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SLJ 2012 Day of Dialog: Keeping Middle Schoolers Engaged

See below for more coverage of SLJ 2012 Day of Dialog:

• Walter Dean Myers Vows to Close the Reading Gap

• Keeping Middle Schoolers Engaged

• Pushing the Picture Book Envelope

• #SLJDOD Twitter Feed

• Pictures from SLJ 2012 Day of Dialog

From left: Emily Danforth, R. J. Palacio, Ellis Weiner, J. Anderson Coats

It was R.J. Palacio’s brief encounter with a little girl who had a facial deformity that motivated the author to finish her first book.

“This girl was seared in my mind,” says Palacio, whose Wonder (Knopf, 2012) was released earlier this year to critical acclaim.

Palacio and three other first-time children’s book authors spoke at the “Stellar Debuts: Celebrating new and noteworthy arrivals to the publishing scene” panel during SLJ‘s Day of Dialog on June 4 at New York’s Jacob Javits Convention Center.

Five years ago, Palacio says, she and her two young children sat next to a girl who looks like Auggie, the fifth grade main character in her book, about an ordinary kid with an extraordinary face who’s about to enter a mainstream school for the first time. “My youngest son, who was three at the time, started crying. And my oldest son looked shell shocked.” Palacio and her kids fled the scene in a hurry, but it “ignited this well of feeling in me, and I thought what life must be like for them.”

A graphic designer by day, Palacio says writing Wonder was cathartic and “a giant act of atonement” because she wishes she would have acted in a “kinder way.”

Ellis Weiner, a writer since 1976, says he was inspired to write for kids after reading a description of pasta puttanesca in Lemony Snicket’s first book. “I wanted to write something funny,” says the author of The Templeton Twins Have an Idea (Chronicle), about the hilarious and wacky adventures of 12-year-old twins. “But if I wrote a comic novel for adults, I’d have a small readership-and a small advance.” Weiner ended up putting a full recipe for meatloaf in his book.

J. Anderson Coats’s says she’s been writing since she was 13, but the 11 previous attempts “were awful.” When she wrote her debut novel The Wicked and the Just (Houghton Harcourt), about two feisty teens in 13th-century Wales, she thought it would never be seen. “But I consciously chose to write something the way it needed to be told.”

The voices in her novel “come from a geeky place: research,” say the author, explaining that her book is about an obscure event in history, the violent and bloody 1293 Welsh rebellion. “I listened for voices that emerged,” says Coats. “The characters [in her book] come from history, but I had to make it accessible for a modern audience.”

When asked if she had an audience in mind or just wrote her book hoping it would find a readership, Emily Danforth says The Miseducation of Cameron Post (HarperCollins), a coming-of-age novel about a girl who had been kissing another girl hours before her parents die in a car crash, stemmed from the “gay 14-year-old me.”

“I would have benefitted from Cam’s story,” says Danforth, who received her MFA from the University of Montana and initially wrote her novel as a short story. “But I only write for me, initially.”

The award-winning author explains that’s one of the main reasons he accepted the role as National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature in January—to publicize the problem.

During his many visits to juvenile detention centers over the years, Myers met kids who were functionally illiterate. “Not kids who were uninterested, but kids who could not read.”

The keynote speaker at SLJ‘s 2012 Day of Dialog spoke to a rapt room of attendees about his own personal experience growing up poor in New York City’s Harlem. By 13, his life began to unravel with his uncle’s murder . Myers’s dad sunk into a deep depression and his mother began drinking again to cope. The young Myers once had to lift his drunk mother off the sidewalk and carry her home.

“I was devastated,” he says. “But it’s not something you can tell your teacher about.” Around the same time, Myers became a knife-wielding gang member, who guarded an older teen. But there’s one thing he credits for helping him choose a different path.

“I found literature,” says the 74year-old award-winning author, who as a child would visit the George Bruce branch of the New York Public Library on 125th Street in Harlem to read Robin Hood and other adventure stories. By reading, he explains, “I came out of that. I had a different worldview than just my misery.”

The statistics are dismal, Myers says. Out of the four Anglophile nations-the US, Great Britain, Canada, and Australia-the largest reading gap exists here, followed by the UK. The author says he sees the problem first-hand in the tons of fan mail he receives. While he used to be able to separate letters written by elementary and high school students, he can no longer do so because the “writing has gotten so bad.”

“A huge amount of these kids are from the lowest economic status and are minorities,” Myers explains. “That’s one reason people are hesitant to talk about it-they don’t want to blame minorities or poor people.

The issue isn’t going away because “one major problem is our silence about it,” continues Myers, whose father worked as a janitor and mother cleaned apartments. “But I don’t mind speaking about this. I know it’s a problem. Kids need to read, especially poor kids and kids in urban areas.”

Since accepting his ambassadorship in January, Myers has done his best to spread the word about this issue, but says, “Our society doesn’t want to see the problem” of our growing illiteracy and incarceration rate, citing one in four black men in New York City has been in jail. “And this will have repercussions for years to come.”

His main concern? “I’m wondering where the next generation of readers is going to come from,” Myers asks. “What’s going on in schools is a reflection of what’s going on in society. There’s a gap. There are huge pockets of language poverty.”

Myers says his goal is to attract readers, “finding that special book for that child,” which isn’t easy considering that most disadvantaged kids look around and accept the bleakness that surrounds them. “[They] see people like them, with the same skin color, and say ‘this is my future,’” Myers says.

“When I talk to young people about literature, that reading will bring them $20,000 more a year [in salary], that education is going to make a difference in their lives, they know it’s the correct answer. But they don’t believe me.”

Myers stresses the importance of introducing books, especially to babies and toddlers from three months to five years old. “All research says that kids at school are at such diverse levels,” he says.” “And if they don’t catch up by fifth grade they will never be lifelong readers.”

Another important suggestion? To give more books to teens. “Change the educational system to deal with unequal scholars,” he says, explaining that in New York City the dropout rate is 47 percent.

“I want to reach kids,” Myers explains. “I want to reach out to them and invite them in.”

See below for more coverage of SLJ 2012 Day of Dialog:

• Video: Keynote by Walter Dean Myers
  

• Keeping Middle Schoolers Engaged
  

• Pushing the Picture Book Envelope

• #SLJDOD Twitter Feed
  

• Pictures from SLJ 2012 Day of Dialog

• Even more pictures from SLJ 2012 Day of Dialog