Day of Dialog Takes on Steampunk, Tweens
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“I won’t want a marketing person telling me who this book is for,” says Lisa Von Drasek, a children’s librarian at the Bank Street College of Education and one of five panelists who spoke at SLJ’s Day of Dialog at New York’s Jacob Javits Convention Center on May 25. “I want to do the reading and recommending.”
Harris, whose It’s Perfectly Normal (Candlewick, 1994) is one of the most challenged books in the United States, says that although there are some similar external traits such as dress, talk, and musical taste, most experts agree that kids between middle school and adolescence are still children.
Stead admitted avoiding the word tween because she says it robs children of a big chunk of their childhood. “It acquiesces that a nine-year-old is more or less a teenager. And it’s completely untrue,” explains Stead, who won the Newbery in January for When You Reach Me (Random). When writing the book, she says her goal wasn’t to teach a lesson but to “recognize my own inner weird random thoughts and to acknowledge the things about the inner life of kids.”
Author Gennifer Choldenko also stressed the importance of books that kids this age can identify with. “Books gave me emotional access,” she says. “They made me feel like I wasn’t alone.” She rejects both the terms “tweens” and “preteens” because they imply that “it’s not a valid time between childhood and being a teen.”
“We need to coin a new term for this age group,” she told an audience of 0ver 200 librarians and publishers, who showed up for the daylong event to discuss the hottest topics facing the profession on the eve of BookExpo America.
The period before adolescents represents such a mixed bag of childlike and mature behavior, coupled with developing hormones and intellectual growth, the panelists say. “So it’s really the job of the adults around to say, ‘Not yet. You’ll be there eventually, but not yet,’” when recommending books, says Von Drasek, who added that the most important way she serves her kids is by listening. “There are 11-year-olds who commit suicide. There are 12-year-old dying of anorexia,” she says. “And I don’t want arbitrary lines drawn for my services.”
Author Tim Green agrees. He says kids should be allowed to read anything that takes them to another time and another place. “Because once you have that experience, you will want to keep going back,” he explains, especially since his books are up against some stiff competition: the Internet and Xbox. “Whatever excites them. Whatever entertains them, give it to them.”
Teens are drawn to Steampunk
Why are so many teens hot for Steampunk? For Karen Grenke, a library manager with the New York Public Library and a fan of this subgenre of fantasy and speculative fiction, it’s because they can embrace it, live in it completely, and make it their own.
“It makes it exciting for teens and adults,” says Grenke, who along with moderator Cory Doctorow, Scott Westerfeld, and Cherie Priest sat on the panel Steampunkery: Why are today’s teens embracing 19th-century technologies? “There’s a lot of freedom but there are rules and structure. There’s also a sense of rebellion.”
Seattle-based Priest, who recently released the novel Boneshaker and has been described as the high priestess of Steampunk, says it “signifies a rejection of mass produced culture.” And Westerfeld, author of Leviathan, says the combination of written word and visual culture is what makes it appealing.
Interest in Steampunk only started to gain momentum in the United States over the last four to five years, says Priest, joking that it can be described as “when Goths discover brown.”
Steampunk is a kind of retro futurism, which draws inspiration from old science fiction stories of Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, and Mary Shelley—and it’s a wonderful opportunity for librarians who know about it to draw kids in.
“Think of how can we use it as a literacy form to create programs and get ideas,” says Grenke. “When you read a Steampunk book, it’s an alternate way of making history. And you want to know more—you want to know ‘Did this really happen?’ And suddenly you’re doing research. It’s a way for librarians and educators to engage kids in a different way.”
Picture books vs. graphic novels
Roger Sutton, editor-in-chief of The Horn Book, now a SLJ sister publication, moderated the panel, “Drawing the Line Between Picture Books and Graphic Novels,” with speakers David Wiesner, Laura Vaccaro Seeger, Mark Siegel, George O’Connor, and Wendy Lukehart, a youth collections coordinator at the DC Public Library.
To Wiesner, creating a picture book involves paring a story down to its most essential elements. “The hardest part is what to leave out,” he says. The award-winning author and illustrator also announced that he’ll try his hand at graphic novels. “I’m at the beginning stages of working on a graphic novel,” he told the audience without elaborating.
Meanwhile, O’Connor, who wrote and illustrated Kapow!, Journey Into Mohawk Country, and the Olympians series, explained that graphic novels tend to play with time and space—leaving a lot of room for wasted space.
Seeger, who always wanted to make picture books since she was a little girl, worked as an animator, so she says her work bridges the two formats. “I approach creating picture books as an animator would with frames of a storyboard,” adds Seeger, giving an example of her book, First the Egg..
Lukehart, who started a graphic novel collection at her library in 2006, says it can get complicated when shelving, especially if a book falls under more than one category, such as an easy reader and a graphic novel or a graphic novel and a history book.
“We have some responsibility to communicate what something is in a helpful way,” she says.
In the end, O’Connor says the great distinction between the two formats is that picture books should be read aloud, while graphic novels should be read to oneself.
One of the highlights of the day was guest speaker Cornelia Funke, who Time magazine voted among its "100 Most Influential Men and Women.” Look for an article in SLJ’s Extra Helping next Tuesday to hear what Funke has to say about her life as a writer and her latest book, Reckless , which publishes September 14 from Little, Brown Books for Young Readers.
