 My name is Seth Manukin. I'm the acting director of MIT's communications forum. We're thrilled that you all came out for the second of our three forums this semester. Our final forum is in April, and we will be having the author, Jeff Vandermeer, here. I hope you all come to that as well. I'm going to briefly introduce the people who you all came here to see, and then they will take it away from there. So tonight's session is going to be moderated by Mara Gubar, who is an associate professor of literature at MIT. She arrived here this year and is a wonderful addition to literature and to the floor that I'm on as well. And she is the author of Artful Dodgers, Reconceiving the Golden Age of Children's Literature, and before arriving here, had directed the Children's Literature program at the University of Pittsburgh. Immediately next to her is Kristin Kashore, who, for those of you who are interested in children's literature, I'm sure needs absolutely no introduction. She's the author of the award-winning Best-selling Critically Acclaimed Graceline Realm series, which includes Graceline Realm, Fire and Bitter Blue, or Graceline. Is the first one just called Graceline? Yes, OK. And next to Kristin is Kenneth Kidd. And I lost my place on the page. He also needs no introduction. He's published widely on 19th and 20th century children's literature, psychoanalysis, queer theory, and cultural studies. And he's also very well known as a mentor and teacher and friend to many people in the field. And he is the author of two books, Making American Boys, Boyology and the Feral Tale, and Freud and Oz at the intersections of psychoanalysis and children's literature. So without further ado, I will turn it over to them. Thank you. Thank you so much for coming. Thank you for coming. I'm so honored to be here with you guys today. And they asked me to just leap right in to questions. So I'm going to start off by asking you what you thought of the whole controversy over the Megan Fox-Girden Wall Street Journal piece, Darkness Too Visible, which came out in 2011. And in a way, it kind of inspired this, or was part of the inspiration for this panel. Can you tell people about it since not everyone may have read it? Sure, yeah. Can you guys see me OK? OK, great. How many of you have seen that article? Anybody look at it? OK. There's a lot of reaction to it, too. So you may have followed some of that, even if you didn't necessarily see the original piece. But pretty simple in a nutshell, I think. It'd be fair to say that the piece, it was in 2011, the Wall Street Journal, as Mara mentioned. And the basic claim was that YA lit is too dark. A certain amount of darkness, that's fine, that things have gone too far. And she gives a number of examples of topics and emphases, which she thinks are excessive or over the top. And she contrasts that with what she talks about as the first wave of YA problem novel writing. And she's about Judy Bloom, for example. And Judy Bloom becomes the standard for an acceptable practice of YA. And so that's an interesting aspect to the article. But to be fair to the piece, there actually is a lot of substance in it. And she talks a good bit about just the problem that parents and teachers and librarians have in providing guidance and supervision and just that whole debate about when is that censorship, when is that what's appropriate. But as one might imagine, this also kind of set off a sort of firestorm of response and critique and tweets and all kinds of stuff. And a number of people weighed in on this, focusing on different parts of the controversy. And what I read on this is that this question has been there from the beginning. And it's definitely accelerated, I would say, in the last couple of years. And so this is one of several kind of high profile pieces that have come out that have raised this issue. And basically, how far is too far? When you're dealing with the whole sort of young slash adult, what's too young? What's too adult? How do you decide what that dynamic is going to be? What's the right balance of innocence and experience? If you expose people to difficult topics, that they may not have necessarily encountered or experienced, is that tantamount to abusing them? I mean, that's often the kind of accusation. So it's a pretty interesting discussion and controversy. So that was sort of the impetus, I think, for the forum. So I imagine we'll be talking about some of those texts. And I know a lot of you know probably more than we do about some of these texts. So we're looking forward to hearing your thoughts about this as well. Kristen, do you want to talk about how creative writers responded to it? Well, it's actually really nice to hear Kenneth speak because your reaction to it is much more measured and less emotional than mine. And I avoided reading the piece once I heard about it for ages because I just knew it was just going to make me mad. And I even, preparing for this event this week, kept saying, I should really reread that piece. And I couldn't get myself to do it until last night. And several times while writing it, I sent angry emails to friends. I was actually a little worried I was going to lose my temper when we started to talk about it. So I'm glad that you know. I love that I'm the voice of measure of reasons of very ironic in many ways, but please. I feel like I don't want to try to analyze anyone. But I feel like I can empathize with where people who have concerns are coming from. Of course, you know, we want to protect the children. But it's an attitude that I think smacks of three things. One, avoidance. The world is kind of a dystopic place. There are horrible things going on. And actually, we need to be engaging with kids about them so that they have some sort of way to cope. But also, two different kinds of condescension. Condescension to kids' lives and condescension to their minds. The notion that the lives of young people are happier or easier than the lives of adults, that's where I start to. I mean, in this field as a writer of children's literature, you get used to condescension. But the real problem is that the reason that condescension exists is because condescension to young people exists. I can't even begin to talk about the problematic idea that kids have easier lives than we do. I mean, not only do they live in the same world we live in, but they don't have the power we have. They don't have the agency we have, the resources we have, the money we have. They can't necessarily change their situation. They might not even realize they're in a bad situation because why would they question what people are presenting to them as normal? So that's the condescension to their lives and then the condescension to their minds. I mean, kids know how to relate to story. There isn't some age where suddenly you realize, oh, it's a metaphor. Or kids, when I stop talking, it's because I'm starting to get mad, so I'm trying to calm down. Can I just explain for people who might not know? One of the claims Gerdin makes is that if you write a book about someone who cuts themselves, this might encourage other people, the kids, to start cutting themselves. They don't understand fiction. And just like adults who read books, kids come to books for many reasons. They come to them for delight. They come to them to learn about something they've never experienced. They come to them to have company in something that they themselves are experiencing. Or they come to them to read a story that might be something they have never experienced and will never experience. But look at that. It still evokes the same feelings that their own life evokes for them. And now, suddenly, they have this whole other language to talk about their own lives. They have this other way to kind of deal with their own material with a more of an objective distance. I'm sure you're all readers. I don't need to explain to you what story is, but you find yourself in this situation when people are saying these things of like, what do you read? Like, what happens when you read? I don't understand. Oh, all right. So anyway, I'll stop there. But it does seem, I mean, we're not, though, disagreeing. I mean, one of the things that struck me about the controversy is everybody immediately attacked Gerdin like crazy, right? In the world of children's lit and creative writers. But at the same time, there really has been a deluge of dystopian fiction and post-apocalyptic stuff and trauma and narratives of personal trauma, right? And so the question still remains, I feel like, how do we account for that? So maybe we could start that conversation by talking about, has it ever been thus? And maybe Kenneth could start by telling us a little bit about the history of YA. Yeah, I'll try not to go on too long about that, but just a little bit of background. And actually, in terms of the grant piece, there are a couple of other accusations there. One other one was that a lot of sloppy writing was happening. And so I think that's a different kind of conversation, but that's an interesting conversation. And then another piece, and I think really, maybe a core anxiety, and I think this also speaks to what Kristin just said. So I think, powerfully said it, I think there was the sense that writers are usurping the role of parents. And so I think that's a kind of interesting sort of perspective that somehow we've turned over, Parenton, to, you know, to writers. Sorry, you have a lot of responsibility there. I'm interrupting with my facial expression. Oh, okay, that's fine. I'm not defending this perspective. I can't say I share it, but I think that was a kind of, it's not quite announced as an argument, but it's sort of there throughout the piece. Yeah, but in terms of the trauma and the trauma question and the question of sort of quote unquote darkness, and I think we were talking earlier about this, we definitely want to put that in quotation marks for the obvious reason that dark is, you know, for the obvious reason that there are sort of potentially racist sort of assumptions behind that and this whole idea of this whole association of dark with evil or lightness with good and so on. Let's say difficult, serious, mature. I also think dark sometimes is code for literary. I think a lot of the push against some of this writing is actually that's too difficult. You know, it sort of challenges you emotionally, it challenges you narratively, right, in terms of just the way the language is working, et cetera, so I think that's also going on. So in a way this is new, I think that's probably true. There's been a real acceleration of dystopian sort of literature in the last 10 years. I mean, it does go back a ways, but there's been an intense sort of, you know, kind of explosion of that. And then I would say probably the kind of literature about trauma probably has a 20 or 30 year history depending on how you define that, again. But if you want to take, I think a broader view, you can argue it's been there from the very beginning. You know, you can talk about different origin points for adolescent literature, but there's certainly an argument to be made for it beginning in the late 19th century or late 20th century. And you can then argue further back from that. Some historians have done that, and I think persuasively. But a lot of those works were fairly serious works. I'm thinking about Dostoyevsky's, The Adolescent, and what else, the Von Vendikens play Spring Awakening, which is a very intense play about a group of teenagers having some horrible series of events happening to them. And if you were to read this description, you'd think this is like more lurid, more dramatic, more problematic than anything we could possibly think of now. So a number of works that really reckoned with sort of that period of one's life and the basic questions about sexuality, vocation, struggles with parents, and other authority figures, so that's there. And I think you see it really all the way up through, you know, the end of the 20th century. I think the usual history is it started in the 60s, right? It started with the outsiders, with Capture in the Rye, with what we think of as the problem novel with Judy Bloom. But there are many examples before that, many examples from the 20s and 30s. A lot of these books were very psychological because the idea of adolescence is very psychological to find that way. Also very much caught up with literary realism and naturalism as movements. So a lot of attention to conditions of poverty, conditions of immigration, racism, and so forth. So there's a fairly interesting history. Some of you may know some of the titles that were very popular in the earlier part of the century. One was 17th Summer, Marine Daily, which is not widely read now, but was hugely read for a long time. In fact, people couldn't keep it stocked in libraries as late as the 60s and 70s and actually led to 17 magazine being founded. So that's pretty interesting. Another would be The Member of the Wedding, Carson McCullers, fabulous book about Frankie who is attracted to the Wii of me and wants to marry the wedding. It's a very odd story about kind of queer kinship and relationality and it's just a wonderful book. It was published in 1947. And so you have quite a few of these texts prior to the 60s to the rise of the problem novel and what we think of as the sort of novels of social realism. So I think there are a lot of beginning points, a lot of, I mean it's kind of a roundabout way of answering your question, but I think there are a lot of different ways to think about it. I think the focus on sort of trauma and atrocity, which I think Willie picks up steam with the first kind of wave of stories about the Holocaust for both teens and for young children, it was really late 80s, 90s. And actually the picture book got there a little sooner. Just if you look at the publication dates, some of the picture books were slightly ahead of Jan Yolin's work for example or some of the other Lois Lowry's, The Number of the Stars, you know. So that was probably around the turn of 1990 or so. And then you really kind of move into the present moment. The dystopia kind of displacing in some ways and kind of in some ways folding all these other genres together, so. Yeah, and like Freud and Nas, your book I think is so important in terms of giving us that prehistory and saying it didn't just start with the outsiders, you know, like people were writing about these themes and topics and upsetting things. Kristen, as a creative writer, do you sort of consciously think about trying to balance dark with light, you know, or not put in too much traumatic stuff, or I'm balanced, everything is a balance. Every aspect of the book is a balance. So yes, I am thinking about balancing darkness and light, but not for the sake of any particular reader. It's for the sake of what this book is asking me for. What book is asking to be written here? I would say, you know, if we're discussing bitter blue, for example. Shall I do a little segue in for people who don't know it? Sure, sure, yeah. So for those of you who don't know, Kristen's the final book of the grace thing around bitter blue. I was actually gonna bring it up when Kenneth brought up The Holocaust because for me, as the grandchild of Holocaust survivors, this book, I was reading it and I could not stop thinking about The Holocaust and it's basically for those who haven't read it about a girl, well, you should describe it actually. I'm gonna make you say what it is now. So bitter blue is 18 years old. She's the queen of a kingdom called Mansi in a world that is mostly composed of kingdoms, although in the course of this book, one or two of the kings are deposed and things start to get a little more politically complicated. But where she lives, it's a kingdom. She's been the queen since she was 10. Her father was the king before her and he was a psychopathic sadist, basically, who for 35 years ruled and had a power that basically he could tell, he told whatever he said you would believe. He could tell lies and people would believe them and essentially used this power to try to create this bizarre kingdom that he decided he wanted to create for some reason that's a little hard to understand and the way he went about doing that was through just horrific abuses that I won't get into the details of right now. So the premise of the book is that bitter blue is trying to figure out how to be queen in a kingdom that is recovering from this, but part of the problem is that part of Lex's power, he's making you believe things that aren't true, is that people couldn't even necessarily remember what had happened. So part of the problem is trying to figure out the truth. What actually happened? People are left unable to forget some things and unable to remember some things, but also bitter blue doesn't know this, but there is a concerted, I guess, basically a conspiracy going on to keep all of that silent, to keep it from coming to the light, essentially because people are so traumatized that they just can't go there. So bitter blue, it's basically a book in which she is uncovering a lot of past trauma, including her own. And the reason I wrote, the reason this became part of this book was essentially, I think there are some unconscious reasons, but the reasons I was conscious of at the time are essentially related to narrative need. I decided, I want to write a book about bitter blue. I committed to that idea. I actually sat down intending it to be my happy book because the book I wrote before it, Fire, was so dark that I just came out of it saying, oh my God, I can't do something that emotionally difficult. Again, this'll be my happy book and instead of making it emotionally complicated, I'm gonna make it structurally complicated. So I sat down and came up with this incredibly structurally complicated plot and of course it turns out you can't write a happy book about an 18-year-old girl whose father killed her mother and was a sadistic psychopath for 35 years. So it ended up being an extremely structurally and emotionally complicated book, which is why it took me so long to write. But anyway, when I actually sat down and said, okay, well, what is bitter blue story? Realized that because of a few fairly careless decisions I made when I wrote my first book, Graceling, this was a much darker. In Graceling, I set up this villain because it was a villain that worked really well with the plot and with the revelations I wanted to bring into play. This, oh, no one knows that this guy is telling lies that you believe because you wouldn't know that if it were happening. That's cool. But when you actually get to the point where you're writing about the daughter of this man and the reality of what this man did, it had to be, I realized, oh, what have I gotten myself into? This is atrocious. And once I realized that, I had to make it atrocious. But I also, in this kingdom, Monsi, there's just so much pain, but I brought in characters from other books and also from other parts of the world who I think provide the light, provide the, what's our opposite word for dark? That doesn't have the assistant to this. The joy and just the ease, the pleasure because... So you were thinking. I was thinking, I think in all my books, it depends on what the book is asking me for, but all of my books so far, I've had some light and that's one of the things I'm thinking about. But also because I feel like sometimes, actually, Catcher in the Rye is one of my favorite examples of this, you can hit harder with the pain if things are funny. Contrast helps. Yeah, I think also another amazing thing about Bitterbloom, maybe this is what you were getting at with the structure point, is that so much of the terrible things happened in the, it's not like the Hunger Games where terrible things are happening in the present over and over and over and over again, worse and worse and worse and it's kind of building. This is, and by the way, I think the Hunger Games is super interesting so I'm not ragging on the Hunger Games, but I'm just interested in how in Bitterbloom, I think the reason it reminded me so much of like cultures that have gone through genocides trying to recover was partly because it was all this sort of, the book kind of unfolded backward in this amazing way that all the action is, yeah. Well there's... It's still kind of terrifying to read because you, I mean it's so powerful but you sort of learn along with Bitterbloom what that history is and there's all this fabulous stuff about cryptography and sort of learning to read between the lines and because everyone who left a record of this had to do so undercover and so you come through it that way and it's still incredibly scary actually even though this is all in the past. So I think that was really quite powerful. Thank you and I think that that was partly pushback to this idea that at the end of the book or at the end of the war, everybody's happy which is obviously not what happens. But also, yes, technically the worst things in Bitterbloom happened in the past because certainly not being presently traumatized is better than being presently traumatized but one of the definitions of trauma is that it's still happening. In fact, unfortunately I hope I can find this. Oh yeah, here's a line from how I live now. This is six years after the war. In my brain, in my limbs, in my dreams, it is still happening so... And the Hunger Games says that too. Katniss says I'm still in the arena, right? And I think the structure of that series is really brilliant too because the second book I remember when I first read it thinking, oh, another one? Like they're just doing the Hunger Games again. And then I realized that was the whole point like that she can never get out of the arena. Yeah, right, yeah. So I don't know, I guess I'm not sure that it... Yes, of course it's true that the worst things in Bitterbloom happened in the past but I mean it is a book where she is unable to stop someone she loves from jumping off a bridge right in front of her because of the trauma that's still happening. And also interestingly because of efforts made to protect her from learning about that. So it ties into what we were saying before about the wanting to protect young people from the traumas of the world. In Bitterbloom it's actually a problem, right? Yeah, and there was a point where I think even in the book at Bitterbloom, where I was and Bitterbloom was also consciously working with the balance between knowing, finding out what happened and healing which sometimes requires, no, don't go there. Like it's too, let's not think about that. So that was something I was thinking of as well. Yeah, for sure. So Kenneth, another sort of insight that happens in Freud and Oz is your insight about the ways in which we now kind of expect children's and YA to sort of heal children. You were mentioning this earlier. Can you say a little more about that? Yeah, sure. And just by the way, I think that's what that last point about Bitterbloom is one of the things I love about that because that tension between the truth must come out at the same time, maybe it shouldn't, maybe it's going to be more deforming when it arrives again. And I think that's just such a wonderful tension. The book is very, the book is very, I think, really gets at the complexity of that. So it's not just, oh thank God we've been able to air all of this and our problems are done, not so much, there's this kind of repetition and there's this, and also the sense that maybe repression has its usefulness and so maybe it just allows us to do some, allows us to survive and to do some powerful themes. There was a moment when I had to decide, do any of Lex journals, which actually detail exactly what he did, get burned? How many of them get burned? Because that is just information that will disappear and that was I guess the moment that most encapsulated I think what you're talking about. Yeah, I love that, I think it's really effective and not an easy thing to do, I think. Well, in terms of that expectation, I mean I think my guess is that it's probably, I think it's built into the broader enterprise of writing for children and young adults just more generally, I think the expectation that it should be educational, that the famous phrase is instruction and delight or instruction with delight and that's also the question is how much instruction, how much delight do you sneak instruction in through delight and so it is, can delight be instructive and so on. But I think that sort of presents there, but I think there's also specific to adolescent literature. One of the lines I thought I'd read, actually the only line I'm gonna read I think, to who's comes from G. Stanley Hall, who was a pretty famous psychologist, who had a big blockbuster two-bit volume on adolescence in 1904, was kind of one of the architects of the child study movement. He brought Freud to America to lecture. He was sort of a big presence in sort of social science and psychology. Problematic sort of believes in many ways, but pretty influential. But at the end of that book, he actually talks about the need for adolescent literature. He says, we've gotta create this stuff. He says, oh and it kind of exists already and has this long section where he talks about adolescent literature in the classics and Plato and the Bible and Shakespeare and sort of does this whole thing. Then he says, and we need to write more of it. And he also says, and we need to prescribe it. So this is kind of the actual language of bibliotherapy specifically, because this is the phrase he uses as much of it. This literature should be individually prescribed for the reading of the young, for whom it has a singular zest and is a true stimulus and corrective. So really this idea that you kind of do niche sort of application. So I think that's been there perhaps all along. And I think probably most of us don't subscribe to such a clearly instrumentalist sort of attitude about young literature. I think, sure, it has its uses. Maybe we don't always want to know about those uses are. No question about what you shouldn't be aware of and what's good for you, quote unquote, good for you or not good for you is a complicated one. But I think it's been built in. And I think it's also kind of gotten built into the genre. I mean, I think this is sort of interesting. We've mentioned catcher. And I think that's, many people see that as a sort of beginning point for the, the fact that that story is kind of, we find out there's sort of a retrospective kind of narrative like, you know, Holden is now telling as part of his sort of his therapy, we assume, his sort of institutionalized, this is having sort of psychiatric treatment. And so the telling of his tale is sort of, is folded into that. And that's also the formula in The Outsiders, which was published in the late 60s. And that's interesting because it's actually an assignment for an English class. And then of course the book itself was written as an assignment for an English class. So the kind of migration of therapy to literature, to writing, to English as a field is kind of fascinating. But there are a lot of examples that I'm sure you can think of others. I was thinking of the perks of being a wallflower, which is as a series of letters, kind of confessional, epistolary sort of tradition, a speak, Laurie House Anderson's book, which in that case is more art making, but it's, there's the idea that there, there's a sort of kind of movement toward truth, toward, yeah, exactly. I think many of the protagonists of these books are artists, writers, have a kind of creative sort of side to them. And that's definitely linked with the form itself. So it's kind of interesting that that's, I think, built into the repertoire. And then I think a lot of it's just still that kind of ongoing anxiety. This must be educational, beneficial, and that there's that fine line again between telling too much and not telling enough. And there's kind of adult anxiety about that. And I was talking with Mara about this a few months ago, just, we were just having a conversation. I said, yeah, it's kind of like the It Gets Better campaign, like the kind of general idea has to be that it gets better, you must survive it, it gets better. And of course, there's been a lot of pushback on that campaign too, and saying, well, what if it doesn't get better? Or what if it gets worse? What if it gets worse for a while? And a lot of the kind of response of that campaign has sort of really has made it, I think, richer and more complex and more interesting. But I think there is some real anxiety on the part of adults, maybe, that this literature has to be helpful to kids in ways that are clear to us. And what if they're not so clear? What if the stories are, in fact, don't have some kind of moral or lesson or something like that? This seems like a very good place to talk about the unhappy ending. And what we think about, sort of, and whether or not, and also the issue of books being maybe too pessimistic or cynical and those kinds of questions. Because I wonder if you guys could talk a little bit about your favorite happy endings, maybe, or questions like that? My favorite happy endings are unhappy endings. Yeah, okay, yeah. Let me write it in my question. I don't know, I've always really liked a good old depressing book. I don't know. I'm not, if you want to, if you have anything. I can't. I mean, so I'll start things off by saying, I think The Hunger Games is a great example of, I agree. You know, because, well, in that one work, the structure works so beautifully and tragically because the whole reason she enters The Hunger Games in the first place. You know, it's a book that's got all this socio-political trauma, but the reason she enters The Hunger Games is to save her sister. And what happens at the end of the third book, after everything she's done, she watches her sister die. Sorry. Spoiler alert. Hopefully you all knew that, oh God, did I just? Sorry. It's hard to talk about it without, you know. It sort of speaks to the fact that sometimes there's a real reason behind the unhappiness and a real like a political thrust or something. I mean, I feel like The Hunger Games are so anti-war. They're like, that's what they're about and they're about the horrors of war. And so the twist in that series for me is that, like you think it's gonna get better when she's with the rebels, but the rebels are just as bad as the other, right? I mean, so there's not gonna be some kind of like hooray, happy ending where everything is fixed, you know? It's interesting in that case because there's also the epilogue. And so you have, I think you get a little bit of both, which is sort of an interesting strategy. It's sort of like, okay, we're not gonna have happy and then we're not gonna, yeah, please. Well, no, I just, I've had conversations with the Friends of Us. The epilogue. I don't see it as, she's still clearly so traumatized. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I wouldn't, I wouldn't, I don't mean just, so happy is probably not the right word for it. But there is the, there is the, there's evidence that she has survived and whatever that might mean. I mean, I think that's basically the question. And she's trying, and of course, they have kids, right? So the kids, so the future, we believe the children or the future, we're back to that. Did she really want those kids? Yeah, she didn't want kids. What did we ever really want? I don't know. Well, no, I'm not saying she, of course I'm not saying she doesn't like her kids, but, you know, it's complicated. It's complicated, yeah. I think it's the right tone. I mean, I would, I think it's handled really well. I think she has this problem of like, you know, how do you, you can't just wrap this, you know, you can't wrap it up, and so, and you have this devastating death of her sister, so there's that, and then, and it's such a bleak place at that point. There's, okay, we can rebuild the society and we can, but it's not gonna be pretty, it's not gonna be, and then you get to the epilogue, and even there, it's just kind of, I think that the tone is, yeah. It works, that's another argument I've had with friends, friends who just hate it, but it works for me. Although at that point Suzanne Collins could have done anything, and I would have been there. She just really owned me, yeah. Well, I think another way we're signaled that it's not supposed to be really happy is that we've had Gail say, you know, she's gonna pick whichever one of us she can't survive without, right, which really upsets Katniss, but then I feel like that's what she does. She's like, I can't, I can't survive without Pita, and Gail would just make me angrier. This is not like a woohoo, like, I finally chose this in love with my life, you know. Jacob, team, yeah, yeah, right. It's a total lure, I feel like, that, to like, hook us in, and we're like, oh, which is it gonna be? And then by the end, we're like, everyone is so traumatized that it just doesn't even really. I think some of the unhappy endings I like are kind of ironized, and in some thinking of Indians. I'm thinking about, for example, Lord of the Flies, which, you know, has that great ending, where basically the naval officers show up to take them off the island, and thank God, they've been rescued from savagery, and from, you know, I mean, I think that's an allegory. So it works neatly, and I think that's, there you have a certain kind of built-in, maybe genre advantage, if you do it right. But I think there's some other, I would also say, we were talking earlier about Empty Anderson's Feed, which is another, I think, pretty fabulous landmark book in kind of dystopian sort of stories, and yeah, it was published in the early 2000s, and the ending of that, I'd say, is fairly bleak. I mean, you basically lose, again, spoiler alert, but we lose the cherished character, let's put it that way. And then the protagonist, who's kind of been an antagonist all along, and that's also, I think, part of the formula here is that you kind of create sort of somewhat unlikely or at least slightly unsympathetic protagonists in this genre, if you're going to kind of keep a little distance and sort of maybe work to defamiliarize, or to at least not fall in love with the main character and root for them unconditionally, I think that you have a little bit of resistance there, I think that's even there with Katniss a little bit. So it's sort of interesting, but yeah, I mean, ending of that, we're basically a feed where it's a kind of bleak ending, so you have this kind of awareness on the part of the character, so that's positive, right? And then the idea of the reader learns his or her lesson, oh, we must resist, we must fight the corporations, we must, don't take the feed. Resistance is not futile, if it is, I'm going to go down anyway, I'm going to go down with the ship, but there's a kind of a bleakness to it too, of course, you know, it's a good thing. Of course, and the humor, when he buys thousands of pairs of the same pair of pants. Yeah, exactly, it list pants, right? Endless pants. Yeah, yeah, feed is, and the playfulness, and the creativity, and the crookiness of the language, I think is so brilliant. Oh, can I just? Do. Okay, so he's trying to talk to, what's his name? His name is Titus, her name is, her name is whatever. Violet? Violet, he's trying to talk to her, he's trying to, you know, be all smooth and stuff, and he can't find his words, and he says, I said, do you mean I stopped and tried? That could be taken to mean that, you know, we, and then my feed was like tongue-tied, wowed and gaga, for a fistful of pickups, tailored especially for this nightmare scenario, tricerano feed, available at rates as low as, and then, you know, the conversation goes on, but there's this, the character of the feed is hysterical, and the, and very impression, so for those who don't know, it's like you have this thing implanted in your head that's sort of telling you to buy what you can buy. It's advertising, constant advertising, tailored to your every situation. I'm like, can you think we know? It's a little bit more extreme. But I think it's really an awesome and radical thing that Anderson does by making us, making our hero, like you were saying, it's not the rebel forces, right? So much stuff comes out like, you know, divergent and all these things where you're rooting for the rebels for them to like overthrow things. And here we are in the head of someone who is like placidly accepting of all this, you know? And it's a really neat reversal, I think. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is a slight change of pace, but I wanted to ask you guys about, in a way it's kind of nice that people are upset about the violence because I feel like in general, people are freaking out about sex a lot more than violence, and so I sort of wanted to ask Kristen to talk about reactions she's gotten to her books and whether that's been true for her. Yeah, so across the board, I think without exception, the concerned emails or letters that I have gotten have been about the premarital sex. It's very irresponsible what I'm doing, suggesting that such a thing could ever happen and should ever happen. And one woman told me that, one of my favorite letters ever, told me that getting to the end of Graceling was like finding cockroaches in her ice cream. The cockroaches were the sex. And here they were, that was some of my favorite, I loved how, these are fantasy books, so I wasn't really, I don't know what I was expecting, but they're married and they don't want kids. It's so amazing. And it's about, and there's stuff about contraception, you know, that's an issue, and I thought, God, when do you read fantasy? We're like, contraception, that's so awesome. When it's written by someone who has brought up Catholic. I'm impressed. And is reacting to that, basically, yeah. Do you think of that as part of having like a strong female, like is that consciously a feminist issue for you? I'm not consciously feminist. Okay. Well, and I guess that's not true, of course I'm very consciously feminist, but I couldn't, right, I couldn't, I couldn't not, right, include that stuff, because what, how would that be about the world if I didn't include it, you know? But was it a surprise to anyone else because of the genre? Like I feel like I'm used to sex in certain kinds of YA, but for me, it felt like this fresh and amazing, surprise, I'm the opposite of the cockroach woman. It's like this amazing surprise that in a fantasy novel, and I also love that you included non-heteronormative, like sexual. Well, you know, and you're reminding me that there's also one other distinction in the letters, which is that they're all from American, adult American fans are the ones who are, female adult American fans are the ones who send me these particular letters. I get a lot of letters from European fans, not even an issue, never even mentioned. The letters I get from young readers, I mean, this, to me, this is one of the reasons why I get so angry when I read a piece like the darkness to visible piece because I, again, across the board and getting letters from young people who are saying to me, thank you so much for writing a character who's dealing with the things I'm dealing with. I mean, I'm writing characters about queens and people who have amazing spectacular powers, but again, like kids get metaphor, thank you for writing a character who feels the way I feel. Thank you for making me feel less lonely. And then this woman writes an article in the Wall Street Journal. It's like, sorry, I'm gonna try to keep my temper. But it is really interesting. I think the ways in which sex enters these fantastic, but also post-apocalyptic novels is really interesting. I know we wanted to talk about grasshopper jungle, for example, which I don't know how many of you have read, but it's sort of a tale about grasshoppers gone wild. I really don't know how to sum it up, honestly. Really big grasshoppers. Killer grasshoppers. Big scary grasshoppers. That used to be people. It's full of sex. And now they're grasshoppers. And I don't know what you guys think. I think it's one of the most amazing representations of being sexually confused as a teenage boy that I've ever read, even in this crazy post-apocalyptic, giant grasshopper-y kind of way. I'm just trying to imagine what you were thinking about this book based on this description. I've actually read it, and it still seems very strange. I'm not sure having read it is a great advantage in terms of this particular plot. I mean, it's such a strange book. Well, I mean, I feel like that's one of the things that's so delightful about it. It's a story about sexual confusion. And in the meantime, all this crazy stuff. I mean, what a great. And this is an example, I think, of let's write a dystopia for the sake of narrative delight. I mean, this is just ridiculous. And getting back to the point about unhappy endings, I was surprised and delighted with the way I ended. Sorry, I've been chastened for giving spoilers. You could just make something up, no matter what. Yeah, right. Now, there is a twist at the end that you don't necessarily expect. And one thing we could say without giving too much away is, I think this is a narrative that's playing with the idea of how structures and books, often everything comes together and gets tied up nicely. Yes, and that's what you're expecting. That's what you're expecting. And it just loves it. It definitely explodes. It's by Andrew Smith, and it was published a year ago. Maybe it's 2014, I can't remember. But it's Grasshopper Jungle. And he's very prolific, wide and novelist. And it's very strange. But sort of set in the Midwest, there was this kind of a whole situation where this giant, where this kind of, I don't even know how to describe it. It's such a strange thing. But basically, it's sort of a repetition of a 1970s secret experiment, Cold War experiment, where a plague strain is accidentally released into this farming community in the Midwest. And before we know it, six foot tall grasshopper or Permanentus creatures are eating everybody in sight. And then the three teen characters are two boys and a girl. And there's kind of a triangle sort of going on. And one of the boys is very sort of not quite sure if he's gay or not gay, or maybe maybe bi, or maybe not, maybe. And so a lot of the books about that, and it's first person narration, it's intensely first person, and it's very repetitious. And it's very over the top. It's very funny. It's very funny. It's also kind of annoying, I thought. Yeah, funny and annoying. And in that way, it's very authentic. Yeah. It's like, oh my God, please, somebody rescue me from this kid. But it's actually really, really pretty great at the same time. But yeah, I think it's definitely from literature of the absurd, too. It's sort of kind of, it feels like this could be Kafka. This could be a number of sort of early modern equa. But I'm just going to say it's like crashed in with very realistic. Absolutely. And I'm interested in that genre mishmash, or that, like, how I live now. Yeah, how I live now, which is a wonderful book. Amazing. How I Live Now, what I, the way I view How I Live Now is, how do I put this? It's a story about a 15-year-old girl who is desperately anorexic and has been rejected by her family. And it's the story of a war. And I feel like, in a way, it's the same story. In a way, I don't know what Rostov was intending. But this gets to one of the other things we were talking about, just the way in which you can approach a topic of personal trauma by blowing it up and making it a topic of communal trauma, getting that little bit of distance from it. The way you can approach something that is personally just incomprehensible by, I guess, finding the metaphor for it, which is something not necessarily more comprehensible, but at least different. Am I making sense? It's a story. I look at this as the story of an anorexic girl trying to recover when, obviously, it's the story of a horrific war. It's both. But it's both, and they're the same thing. It's like what you're saying is like the genre. Because it feels like a genre mix. Like, if you don't know what's going to happen, it starts off one way. And you feel like it's just a realistic story about a teen who's going to the relatives. And then it just tilts on its axis and shoots off in this direction. It's actually an amazing experience that I've just ruined for all of you who haven't read it. But I think what you're saying is that the weird genre mixing is also, in its way, the kind of conflation of the personal trauma on the one hand and a more sociocultural or communal trauma on the other being kind of used to, yeah. Yeah, I would add to that, too. I think one of the things that it's not often talked about in these pieces is, again, literature as literature, like how is the writing happening? What sorts of strategies are there? Because this book, she's the master of one sentence paragraphs. And that may not sound like a great description, but if you look at it, it's incredibly, it's very stylized and absolute controls. And I speak as a total nonwriter and non-expert. But I mean, it's just, it's so understated. And so that's part of what I think we're talking about is that you're not quite sure what's going on, because she's not quite telling you. And it's sort of sat in a kind of contemporary Britain. And there was a sort of some kind of war terrorist situation. And everyone's sort of captive. And no one's quite sure who's the bad guy, where are they, and how do you distinguish. And so it feels very contemporary in that way. But when you first started, it also feels like it could be about World War II. You know, they're sent off into the countryside. It's not like the beginning of Narnia Chronicles or something. But I think that the writing is not incidental to that kind of tone and to that, not just the genre mixing, but the question of expectation. You don't know what to expect, partly, because it doesn't look like anything that you've seen before. That was my experience with it. If anything, I would think it reminds me of anything. It might be more like some of the early modernist writing. There's a way in which, I mean, if you just open the book and look at any page, there might be a 10 line sentence. Maybe it has one comma. And so you begin the sentence, and you have no idea how many things she's going to go through by the time you get to the end of the sentence and where it's going to end up. And it's delightful, and it brings you along, and then suddenly you get to the end, and you're like, oh, that's where this was going. And there's this moment in the book that mirrors that entire structure when all along, there's this war going on, but she doesn't really care because it's not really affecting her. And they're riding on this truck, and then suddenly someone gets shot right in front of her. And it's just like all of those sentences that are just like going along, going along, oh, oh. And that is the moment, I think, when something really changes in the book. Yeah, I mean, I wonder, though, if there's an ethical issue raised by the conflation of personal trauma with so, you know, I'm thinking like, for example, grasshopper jungle, I'm thinking like, is it really good that the end of the world coincides with someone thinking they might be queer? Like, that seems like a problematic, like, do you see what I'm saying? Or, for example, like, I recommend a bitter blue to a friend of mine who has a teenage daughter and she was shocked by the sex and I was annoyed at her. And, you know, but she also said to me, like, did she have to also be the victim of child abuse? Like, couldn't it have just been like the, like, did they have to be both, you know? And I feel like, so I'm wondering what you guys think about the issue of that conflation of like a personal thing with a sociocultural thing if there's issues raised. You know, it's interesting for me the issue that I go to first when I, I mean, I think about all these things when I'm writing, or at least I try to, if I'm aware enough, I think about them, is, you know, perhaps with bitter blue, I was trying to work through some of my own personal experiences using a sociopolitical nightmare. Well, aren't I privileged that I can do that because I don't live in a sociopolitical nightmare? You know, people who do might resent me using that structure to work through my own little problems. So that's where, I mean, ultimately I feel that every writer has the right to write about the essential fucked upness of the world. That's like the motto of our panel. But I love that you brought that up and I love thinking about these things like that because they really matter and they're, and it's a sort of question where there are often opposite answers to the same question, but I'm not really, I don't have an answer, but I love thinking about that sort of question. I mean, I'm sure there are reasons why I made her, well, she had to be the victim of abuse because she was in Graceling, like I couldn't change that. But wait a minute, your friend had a problem with the fact that she both was the victim of abuse and had sex? Well, so first she said, first she said, there was sex in it, you didn't tell me there was sex in it and I had just like forgotten. Like I just have not made a- Because it doesn't matter. Right. So then that was with Graceling, actually. Oh yes, okay. And then when they got to Bitter Blute, I think her issue was with the sort of hint of sexual. And I can understand that. I actually tried to make it clear that Bitter Blute was not sexually abused by her father. Of course, many other people were. The possibility was raised. And as time passed that she might be, that was actually a really difficult thing to balance because would she remember if she had? So I did what I could there. We can also extradite this to like how I live now or something like in the sense of like, anorexia is somehow cured by going through a war? Like in a way, you're sort of like, oh, like the conflation is starting to, you know? Yeah. So I think it raises issues, I guess. Which is what I'm saying. It's a great, it's a hard question to answer in the abstract. I think you're definitely, I think right to flag it. I hadn't made that the connection between that and another book called The Hunger, which makes a similar kind of, it's sort of a time travel book and it goes back to, you know, the kind of sort of Armenian genocide. And there's this, and then also it learns not to be anorexic and it's sort of very strange. It just seems, that's probably not a fair summary, but probably not a particularly objective summary in any case. But I think the same kind of coupling, I think it's right to ask questions about those sorts of pairings. I don't know if it means that it can't work or it can't be requested. Can I suggest something? Which is that the people who think kids shouldn't be reading these books could be having these conversations with the kids. Absolutely. For sure. I mean, that's what you do. You talk about it and you disagree and you talk about it. Absolutely. I mean, I would agree completely. And in the case of the Grasshopper Jungle thing, I found it really annoying too that there's kind of apocalyptic scenarios paired with this exploration of queerness. But in a way I also like that because it's not kind of queer affirmative and it's sort of some dumb way. And so I like that it's sort of just going in all kinds of directions. That raises questions. Yeah, I mean, do I worry a little bit that maybe some people that would just reinforce the association? Yeah, because I have a certain investment in sort of what I think of as kind of progressive representation. So that's the tension I think. You know, that between that and this kind of idea that, well, queer is queer and that's pretty queer. You're going to get queer in the Grasshopper Jungle, I don't think, in terms of the sexuality, but in terms of all these other things, and delivery, and tone, and sequence, and so, and I like it for that reason. Part of it, I think largely because I find it annoying. And there's something that's sort of about it that sticks. I do think girls are kind of absent. Oh, girls are totally absent. It's about, I mean, I think this is an issue for... The girl has nothing, she has no character really. But I feel like that's kind of the point. I mean, it's like a love story between these two male friends. It is, it is. I feel like, and we don't have to get into this, but I feel like the character's attitude is completely appropriate and understandable. I feel like the structure of the book could have used a little bit more thoughtfulness. Like, why not just make one of those characters who's actually doing something a girl? Yeah, that's true. I feel the time has come, the walrus said, to open it up to the audience because we have so many wonderful experts in children's lit and YA, and you guys should have time. But I am going to ask you to go to the mic so that it can be recorded for posterity if you have a question. So just hop right up. Oh, good. Okay, I wanted to ask this question earlier on. So thanks for opening it up to us. And it goes back to the question about sort of why young adult literature is delving deep into the darkness of personal trauma stuff. And I wondered, and Kristen, I think you alluded to this to some degree is how much of this is adults processing, they're processing these issues. And the reason I asked too is that I work with youth. So I delve into young adult literature every now and then and I just finished reading Jandy Nelson's I'll Give You the Sun. And I just loved it. And as a gay man who was in the closet and way in the dark for so long and not coming out until I was 29, having a piece of literature like that to have read when I was younger, how would that have helped and how would that have transformed? But sometimes I think I haven't had enough of really good young adult literature when I was young and I love going back and dipping into it now. And it's sort of an opportunity to sort of relive an adolescence that I never fully embraced or could embrace, especially being gay and being in the closet back in the early 80s. So back to the original question, how much of this is adults really sort of grappling with and processing all this incredible stuff that has happened to us, to our friends, to our neighbors friends? Yeah, so that's my question. Yeah, great question. That's a great question. I mean, I'll just say that I kind of think that if an adult is making art, that's probably what they're doing. Maybe that's two. Always. Maybe that's two, yeah. I certainly, I don't know that it's always conscious. I kind of skimmed bitter blue last night because it occurred to me that I was going to be expected to remember what happened in my own book. And was actually kind of stunned to make connections between the book and my own life that I didn't make while I was writing it. Probably would not have written it had I gone into it knowing, oh, there are parts of this book that are about me. That shouldn't be so surprising. So for some reason I had to write it. I'm not sure what else I have to say other than, I just think that for many writers, that's whoever they're writing for, that is at least partly what writing is about. It's a way writing can be, to use a little bit of psychological language, writing a story is a way of getting just enough dissociation from your own story that you can touch it and deal with it and work with it and so on. I would say, if that makes sense. Can I add on and say though that there are children's and young adult critics who are really worried about the issue that you're raising. And I'm thinking of a book like Welcome to the Lizard Motel which is actually not, it's a popular press book but it's about a teacher who is worried that all these books she's supposed to give her like sixth graders are like the giver and number the stars and all these incredibly and dead dog stories where the dog dies in traumatic fashion like sounder and all this stuff. And I think she's really saying like, this is a little worrying like, is there some reason why we feel the need to try, like a good book when one of the administrators says to you it makes a child cry. And she's like, why? And if you're interested in this, Eric Tribionella is a children's like critic who just wrote a whole book about how there's a kind of weird thing going on where it's safer to be a child now in the United States that it's ever been like statistically in the past, it's safer. And so his argument is we feel the need to like traumatize children artificially through the literature that they read. So I think there are people who are concerned about children's and YA in particular who are sort of thinking through this. I mean, when I write, I'm not thinking about the age of my audience but it is this kind of uncomfortable responsibility knowing that these books are not having control over who reads your books. And I'm not even sure what I'm saying. It just, there is a discomfort there and a worry about whether I'm somehow being irresponsible. If what I'm doing when I'm writing my books is working out my own stuff, should I really be subjecting anyone to that? But on the other hand, then the honestly kind of miraculous thing that happens is that someone will come up to me in a signing line and basically thank me for writing something that allowed them to work through something in the exact parallel way that writing it allowed me to work through it. It's like, I was doing this for myself. Oh my God, it helped you. I've never even met you. The way a book can become a thing of its own and create this connection such that I feel like, I write one book and then every time someone reads it, if you read it, now I've written two books. If you read it, now I've written three books. It's a different book every time it's read. Again, I've lost track of the point or the question, so I'm just gonna stop talking. Thank God nobody reads scholarly books because, and when they do, people do, they don't necessarily ask these questions about what sort of issues we're working through them. So don't start looking at that because I'm sure it's much more revealing. I know, I actually did have somebody once make a category mark about biology. So this is a strictly professional. It's an interesting question and complicated one. I think there was some will, I think that anxiety hangs over the whole landscape really of children's and YA literature, but I think especially maybe YA because it's so close to adult literature proper. That line is always what people are interested in. And I think there is a will sense that you are writing, you may be writing partly for your younger self or partly for the child that you were or maybe did not quite get to be in the case of queer kids especially. I think there's a kind of will legacy sort of there. And I think this idea that you're willing into existence actually the possibilities for people, scripts that they can follow. And so I think that's a pretty powerful thing. Yeah, should we move on? Yeah? This is way too tall for me. I didn't mean to stop the conversation but I was interested in your raising Lizard Motel because I see that book as doing all the things you said it does but also as being really confused and tense about the difference between public reading and private reading. And so much of what Kristin and Kenneth have talked about is how young adult literature itself kind of interferes on the adult's relationship with the young adult as being somewhere between that public and private. So in young adult literature we can look at the spectacle of young adulthood. We can put Katniss on the stage, we can watch her as adult readers but also as young adult readers and we can kind of experience her young adulthood both as a character but also as an observer. And so Kenneth and Kristin and Mara, I would love you all to talk about sort of what is that adult anxiety around young adulthood and how are the ways in which dystopian fiction but I also think young adult realistic fiction really pathologizes young adulthood in problematic ways. And how do we, as a culture of adults who are readers and who may be working with kids and who are writers who are definitely speaking with kids, how do we understand our anxiety around the very state of young adulthood? That's a complicated and hard question. Did you have any immediate? No, you go for it. Yeah, I mean, I think I'm not sure I would know how to answer. I'd be curious about your thoughts about that too, Kathy, but afterwards. I'm not in your class anymore, Kathy. But the pathologizing thing seems to come out of part, you know, being. Yeah, I mean, I think there is a profound ambivalence toward adolescence that we've seen across the century, right? We love them, we fear them, these strange exotic creatures and yet they are us. And so that kind of schizophrenic sort of orientation, I think, is there. And I think that's a huge problem. And I think maybe that's why dystopian, it's interesting because the descriptions of adolescent literature now is dystopian, right? Like the landscape is really scary and dark and horrible things happen to you if you go there. And so it's kind of interesting and it's kind of applied to the literary world. You know, so the dystopian kind of impulse, I think, is linked to that ambivalence and linked to that anxiety. I think a lot of it is about sexuality, a lot of it's about power. I think it's a lot of it's about maybe the fear about mortality and about being kind of being replaced in this sort of generational sort of reality of time and just the sort of moving into adulthood and what that means. I think you see it play out differently in some of the dystopian sort of trilogies and series, you know, I think there was various levels of, I don't know, but the right with spectacle, you said, or kind of exhibition of adolescence there and it's kind of interesting. I think some of the writers managed to kind of get around that problem or at least have a somewhat, you know, they problematize the figure. I mean, when it goes too far, that's probably what you're asking about, is when does that go too far? And it becomes the sort of exhibition and when does it not go far enough? I was thinking about the Ugly series, which, you know, the main character, Tally, is ugly and then she's a pretty and then she becomes a special, I believe it's the sequence here, and the specials are like these superhumans that prey on the rest of them. And so you're with her on this journey and it's a very strange thing because she becomes in some ways less sympathetic and kind of you become sort of like, well, wait, what is this whole world and why are we now doing this sort of like Superman kind of thing and... Do you ever feel like she should just stop a pretty? Yeah, I mean, it's not my favorite series, but I like that you're taking on a strange ride of kind of ambivalence. I mean, so basically that's the way I would describe it. I don't think I'm answering the question at all, but I'm happy to have other thoughts about it. I feel like I need to sit with that question. But I don't, I mean, there is certainly a discomfort in understanding that the literature you're writing, for people who aren't writing their own literature. You know? So like the ethics of the responsibility like that. So what is, are your portrayals fair? Are they accurate? It's so much. The writer is in such a position of power. I don't know the way around that. Well, this seems like also a good time. One of the questions we were thinking about talking about is like there's, YA is actually really diverse, right? I mean, there's lots of funny YA and other kinds of books out there that we don't always talk about. So I was gonna invite the panel to sort of talk a little bit about funny YA or not like totally pathologizing like dark, scary YA. Do you have favorites? It's funny because I looked at my bookshelf, I looked at my favorite row and I kept saying, oh yeah, I'll talk about when Mara asks this, I'll talk about Margaret Mayhee. And then I was like, oh my God, she's like the creepiest writer ever. But the thing is it's all about balance and the book, The Tricksters. Yeah, it's amazing. That doesn't have any, you know, whatever, super, super, it's got, every book has some creepy stuff in it, but who else? I was looking at the Cynthia Voight Kingdom series. I was thinking about Molina Marqueta's Saving Francesca. I guess if you get into Jelico Road, then you're getting more into the darkness. Yeah, no, some of those are some of mine as well. And I was thinking maybe if you wanna go over the top, Utopian, David Levithan's Boy Meets Boy, which might have actually be too loved at this point, but it's actually, it is kind of a wonderful book and probably because it's so ridiculously Utopian. And there may be some others. I mean, maybe Francesca Leoblox work might kind of fit into that category. These are just some examples. I mean, there's, I think there are quite a few that are playful and funny. I mean, Anderson's book, as we mentioned, is hilarious. I mean, the humor is devastating too. So it's, I think a lot of this too might be, it might be useful to think about dystopian as an adjective that kind of runs across genres, right? So it's not just, it's an impulse or a thread, right? So I think there's, I mean, I think you could argue Harry Potter. It has strong dystopian sorts of tendencies, especially as you move into the later books where he's more adult and it's darker and it's more dramatic. And so I think, you know, think of it that way as opposed to, I mean, there are dystopian stories about dystopias, we've got that group. But there's also a kind of real sense in which that thread is there in so many genres and not only fantasy and science fiction, it's there in, you know, I think some of the older science fiction classics and Alan Engle and so forth. I also wonder, and a conversation with a friend helped bring this to the forefront of my mind, whether YA really is so much deeper and darker than other literature, or is it just that we feel that it shouldn't be? Because it's a good question. Kristen and I were also talking about E. Lockhart's Disreputable History of Frankie Landau Banks, which is one of my favorite books in the world. An amazing book. But it's funny how I like the idea of strands because I was also gonna mention Ellen Emerson-White's President's Daughter series, which I adore and everyone should run out and buy and read. But there's a lot of trauma kind of woven into that in ways that I, as soon as I thought of an example, I was like, whoa. Oh yeah, except, oh, except. Yeah. But there's a lot of great stuff out there. I just wanted to gesture toward that diversity. But you are waiting to ask a question. This goes backwards a little bit to the notion of these adults who are concerned that YA and children's lit is introducing children to trauma. And I just, I'm wondering if that feedback ever comes from any kids or teens at all. Because it seems to me that the violence in our field, whether it's individual abuse, guns, cops, state, whatever it is, is all over the world and kids are growing up with that and kids know that. And Marie said something about it's safer today. That may well be true, but it's not that safe. And it's safer if you're white and it's safer if you have enough money to eat food. Like, but there's so many ways in which it's not safe for so many people that I just wonder if the adults who have that particular concern, do y'all think that they may be holding on to some notion of childhood and adolescence that is not really totally true? I mean, I don't, I honestly find it so hard to get into their mindset and what it is that they're thinking. I mean, I feel like their eyes are closed. You know, it's so, to be, oh God, I was just, I just was gonna start a sentence with to be human, but you know, since the dawn of time. Since the dawn of time. Just the notion that kids are not suffering and aren't exposed to darkness. I mean, how can they, how can, it's really naive. It's really naive and it's harmful. Yeah, I agree with everything you said. Yeah, I think you're right, Rebecca. I think that's absolutely right. And there's a kind of, it's interesting too because the accusation is sort of cyclical. We've seen it before, right? Most recently in the 60s, a real reaction to the problem novel until the kind of, you know, the rise of Judy Blume and Robert Lipside and all those, and Gawask Alice and, yeah. Oh, Kormier. Kormier, yeah, especially Kormier. I mean, that's that, you know, that was, but I mean, a lot of the, a lot of the, yeah, a lot of the critique then was this, it's gone too far. It's too hopeless. It's too, it's too dark. And again, it's coming from mostly reviewers. It's coming from mostly parents. I don't think there's any evidence of kids saying, oh my God, how can you, how can you force these horrible stories to my face? I have certainly never gotten that in any letter I've ever received. And I also think it's funny that in the Darkness to Visible article, she's now saying, Judy Blume is okay. It makes me wonder if in 30 years, someone will be saying, you know, the stuff now is okay. Which then, yeah. It's kind of like with the picture book scene where the Rothings was completely scandalous when it came out, you know, horrible, the stuff at night mirrors, and now it's the standard, right? You're gonna go to that, oh, this is how you work through fears, this is how you, this is the template for what we think of as a kind of normal life. Yeah, one of the, one of my notes was a producer of the TV show, Grange Hall, which is a British sort of realistic, yeah, so sitcom, a British series actually wrote in response to some of the same criticism of the show. It was child viewers who regularly suggested, wrote in and suggested topics such as bullying or drug abuse for future inclusion. Far from gloomy adult producers, foisting their pessimism onto a young audience, it seemed children themselves most wanted to hear about the darker side of life. Now Grange had, he probably has a particular investment in that perspective, but it seems plausible, and it seems at least needs to be part of the conversation. Well, and you can also look at what writing children themselves do produce. Like, I don't know if you guys have read Stone Soup recently, but my eight-year-old gets it, and it's writing by children for children, eight to 13-year-olds or something like that. And oh my gosh, death, divorce, bullying, like I said to my son, I do want, this is really upset, I'm really upset. And he's like, no mom, this is real, like I really like this, and I was like, okay. How dare you force your childhood on me like this? Do we have other queues? I do, I have a young adult child, I was a 16-year-old daughter, who's had a whole variety of misadventures in her life. But one of the things that she became involved with was self-harm, and she found some books on the topic interesting and helpful. She read Willow and came away from that saying, why would they present this topic, and suggest that this is something that kids can deal with themselves, and not seek out an adult to help. And she felt like that's a really irresponsible message to give a child, to say, yes, you're struggling, don't bring this up to anybody. Keep it with your peers, and you're all ready to deal with that. I'm just curious about kind of the responsibility of addressing an audience with a message that the audience actually may say, that doesn't ring true. That's interesting. I haven't read Willow, have you ever, yeah. But I mean, this is what you were discussing a little earlier, it's just that kind of, it's such a huge responsibility. That's why I'm so glad I haven't undertaken it. I can only imagine what that sort of pressure is like. And especially since, I know that I, and I expect many, many writers, aren't approaching what we're doing with the notion of it being instructive. But everything is instructive. No, yes, but since that isn't part of the motivation, then the responsibility becomes even more uncomfortable. You just, there's something you are trying to work out, it's something maybe that author was trying to work out about something else, and this is one of the consequences. That's just what happens in books. It's interesting that some authors seem to have taken on that, as soon as I could, it was a big burden. Potentially, I was just thinking about Julie Bloom, who people wrote to, and she published several volumes of letters about that she received, where people were responding, kids were responding, parents were responding to the topic, but a lot of it was affirming. Thank you for telling this story about whatever this difficult topic was, but she really became a mentor and a kind of homosexual lay therapist in some ways, and it definitely seemed like it was a role she embraced, but also really has been difficult. It's a serious burden to put on literature or authors to expect them to take on lay therapist or teacher, parent, kinds of roles. I would also say, again, I haven't read this book, but a book that strikes one reader that way might strike another reader another way, so, I mean, when it comes down to it there, when I'm at my writing desk trying to make a decision, you get the overwhelming impression that there is no right decision. You give the book to 10 different readers, and five of them come back at you saying, you have got to change this one thing, this is a real problem, and the other five are saying, oh, this was my favorite part of the book. And you realize that what you have to do is just follow your instinct and hope that it will touch a reader, hope that it will touch the reader it's meant for and hope that in the case of your daughter, that was a very intelligent reaction, and it spurred a good conversation, hope that the readers in that situation can get the distance for, I mean, I feel like readers, readers notice when something is bothering them about a book. And that, I feel like I'm fumbling a little bit with my words, I'm trying to articulate something that's more of a feeling. I don't know. But I do think, I'm thinking about the criticisms that have been lobbied against winter girls and anorexia novels, like on the one hand, these novels are trying to give voice to what it's like to be anorexic and, but on the other hand, people are like, well, it's like an instruction book for how to become anorexic, right? You cannot control at a certain level how a book reads or what it does. And that's a perfect example. A good friend of mine considers that book to be an instruction manual for anorexia. I consider it to be an amazingly accurate representation of anorexia that has many, many helpful benefits, if that's what you're reading it for. So it's tough. And we're both smart readers. I feel like that book is perfect, but obviously, different books hit different people different ways. That's just the way it is. I mean, that might essentially be what is at the basis of the entire problem. We can't control what this is going to do to you when I hand it to you, you know. It's literature. But that's life. People learn how to deal with that. Other questions? Oh, good. Cora. Hi. So obviously there's this character, the woman warrior, and you find it in Katza and Katniss and Saber and Alana and all of these incredible characters. And I was just wondering something I've been noticing more frequently. And I think I read Graceling right when it came out. So my memory may be fuzzy, and I honestly didn't read Fire of Little Bitter Blue yet. So exactly, yet. But one thing I remember from the Hunger Games that you guys touched on briefly is that, you know, Katniss is like, do I want to bring children into this world? I don't know, it's so dangerous. And then at the end, she ultimately does, but it's more of a struggle. Katniss. Yeah, sorry. And I'm just wondering that whole thing about, you know, I remember when I used to read novels, I would kind of think to myself like, oh, is this gonna end with a wedding? Is this gonna end with her having babies? Like, I don't know if that's what I want. And as a young female, that was a really interesting thing to be kind of battling with. And I've noticed that more frequently now, you don't necessarily see these female characters ending and being like, you know, time for babies, you know what I mean? And Katza thinking about her wanting to start an academy or like a fight. It was something like that where she wanted to teach young women how to fight, right? So I'm just wondering if you have anything to say about, you know, people not necessarily wanting babies and marriage and that being kind of the end game is not really the end game anymore. Just curious. Well, what I will say is that, so as I mentioned before, this is, I guess before what I said was the main, you know, concerned letters that I get are about the premarital sex, but they're also about the, well, it's premarital sex. Why don't they get married? Hopefully she's gonna grow up some day and realize how important it is that she get married and that the true, you know, life is not fulfilled until she has babies. People have told me this in letters in the most unbelievably condescending way. People have said to me, do you have children? And if not, why not? I wanna respond, well, I had a child, but it got run over. Like, you know, I just, I wanna say something to point out to them, what a rude question that is. But anyway, I'm getting off track. What was the question again? Thinking about endings. Right, right. So these are the letters I've gotten from the adults and then over and over and over again, I have gotten letters from young women who thank me for creating a representation of a female character in literature who doesn't wanna get married and have babies, which they've never seen before in a book. Wait. You know, and it's, the idea too that Katza is anti-marriage because she herself doesn't wanna get married. Like, other people in the book are married and she's not mad at them. No. It's so important to me, I probably to write Graceling and End It That Way because I had never seen it in a book and I had a friend who said to me, I love that you do this. And then she said something that my readers, my friend readers, the ones who are my early readers, don't usually step in and do. She said, I just really hope she never does. If this is how you're gonna write her, keep her that way. And I could just honestly, flatly say, don't worry, she never will. It happened at Joe Marsh, but it's not gonna happen. Anna Green-Gavils went down, but. Because you can be a fulfilled person, like newsflash, you can be a fulfilled person and not get married and have kids. Like, why am I even saying this? Like, why does this need to be said? 2015. Why do I need to be getting letters from people who are thanking me for introducing this concept to them? It's shocking. I do like that a number, it seems like a number of the dystopian series actually feature strong female characters and heroines that's pretty interesting. I mean, there are some precedents in fantasy, but it's not as common about Robin McKinley's work, Hero and the Crown, for example, and that series, wonderful series. Yeah, and then I think that's a real powerful series. But it is so often the kind of Harry Potter sort of formula. And so it is, I love this about your work, one of my favorite things, as well as all the emphasis on storytelling and memory and just that. But I think that's a really kind of exciting dimension. So that's interesting that dystopian fiction seems to make a space for that, although I think it's hard because we were talking earlier just about that representation of character. I mean, Katniss just get such drama around her. Is she too cold? Is she too heartless? Is she too... And there's just such, you know, kind of interest in her character. And so I think that's fascinating, actually, as well. And I mean, the wonderful thing about being a writer who goes on to write more books is that then you can address the opposite thing in the next book. Fire, if you ever read it, you will discover really wants to have kids and can't. And that's the joy of, well, that's one of the many joys of being a fiction writer. You just, you can do all the things. Do all the things. Question. Yeah, so when I was a young adult in the 70s, my peers and I, I think we also really loved the dark stuff. And there wasn't much of it like in the YA stuff at the time. So we used to read like on the beach and Stephen King, you know, the stage. Flowers in the attic. Yes, I loved that service. But you know, when I became an adult, I looked back and I'm like, why did we wanna read all that dark stuff? And I don't know when I thought about it. I mean, at the time when we were that age, you know, in that generation, like we, like our parents used to say, like, why do you wanna read that apocalyptic stuff? And to us, I think it was kind of hopeful because like the apocalypse to us was like a chance to wipe away the kind of bogus adult world that was created. And it was like the time for us to shine. Like that's when the world would be really awesome after our parents blew themselves up. Then we could like do things the right way. So it was like what they saw was as darkness, what we saw as like a new beginning. And same thing with trauma. Like I think when we were adolescents, we felt really repressed. And so trauma was the chance to whip out your sword. And you know, you couldn't do that and you couldn't be the hero without being surrounded by trauma. So the more trauma, the more chance for personal discovery and elevation. So what our parents looked at to me as darkness was our chance, like our hope. Like we hope this horrible thing happens so we can have our moment to show how awesome we are or you know, wipe away the status quo and start new. So I just wanted to know what your take on that was. It's a great, it's a great, I love that perspective. And I think I shared that. I think I had some of the same attraction with the Stephen King and also I think even if you just think about some of the quote unquote classic American children's stories they're all about orphans, right? So people have pointed out that basically you have to. The first thing you do is go to parents. Yeah, you have to get rid of the parents in order to launch the narrative even if it's just a nice little travel story or a nice little mystery and not even necessarily anything that's thematically apocalyptic or explicitly traumatic. So that's a kind of interesting issue. I think having the parents out of the way for various devices allows you to kind of, yeah, to have that sense of adventure and that sense of ownership. And I think maybe some of it's just aspiring to adulthood. It's a lot of it. They talk a lot about readers tend into read up in terms of identifying with characters who are slightly older than they are and kind of like thinking about that. Okay, so and some of it's about sort of seeing yourself as maturing, seeing yourself as moving in that direction. So maybe aspirational is not the best word for it but something about that identification could be very, very powerful as well. So it's a good point that it's not, bleak stories aren't necessarily bleak reading experiences and in fact could be just the opposite. This doesn't relate, well, I guess it does relate to what you just said too but I feel like one aspect we haven't touched on is reader's choice. I mean, if we're starting with the great concern over what kids are reading, well, are they choosing what they read? I hope they're mostly choosing what they read and if they aren't getting something out of it, realizing I'm not getting something out of this and then going to look for something else. I mean, if a kid is reaching for a dark book, there's probably a reason. And there was patterns to that. I was thinking about, you know, one of the points that people often make about the history of children's literature is that you have tales like Robinson Crusoe and Gully was travels that got kind of appropriated by kids and kind of brought into the, you know, to the landscape of children's literature and I think a similar thing happened really with some of those great dystopias of the early 20th century, Brave New World, 1984, Animal Farm. Animal Farm is taught widely, at least it was. I don't know if it's still taught widely. Did anybody read it like in middle school or high school? Okay, that was like vital to my middle school experience and sort of teaching you about what allegory is and what trauma is and what, you know, what sort of, what the dangers of kind of collectivist, you know, sort of impressive thinking and not good, bad collectiveness, not good collectivists. So that whole tradition and so that's kind of interesting because those texts, I don't think were originally necessarily envisioned for kids but they became part of the repertoire and they even got folded into this sort of educational scene which is kind of interesting. Lord of the Flies is another example. I mean, it's kind of really routinely taught. Like that's how you learn about irony and allegory and all of these things. Or even Ender's Game, which is not originally written for children but got kind of appropriated by them and now comes out in children's editions and I think that sort of brings up like, you know, what you were saying. We live in a society in which, especially in American society, children have like a lot less autonomy than they used to have and so they have less opportunities to be out on their own, like, you know, doing their thing and I feel like some of these like chosen one kind of narratives where it's on the child's shoulder to like save the world really is about like that. Like it's, I'm out there, I'm like fighting. It all depends on me and I have my issues as I know you do too with the chosen one narrative but I feel like that's part of what it's coming from is this desire to be important and consequential in the world and matter, yeah. Yeah, other questions? Oh yes, here you are. Actually this feeds right into it which is, yeah, that idea of like to kill a mockingbird and Lord of the Flies used to be adult literature that trickled down and you said earlier that you don't think about the age of your audience when you're writing and obviously why it has tons of adult fans and I guess my question is whether there's a concern that the idea of YA led as kind of a market segment where it's supposed to start with teenagers opens it up to this kind of policing of the language where you guys are telling important stories and often it feels like the characters don't necessarily like bitter blue could have been 30, you know, and you know, same thing was fire, all the characters in these books are seated in a particular place but sometimes they feel like they could, you know, that's a choice, not a necessity and I'm wondering whether actually it's really just like a comment on the idea of like is there something interesting in this fight about YA literature being so policed even though and this sort of movement from having these books that trickle down from adulthood and sort of maybe slide by, you know, into like I'm thinking of The Red Pony which we read in seventh grade. It's such a hard book to read. Oh right, anyway. Oh, maybe that's a book I shouldn't have read when I was an adult. I mean, I think it's a great question. I mean, YA kind of got taken out, it's kind of a library of services as well as marketing and publishing category, right? But like that, I think what we ought to do is I'll go out and blog on what is adult literature or we should say adult literature is so light and so oppressively light. I mean, maybe this is the campaign we need to launch because I think all of this puts pressure, right? You know what it is? You know, what is adult literature? What is literature for adults? It's repetitive. Often so many times when I'm reading an adult book, I think to myself, you already said that three times. Do you think I'm stupid? If my editor were editing this book, she would have struck that out the last three times. That's interesting. Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah, so I think that would be. I'm not saying I don't, of course, I love many, many books of all, but there are things you start to notice that make you start to wonder, where is this condescending coming from? Why is this necessarily better? Yeah, absolutely. And then how much of it has to do with just strategies of marketing, circulation, the sort of, you know, the realities of publishing, especially in our blockbuster moment. And so I think that's a lot of it too, is just how does the publishing industry work and how does changes take place over time, and especially now, I think, because there's such an acceleration of the kind of blockbuster strategy, which is kind of a weird combination of sort of grassroots sort of activism with giant, you know, giant sort of connect, like we must have a movie, we must have a video game, and we must have a website and everything. And that kind of coordination, along with this sort of tapping very deliberately into networks of librarians and teachers and taste makers, right? The book came out recently about the blockbuster as a kind of phenomenon, and it's a fascinating thing. And she talks about this strategy, which kind of came to us from the movies, but actually The Hunger Games, ironically, was the book that sort of benefited the most from that, because it came out on the, of the second book especially, but it came out on the heels of the Harry Potter success with Scholastic, right? And so, and some, yeah, I mean, exactly. Scholastic was kind of a, you know, not a fancy tear press, let's put it that way, because in Goosebumps it kind of kept it afloat and allowed it to do different things, but then it really managed to leverage the success of Harry Potter and take some real risks on some other series. So it's a fascinating kind of case study in publishing and so on, but that's slightly off topic, but the kind of, the kind of, yeah. There are so many interesting angles and so many ways to get at the same thing. Yeah, and there was a series that Scholastic did, and I'm not blanking the name of it, but it was the push series, and the idea was these would be books by teens, for teens, and then the concept of teen kind of got incredibly more and more expansive, so some of the authors were 25, you know, especially if you tracked it from beginning, you know, you first start working on projects and it takes forever, some of these, and so that was kind of a fascinating, but it was a great idea, and the idea was we're going to publish, you know, YA lit by YA people, and a lot of these articles have been not just about the literature, but about the people who are reading, consuming, writing, you know, the kind of, the elasticity of YA as a kind of marker for people, as well as for the literature is kind of fascinating. You know, maybe eventually it'll just keep moving, moving upwards, and we'll all be YA. We're always already YA, who knows. Question. So this is slightly off topic, but so we're talking a lot about, throughout this talk, talking about teenagers and how they identify and see themselves in these dystopian novels, and they can place themselves on them, and I'm just thinking back to my own experience in high school and, you know, reading, you know, Perks of Being a Wallflower first time and speak in books like that and really loving them, but not looking them as, you know, this reflects my life at all, just because there was such a lack of diversity in the characters. For me, it was like, oh, it's like watching a movie, like this is, you know, and some of the themes did resonate with me, but largely I didn't see many people of color in the book, so I didn't really identify with them in that way, so I'm wondering what you think about the current state of YA literature and if you think, you know, making strides in that way or what kind of work you think needs to be done so more kids feel represented in YA and don't just see it like I did, like watching a movie and not placing themselves in it. Can I just say really fast, that's a big part of the reason we wanted to put the darkness in quotes is that it's so ironic that she should write this article called Darkness Too Visible. Did we say that before? I'm losing track, but I just think it's really important. You're absolutely right. I mean, I think it's a real problem. Would you agree? Oh, yes, it's a, it's a, it's kind of an appalling situation, honestly. My own personal place of discomfort with it too is that because I am white, which is part of the reason my books have been successful, I can write about people of color in my next books and they will be published. I can probably say to my editor, don't you dare put a white person on that cover. They will listen to me and I'm uncomfortable with having that power when so many writers of color aren't getting published. I'm also uncomfortable looking back at my own work with how thoughtless I was in the beginning, setting up my own world on that axis and thinking a lot about it now for my future books, trying to be more conscious. But it's just, it's just such a white industry. And, you know. Yeah, I mean, the statistics that are kept by a children's book council, et cetera, really point to the persistence of the, some tiny percentage of the total books published or published by writers of color. And it's a huge problem. And it came up and a lot of the, maybe some of you followed the reaction to Woodson's winning the book award for Brown Girl Dreaming and that kind of remarks that Daniel Handler made off the cuff, which was really problematic and there was this whole series of responses to that. And she wrote, Woodson wrote an editorial and basically pointed out once again, we are talking about a tiny percentage of books across all these genres and how can you even be, there's no way to be playful about these issues in this kind of environment, basically, yeah. Bitch Magazine recently did a series on books about girls of color in dystopias and it came up with a bunch of different examples and I thought I actually brought it with me but I seem not to have. But determined that it's pretty depressing how few examples they could come up with and also how few examples they could come up with of girls of color who survived the apocalypse. Well, and also can I just say, like even when authors put in characters of color, the ability of readers to not notice that, like the Rue controversy and that is a character of color who unfortunately dies so she doesn't really count as a survivor. But, I mean that whole controversy was so awful because here we actually had a character of color and all these people reacted to the movie, I don't know if you guys followed this by saying, why did they have to make Rue a black girl? That just ruins it and she's clearly marked in the book as dark skin, I should say. So it's outrageous to have this reaction, right? But so it's, I don't know where to go with that, I'm just expressing outrage, yeah. But there has been a campaign, I don't know if everyone, I know the children's lit folks know about we need diverse books and many people also do and so I think there's really a serious recognition of the problem and an attempt to sort of. And there's a lot of dialogue if you're looking for it. It can be really depressing to get into the various Rue jajas that occur because it's the internet and so people, you know, you have to read the comments section in order to follow the dialogue but comment sections are so toxic. So, and another interesting, again, speaking just personally as a writer, a factor with all of this is that while this is one of the many things I think about a lot and talk about a lot with friends and try to get feedback from readers, it's also something that writers need to get a certain amount of criticism about and then push it away because you kind of need to protect your own writing space. So it's this interesting balance between, okay, I really want to be engaging with this topic but not necessarily so much with the internet which is just a little too much and it can get counterproductive. We have a questioner. So first I just want to start so I'm going to apologize in advance because I'm probably going to fumble over some of my words. So I was reading the Divergent series like a couple of months ago and I remember reading about Triss and what her feelings were about how she wanted to take things into her own hands and I think I took that personally as she's trying to become more independent on herself and trying to become more independent so she wouldn't have to rely on a lot of other people and so that kind of inspired me as well because on my 14th birthday I asked my parents, can I just spend a day to Boston with some of my friends and take the train in by myself with some of my friends and they were totally for it. They were like, yeah, go off and I was so excited and I was so glad that Triss got me inspired about that and so I was just, and it just felt awesome that I actually went out and I felt like, oh, I am like them. It's like, there's not this huge gap away from us and so to get back to the question part of it is that my question is, do you guys strive to create books that inspire kids to be independent and to go do things that they wanna do or are you just doing it just to entertain in something and what happens after a long is completely fine. Thank you. That's a really good question. And by the way, you didn't fumble. I think what I have, I keep repeatedly say that I'm not thinking about who my reader is but I would have to say that without question when I'm, so when I'm sitting down and it's actually a writing day, I'm not thinking about who my reader is but when I'm planning the book and I'm planning who this character is, I'm thinking about a lot of things like what you described. I'm thinking if I make this character do this, what is that saying about the world, about a person this age, about whatever the issue is. And I think for me my ultimate goal, if I have a goal for young readers, is that they come out of the books with self-respect. They get some sort of self-respect from reading the book, some sort of confidence knowledge that they are valuable. That makes sense. That's really, I think that's really important to me. Did you get sorted into Dauntless? That would be the first thing. Then you have to run and catch the train as this. Just thinking about that whole sequence. And by the way, that's a really interesting that theme of being sorted, right? Which I feel like comes from the giver which we haven't talked about that much but like you know how you all get tracked. I feel like man, that talk about attesting to like anxiety about how our culture is getting more striated so that you just do what your parents did and there's no mobility. I feel like maybe that's where some of that darkness comes from, that sorting move. Do you know? I don't know. Anyway, we have another questioner. Okay. Kenneth, you spoke a little bit about kind of the cyclical nature of these criticisms of genres getting too dark, of all these terrible things. And I think if you look back further when novels started being a real force in literature as opposed to kind of weird experimental things, they were derided as being, they were going to ruin the minds of the readers, especially women. And so I was just curious about kind of this theme of criticism as a tool of social control and how you think that's currently continuing to play out. Oh, that's interesting. That's a good question. Yeah, and I think you're totally on target and it plays out across all, probably all genres or what's the right word, registers of kind of creative works on the music is a big flash point, right? As we all know, so thinking about all the reaction to in the 20s, to scandalous music and dancing and so forth, not the anxiety about the policing and dancing. And a lot of that I think was also anxiety about immigrant kids specifically. There was a scholar named Sarah Chin who's made the case that a lot of what we think of as the generation gap actually was modeled specifically on the gap between first generation immigrants and their kids growing up in this country who assimilated quickly, the parents didn't. And so this became a kind of, this became sort of mythologized, she says, as a kind of a permanent thing. It just kind of cuts across our races and classes. So that's a pretty interesting kind of phenomenon. She places that at about that same time. So I think, but I think you're right. I think a lot of the reaction is very much about policing behavior and about kind of controlling taste. I think it's about taste management, which is always class, right? Always class-based and always, you know, I think it's inflected by other kinds of things and. Feed, pardon me. Makes me think of feed. Yeah, absolutely. That's what feed is about. Yeah, it's kind of the nightmare scenario of total control and also mindless consumption with the two things kind of paired with that. But yeah, and I'm sure, and I think you're right, complaints about the novel, sounded not like complaints about comics, a lot like complaints about the radio, about television, certainly about the internet. So you get these, you get this repetition and particular anxiety is about why you let, I think, don't go back quite as far just because people, you know, I think you do see them. You see them in the 60s. You see them in the 20s a little bit. Maybe that's kind of when they're first fully on the radar in the same way. Other than reaction to some of the 19th century sort of texts as well. Especially if you have a loose definition of adolescence, just go youth. Youth is a kind of term that cuts across all of these categories. So I think you're right. I think a lot of it is about that kind of, you know, sort of surveillance and control, you know, which other people may see in more positive terms, you know, education, parenting. Whereas we might find it dystopic. Yes. Yes. It's a bit dystopic. Yeah, it's a great... Any final questions? All right. Thank you so much. You've been an amazing audience. Thank you. Thank you.