Book Clubbing via Google Meet, or There Is Always a Time for Hope by Leilya Pitre

This week's post deals with book clubs within a pre-service class and follows on the heels of the post written by Kelli
Sowerbrower. Her post focuses on how high school students define YA literature. Kelli's post doesn't deal directly with clubs, but many of the students who wrote participate in a book club at Kelli's school. Here, Leilya Pitre, one of my former doctoral students, provides a glimpse of how her students have incorporated  online book clubs as they have moved to online learning as part of the COVID-19 quarantine measures. I am excited about how she has outlined her YA course. I know that I am going to be moving some of these ideas into my courses.

Book Clubbing via Google Meet, or There Is Always a Time for Hope

This post was initially planned as a thematic approach to exploring young adult literature with the preservice English teachers, and then COVID-19 happened. First, we heard some distant news about people in China, and then Italy was hurt with staggering numbers of those who contracted the virus. Now it is in our house – the USA,—and daily updates of the numbers of infected and those who lost this battle are frightening. Thus, this entry still remains thematic, but is devoted to resilience, love, and hope—things that keep us going.

When I developed a course on exploring adolescent experiences in literature in December, I chose a dozen of novels that were published in chronological order, from The Catcher in the Rye (Salinger, 1945) to The Music of What Happens (Konigsberg, 2019). There was no specific, thematic order in mind. The plan was to let each student select a novel and lead a class discussion on it. So we read a novel a week, explored it through discussions in class, and completed a project, which my students could later employ in their own teaching. For example, we created a Character Web and a Theme Development Map with The Catcher in the Rye (Salinger, 1945), a Tree Activity with Speak (Anderson, 1999), a Novel in Sticky Notes with Freaky Green Eyes (Oates, 2003), Daily Masquerade Project with American Born Chinese (Yang, 2006), and Picking up the Pieces Activity with Hate List (Brown, 2009). If any of the readers are interested in these projects, I can email you the description and instructions, and you may modify it for your students. 

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Since we are not in our regular classroom, Randy, this week’s novel presenter, emailed me the day before our Google Meet class session and suggested to “treat it more as a general book club type.”  Before our class meeting, he shared with me the presentation notes entitled “The QuaranTEAM Meeting” (you gotta love this boy’s sense of humor) and outlined the general rules for our Book Club. Explanations aside, they boil down to these four:

• Let others answer first.
• Make connections between comments.
• Occasionally direct questions toward quiet people. 
• Don't feel obligated to get through all the questions. 

It seemed like nothing major, but I greatly appreciated the very act of thinking about how to accommodate each of the classmates. Being respectful, keeping an open mind, and being free to express thoughts goes without saying in my classroom space.  

This week’s reading was The Memory of Things (Polisner, 2016), and, to my preservice teachers, it didn’t seem accidental. It is a story about the heartbreaking events of 9/11 that shook the world and changed it forever. The novel begins in Manhattan as a high school and thousands of new Yorkers are evacuating from the attack over the Brooklyn Bridge. The main character, a 16-year-old boy, spots what he thinks is a bird at first. Throughout the novel, we follow the story of two teenage narrators, Kyle and H, who found themselves and each other in the midst of a horrific tragedy trying to survive and cope with unthinkable trauma. 

In a Forum response to the novel, prior the class discussion Reagan, one of my students wrote: “I don’t think we could’ve read this novel at a better time. Though we aren’t dealing with a terrorist attack, we are all currently experiencing a global pandemic. Much like 9/11, our country has never seen an enemy like this.” Echoing Reagan, Dominique expresses the same idea, admitting that “reading the novel, I could not stop myself from comparing it to the situation going on right now. There are many differences between the coronavirus pandemic and the terrorist attack, but something that the two catastrophic events share is the anxiety and uncertainty caused by them.” We all can relate to these feelings.

Responding to Dominique’s entry, Hannah’s comment demonstrates how we too, much like Polisner’s characters, have to adapt to the changed reality: “While the quarantine may not seem as immediate or terrifying, it is certainly impacting our world in ways we never expected, and we are having to alter our daily routines, similar to the ways the characters did in the story.”

Moving from the Forum discussion to a Book Club format via Google Meet, Randy led the session beginning with his peers’ first reaction to the novel. Most of them are 21-24 year-old young adults, who do not remember or have vague memories about September 11 of 2001; nonetheless, there wasn’t anyone who didn’t connect with the novel and its characters. For Louisianans, connections are easy to make—here we are frequently weathering heavy storms, hurricanes, and some are still dealing with a historic flood of 2016, which left thousands of families homeless. The locals know firsthand what a tragedy is. They also know how strong, caring, loving, and resilient our communities are. If you haven’t heard about the Cajun Navy yet, click on the link. (There is also documentary film produce for the Discovery channel.) You will see that our people will drop everything and rush to help the others who have it tougher at the moment.

My preservice teachers quickly noticed how Polisner’s The Memory of Things accentuated people’s nature to unite in times of trials, how New Yorkers came together to honor people who were lost, people they did not know, by hanging pictures and lighting candles. Strangers sympathetically smiled to each other through the heavy air filled with dust and ashes. Hannah also believes that “this book was written to show the resilience and perseverance of humanity to continue moving forward and to not forget tragic events, but to grow from them and to grow together.” 

It was that immediate connection and relevancy that drew my students’ attention to this YA novel. They wanted to discuss Kyle and H’s experiences because they felt they too encountered pain and loss in their own lives. Everyone could add something to what Caitlin shared: “I have had several tragic things happen. I watched one of my grandfather’s fade from this world because of Alzheimer’s. I helped take care of my grandmother after he passed until she passed from cancer five years later. We flooded in 2016. I watched my Aunt die from complications with Leukemia. Just like Kyle and H, I had to learn how to deal with all those losses.” This conversation steered towards emotional trauma, which might be invisible, but not less destructive than a physical wound.

Discussing trauma and how to heal, Reagan notes that “there is no rule book for something of this magnitude,” continuing: “That is why we have the trauma bonding that happened between Kyle and H.”  She further explains that if two or more people endure a traumatic experience together, they have a strong bond. People tend to cling to each other when they are lost and scared. In the novel, the two young people meet under extreme circumstances, have to stay together for a few days, and fall in love. The questions some of my students pose are: So, Kyle and H bonded and fell in love because of shared emotional trauma.  Does that make their bond weaker or less valid? Would they fall in love if it weren’t for 9/11 events? The answers vary, until Jade, one of the two graduate students I have in class, declares that H and Kyle’s relationship are not “less legitimated based on how they met and got close to one another. Unlike the couple in Hate List, they are bonded by grief, fear, and confusion, but not hatred. They are not compelled to each other because of the people they hate, rather they are drawn together by the people they have loved and lost.” Their love may not last long, just like the first teenage love of millions of other young people, but it is genuine, gentle, and real at the moment. This love helps them survive. 

Another intriguing question suggested by Randy to continue discussion was: Is Kyle helping H or is H helping Kyle? His classmates seem more agreeable on this one and believe that both characters need and help one another cope with personal tragedies coupled with the entire country’s catastrophe. “H helps Kyle in dealing with external conflict while Kyle helps H with internal conflict,” concludes Randy. Perhaps, Kyle needs help even more longing for sense of normalcy and occupying himself with mundane task as doing laundry, preparing breakfasts, taking extra care of his Uncle Matt, and protecting Hannah. The world, as he knows it, has broken into myriads of pieces, and being unable to fix it, Kyle does little things he can control.
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By the end of the novel, readers sense hope and know that our major characters are going to be okay. “Hope is the thing with feathers,” claims Emily Dickinson in her famous poem, and H, who is literally wearing feathers at the moment we meet her first, becomes Kyle’s hope in the novel. In his Forum response and later in class, Daniel thinks that “the girl represents blissfulness. She is innocent and her wings make her an angel who is just squeaky clean and innocent. Kyle views her as important but fleeting, like happy memories that we all wish to relive and relish when life is falling apart around us.” He wants to save her, so she can save him.

I would like to conclude this post with a couple of quotes from my students. They wrote an after-class journal entry responding to a question: How do we find hope when we are broken? Here is what Tyler wrote:

Every day we walk around putting walls up. We don’t want to be weak or hurt. Because that stuff sucks. Then why is it that inside of all that chaos and misery there is also happiness and connection? Who decided on that nonsense? I don’t know, but what I do know is that moving on is worth the risk.
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Whenever life feels out of control, off track, or just plain chaotic, know that you are more than those things. We are more than the sum of our intentions and the sum of our mistakes. We are the liminal. We are the doorway, and we get to decide what comes next. So let your heart out every once in a while. Take it out for a walk. Let yourself feel again. Let yourself heal and be vulnerable. 

Finally, there is Lisa Viviani, an exchange student from Italy (yes, that very Italy) in my class this semester. She is also a graduate student. In response to destructive events in her life, Lisa confesses: 

I cry a lot, I feel angry, I feel empty. But then I realize it's just life, and sometimes you cannot control it. So I keep moving on. Maybe starting from small daily things, like Kyle did, doing laundry or cooking breakfast. I know that, even when my world collapses, the world outside keeps moving on. I can find the way to keep moving on with it too.

The people of this country have survived the devastating aftermath of 9/11, will conquer the present pandemic virus, and will keep the memory of things, along with Gae Polisner and her heroes—H and Kyle—because we are “tethered,” tethered to each other. I also have a hope for my preservice teachers that one day they will walk into their own classrooms and bring these priceless memories to their own students. They will teach them to always hold on to hope.

Until next time.