things around and about Fourth Street

[aamcnamara]

1. I would totally read Tom Bombadil fanfic.

2.
I have been to several cons now. At those cons, I have attended many panels about YA fiction. This is partially because I like YA fiction and partially because I feel more confident at YA panels; I've more often read more of the books being discussed, and as a teen I get the impression that my Opinions get more respect on YA panels, because I am a Real Live Teen. (Which is not to say that I haven't said things at other panels, but I get uncertain of myself in non-YA panels, because I know that everyone else has probably read much more of what's being discussed than I have.)

Panels like the one we had at Fourth Street this year are good in some ways and fail in others. The panel description asked why the bestsellers are nominally YA, why adults read YA. Which are valid questions, if not the questions that I think are interesting about YA. The thing is that at conventions, where 99.9% of those attending are adults, if the room is not full of people who read YA these days, the conversation does not go directly to "why do these things happen", it looks at it from a standpoint of "the last time I read YA or YA-type books was when I was a kid/teenager, what has changed since then to make these things happen?"

And, okay, there is merit in looking at the history of any genre. YA, though, strikes me as being one of the ones in which the history of the genre is largely orthogonal to talking about the genre as it is today. There are important books, sure; there are books that changed the way the genre looked, sure; but those books are not the ones that many teens read today. When talking about the way that SFF is today, we talk about the history of the genre--"The Last 20 Years in Fantasy" was another panel at Fourth Street--and when we talk about the great books of SFF, we start with Heinlein and Tolkien and work our way up.

There are probably people who, for example, consider S.E. Hinton's The Outsiders completely necessary for their development as a person, and who go back to reread it (just as there are people who feel that way about Heinlein). But while these people may exist, they are largely not teens any more. Same with Catcher in the Rye, or any other classic YA book.

And this voice is largely unimportant in the genre. YA is about the here and now. However you define it--"books that teens read", "a marketing category"--YA is about what teens are reading, present tense.

This may be changing. There are a lot of adults now who read YA books. (This is what the panel was about, yes, but from a different angle.) These adults, who perhaps read YA as a teen and have kept reading it, are the thing in YA that is most like the community around SFF. There are also communities of YA writers that have begun to spring up, on the Internet and offline. Maybe as these communities grow, we'll see books in dialogue with each other in YA the same way that books are in dialogue in SFF.

I am entirely uncertain if that is a good or a bad thing.

(Going back to conventions, panels like the one we had at Wiscon this year about gender roles in YA SFF tend to go better for me. There were book recommendations, discussion of how gender roles are being subverted in YA SFF these days and how they're being reinforced, and almost all of the books mentioned were recent books. It wasn't a picture of how the genre was; it was a picture of how the genre is.)

I would be interested to hear opinions on this one. From people of any age, who have any range of interest in YA.

3. I need to start reading a lot more nonfiction.

4. Today is my official Day to Relax and Not See People. And, you know, keep working on the novel. (And slush.)

5.

37759 / 80000

Comments

[janni.livejournal.com]

I find YA panels at cons a little frustrating, because it seems you need to spend half the panel trying to explain what YA is to an audience that hasn't been near the YA section of a bookstore or library in ages (it's not fiction for elementary school kids, it's also not fiction with the sex and violence and language removed ...) And often not just the audience--I've been to cons where the panelists don't know what YA is either.

And even outside of cons, every so often it seems another adult writer decides "oh, maybe I should write a YA book now," goes off to read a few, and comes back with "OMG how can we be exposing the children to Books Like This." (Because that YA books are for teens, and that teens are not children, is a huge part of the misunderstanding.) (Also that teens are intelligent and critical readers who won't be harmed be random content and in fact often question and argue with their reading more than adults do.)

Also, if I hear Heinlein invoked one more time, I'm going to scream. Because if you can't understand why Heinlein juveniles are not the way to introduce contemporary teens to SF, well, you need to go read more and spend time with teens more both.

The best YA panels I've been to/on have been the ones where there've both been teens in the audience, and the panelists have had sense enough to let them speak.

I think one could do worse than to have those teens on the panel, and to put the adults in the audience so they can listen a bit more.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

I don't attend those panels any more, especially if there's a YA editor on it, whom many seem to have to schmooze and hold up as the shining example of what's good in YA.

I ask kids.

[jennygadget.livejournal.com]

hmmm....

I've actually liked most of the YA and middle grades panels I've been to. But then, the only panels I've been to have been at professional conventions (CLA and ALA) and the LA Times Festival of Books. The audience of the former was full of YA librarians and wannabe YA librarians (such as me) and the latter was a mixture of the same, teachers, kids/teens, and their parents.

There were times when the panels at the Festival felt a little YALit (or Middle Grade Fiction) 101, but definitely more towards the end of the course rather than the first day. Which seems appropriate to me. The moderators and panelists always made sure that the audience questions were from a mixture of adults and teens (or kid, if it was a middle grades panel).

re: "YA, though, strikes me as being one of the ones in which the history of the genre is largely orthogonal to talking about the genre as it is today."

Yes and no, imho. In my experience, part of the reason why so many of the panels talk about books like The Outsiders (esp the Outsiders) is that until those books were published, YA Lit as a genre did not exist. Teens read books, certainly, but publishers did not publish and market books specifically to teens. A lot of adults that I know that are interested or invested in YA Lit see parallels between that and what is happening now. So the discussions that I've been at haven't been so much about how YA Lit has changed from then to now, but speculation as to what was happening then and what is happening now to create such a dramatic change in the existence/size of YA Lit as a genre.

But then again, this has been at panels were the panelists included Laurie Halse Andersen, Holly Black, John Green, MT Anderson, Lauren Myracle and the like. So the majority of the discussion was always about those authors' books in particular, with the issue you are raising being largely a footnote. When the question of what used to be popular comes up, it's more often a question asked by kids or teens specifically of the authors because, as fans, they are curious about the authors' tastes and what they were like when they were the fans age. And the answers have rarely been about YA Lit in particular, partly because most teens do not read exclusively YA lit and also because this was even more true a decade or two or three ago when the YA section of the bookstores was only a fraction of the size it is now.

[aliseadae]

ditto to three.

YA panels never seem to change. There should be more of them with actual young adults and teenagers present. It'd be cool to have a whole YA panel with people who /do/ know what is going on now.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I'm with you and other commenters: there are interesting things to say on panels about YA fiction, but "why do they sell so well/who is reading them" is no longer on the list of interesting central questions. I always skip panels of those description. Maybe we can poke Steven about having something more interesting about YA fantasy in specific next year. Some of the GoHs I've heard discussed would be interesting for that.

[sdn.livejournal.com]

what can i tell you, i did what i could. :)

[aedifica]

Hi! Liza here. We didn't actually meet at 4th Street, but I saw you around. (Which is to say, this is who it is that just friended you.)