spark or seed?
A book is not a machine but it IS an invention—as a writer I’m part dreamer and part engineer. Yesterday I spoke with Stephanie Toliver, a doctoral candidate at UGA whose research is on Black girls’ reader responses to speculative fiction with Black female protagonists. Hearing about the girls’ reactions to CIN’S MARK absolutely made my day—and I felt vindicated, as any inventor would, that my creation was working as intended! It’s like putting levers into certain passages and you hope the reader will stop to pull the lever, agree with or challenge a point you’ve raised, and that’s what was happening within the book club. The girls started with BINTI by Nnedi Okorafor and that’s a tough act to follow, but I’m glad they’re relating to my teen protagonists. Whether I’m writing time travel or a ghost story, I try to first establish a relationship to the contemporary moment by creating characters who live in a world teen readers can recognize. It’s hard when you invent something you think will help others and then your invention gathers dust on the shelf, so I’m very grateful that such a skilled educator chose to use my book.
I’ve submitted a workshop proposal for the upcoming SWaG Instructional Equity conference in NYC: “I Dream a World”: Black Feminist Visions of the Future in Young Adult Literature. Many educators don’t seem to take speculative fiction seriously—especially when it comes to Black students. Instead they get the diet of “liver and Brussels sprouts books” full of noble characters who overcome oppression under slavery or during the Civil Rights era. But spec fic can teach readers just as much about social justice—and many YA novels can be linked to topics covered in social studies and science class. Plus students are excited by spec fic and once you have that spark, so much more can happen than when you assign a “classic” that kids find dull or irrelevant. I often say I’m sowing seeds but I also want my writing to be the spark that lights a fire inside kids who never thought reading was important or fun. I’m heading to Harlem tomorrow and then I’ll visit Girard College here in Philly next week. Hopefully I’ll get to see the students I met last month, one of whom wrote the above article for the school paper. I’m struggling with the poem-a-day challenge so I’m hoping that getting kids to read and write will light a fire inside of me, too!
