The Curious Boundaries of YA Fantasy (WisCon 32 panel)

56 The Curious Boundaries of YA Fantasy

Reading, Viewing, & Critiquing Science Fiction and Fantasy • Saturday, 1:00-2:15 P.M. • Senate A

What are the limits of what can be discussed in YA fantasy? What themes and issues are considered appropriate, and which are taboo? Who sets these limits and do they mesh with the desires and expectations of YA readers?

M: Mary Anne Mohanraj, Sharyn November, Tamora Pierce, Sarah Beth Durst, Alma Alexander

Transcripts and Notes

Notes by Janice Dawley:

This room is packed! A woman sitting next to me in the back has a folding fan that is giving me some free cooling. Nice.

Mohanraj starts the conversation by asking the other panelists how they handle sexuality in their fiction. Durst says her protagonist is 12, so the topic doesn’t come up. However, she thinks sexuality is fine as long as it is truly a part of the story and not gratuitous. November defines YA. She says a lot of people think it’s anything that’s not a picture book, which isn’t true. Pierce mentions a guy who advocated taking the plots from books that were out of copyright since they were out there for the picking. She won’t name him, because he’s dead and people will be upset to hear him slagged off. This man also said that YA had no sex, no alcohol or drugs, no swearing, and you couldn’t make any money with it. Pierce corrected him by saying there IS sex, alcohol and drug use, and swearing, and NO, you don’t make any money. She then describes some of her work, and editorial objections to a couple of her books involving sexuality. Interestingly, none of her editors care about violence.

Mohanraj says that she thinks Pierce’s level of detail about sex is less than some other authors. Progression of Alanna as a character. November says, “By the end, she’s having a good time.” She loves that there is magical contraception in the books. Pierce says, “I love it too. I wish I had had that! I had to deal with the pill like everyone else.” November says her only boundary is “explicit sex”. Laughter as people talk about the many ways of indicating time passing during a sex scene. A shirt thrown over a chair, the moon in the window, “a train entering a tunnel” (Pierce). Writing sex by indirection means that some kids won’t get it, but others will. Durst says she didn’t get the sexual implications of the green dragonriders in Pern when she first read the books.

Audience member asks about sexual violence – what is appropriate to write about? Some examples: Holly Black’s Tithe. Pierce says, “there’s a character who has an abusive sexual relationship with an elf”.

A health care professional in the audience says books with rape in them ought to have warnings on them. There is a grumbling of disagreement immediately. November says she thinks that’s a slippery slope, and will also have the opposite result from what is intended (kids want to read what’s forbidden). Her company (Viking) has had many arguments about coding or labeling books. She talks about a book she recently edited in which almost every other word is a curse. One character goes over to the next town to turn tricks, and the main character’s mother is a drunk. She presented the book to her colleagues and described it accurately (“Scholastic will NEVER take it”), and they said, “At least you’re honest about it.” In the end, the flap copy describes these things, and she thinks the audience for the book will probably be people in their early 20s.

Pierce says she is a child of the '60s and '70s, and read Psychopathia Sexualis when she was 10. She doesn’t understand kids these days who will “self censor”. She says, “you should be grabbing new experiences with both hands!”.

Mohanraj says kids who have experienced abusive relationships, etc. may be the ones who need books about abusive relationships the most; then they know they are not alone.

More re: self censorship. Someone in the audience says that “if it reaches a certain mushiness level” she skips ahead. Durst says she’s a big fan of Laurell K. Hamilton, but admits she can’t read all the words in her books.

Mohanraj asks about writing lists of themes to guide people. Turns out the ALA is already doing it. [Anyone have a link to these?]

Re: violence. There are similar questions about its appropriateness, but November says that “ironically you can get away with lots of violence.” Some books are like blockbuster movies where legions of faceless people all die. Some discussion about Robin McKinley’s Deerskin, about a character who is raped by her father. The author doesn’t consider it a YA book.

An audience member asks “what about puberty”? The Alanna books are exemplars again. Pierce says that if you are a teenage girl dressing as a boy pretending to be a knight, these become important issues. “You better pack your pads.”

November mentions Katherine Paterson always being censored because she is very moral, but in an organic way, not according to a specific religion etc.

The best quote of this panel so far, from Tamora Pierce: “Pregnancy is my STD.”

Mohanraj singles out some works for mention:

Megan Whalen Turner has a character whose hand is chopped off partway through the book, and there is no magical reversal or healing. He just has to deal with it. Also, he marries the person who ordered that it be done.

Pamela Dean’s Juniper, Gentian & Rosemary. At the end, the sisters are enspelled. Two break free, but the last one loses an entire year of her life, and her parents, who are RIGHT THERE, can’t help her. When she read it, she found herself thinking “Parents should save you!”

Some talk about how parents are often done away with in children’s books. (Durst: “Eaten by rhinoceroses or something.”)

What about death? “You can’t kill the protagonist.” November mentions books written by characters from the afterlife, and a whole crop of zombie books that are about to come out. Mohanraj thinks that’s cheating.

An audience member asks about “Privilege of the Sword”. She thinks it reads like a YA book. Pierce says she recommends that book to older teens because of the “pansexuality”. The audience member says that she would love to have read that book at 14, and worries that adults are underestimating kids in their assumptions about age appropriateness. November asks the 14-year-old in the audience if she reads any adult books. The answer is yes (she recently read Dune), so November says, “There you are. The book is available to you, just not in the YA section.”

November makes an interesting comment about how YA books have more time on the shelves because of the market (libraries, awards cycles). “You have a good 6 months before the book reaches its sell point. It’s not like retail.”

November plugs Elizabeth Wein’s series that starts as Arthurian, but moves to Africa and features a biracial protagonist.