Two YA novelists discuss the gender politics of literature’s biggest growth industry

John M. Cusick (JC) is an editor at Armchair/Shotgun and literary agent specializing in YA books. His first novel, Girl Parts is available from Candlewick Press.

Laura Goode (LG) is an essayist, poet and author. Her first novel, Sister Mischief, was released by Candlewick Press on July 12.

JC: So why did you start writing YA?

LG: Because somebody told me I could make money doing it.

JC: That was smart.

LG: One of my friends had some success with YA, and her agent wanted to build his list. I was finishing my MFA in poetry when I ran into him at a party. He asked if I ever thought about YA and I was like, “Yes! [hand clap] I think about it all day every day!” Lying. Total lies. But three months later, I had an agent and I came around to the idea. Plus, I had the lesbian rapper idea…badabing badaboom.

JC: Do tell.

LG: I like to call Sister Mischief the world’s first interracial gay hip-hop love story for teens. In that way it’s a mélange of, like, all the hot topics of the moment, but I think it was important to have an authentic lesbian love story at its center. It’s interesting—LGBTQ YA is emerging right now but it’s still largely male-dominated. When I started out, I didn’t see many female coming-out stories, or stories that move past the coming-out event. I wanted to operate from a starting point that my main character would know already that she’s gay, and disclose that in the first chapter so the narrative could move forward as a love story from there.

This is a dialogue between Teach, an adjunct philosophy instructor at a public university in New York, and Cheat, who has authored over 100 papers for pay.

Teach: In my philosophy class of 36 students I had six instances of plagiarism. I ended up turning them all in to the Committee on Academic Standing.

Cheat: Do you remember how they plagiarized?

T: One is a case of self-plagiarism, in which the third paper was turned in a second time for the fourth paper.

C: In its entirety?

T: In its near entirety. He changed the introduction and the conclusion, but left the body paragraphs the same.

C: So he tricked a search engine, but not a human.

If intellectualizing Rebecca Black’s mysteriously bad single “Friday” is wrong, TNI editors Rob Horning and Malcolm Harris don’t want to be right. (See Know Your Meme if you need to be caught up).

Rob: I say the video is a parable of the attention economy. The literalism of the video is a sign that the song’s lyrics and imagery consist of residual content — of placeholders, the necessary boilerplate to get the meme off the factory floor and onto the internet. Rebecca Black doesn’t seem conscious that she is in the midst of making a meme, yet at the same time she must know — at least that is the fantasy. She is aspiring to go through the motions of celebrity without there being anything about her to celebrate. Hence “Thursday is the day before Friday.”

Mal: It’s in some ways a Ke$ha parody. “Friday” makes explicit reference to “Tik Tok” while pointing out how inextricable her fame is from its own ridicule. At the same time, the song is undeniably catchy. A flat-out bad song doesn’t get nearly this much attention; “Friday” succeeds in ways I find very uncomfortable. I think at least some of the impulse to ridicule is a defensive tool we use to distance ourselves from the kind of people the song is designed for, the kind of people we secretly know ourselves to be. It’s like the closet-case snapping his towel extra hard in the boys locker room. The meme principally, whether we want to admit it or not, allows us to listen to the song.

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TNI contributor Ryan Ruby and editor Rob Horning discuss difficult books and the politics of taste. Another weekend well spent, fellows!

From: Ryan Ruby

To: Rob Horning

Subject: Just a thought…

Date: Fri, Feb 18, 2011 at 10:11 PM

Came across the following passage in Finnegan’s Wake, which made me think of you. “Qui quae quot at Quinnigan’s Quake! Stump! His producers are they not his consumers? Your exagmination round his factification for incamination of a warping process. Declaim!”

In the margin I wrote, “Producers = Consumers. Joyce as his own audience.” Then wrote the following and was wondering whether you thought the argument, hastily sketched though it is, helps solve the problem of the specific mode of literary consumption:

Ten years before she would publish Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë sent a poem to poet laureate Robert Southey asking for his opinion. Their resulting exchange is interesting in the context of the recent publication of The Count 2010 by VIDA, as well as the defensive response from several editors that men both submit more and are more likely to resubmit having been rejected.

Perhaps. But we read Southey and Brontë’s exchange as uncomfortably familiar:

Robert Southey to Charlotte Brontë, Keswick, March 1837

MADAM,—

[…]

It is not my advice that you have asked as to the direction of your talents, but my opinion of them; and yet the opinion may be worth little, and the advice much.  You evidently possess, and in no inconsiderable degree, what Wordsworth calls the ‘faculty of verse.’ I am not depreciating it when I say that in these times it is not rare. Many volumes of poems are now published every year without attracting public attention, any one of which, if it had appeared half a century ago, would have obtained a high reputation for its author. Whoever, therefore, is ambitious of distinction in this way ought to be prepared for disappointment.

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