Release

This is the week of Every Move’s release.  Wow – there were times when I didn’t think this book would even happen.  Again and again I’m reminded: writing is hard.  We wouldn’t keep doing it if we didn’t love it.  It’s work – deeply satisfying work.

My son has reached that age when he’s making decisions about the things he wants to do and be.  I don’t mean he’s consciously making those decisions – I mean, he’s following his gut instincts towards the things he likes, gravitating towards the things he enjoys, and slowing dropping out of the things he finds a bit ‘meh’.  We all reach that stage.  Sometimes it takes us longer, so the things we really like and enjoy get sidelined for a few years, to focus on the things we need to do.  But they simmer away there inside you, those things you are drawn to, the pastimes you love, or the hobbies you wish you had more time for.  If you’re really lucky, and you have good circumstances and the right encouragement, you find a way to utilise those talents early.  But for many of us, me included, it sometimes takes years of trial and error before you figure out just what exactly you’re hankering for, what it is that really fires your passions.

I have worked many jobs, and I have liked quite a few of them.  But there has always been something else there, bubbling in the background. I remember writing stories on sheets of foolscap paper in a special folder that I kept in my bag especially for the long trips to and from school on the bus.  I did it all through primary and high school, and I used to hang out in libraries a lot.  I read everything I could lay my hands on during this time, and used to hound the school librarians for the next books when they arrived on order.

By the end of high school I knew that saying I wanted to be a writer was a like saying I wanted to be an astronaut – one of those things that little kids say, not realising how far out of reach a goal like that could be.  So I looked at law and journalism and education and other things, all those stupid pamphlets they used to give you in high school when you’re trying to figure out your direction after Year Twelve, while surreptitiously sneaking the ones about writing and publishing into my bag.

But in the end it came down to two things: determination and patience.  By the time I had my first child, I was thirty, and knew that somehow I wanted to keep writing.  And then when I’d been patient a long time, and had developed a dogged level of persistence, I figured it was now or never.

Ultimately, if you want to follow the thing that inspires you, you have to be determined.  You will not be given the chance to pursue your dream or talent or whatever because some Fairy Godmother gave you a wish, or put an opportunity in your lap.  You will have to work for it.  You will have to be determined, and just stick with it, despite tedium and bad luck and frustration.  You will have to become a bit of a bloodhound about it. Because nobody owes you anything, nobody will give you anything for free.  So you will just have to suck it up and do it.

Fortunately, if you’re following the dream of your heart, the thing that inspires you, your passion, you will not find working at it a chore.  You will keep going because you love it. 

So here’s some of the new reviews for the thing I created out of love J

Here at UnfinishedBookshelf

A full series review at Behind the Pages

Here at Written Word Worlds

At Fictional Thoughts

And at DaringDamsels

I've also had some amazing reviews at ALPHAreader's blog and at Kid's Book Review. There will be more reviews coming in as the blog tour continues, and also in print media like Dolly and Birdee.  If you'd like to join in the giveaway, you can click on the link to GoodReads at right, or go back to my previous post, which tells you how to enter.

Tonight, I know lots of people are going to see Roxane Gay speak at the Wheeler Centre – I so wish I could be there!  She’s amazing!  But if you can’t make it to Roxane’s talk, and you’re around Castlemaine tonight, please feel free to come along to the Castlemaine Library, where me and three other female crime writers (Sandi Wallace, Kathryn Ledson and Sue Williams) will be having a lounge-room chat for the Killer Queens event.  It’s free, it starts at 6pm, there’ll be a door prize and refreshments, so please feel welcome!

I’m also gearing up for my visit to Queensland as part of the Somerset Celebration of Literature on the Gold Coast – I’m flying out the day after the launch party for Every Move.  It’s gonna be a massive week, and I hope to see you there.

And finally, for those of you who don’t know, it is also the week of International Women’s Day.  IWD is actually on 8 March (which is the day my littlest son was born J  Happy Birthday Ned!).  IWD exists because we still live in a world where the pay gap between women and men is huge, and where here in Australia, the Minister for Women is a man (our illustrious Prime Minister, He Who Shall Not Be Named), who happens to have scheduled an IWD lunch at a men’s-only club (really.  I mean, really.  I hope Roxane says something about this tonight, I really do), and where women all over the world still live in fear and inequality.  With that in mind, I’d like to do a quick roll call of all the women writers who’ve influenced me in my lifetime.  And here they are, and many more besides, in no particular order:

Joanna Russ

Anna Livy

Sally M. Gearhart

Simone de Beauvoir

Sheri S Tepper

Margaret Atwood

bell hooks

Mary Fallon

Germaine Greer

Helen Garner

Kate Millet

Monique Wittig

Ngaio Marsh

Marie Lu

Helene Cixous

Alice Walker

Amy Tan

Lucy Sussex

Honey Brown

Kerry Greenwood

Kat Zhang

Diana Gabaldon

Katherine Mansfield

Angela Savage

Kendare Blake

Julie Kagawa

Patricia Cornwell

Judith Wright

Phillipa (PD) Martin

Maggie Stiefvater

Janet Frame

Margo Lanagan

Veronica Roth

Stephenie Meyer

Geraldine Brooks

Donna Tartt

Laurie R. King

Rebecca James

Leanne Hall

Laura Buzo

Cate Kennedy

Malinda Lo

Rebecca Stead

Madelaine L’Engle

Ursula Le Guin

Fiona Wood

Cath Crowley

Kim Kane

Kirsty Eager

Melina Marchetta

Emily Rodda

Lili Wilkinson

Carole Wilkinson

Catherine Jinks

Angela Carter

Jeanette Winterson

Finola Moorehead

Joanne (JK) Rowling

Sheila Rowbotham

Sheila Kitzinger

Val McDermid

Suzanne Collins

Melissa Keil

Gabrielle Williams

Simmone Howell

Ruby Langford

Jane Austen

Charlotte Bronte

Toni Morrison

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Emily Bronte

Nicole Hayes

Lee Kofman

Pamela Allen

Jackie French

Ruth Park

Miles Franklin

Nansi Kunze

Fleur Ferris

Claire Zorn

Zuzanna Budapest

Naomi Klein

Amie Kaufman

Sally Morgan

Amrita Pritam

Susie (SE) Hinton

Cassandra Clare

Suzanne Collins

Sandi Wallace

Sue Williams

Liz Filleul

Ella West

Kirsten Krauth

Lauren Beukes

Lisa McMann

Anne Buist

Alice Pung

Jenny Valentish

Valerie Parv

Felicity Castagna

Kathryn Ledson

Emily Dickinson

Maxine Beneba Clarke

Isobelle Carmody

Roxane Gay

Brigid Kemmerer

Maureen Johnson

Christina Rossetti

Holly Black

and all the women I’ve accidentally left out,

and most especially, poet and high school English teacher, Lorna Ferguson.

With all my love -

xx Ellie

YA-Bashing is the New Black, or something, whatevs

Look, I should be working on another article for the blog tour, but I can’t help it: the number of articles and the increasing fervour of the debate surrounding YA literature in the media lately has kind of infected me.  And I don’t like being angry, it generally makes me cry (embarrassing but true) or get all tongue-tied, and it’s emotionally exhausting.  But I have to say my twenty-cents worth, even though, as friends have advised, you can't reason with crazy.  Because the articles that have popped up all over the place have made me angry, and here’s where I rant, so I will have at thee, Helen Razer and all you people who have flamed my world.

For those of you who don’t know about it, here’s a little intro.  Articles about how YA lit is crap have been getting a lot of media time lately.  Here’s AO Scott in the New York Times, decrying The Death of Adulthoodin American Culture.  And here’s Robert Lipsyte in the same rag, talking about how YA is too Girl-focused.  And here’s Chris Beha in the New Yorker talking about Henry James and the Great YA Debate. Michelle Dean wrote about Our YADystopias here.  Laura C Mallonee wrote a piece here on how it’s Time for Teen Fantasy Heroines to Grow Up.  There's lots more.  And if you really want to make your eyes bleed, here’s our very own Helen Razer saying that People who read YAliterature Should Just Grow Up too.  If you want to go read them and get really pissed off about what’s being said, be my guest.  It’s probably good that you read them, so you’re informed about what’s going on.  My suggestion: keep a cup of chamomile tea handy, or something else that will help you maintain calm.

Because a lot of what’s being written about YA lit is uncritically opinionated, poorly researched, badly thought-out, academically non-rigorous bandwagon-jumping, based on a whole bunch of ingrained assumptions about teenagers and writing and reading and literature and women (I’ll get to that later), written by people who don’t read YA, and would never sully themselves by doing so.  Most of the articles are op-ed pieces – they’re clickbait, as Danielle Binks has pointed out, designed to provoke a reaction.  There’s no academic rigour; although the publication of them in places like The New York Times gives them a veneer of intellectuality, there’s no real examination of the underlying issues (and there’s plenty of issues: see Maureen Johnson’s Cover Flip).  It’s maddening, and engaging with it is frustrating, like trying to hit a buzzing mosquito in a dark room (and probably equally doomed to failure).  But there you have it – this piece isn’t academically rigorous either, because I’m too cross (perhaps it’s easier to engage on the same wonky playing field anyway?) and because I think others have done it way better before me (see below).

But I have to say the lack of standards bugs me.  How can you critically pick apart a whole category of literature, of which you have partaken of only the most recently-noteworthy examples (and it’s the same ones, always – Twilight, The Hunger Games, Harry Potter, The Fault In Our Stars)?  I don’t know.  If you position yourself as a critic (Helen Razer, I’m looking at you), then surely you need to have some idea of what you’re discussing?  But no – the people who’ve written these articles seem to think that this handful of books is representative of the whole category, and reading them is the sum total of their academic research on the issue.  The idea astonishes me.  It’s as if I said I played Frogger once (in 1985), and I now have the right to offer scathing commentary on the whole of the gaming industry.

I would like to point out, at this juncture, that there have been a number of excellent rebuttal pieces written as well.  And here they are: Anne Ursu wrote a rebuttal of Scott at Terrible Trivium.  Sarah McCarry’s piece on pleasure principles is a must. Kelly Jensen talks here about how Advocating and Writing for Girls is a radical act.   And Foz Meadow’s writes the most entertaining stuff – her pieces in response to Dean and Mallonee are excellent.  Most of these writers have actually done some examination of the issues, and – most tellingly – they have read the literature of the category that they are seeking to defend.  They are all better quality pieces than this will be, and I heartily recommend that you go read them, if only to make yourself feel better.

But I would like to posit a theory of my own as to why YA literature is receiving such a pasting in the media lately.  I know – the issues involved are many.  But I would like to unpack two of them, and I think they are the most relevant two.

First of all, I contend (and see how I did that? I contend something, and I don’t even have to cite anything to back it up! I can say whatever the hell I want!  Two can play the game, folks) I contend that people who criticise YA literature are afraid of teenagers.  This, our society tells us, is a perfectly acceptable position to hold – teenagers are scary, everybody says so.  The ages between 13 and 19, depending on the laws in your state or country, are an amorphous grey area where individuals are neither child nor adult (see Scott Westerfeld’s useful unpacking of the concept of childhood/teenaged years).  Teenagers do crazy shit.  They slouch and spit and wail and groan and bellow.  They smoke and drink and drive fast and have sex and stick two fingers up at religion and politics and custom.  They are not polite.  But above all, they are unformed.

Most adults look back – not too long or hard – at adolescence as a period of their lives that was both embarrassing and frightening, when their bodies and minds were in a state of flux, when things were out of their control (quite literally, when your parents are still dictating to you what goes).  They remember – not fondly – a period of crazy experiences, painful growth and change, humiliation, lack of direction, social embarrassment.  So they find teenagers scary, because hey, it was a scary time in their own lives.  Yes, folks, they’re projecting.

Teenagers dress differently, think differently, act differently to adults.  ‘Yeah, well, obvs.  Whatever.  It’s all g’: teenagers even speak a different language.  At a really basic level, adult fear of teenagers is a xenophobic fear of a completely alien culture (and maybe a fear of what that culture will propagate after the current generation’s demise).  I find it particularly telling, the way adults are so panicked about the level of social media exposure teens willingly (nay, eagerly) participate in.  Because most adults remember adolescence as such a shit experience that they don’t want to remember it, let alone have it pasted up on the internet (and as Lauren Beukes pointed out, that shit is forever.  Your ghastly drunken embarrassment on prom night? Now anyone can see it anytime they want, and it will never go away).

Most adults display a general lack of awareness of how teenagers think, create, dream and feel.  That’s okay – they just don’t get it, or have wilfully or unconsciously repressed the ENORMOUS spectrum of mental and emotional and spiritual experiences that they went through themselves at that age.  But I find it a bit sad.

When I tell people I am a high school teacher, they look at me aghast.  ‘How can you stand up in front of a room full of teenagers?  Doesn’t it freak you out?’  Well – no.  I like teenagers.  They have a refreshing honesty, energy and transparency that I admire.  Their exuberance, their beauty, their rebellion, even their mood swings – I find teenagers incredible, and although I too don’t have great memories of my own adolescence, I admire their bravery and ingenuity and dogged optimism in the face of it.

Adult critics who denigrate YA literature (and other types of children’s literature) seem to want us all to be ‘grown up’, to move away from childish literature into ‘adult’ fiction (or even better, non-fiction).  They remind me strongly of those who also criticise genres like romance and fantasy, because they are wish-dreams, there’s no cold hard facts, no ‘real life’.

I could rant on about how this is stupid, but I think CS Lewis – quoted in Ursu’s article – says it best:

“Critics who treat adult as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. … But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.”  (On Three Ways of Writing for Children)

And I would also like to quote an entirely relevant excerpt from Ursu here:

“Isn’t this really the marker of adulthood? Learning to look beyond yourself to others? Isn’t a marker of intelligence a hunger to see the world outside your own experience? Isn’t that maybe why so many people outside of traditional power structures are draw to this lit in the first place? Everyone who insults reading these books is not just denigrating the quality of the books themselves, but of the very act of using your time to give a crap about kids and the things they give a crap about.”

Before this article gets too long, I would like to just point the finger once – and that should be enough – at the underlying sexism and assumptions about women and women’s writing in YA literature critique.  Female writers dominate YA, despite what the NYT Bestseller list might lead you to believe.  One of the reasons why YA literature is such an easy target is because it’s seen as a women’s field.  This is the second major issue I have with pieces like Razer’s.  Suggesting that YA literature’s success is a collective ‘dumbing down’ of culture – in other words, crying over the decline of the cultural authority of canonical (read straight white male) texts - is staggering perilously close to saying that women’s writing is shit.  I have talked about women and YA writing before.  And as I mentioned earlier, other people have unpacked this issue, and in articles way more erudite than this. 

Foz Meadow’s article says it best -

“…women, whatever their age, are held to different standards. We’re presupposed to be the moral and aesthetic gatekeepers of every genre we’re discouraged from actually enjoying, not just because girls aren’t meant to like that sort of thing (and if we don’t, we’re humourless, fun-hating harridans – natch), but because, if we do, it’s unseemly and inappropriate and we’re doing it wrong, and why does there have to be romance and boys and ugh, trashy films with magic and explosions are just so much better when they fail the Bechdel test and are made for teenage boys and young women need to stop participating in popular culture!...
 …Whether we’re conscious of our biases or not, we’re culturally predisposed to be extra critical of everything women, and particularly young women, do (to say nothing of the women themselves) – and now that YA novels have become such a breakaway phenomenon, with plenty of film adaptations still in the works, otherwise sane adults are falling all over themselves to declare the whole business a type of commercial heresy.”

If you want more on that, I suggest you go read the article.

And that’s all I’m gonna say.

xx Ellie