Let's meet the kids where they are

This is a letter I still may publish in the paper: I'm incensed about this attitude. I'm posting it here to get it off my chest but we'll see..

I am an Alberta author with a newly released novel entitled Body Trade.  Please be assured this letter is not to promote my work. The novel deals with some hard issues: disappeared aboriginal women, sexual exploitation, class, teenagers getting in over their heads, luring, casual sexual relationships, imperialism and the consumption and erosion of culture. In a word, the book is about hard moral choices young people are forced to make. The female protagonists in the book are seventeen and twenty-two years old respectively

Yesterday I was invited to a small rural community to speak about my work to high school students. Imagine my dismay when I was pointedly asked not to say too much about my new novel, nor, indeed my previous book, which deals with identity, institutional manipulation, abortion and domestic violence. “Keep it safe,” was the message I received. “These are high school students. The school board has boundries.” In the next breath the person overseeing the author visit told me her community had the highest levels of STDs, teen pregnancy, cutting (self mutilation) and crack cocaine in the province.

I put it to you, and to anyone who cares about students and literature and telling the truth about the world we live in, is it not safer to learn about the world of choice through books (that one is free to put down) than by acting out in the ways described above?  God help us, if we do not address the needs of our young people with stories they can relate to and talk about among themselves.  An ostrich with its head in the sand is the stuff of Dr. Seuss. Perhaps the Alberta public education systems need to think about the reality of young Albertans when Seuss says, “The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you'll go.”

Read, but not the new stuff

I often do school visits. I like them. I like the kids. I like the energy. I like demystifying the writing process as much as possible. I love going to  rural places, the initial drive through the country, the feeling that I am leaving the claws of the city to go to a fresher more simplified place, Afterwards is the restorative drive home, the depleted feeling of good energy given, of having done something good for kids who may come a little closer to themselves through the documentation of themselves, the process of processing experience. I like it.  I like sharing my ideas on the hows and whys of writing

In the last two school visits, I've been told to stick to old material. Someone (the high school board of Education, I assume) has deemed Body Trade and Released  too hard for high school students even though they are hungry to read the material. Domestic violence, teenage sexuality, institutional manipulation, friendship, betray...hummmm all the things they are experiencing in the school yard and outside the walls of higher education, but not inside, no never inside.

It reminds me of the librarians who legislate the moment you can go from the children's library to the adult section, that glorious moment that opens up when the censor falls asleep, the guard is dropped and the world of real life opens up. I mention my books. I do not read from the. Perhaps the students are not ready. I wonder if this is so. And who calls that shot?

The fall of childhood

I took my son to a pumpkin field north of the city on Thanksgiving Monday, after roast turkey and red wine consumed the night before gave back their somnolent power.  We drove through town, the unfamiliar north side where dim sum and pawnshops and rows of walk up apartments barely blinked at our smooth Volvo passage.

He wore a leather jacket and a slouch cap and took up so much room in the front the modern seat motor whirred to make room for his knees clashing with the dash. My son, his loping feet size twelve, his shoulders broadening and growling under a stripped new September tee, already too small, his chin a jumble of hormones and whiskers and the wild eruptions of fourteen-year-old man-boy, almost of age.

My boy and I were together for the day despite the fact that I’d encouraged another – his girl, perhaps? – a teenager named Jane whom he’d gravely told me the other day:  “you know were dating now,” and when I inquired about the change between “just friends” and “dating”  he’d drummed his fingers on the counter asking why there was rarely anything good to eat.

My boy and I on a road, on a sun soaked highway heading  past haystacks so golden I swear they have been placed upon the field for the express purpose of calendar shots, that shimmering feast of harvest  a riot of warmth for my hungry-for-the-country eyes. We travel fast and talk little and yet what hangs between us is as rich as the farmers yield, as certain as the beets and spuds and strangely misshapen carrots I pulled from our backyard garden the day before. Our silence is a feast of mother/son love, revealed in the autumn glow as the last of this certain light gives way to frost.

We turned into a farm, some pumpkin patch, corn maze place I had found on-line the day before to solidify our adventure and I immediately realize my mistake as he unfolds his slouch frame, surely six full feet by now, from the passengers seat squeeze.

“Mom, this is for little kids.”

And, indeed it is. Small yelping tykes, from age two to eight, launch themselves off haystacks, beg tokens to shoot pumpkins from a blasting cannon for the pleasure of watching them mush against a distance pirate ship, its flags in stringy tatters half an acre away.  The parents, thirty-something’s, fresh in the throes of what to do without nursery school, hover nearby, exhilarated by family time, their cameras clutched close to capture the fleeting cuteness of this October adventure.

Oh, my boy is embarrassed.

“We can still do the corn maze,” I cajole. “You like corn mazes. Let’s take a look, we’ve come this far,” and, bless him, he agrees, and we line up with shrieking children mad for the petting zoo, the haunted house, the painted pumpkins and I see the time between then and now is realized in the shifting stance of these patrons, impatient to begin.

Meanwhile my boy, this young man, smiles at me shyly and suggests the entry fee may not be worth the price of admission, but I will not agree and we both know I am buying autumn’s times before he slips away into the silence of his own long winter.

“You like it, Mom,” he teases, and I must admit I do. I chomp on a caramel candied apple while he is satisfied with the least autumnal item, a tin of coke, as we walk together, stroking alpacas and goats, a rabbit hutch of squirming young. When I ask his to hold a tiny bunny he only shrugs, so I lean down into the straw and find another boy, the shadow of my companion, pale and shy and not yet three and I hold the baby rabbit out, “gentle, gentle,” I command as this other long ago boy reaches his grubby hand to touch.

Through the empty pumpkin fields my son and I walk. I make a scarecrow from straw and old clothes and while he allows this mother indulgence, he staves it off by plucking a wizened gourd from the vine and flipping it up and away, his boy smile broader than any jack-o-lantern we have ever carved.

We entre the corn maze together and it’s then I see my son alive as he charges zigzag and headlong through the drying stocks of corn, his comment tossed off like the now forgotten gourd.  “Soon I’ll see above the trail” he crows amid the labyrinth maze of this particular harvest.

Oh, I am subdued when at last we leave, but there is something accomplished in our departure and that 32 kilometer drive back to town. He puts his head back, closes his eyes and in the warm afternoon glow I see him into his next incarnation, grateful for the wrong-headed, right -hearted afternoon we have spent together as the husk of his childhood falls away and the bare autumn fields surrender their fruits. 

As my son sleeps – for sleep they must – I silently thank the God of Harvest for this lad who, even as he shakes off childish ways, allow me to remain a seed keeper, a sure and certain memory receptacle for all his boyish ways. 

now that I know the code

After numerous attempts I have discovered how to access my own blog! A minor miracle for me. But I think it opens up another conversation and a question I'd like to address: are we spending so much time doing virtual updates, keeping the masses appraised of our every thought synapse and physical movement that we are suppressing and stifling the creative impetuous that leads us to walk, talk face to face, indeed create?

I have been advised to get my new novel out to book bloggers and I would gladly do so as I believe the world vitural has a voracious appetite for on-line reading, Problem is I'm not sure how, and given my comments above, I'm not sure if that is a healthy alternative. I do not see the mainstream press (which, I must admit, I have been a part of for a good two decades) taking up the mantle of new work, original ideas, Canadian invention.

This is a question I will sit with, contemplate, until there is a call to action. Meanwhile, comment if you care to. I am all (virtual) ears,