[Gr. 10 English booklist ideas]

I put together a list of short stories by Native American authors the other day (I haven't read these; I was cribbing from a Facebook group I'm in for my 12th grader this year: 

Native American authors short stories: Sherman Alexie (the approximate size of my favorite tumor), what you pawn I will redeem, superman and me, eulogy, I hated Tonto (still do)

Only Approved Indians Can Play: Made in The USA, by Jack Forbes

Louise Erdrich Red Convertible and the Leap, Dear John Wayne

Blue Winds Dancing by Tom Whitecloud

The Way to Rainy Mountain

Re: To Kill a Mockingbird...I personally wouldn't assign it much later than 10th grade; it's a nice, gentle introduction to metaphor, and it's commonly assigned in 8th or 9th grade (there's an infamous Flannery O' Connor quote about it: "For a child’s book it does all right. It’s interesting that all the folks that are buying it don’t know they’re reading a child’s book. Somebody ought to say what it is." I'm not a big TKAM fan, and my kids haven't read it at all, but I feel guilty about that sometimes since it's one of the very few "everyone's read it" books we have). 

For the 30's, I'd second Their Eyes Were Watching God 

Lincoln Highway is contemporary but set in the 50s, and it's excellent. 

 

[How often are you out of the house for teen activities?]

I only have one teen at home this year; he's driving, so I'm not doing all of this, but he'll have: homeschool coop Mondays and Tuesdays, plus a DE class on Tuesdays (so that will be his long day--a class in the early afternoon and then another from 5-8, both on the same side of town, so he'll get dinner out and not come home in between), horn lesson some evening TBD, piano lesson Thursday afternoon, youth orchestra rehearsals (two different groups) Monday evenings and Sunday afternoons. So he actually gets to stay home several school days, but his evenings are pretty crazy. I have a 10 year old, too, though, and I drive him to stuff every day but Wednesday (and all bets are off for Wednesday evenings once baseball starts).

[If you are considering hearing aids]

Aww...my oldest kid had a phonak hearing aid; they gave us a book when he got it that featured Oliver the Phonak elephant. memories! He has a moderately severe unilateral hearing loss, diagnosed when he was 5...he doesn't wear a hearing aid for it at the moment and has learned to compensate well, but his audiologist really pushed for one at the time (insurance wouldn't cover it; I'm not sure if that's changed with Obamacare), and we were amazed at what a difference it made for him with social anxiety stuff. 

[New PEN report - In Defence of Literary Imagination]

25 minutes ago, Pam in CT said:

 

 

I read American Dirt.  She did do the research. And while I can't speak, personally, to how authentically Mexican her writing presents.... I can say, personally, she did pretty well with the experiences of trauma, and motherhood, and dissociation, and walking wounded; all of which were, also, plot-central. I wouldn't categorize it with Faulkner or Morrison but the idea that she wasn't "qualified" to write it  is.... silly.

 

It looks like it's sold 3 million copies, so in this particular case at any rate the backlash only helped commercially. Whether she'd rather have sold fewer copies in exchange for not having to go through all the controversy or not, I have no idea of course. It doesn't sound fun. 

[New PEN report - In Defence of Literary Imagination]

Is the PEN link showing the same thing it showed last night or is there a longer thing up there now? I swear I didn't see the whole thing last night. Which does not, of course, mean it wasn't there 😂

[New PEN report - In Defence of Literary Imagination]

5 minutes ago, Melissa Louise said:

I think what PEN is concerned about is pressure being put on publishers not to publish books they would otherwise (or have already!) choose or have chosen. Especially when the pressure comes from employees within a publishing house, or those outside it, who do not understand that many publishers hold to the principles above.

Of course, publishers can reject a book for any reason.

I see the intervention of PEN (not widely known as a conservative body) as an indication there's some trouble in understanding the principles, and it's worth reaffirming them. 

 

I guess, again, I'm just curious about what specific examples this post is reacting to. And I say that as someone who does feel like there's less room than there should be for thoughtful disagreement and multiple perspectives these days and that that probably does spill over into what writers feel comfortable putting out there. I'm not uninterested in those issues or unsympathetic to PEN's concerns. The recent example that comes to mind is American Dirt (which I haven't read)...so book about Mexican migrants criticized because it was written by a white woman. But then when you look at that story closely, it's more complicated than that. Like, for one thing, it did get published, and it got a ton of advance publicity, and THEN some people were like, "but hold up..." From Vox's explainer on that whole thing: https://www.vox.com/culture/2020/1/22/21075629/american-dirt-controversy-explained-jeanine-cummins-oprah-flatiron

Quote

The aesthetic question is more complicated than it might initially appear. People sometimes flatten critiques like the one American Dirt is facing into a pat declaration that no one is allowed to write about groups of which they are not a member, which opponents can then declare to be nothing but rank censorship and an existential threat to fiction: “If we have permission to write only about our own personal experience,” Lionel Shriver declared in the New York Times in 2016, “there is no fiction, but only memoir.” But the most prominent voices in this debate have tended to say that it is entirely possible to write about a particular group without belonging to it. You just have to do it well — and part of doing it well involves treating your characters as human beings, and not luxuriating in and fetishizing their trauma.

 So I question whether there really is a big movement saying no one can write about characters with identities that aren't their own, or if we're just critiquing the ways in which they do so more and/or differently than we did in the past. Which I think is entirely fair. Because, again, there ARE plenty of books like that getting published and not getting that same pushback, even when they become popular. 

[New PEN report - In Defence of Literary Imagination]

And then there's also how rarely we even ask the question the other way: https://www.theroot.com/should-a-black-writer-write-white-characters-1790875261

(I know there's more to this than white authors/Black characters and vice versa; that's just where my brain is going at the moment)

[New PEN report - In Defence of Literary Imagination]

Just now, Pam in CT said:

maybe. 

But maybe also male writers were doing a not-very-authentic job with a whole lot of female characters for hundreds of years (see: DH Lawrence, Women in Love) and women weren't "calling it out" as inauthentic in real time because reasons.

which maybe is saying the same thing a different way.

 

There are some similarities between patriarchy and other forms of power.  But important differences also.

Yeah. Lots of groups, including women, were historically shut out of the publishing world or given very limited access to it. But then you couldn't really write about, say, every day life in Victorian England without women characters the way you could leave out Black characters without anyone thinking that was weird. 

I remember reading something years ago where Anne Tyler was criticized or at least questioned for not having Black characters in her books and her answer was something about how she didn't feel like she could write Black characters well because that wasn't her experience. But that is the danger...a fictional Baltimore where everyone is white that looks nothing like the real Baltimore. For example. Oh! Handmaid's Tale, too! People talked about this when the show first came out...in the book, Atwood literally ships all the Black people off to camps in the midwest somewhere so she doesn't have to deal with them. But then the show addresses the problem by creating a weirdly post racial, colorblind dystopia, which doesn't seem better really (disclaimer: I've only watched the first season...maybe it's different later). But I remember one of the show runners being like, "what was the alternative? an all white cast?" And...yeah. I don't know! 

[New PEN report - In Defence of Literary Imagination]

27 minutes ago, Pam in CT said:

(well, men write women characters and women write men characters all the time, and always have. Some more successfully than others.)

Yeah..I mentioned that up in one my rambly posts...I wonder why that is? Maybe as simple as that it's been a convention for so long that we don't give it much thought. 

[New PEN report - In Defence of Literary Imagination]

25 minutes ago, regentrude said:

 

In my opinion, writers should write and make art. Their responsibility is to tell the stories that move them to the best of their artistic ability. The judgment is up to the readers, the critics, the publishing industry... but nobody should censor what a writer can write.

 

 

Yes, and this gets at essential questions about what censorship is...like of course people can write whatever they want and no one's going to stop them (well, with some exceptions for things that are actually illegal). And they can give it to whoever they want to read and these days they can self-publish it and sell it on Amazon. But generally a wider audience requires a publisher as a go between (not always! The Martian!), and it's not censorship if a publisher chooses not to publish your book. 

[New PEN report - In Defence of Literary Imagination]

8 minutes ago, Heartstrings said:

I haven't seen a huge movement towards authors writing outside of their experience, although I see a lot of harsh critiques when it goes wrong.  I have seen a lot more of this argument being made when it comes to TV and movies.  People complain about a neurotypical person being tasked with playing an autistic person, or an able bodied actor playing a disabled character.   

Yeah, although it still happens plenty. My perception is that the objection there is more about how if there's a role for a disabled person, a disabled person should get the role because there aren't a lot of roles like that to start with. As opposed to feeling like actors can't effectively portray someone with a different identity...which is an interesting difference (if my perceptions are even correct). And, of course, we're coming from a time when white actors played, say, Asian characters regularly and played them as terrible stereotypes. Have we gone too far the other way? 

[New PEN report - In Defence of Literary Imagination]

I'm still kind of hung up about how PEN purports to link to evidence that there's a movement to stop people from writing about characters who don't relate to their own identity and experience and then does no such thing. I'm not saying such a movement doesn't exist, but they haven't presented any evidence for it. There's a HUGE difference between saying that there's value in seeking out, say, disabled authors writing children books about disability, et. al. (in a space that historically has not allowed a lot of room for diverse authors) and saying that no one else should be allowed to do so. The site they link to does the former (and, importantly, it's not a publisher, but a site that curates lists of children's books). It's simply not true that people aren't writing well-received, popular books about characters with different racial, ethnic, etc. identities from their own right now. 

I'm interested in and concerned about these issues, and I do think there's plenty to talk about...but I'd like to talk about actual examples (I think yours about your ex being expected to always sit on panels about post-colonialism is a good one, @Melissa Louise), and the only one they're giving says, "hey, probably if you want your kids to learn about Diwali, an author who grew up celebrating Diwali is more likely to get the details right!" Interestingly, it looks like the Own Voice movement is, in fact, backing away from the term and having its own discussions about limits and nuance and all that. 

[New PEN report - In Defence of Literary Imagination]

1 minute ago, Melissa Louise said:

Writers of fiction don't have to do anything, really. Other than write from the imagination.

Sort of the point of art. 

 

I'm not sure what this is in response to? Obviously writers can write whatever they want. I would disagree that using one's imagination is the primary point of art, although it's certainly a necessary component of it. Art has had and continues to have a lot of purposes and those have never been separate from forces like politics, religion, the marketplace, etc. 

[New PEN report - In Defence of Literary Imagination]

I followed the link they give as evidence that "some critics are calling for an identity-essentialist approach to literature, holding that writers can only responsibly tell the stories that relate to their own identity and experiences," and it doesn't actually link to a source calling for that. It links to a site that deals exclusively with childrens literature and a page that talks about the "own voices" movement. It does say that there's value in reading books written by people who share an identity with their protagonist (again, it's talking about childrens literature) and points out some potential problems when that's not the case, but it says, "If a book is specifically about the experience of a character who uses a wheelchair, we want the creators to look to how those in that community feel about the book. If a book is about Diwali, the creators must be looking at how the book resonates with those who celebrate in the South Asian community. If authors/illustrators don’t hold those identities they are representing, we expect them to listen to those who do." I.e. it's great to read books written by authors who can identify with their protagonists, but it's also okay if they don't, as long as they're respectful of those identities and work to get them right.

It's interesting, because I can certainly remember instances recently where writers have been criticized for how they've written about marginalized characters with whom they don't share an identity...but then there's, say, Geraldine Brooks, who mostly had a bunch of praise heaped on her when she wrote from the perspective of Black characters in Horse. I think there's tons of nuance here and a million different issues at play. It's interesting that we've never really taken issue with writers writing from the perspective of a character of a different gender the way we have with race. For example. Just one little example. There are lots of examples!  Going back to my first post, William Styron got a lot of crap, but he also won a Pulitzer. 

 

[New PEN report - In Defence of Literary Imagination]

Hmm. I don't think this is a new issue at all. I've been surprised a couple of times recently to see it framed as such. It's certainly as old as William Styron's The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967) at any rate. I did a tutorial on southern lit in grad school--a one on one thing with a professor where I'd read a book a week and go in and discuss it. That week I was all ready to talk about whether it was William Styron's story to tell or not, and the prof shut it down immediately by saying that all stories are any writer's story to tell. Which did not leave me with much to talk about that week, sadly. I continue to both think he was right and that it's more complicated than that. Which I imagine is why people are still talking about it. 

[U.S. residents/voters of good will...come in, pls.]

5 hours ago, PaxEtLux said:

 

As I said in my first post, I'm outside the public school system. But what I see, and what others on this thread say, is that many (most ?) teachers seem free to create their own custom curricular materials, or grab any from the millions of web sites, paid or free, or show any youtube videos they can find.  So, teachers seem to have a tremendous amount of autonomy in this regard.  Is this what you see in your new role?

It easy to get upset about Shakespeare and other materials being removed from the classroom, but I'm more interested in who decides which books are read in a classroom. I don't think that should be the state legislature or governor, but I'm not sure it should be down to the individual classroom teachers, either.  If a school has four English 10 classes, should each be reading completely different texts?

And I think it is particularly cruel to teachers to threaten them with loss of employment (or worse) if they select the "wrong" material, without giving them any serious guidance on what is "wrong" or "right".

Honestly, this seems like a completely different discussion; the stated point of current legislation in Florida and elsewhere isn't to create a common curriculum so that all 10th graders are learning the same thing (remember Common Core? That WAS the point of that, and it definitely wasn't embraced by conservatives). Would it be nice if there were a common body of literature that we could expect everyone would have read by the time they graduated from high school? Maybe? I don't think it's necessary, and in some ways I think the fact that we don't is reflective of what a wonderful variety of excellent texts we have to choose from rather than the narrower canon that generations past had to work with. But, at any rate, that's NOT the goal of current legislation. So do I think it would be better for teachers or students if teachers were given a narrow list of acceptable texts that carefully avoided all mention of racism or sexuality or religion? No. If you want to talk about how we create a modern literary canon that takes into account the full range of human experience and ensures wide representation across cultural and racial and gender lines, then that's an interesting conversation. But it's not the one that's happening right now in the US. If you want to cut lots of people back out of the canon in an effort to ensure that no one is ever made uncomfortable (and when we say "no one" in that context, we mean no straight, white, middle class, Christian kids), then I'm not interested. 

[U.S. residents/voters of good will...come in, pls.]

15 minutes ago, Sneezyone said:

I’m probably rambling but just to re-center, is all of this stuff (limiting what people can learn) who we are, have always been, and if not…how do we change course? If these problems are indicative of minority/authoritarian rule, how do we combat it?

I think it's who we've...often been? Like I think it's worse right now than it's been in awhile, but there was McCarthyism. There were the Alien and Sedition Acts back when the ink was still drying on the First Amendment. So I think there's always been a tension between free speech and attempts to stifle it (and shifting ideas about the limits of free speech). 

[U.S. residents/voters of good will...come in, pls.]

Just now, Sneezyone said:

It’s not in THEIR interest to do it, and alienate users??, it’s in ours. It’s NOT their responsibility, it’s ours.

I don't think I'm disagreeing? I'm just commenting on the incredible difficulty of the task. Or impossibility. I was just thinking of AP exams as maybe the closest thing we have to the comprehensive exams some other countries have. 

[U.S. residents/voters of good will...come in, pls.]

1 minute ago, Sneezyone said:

Except the college board is a private entity and not a public initiative. We have citizens actively promoting, even today, the notion that slavery was a gift, a beneficial condition, of marginal import in modern life. The ONLY reason folks can say these things with a straight face and not be laughed out/run out of polite company is the lack of shared history. It’s a problem.

Sure...I'm definitely not holding the College Board up as an example of everything pure and good..but they DO have a monetary interest in creating a common curriculum that's acceptable to as wide a range of people as possible, while still being acceptably comprehensive and rigorous for colleges to see it as valuable....and they STILL can't do it. 

[U.S. residents/voters of good will...come in, pls.]

I mean, AP courses are an attempt to create a standardized curriculum--one that's comprehensive but also widely acceptable to people all over the US--and two of its courses have recently been banned in Florida. So I'm not terribly optimistic about a search for common ground. 

[U.S. residents/voters of good will...come in, pls.]

6 minutes ago, Halftime Hope said:

OK, split hairs about the way I worded the sentence: school districts and their policies are very, very different from one place to another in the US. What we are experiencing, or our teachers, or our neighbors are, can be very, very different. (See math discussion above.)

 

I wasn't trying to split hairs; I was clarifying...I'm certainly not claiming (I don't think anyone is) that every school district in the country is doing these kinds of things. My kids are homeschooled, but I'd be surprised if this stuff were going on in my own school district at the moment. That doesn't mean I can't or shouldn't be concerned about it happening elsewhere.

[U.S. residents/voters of good will...come in, pls.]

30 minutes ago, Halftime Hope said:

Clearly our lived experiences in school districts across the US are very, very different from one another.

However, if a child watches any TV or engages on social media, they will not lack exposure to positively-portrayed gay relationships nor to racism being addressed and condemned. 

It's not my lived experience, it's what I've learned from listening to teachers who are teaching in affected districts. I guess "they don't need to learn that in school because they can just watch TV" is...an answer, though. 

[U.S. residents/voters of good will...come in, pls.]

Just now, Murphy101 said:

 

Can you give specific examples?  

I consider reading books like Beloved that look unflinchingly at the history of racism in America to be essential. My kids know that racism was indeed woven into the founding of America and is still with us--including lots of ideas from the AP African American history class banned in Florida. I also already gave the specific example of Shakespeare being banned in one district in Florida for fear of crossing the new laws. The Don't Say Gay law is commonly interpreted to mean teachers cannot acknowledge the existence of LGBTQ people at all, including mentioning their own family members--certainly not teaching any literature with any portrayals of gay people--Florida recently banned the teaching of AP psychology because of material pertaining to sexuality and gender, although it looks like they might be backing off on that (but not before lots of schools have already removed it from course offerings this year). Here's a quote from an AP lit teacher on my Facebook group:

Quote

We teachers in Florida need the country to understand what we are dealing with under the new law, HB1069. We are threatened with (up to) prison for giving the wrong book to students, talking about inappropriate subjects in class, and of course respecting transgender or gender neutral students.

Districts are individually interpreting a response to the law, mostly from a fear base. A neighboring district published a list of 120 books banned for high school; my district won’t put anything in writing but has banned all Shakespeare and The Crucible outright. Everything else must be approved, including classroom libraries, before use. School starts next week and I have no approved materials for AP.

 

[U.S. residents/voters of good will...come in, pls.]

8 minutes ago, Sneezyone said:

Which goes back to what I said upthread, something we can all, perhaps, agree on...

The U.S. doesn't have a shared history/cultural narrative that's inclusive and tested, tried and true.

This. MY idea of what is absolutely essential knowledge and reading for my American kids is no longer allowed to be taught in Florida. 

[U.S. residents/voters of good will...come in, pls.]

6 minutes ago, PaxEtLux said:

I'm not suggesting mandating how to teach, but consider how math is usually taught in High School -- the teacher mainly uses one textbook, which has been reused for years, and teaches from that book, in order, using problems in that book.  I've never heard a complaint from math teachers about lack of autonomy even though they've been working this way forever.

I'd also point out that making a standardized curriculum to save time for teachers isn't what's going on in literature classes. It's not about helping the poor, overworked teachers, it's about ensuring that students are never exposed to ideas that certain segments of the population find objectionable. Like the facts that gay people and racism exist.