Loving the Young Adult Reader Even When You Want to Strangle Him (or Her)!

Adapted from the keynote speech delivered at the Arizona English Tachers' Association State Convention, October 16, 2004

The title of my message, "Loving the Young Adult Reader Even When You Want to Strangle Him, (or Her)," is based on my belief that we need to quit whining about teenagers and begin to celebrate them instead. I'm officially on my soap box now, so as I stand at the podium up here on the stage, I want to warn those of you who are sitting in the first three rows that you are in the splash zone. If you have ever been to Sea World, then you know what happens when Shamu hits the water after a big jump, and you know what the term splash zone means. Well, when I really get into it, I start to spit and foam at the mouth. So, I'm sorry I didn't bring any of those clear plastic ponchos for you to put on over your clothes but you might want to put a mask on; I don't know, but we'll see. You might also want to get out a pen and a piece of paper. There are two writing prompts or exercises a little bit later that I want you to do. Not here, but when you get home.

I'm going to give you my background, briefly, to help explain why I wrote a couple of the books I wrote and the impact I have had on teenagers. This was all unanticipated by the way; I did not set out to write books for teenagers. I have been put in a unique position, as have many YA authors, of becoming a sort of mother/father confessors for this generation. When young people read a lot of books and actually connect with them, they often seek out the writer, through email, letters or in person, to talk to us in a uniquely intimate way. I want to share some of the feedback that I've received from my readers because I believe that you, as teachers, librarians and others who work with young adult readers, need to hear this.

Frankly, I hated school. I was the student that teachers often don't like to have because of the dilemma I presented; I was tall, so they wanted to put me in the back row, but in the back row 1 either got in lots of trouble or I ignored the teacher. No offense intended, nothing personal against my teachers, but it's just very hard for me to sit still for any long periods of time. I do some of my finest writing, by the way, at conferences. Those of you sitting in the back row, I suspect that you are all secret novelists and you've chose the back row so that once my voice begins to lull into a rhythm, like a white noise, then you can start working on my novels, your novels. Go ahead, you have my blessings. That's how I get some of my finest work done.

I left high school early to be a foreign exchange student in Denmark and missed my senior year in the states, but if you want to know what I really think about high school, just read Speak. That's what it pretty much felt like for me, particularly ninth grade. 1 made friends eventually so it wasn't all bad, and I'll give you the details of that in a moment, but leaving was a good thing, and when I came back to the states, I went to community college, which I loved. Community college was a godsend for me. And from community college, I transferred and went to Georgetown University, which was fun but it gave me a totally useless degree and a lot of debt (which I finally paid off). I studied historical linguistics, which, as I mentioned in an earlier session, qualifies me to work at the mall. But it was fun at the time.

I wound up working as a journalist for a couple of newspapers that had wonderful editors who taught me how to write (once they finished throwing dictionaries at my head). From that newspaper writing, I started to write for fun. At that point I had little kids around my house, so I bejjan to write for children. I was not going to write about or for teenagers; in fact, I didn't even enjoy being a teenager. You know how you try to not think about those weird, awkward breakthrough years. I should tell you now that through a combination of my kids and my stepkids, we have girls, 19, 18 and 17 and a 12-year-old boy, so we're just up to our ears in adolescence.

A letter I received this year kind of summarizes what I've learned about teenagers in the last four or five years. I got this letter about six months ago from Slovenia (who knew my books were being read by teens in Slovenia?). It was written in English, very well written in English, from a young girl. I think she was sixteen, and she has relatives in northern California. While visiting in northern California, she had picked up a copy of Speak and taken it back to Slovenia. I have forgotten which city she lives in, but it is devastated, bombed out from all the wars those folks have had. Its economy is depressed, and so it is very similar to Eastern Europe in the 1950s and the 1960s. She wrote me a very sweet letter, continuing for several paragraphs before saying,

"I should probably get to my point. I read your book and I have a question for you. The main character in your book, Speak, was very sad because bad things had happened to her. That's how I feel all the time. Bad things are everywhere I look: in my school, in my city, in my family, nothing is happy, everything is broken. How did your character find the strength to go on?"