Beth Neff's Blog - Posts Tagged "juvenile-detention"

The audience. That’s the big ‘if,’ isn’t it? Who is the target audience? Who will read what we’ve written, tell other people about it, participate in Goodreads discussions and share postings on their Facebook pages?

It starts with a label, of course: YA, contemporary, sci fi, magical realism. The list is long. But it’s considered important to communicate – articulate – what it is that defines this product, who will be attracted to it, and then find a way to sell it to them.

Any marketing strategy requires achieving the proverbial balance between something familiar and something unique. If one author hits the big time with vampire romance, you can be sure that a blitz of vampire romances will follow. But the new ones have to be different enough to avoid saturation, copy-cattedness, creative stagnation. It’s a game, certainly, a crap shoot in some ways. And it’s most assuredly ruled by the marketplace, the almighty dollar. You can’t be a ‘success’ without it. You can’t get published again without it. You can’t pay the electric bill without it.

I’m not knocking book sales. I want them and need them as much as the next author. It’s just that, if we operate exclusively from this perspective, write from this perspective, we become purveyors of a product, can find ourselves determining audience by consumption and the promise of ‘value’ – as in ‘getting your money’s worth,’ or ‘entertainment value.’

But what else might fall under that broad and somewhat intangible ‘value umbrella?’

This is where my story comes in.

This week, a bookstore in my area (thanks, Kazoo Books) arranged for me to visit a private juvenile detention center. It’s called ‘an academy.’ The kids are there by court order, spending anywhere from six months to a year-and-a-half in the program. They’re not there by choice but whatever value they might derive is by their own volition. They can participate or resist but the consequences, as explained to me by the director, are primarily peer-driven. I had no idea what any of the girls had done to get there, only learned a bit about the circumstances of their lives from what they told me while I was there.

Some of the girls in the group arranged for my visit had read my book. A few others had read part of it. The discussion was lively, dynamic, challenging, fun. In fact, it was one of the most stimulating experiences I’ve had in a long time, certainly the most rewarding in direct relationship to my fairly embryonic writing career. Why?

The main reason was that the story I had written provided an excellent opportunity for engagement. It also allowed us to digress a bit into issues that were of particular interest and importance to the audience (teen pregnancy, the juvenile criminal system, lesbian experience.) The girls liked talking about the story. They had questions I hadn’t considered. They made suggestions I wished I’d thought of. But, more than anything, they found the story real. It made sense to them. The characters felt authentic. The results of the characters’ choices seemed, if sometimes disappointing, at lot like what might happen in the world they were familiar with.

One girl said that it was the best book she’d ever read.

No member of this particular ‘audience’ had paid a penny out of her own pocket for the book. Not one had read a review, knew the reputation of my publisher, had met any other authors to compare me to. And that made their opinions more valuable to me than anything else I have so far experienced.

I left in an exhilarated daze. We all could have spent a lot more time together and that was a great way to end. I hope I get to go back. I wish I could follow up on what happens next in their lives but I know that’s not going to happen. I think they might agree that they’d like to follow up with mine.

The point is that, among those girls whose futures are about as up-in-the-air as any teenager’s can be, I found a critical component of my audience. Far outside and beyond the marketplace, we found valuable points of connection.

They, and anyone else who is motivated to think more, feel more, discuss more, evaluate more, are the audience I care most about. They are who I’m writing for.

I’ve received some great questions from various interviews over the last nine months since Getting Somewhere came out so thought I’d gather a few of the responses in one place. This is the first installment.

From Eve’s Fan Garden…
What do you like most about writing? What do you like least?
I hope I don’t sound too Pollyanna-ish to admit that I love virtually everything about writing. I love the creative process, the opportunity to incorporate imagination into my daily life. I love watching the characters develop, take on personalities of their own, and I love the ‘problems’ that arise in connecting all the threads of the story and working to solve them. I love that my time is my own, that productivity is completely dependent on my own discipline and resolve and that I can write for a bit, work in my garden (thinking about the story, of course!,) come back to it for awhile, do a little cooking or sewing or reading, and then return to the manuscript just as I left it. I also love just working with words, finding the best ways to express an idea or a thought or an emotion. It’s a very rewarding process. Weirdly enough, I also love the editing process, receiving feedback from my wonderful editor, making revisions. In fact, I might like rewriting the book as much as I like writing it in the first place. And, just having gotten started on the publicity aspect, I’m enjoying that too. There would be no point in writing if I didn’t eventually get to talk to people about it? The hardest part? Waiting. Lots and lots of waiting.
From WMUK interview...

Why did you decide to set the alternative detention facility on an organic farm? What did that environment offer that the girls might not have gotten somewhere else?

One of the primary things that the farm offers to the girls is the element of belonging. Places have a huge impact on who we become. Each girl in the story, except one notable exception, contributes her labor to the farm and also seeks out places among the fields and woods and waterways that allow her to feel a kind of connection that was inaccessible to her before. Without even realizing it, the girls finally belong to something that their families and other people in their lives have been unable to provide.

Another important resource offered to each of the girls at the farm is the ability to control her own use of time. They work hard, using some of their time productively with very tangible results but they also have plenty of free time to explore both the inner and outer worlds that are becoming available to them. They begin to see how precious their time really is and what it feels like to make choices for themselves.

Along with time comes the notion of sovereignty. This is a very good word, I’ve always thought, to describe the concept of ‘control’ without the negative connotations we have with that word. The farm helps to erase the imbalance of power that has been so much a feature of the girls’ early experiences, creates an environment where choices are encouraged, where each person has the opportunity to become accountable for how they behave, how they treat other people, how they view themselves.

And finally, as Ellie states in one of the early scenes in the book, the farm is about food, for sure, but it’s also about passion. The adults who work there are nothing if not passionate about the land, the plants, the food they produce, and the ways in which they attempt to connect with their community through its production. The hope of the program is that, even if the girls do not become passionate about the exact things that the farm represents, they’ll experience what it feels like to be passionate about something and carry that with them when they move on into their own adulthoods.

From The Story Siren guest blog, responding to the question of why I wanted to write a story about juvenile offenders...

From the time I was a little kid, I’ve always been highly responsive to the pain and suffering of others. I think I was in about the fourth grade when I began to read the newspaper and any stories I came across concerning war or famine in other countries, oppression of women or children or minorities, environmental disasters, felt like they concerned me personally. It wasn’t a puppies and kittens thing. It was more of an activist thing. If it was wrong, I wanted to do something about it.

I suppose that’s part of the reason I became an organic farmer. In addition to loving plants and enjoying the labors surrounding their care, even more than the desire to help people eat healthy food, was the satisfaction I derived from restoring a small piece of land to it’s highest level of well-being, the sense that I had an ever-so-tiny impact on making the world a better place.

And I’m sure that’s also part of the reason I wanted to write a story about juvenile delinquents. There’s no question that their experiences are interesting and compelling. But the issue for me was more that juvenile offenders, especially girls, are extremely likely to be victims of circumstance, their crimes the result of powerlessness and oppression. And, in fact, the more I read about juvenile detention facilities, their ‘conditions of confinement,’ which resemble prisons far more than they do any therapeutic environment, the more determined I was to create – if only fictionally – a scenario which allowed these girls to recover the choices that might lead them to better lives.

In Getting Somewhere, these four girls – Cassie, Jenna, Sarah, and Lauren – have an opportunity to address the issues that have brought them to this facility in the first place. They apply their labors to the work of the farm, interact with Ellie, Donna, and Grace, the adults there, and learn to know each other, to identify ‘resources’ when they appear and to put them to use better understanding themselves. Unfortunately, one of the girls is not only resistent but downright hostile to the opportunity being offered to her. And her hostility threatens everything the others have worked so hard to achieve.

The story seeks to address questions that are relevant to all of us and to society in general: What if your life, a part of your immediate future, at the very least, had been determined by something bad that you did? Would you want people associating you with that thing? Would you want to be known by it?

And even more, can you stop being a victim once that’s happened? Do you have choices? And, if so, how do you make them?