. Amy Azano’s “The Other Neglected R” and Dr. Sara Webb-Sunderhaus’s “‘Keep the Appalachian, Drop the Redneck’”. Like Alli Behrens and Dr. Rob Petrone, we believe that interacting with representations of the rural and the various and nuanced experiences of the folks who live there are important to the cultivation of the identities and worldviews of students from all geographical backgrounds and classifications (i.e., rural, suburban, and urban). 
 
However, it seems that depictions of the rural in YAL are somewhat hard to come by. A quick Google search for “top urban YA books” turns out several curated lists featuring popular and critically acclaimed YA fiction. However, the search for “top rural YA books” yields far fewer results. Though there are representations of the rural in YAL, there aren’t that many. And those that are available can reflect distorted and stereotyped representations, that - like all texts - should be read critically. 

​In “Reading YAL for Representations of Contemporary Rurality,” it struck us how covers can overtly communicate a book’s connection to the rural, which is often connected to the book’s focus and content. Books featuring images of the rural (whether considered stereotypical or not) tend to situate rurality as integral rather than incidental to the plot. 

Recently reading Shout by Laurie Halse Anderson, we were completely surprised to find that Anderson’s identity as a rural person and experiences in rural spaces are featured in the text. Likewise, listening to her interview on the We Are YA podcast, Chea got super excited at hearing her describe herself as a country girl. (Hearing authors explicitly mention their rurality isn’t a frequent occurrence.) Shout’s cover art doesn’t nod to her “country” identity, nor does any description of the text. These noticings have encouraged us to think about how teachers might incorporate a critical perspective that asks about the place of a novel - especially the rural when it comes up unexpectedly.

Because not all YA books featuring the rural are “rural books,” we’ve chosen to discuss three books in which encountering the rural comes as somewhat of a surprise: Shout by Laurie Halse Anderson; Sadie by Courtney Summers; and Exit Pursued by a Bear. 
 
Laurie Halse Anderson describes Shout as “the story of a girl who lost her voice and wrote herself a new one” (p. 1). Through fiery verse, Anderson explores all the “accidents, serendipities, bloodlines, tidal waves, sunrises, disasters, passport stamps, criminals, cafeterias, nightmares, fever dreams, readers, portents, and whispers” (p. 1) surrounding the rape she survived as a teenager. Much of the book focuses on the rape itself and the process she undertook to heal and advocate for survivors of sexual assault. Part of that story involves her identity as a “country mouse” (p.19). Her inclusion and representation of the rural is nuanced, evoking the complicated positive and negative aspects associated with rural living and identity. The rural is positioned as a place of connection and healing as well as a place that is suffocating and boring. The closeness of community and reliance on one another are at once represented as supportive and stifling. Considering how Anderson both constructs and critiques the rural aspects of her identity can help readers from all geographical walks of life think about and question how place works to position people in society. 

Sadie, judging only by the cover and jacket summary, is a murder mystery that won and Edgar Award. While the driving force behind the plot is Sadie’s quest to find her sister’s killer and bring him to justice, other issues, such as rurality, poverty, drug abuse, and child neglect and sexual abuse, surface in the text. After Sadie also turns up missing, the host of a podcast dedicated to chronicling life in dying rural towns attempts to find her. Sadie’s journey and the search for her, spans both rural and suburban spaces, often leading to juxtapositions of the two. Rurality is often only painted in a negative light, describing Cold Creek as a place only good for leaving with Sadie making mental lists of all the things in the suburbs she can’t bear to allow herself to want. Although on a surface level the two different spaces serve as settings for the story, how Summers describes them through the podcast and Sadie’s eyes implores readers to consider how place might be accurately represented or distorted in those descriptions.

Exit, Pursued by a Bear (discussed recently by Stacia Long) chronicles the story of high school cheerleader Hermione Winters. After being drugged and sexually assaulted at a rural summer cheer camp while her parents were out of country, it is difficult for loved ones to reach her because of the rural location. The rural detective assigned to her case is described as unfamiliar with this kind of case and unsure of herself in interactions with Hermione after the assault. The school Hermione attends is also in a small town which impacts how she decides to seek health care (physical and mental) as she works to survive her assault in the healthiest ways possible. While the central focus of the plot is Hermione’s journey after the sexual assault and the rural setting seems incidental, considering how the issues connected to rurality are presented in the text can help bring students to an even deeper understanding of rural places, communities, and the text as a whole.  

Teachers and readers of these and other YAL texts that feature representations of the rural could consider the following critical questions:

• How is (rural) place functioning in the book?
• How are rural people, space, communities depicted in the text?
• How does it impact your understanding of what rural is?
• How does it impact your understanding of the themes in text?
• What (dis)connections do you share with the characters’ experiences?
• How do these depictions of (rural) places help us think about how society and identities are constructed?
• What can we do with this new knowledge?

We firmly believe in the benefits of critically reading place in rural YAL, and we’d love to hear about the ways you are doing this work in your classrooms. Please reach out to us with your stories and any recommendations for rural YA novels to add to our reading lists and share with our students.  
 
[email protected]
 
[email protected]
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Anderson, L. H. (2019). Shout. New York, NY: Penguin Random House.
 Azano, A. P. (2014). Rural. The other neglected “R”: Making space for place in school libraries. Knowledge Quest, 43(1), 61-65. 
 Summers, C. (2018). Sadie. New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press. 
 Webb-Sunderhaus, S. (2016). Keep the Appalachian, drop the redneck”: Tellable student narratives of Appalachian identity. College English, 79(1), 11-33. 

Until next week.

A few weeks ago Melanie and Sarah set me a blog post. It arrived at a perfect time. I had just finished Jason Reynolds newest, Look Both Ways, and I can stop thinking about short stories and short story cycles. 

Many of us who have taught or who teach in ELA classrooms realize how often the short story is used. Classrooms are few of anthologies that are full of great story stories from "The Scarlet Ibis," "The Most Dangerous Game," or "The Gift of the Magi." Teaching stories like these and other can go a long way to teaching or refreshing student understanding of basic literary components--setting, plot, character, symbols, and other components of literature. They are often taught independently or  grouped together by theme. 

From time to time some of the short stories included as "stand-alone" are in reality often part of connected collection or a short story cycle. For example, think about how often Joyce's "Clay," Steinbeck's "Flight," Hemingway's "Soldier's Home." and even more recently O'Brien's "The Things They Carried."  How much richer would the reading experience be if student read the short story in its full context?  Would student benefit from a bigger introduction to the context of Joyce's  Dubliners or of the Salinas valley as depicted in Steinbeck's The Long Valley. 

Chief among these collections of short story cycles, and perhaps, the inspiration for many of these is Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg Ohio. There are many things to consider when teaching the short story. What is our instructional goal? What these short stories? Are we using them to introduce students to a specific author? If the latter is the case, should we be considering the short stories of many of today's YA authors--those that stand-alone as independent shorts and those are a deliberate part of short story cycle. 

Below, Melanie and Sarah introduce us to a collection of short stories that focus on technology. Take it away.

Stronger, Faster, and More Beautiful by Arwen Elys Dayton began, Dayton says, “with a revelation” (p. 369) she had after reading articles about gene editing, gene manipulation, and new ways to grow human organs.  She thought both about possibilities for curing disease and saving lives and also about the multiple ways in which things could go horribly wrong. The stories in the novel focus on teenagers who experience the wonders and horrors of genetic modifications.  These stories raise questions about what makes us human and who gets to decide what responsibilities we have toward humanity. In addition to raising questions, the stories show what can happen when the focus shifts from saving lives to modifying bodies to make them stronger, smarter, or more attractive.  The stories highlight ethical, moral, and religious issues raised when people begin to use technology to modify, adapt, or change the human body.   

The first story, “Matched Pair,” introduces the twins Evan and Julia, both of whom are dying.  Their parents and doctors have made the choice to save one of them by using the organs from the other.  The question of whether or not Evan will still be human after this is raised by Reverend Tadd who has made a career of preaching against any sort of procedure that alters or changes a body.  He tells Evan that he is doing a selfish thing and asks if Evan wants to be a demon but the question of whether or not Evan should have the procedure is not Evan’s to make because he is young and his parents have made the choice for him. Doctors see him as a medical marvel—a potential miracle.  Tadd and his followers see him as an abomination. The use of religious language around the choices highlight how potentially challenging this kind of situation can be.  At what point does Evan stop being human?  Do the organs that are used to repair him make him more than human? Is Evan still Evan, or is he something—or someone—else now that Julia’s organs have become part of him? Does tinkering with our biology indicate a desire to be more than human, to be godlike? What “tinkering” is okay, and what is dangerous?

Questions around religion and science continue in “St. Ludmilla.”  Medical advances and robotic body parts are used to save Milla’s life; while Milla does not hide that there are changes in her body since her accident, she does not share the extent to which she has been altered.  She and Gabriel have an argument on their first date about modifications.  She asks, “But what’s the difference between a half-real heart and taking antibiotics, or getting a doctor to set a broken bone?” (p. 49). The question becomes one of morality as the teens hear Reverend Tadd condemning the science that allows modifications to happen.  Gabriel replies, “How are they drawing the line?” (p. 49).  What is the moral and ethical line here?  Again, we are prompted to wonder: how much modification becomes too much?  What is the line between saving a life using artificial organs and completely rebuilding a person who was nearly dead?  Are scientists creating medical miracles or are they playing god with lives? 

​Reverend Tadd gets his own story in “The Reverend Mr. Tad Tadd’s Love Story.”  When the Reverend and his family—his wife, son, and daughter—are attacked, the Reverend’s views on modifications flip.  He says that he was wrong, that he “defied the holy design...when I told [Evan] he was turning himself into a demon” (p. 92), and that he should not have opposed modifications.  Elsie—his daughter and the only other survivor—questions his shift in beliefs.  She discovers that the Reverend has made modifications to both of them using body parts, skin, and hair from his wife and son.  They did not need these components to survive. Rather, these parts served as memorials to the dead, parts of them that live on.  Tadd now argues that “evolution is not a side note.  It is not something to be accepted begrudgingly” (p. 93), implying that man should be able to adapt and modify as part of divine design.  Elsie refuses this idea and explains that her father has made them both into monsters, creating a schism that reverberates throughout the next stories. 

What makes us human? What makes us monsters?  Where is the line?  Just because we can do a thing with science, does that mean we should? Science has developed to the point that genetic modifications and alterations can save lives.  Because the technology is available, it can also be used to change and adapt people to make them stronger or faster.  This raises questions about whether genetic modifications should be allowed by choice rather than necessity. Who gets to decide?  As genetic modifications become more prevalent, the world of the novel shifts.  Modifications become money-making tools and issues to go to war over.  Corporations, countries, and scientists argue over whether modifications should happen and whether or not these modifications make someone not human. 

In “Eight Waded,” Alexios has been genetically modified to be extremely smart.  He can see and breathe underwater, talk to animals, and learn at an accelerated rate.  He is, however, physically very different with fins instead of feet and an overly large head, and he cannot connect with other humans the way his parents expect him to.  His mother, disappointed with the results of the genetic modifications, calls him “dead weight” and intelligent, but not “in a way that matters” (p. 129)”.  Alexios is part human and part animal.  He is treated as a commodity to be used, and a curiosity to be tested endlessly by researchers.  He is kept in what he calls his “sea prison” and interacts with both people and animals, struggling with where he might truly belong. The questions of how far to go or what changes to the human body should be allowed and who should make those decisions thread through this story.  How do we deal with unforeseen consequences of alterations we impose on our children, presumably made for their own good, but with unpredictable results? How do we deal with consent in these scenarios? 

“California” propels us further into this future with the story of Jake, a California teen who chooses to be frozen in the hopes that scientists will develop a cure for his cancer. Geopolitical upheaval foils this plan, though, as Russia takes over the Estonian center where Jake’s body is stored, and all of the people housed there are re-animated and re-tooled to become platinum-mining “slaves.” We follow Jake’s escape as he tries to discover who he is now in this new body and new time period.  This story raises questions about choice and outcomes.  Jake chose to preserve his body in the hopes that a cure for his disease could be found.  The Russians chose to modify Jake and change him into a slave.  Who has the right to make decisions about Jake’s body?
 
In the final story, “Curiosities,” Luck and Starlock are “Protos,” or unmodified people who are told they are a separate species from the highly modified humans who keep them on a reservation.  When a catastrophic disease kills their human contacts, Luck and Starlock venture off the reservation to see how they might help. Luck and Starlock have grown up believing that they are not human, that humans are a species apart and evolutionarily beyond Protos.  However, what seemed like truth turns out to be a form of human oppression as it becomes apparent that one group has been using physical differences as a way to keep themselves separate from another group.  

The final stories focus the question of what it means to be human; the characters themselves wrestle directly with what makes someone human? What makes them more or less than someone else?  Where does technology start and end in the shaping and reshaping of humanity?
 
As readers, we see connections to familiar and frequently discussed tropes about human morality: pride and/or vanity will come before a fall (e.g., an apocalyptic plague); those who meddle with their bodies will be punished; those who oppress others will ultimately suffer; youth and innocence, hope and love will save humanity. Dayton offers the reader a complicated and nuanced way to think about technology—not as the savior or the cause of suffering but rather a tool to be used by humanity. This shifts the focus to how technology changes how we think about the technology itself. The moral question developed across these stories is not whether or not technology is right or wrong; it is, rather, the question of who makes the decisions about technology and how that technology gets used. Technology has been used to free and enslave and to kill and to cure; this young adult novel highlights those uses but also raises questions that challenge reader perceptions of technology and the ethical use of it in a society. Perhaps it is our human attitudes and human choices in how we apply both morality and technology that cause the harm attributed to technological development.

References
Dayton, A. E. (2018). Stronger, Faster, and More Beautiful. Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books: New York, New York.

Sarah Burriss is a doctoral student in the Department of Teaching and Learning at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. Her research focuses on teaching and learning about ethics and advanced computational technologies, like artificial intelligence. Sarah came from the public library world, where she was a young adult and adult services librarian.
 
Dr. Melanie Hundley is an Associate Professor in the Practice of Language and Literacy Education at Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College; her research examines how digital and multimodal composition informs the development of pre-service teachers’ writing pedagogy.  Additionally, she explores the use of digital and social media in young adult literature.  She teaches writing methods courses that focus on digital and multimodal composition and young adult literature courses that explore race, class, gender, and sexual identity in young adult texts.  She has taught both middle and high school English Language Arts and currently co-directs Patterson RAPS, a reading program for middle school students. 

Until next week.

This is another week where I get to host the work of great YA and ALAN community member. As I mention all of the time, I am not an expert in every area of YA literature. The field is vast and full of fantastic literature in every genre or, for that matter, sub genre. Today Lisa Scherff discusses Climate Fiction or "Cli-Fi." I love some of the books she mentions and have been meaning to follow-up. She has certainly peaked my interest again.

Lisa has contributed before. You can find her first post on YA memoirs. She has also written on the Alex Award, how the Amelia Walden Award committee functions, and promoted some books for summer reading.

The above was spoken by Greta Thunberg in her September 23rd address to the United Nations Climate Action Summit. Thunberg is a part of a vocal and growing movement (already in the millions across the globe) of young people and adults committed to bringing awareness of and driving political action towards the issue of climate change in order to help save the planet. I have been following the movement and the children very carefully not only because the situation is serious but also because of my love of dystopian fiction, especially those novels set after some cataclysmic event caused by nature/climate change. These (sometimes) futuristic novels, called “cli-fi,” are a genre I had not heard of before.

The term “cli-fi”—short for climate fiction—was coined by Dan Bloom, an English teacher, reporter, and environmentalist who was influenced by the 1957 novel On the Beach (a book I remember from high school) and the writings of British environmentalist James Lovelock. As reported on Lithub.com, “it wasn’t until he saw the 2004 disaster film The Day After Tomorrow . . . that Bloom started thinking about the power of storytelling to rally like-minded citizens concerned for the future of life on Earth.” Climate change fiction is rooted in science fiction but adds elements of both realism and/or the supernatural.

​According to one psychologist who has written about climate change denial, people distance themselves from the issue “because the facts of global warming are too often presented in abstract or guilt-inducing ways.” Amy Brady, deputy publisher at Guernica, “a non-profit online magazine dedicated to global art and politics,” argues that is the reason why stories that connect readers emotionally to the destructive and local effects of climate change are needed. Cli-fi explores “what the world might become if climate change continues unabated.”  

While climate change should worry us all, the issue hits close to home. Literally. Immediately below is a current map of the area I live, Lee County, Florida. I live about 9 miles northeast of the coastline (from where the bridge to Sanibel Island joins the mainland). So far, even with the heaviest rains during rainy season, I have not had flooding issues, although some areas (parking lots, streets, neighborhoods, etc.) often have 1-3 inches of standing water for a day or so. Not so bad given how much rain we tend to get from June through September. Even with the past few hurricanes, only those right on the water have suffered from relatively minor storm surge.

However, many of us are scared. Even the most conservative estimates have us being affected from rising sea levels within the next 30 years. The map below shows the potential impact of just a one meter rise in the sea level if both Greenland and the West Antarctic ice sheet melt.

And, this one: three meters. 

​So, it was with all of this on my mind that I read London Shah’s (2019) debut novel The Light at the Bottom of the World (Hyperion), which is set at the end of the twenty-first century in Great Britain. Sixty-five years earlier, the world went underwater when an asteroid hit Earth, causing most living things on the planet to die when everything became submerged. Everyone thought they had time, several years, before the strike; scientists and politicians had assured everyone that they would survive no matter how high the water rose. 

Sixteen-year-old Leyla Fairoza McQueen wins a chance to race her submersible in the 2099 London Subermsible Marathon. Winning this annual race means she can get one wish granted, and she knows what that is: asking for her father’s freedom. He was arrested, accused of encouraging victims of “seasickness” to take their own lives. Without giving too much of the plot away, Leyla does not get her wish and instead goes on a search for her father.
 
Reading this novel rekindled my desire to not only reread some of the “cli-fi” novels on my shelf but also search out some new titles. Below are links to some of my favorite titles.

Until next week.