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Dear Governor, Please Make My School A Prison

While you are in school, some days it feels like you’ll never escape. School feels like a prison sometimes, with a sentence that ends so far in the future, it seems like you’ll never get out. There’s actually been a fair amount of thought on the topic by education reformers, a sample of which you can see in this blog post by Deborah Meier(who for the record I really admire) about the similarities between public schools and prisons.

I am a licensed teacher and school media specialist, as well as a former public school student, and with most public schools, I think the benefits of making a free education available(as restrictive as it can sometimes be) outweigh the negatives (although the word FREE to me does not mean education constrained by centralized standardized testing). At least, I thought so until this open letter to Governor Rick Snyder of Michigan from the superintendent of the Ithaca Schools appeared in the Gratriot County Herald on May 12. You’ll have to scroll down the page to see his entire letter, but here’s the essential part:

Consider the life of a Michigan prisoner. They get three square meals a day. Access to free health care. Internet. Cable television. Access to a library. A weight room. Computer lab. They can earn a degree. A roof over their heads. Clothing. Everything we just listed we DO NOT provide to our school children.

This is why I’m proposing to make my school a prison.

Oh, Governor Snyder… Couldn’t you give these kids the same advantages prisoners have now? Why wait until they’ve been convicted and incarcerated to give them access to a library, information, and education?

Posted on June 2, 2011 by , Reply

This is just to say…

Philip Charles Crawford rocks.  This  unapologetic article, “A New Era of Gothic Horror”, which appeared in School Library Journal, is the kind of thing more librarians need to be reading, and encourages them to give the kind of support that kids and teens deserve when they want or need reading material in the horror genre.

I’d say this is a fresh new voice for the horror genre and for teens, except that he wrote it in 2008, and then apparently went on to focus on graphic novels. But discovering his article gave me the warm fuzzies today.

Thanks, Philip.

 

Posted on May 31, 2011 by , Reply

The H-Word. Part 3

And now… The tipping point for me. The article that made me want to shake somebody at the Wall Street Journal. Did you know this summer is…

 

THE SEASON OF THE SUPERNATURAL!

 

Yep.  “Real” authors are now coming out of the closet. The genre fiction my creative writing professor, Clint McCown, banned us from writing in his class because it wasn’t “real” or “literary” is suddenly okay.  Except, wait! Let’s not call it horror fiction when literary writer Glen Duncan writes about a werewolf with “a lusty appetite for human flesh”.  Nope- it’s “a high concept literary novel.”  It just HAPPENS to have a man-eating werewolf as the narrator.  Hmm… How can the literary establishment avoid the stigma of writing genre books? Certainly, those books, populated with werewolves, zombies, ghosts, and vampires, couldn’t possibly be horror fiction. Of course not. It’s “supernatural literary fiction”. I’d like to thank Glen Duncan’s publicist for taking the time to offer us here at MonsterLibrarian.com, a horror fiction review site, a review copy of The Last Werewolf.

The Wall Street Journal did briefly acknowledge the horror genre, but none of the books in this article were mentioned as part of the horror genre. And, while I understand that different imprints have different audiences, I was appalled at Knopf’s attitude that “we don’t do those kinds of books”.  It’s so disrespectful to readers’ preferences, and readers are the lifeblood of any publishing house.  The author of the Journal’s article tried to justify the popularity of these titles by counting Homer, Shakespeare, Dante and Milton as writers in the literary tradition who tossed gods, monsters, and the undead into the mix, but those guys cared about telling a story, not whether it was “literary”.

And that’s why my five year old is begging me to tell him about Odysseus and the Cyclops for the billionth time, and preparing for the zombie apocalypse (in spite of my attempts to protect him from all things zombie). The stories and the monsters are just that good. There’s no reason to be afraid of the H-word. There are a LOT of good storytellers out there. Even if they write “those books”, that’s no reason to write them off, or treat their readers with contempt.

Look, the horror community is not as organized as the romance community. RWA has hard data on sales and on who their readers are.  Writers in the horror genre don’t. And it would be hard to collect… are there ANY major publishers who publish horror since Leisure went by the wayside? But horror readers, writers, and books are here, and it’s foolish for publishers, mainstream authors, and book critics to write them off.  Horror fiction. Not “paranormal”, not “supernatural”, not, “thriller”, “science fiction”, “fantasy”, “dystopian” or “lowbrow”.(although it can be any of those things as well). It’s okay to read and write horror fiction with pride. No one should have to defend that choice.

No matter what anyone else doesn’t say.

 

Posted on May 29, 2011 by , 4 comments
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