Skip to main content

March 2016


GOTTA #LOVEOZYA


I actually went and did a little "Professional Development" the other day, dragging myself into the city to attend a Teacher/Librarian do that Readings Hawthorn hosted.  The evening consisted of four fabulous Australian YA authors talking on their latest middle years and YA offerings (and there was also wine!).

 I didn't really know what to expect, but I certainly didn't expect to walk out of there feeling as inspired as I did.  It was awesome, and really quite uplifting.

 Emily Gale and Leanne Hall tackled the difficulties of writing for those odd middle years - not really a kid, but not quite a teenager.  If you can cast your minds back (I found it hard) it's a time when your folks are expecting you to act more mature, and you're feeling more mature, but no one is really giving you any credit or independence.  How do you reach that readership, and as an adult write something that doesn't sound either too simple, or like you're talking down to them?  A fine balance indeed.  They also tackled the topic of diversity in middle fiction, is there enough?  Or are we still walking down the tired path of middle-class anglo?  I talked about this in a post a while back, so I won't cover it again, but I remember when I started high school - my group of friends were from Sri Lanka, what was then Czechoslovakia, England and China (as well as Australia, of course).  We all read books, but I would say my mates from Sri Lanka, Czech and China probably weren't represented in what we were reading.  That was 25 years ago people.  We should have made some progress by now!

 The most excellent Lili Wilkinson and Jay Kristoff discussed their latest offerings to YA, and talked a lot about the representation of strong female protagonists in their books.  The discussion focused on the pleasure of writing strong, positive and optimistic characters, even when they are faced with overwhelming difficulties.  The ongoing popularity of the dystopian genre was covered, and it was pointed out that despite the doom and gloom settings, the backdrop of misery acts as a canvas to allow the positive traits of the characters to shine - showing that one person does have the power to change the world.

 My colleague and I walked out of there with renewed inspiration for spreading the message of how important and fulfilling reading can be.  We were walking on air (albeit weighed down by a ton of books that we bought for the library), and we certainly had a renewed appreciation of why our schools should get to #loveozya (http://loveozya.com.au)




Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Using librarian skills to uncover a network of dodgy shopping sites!

In all my posts over the years I'm not sure if I ever mentioned I am an avid steampunker.  Like many of my quirky fellow librarians, I love a good dress up and recently found myself searching for a great pair of boots to go with the Steampunk Aviator Superhero costume I'm assembling (trust me, it will work!). One evening whilst idly thumbing through Pinterest I found a picture of these undeniably AWESOME combat-boot style boots.  I followed the link to the website ( www.chichola.com ) and although it didn't look dodgy and offered PayPal, I am a cautious online shopper and always check the customer reviews first.  They were 1000% abysmal.  Like the kind of reviews that say SCAM, THEFT and CAN I LEAVE 0 STARS.  So despite loving the shoes, I was definitely not parting with my money on this occasion. Fast forward a couple of months and I see an ad for Victorian-style cosplay boots in my Insta feed.  Did I mention that I am an avid steampunker? ...
24 comments
Read more

February 2016

SUNSHINE, DECKS AND GRAPHIC NOVELS So, that's another year out of the way! I hope you enjoyed the school holidays.  I certainly did.  For me, it wasn't so much bookish as practical.  I cleared some land, levelled it, landscaped it and made a deck.  Not much time for reading in between all that but it was therapeutic to get out in the sun. Because all this practicality left me little time to actually read, I decided to focus on something a little less wordy, but no less relevant - the graphic novel.  Now, I did read a few but they are a little too adult to be termed YA so I probably won't review them here (one was an excellent memoir of growing up in Yorkshire when the Yorkshire Ripper was on the loose - highly recommended, but not particularly YA friendly). Devouring these graphic novels made me realise that literature comes in so many forms these days.  Traditionalists may find it easy to dismiss the graphic novel, but having read several excell...
Post a Comment
Read more

Ambidextrous Me

After a minor interruption to service, I'm back and I've installed an upgrade! For those of you out there who may actually read this blog (the one or two of you, hi Mum), life has been more than a little busy of late and has interfered with my ability to read, and to blog.  Basically, I have been experiencing a career crisis.  Actually that's a bit dramatic it wasn't really a crisis (I just like the familiar-sounding alliteration), it was more that I really didn't like my job.  Don't get me wrong, my colleagues were AWESOME and that counts for so much in a workplace, but as a new Librarian, the job itself was probably as unchallenging and backward as it could get.  A career cul-de-sac.  A dead end.  A career coffin.  A place of final rest. So what was the position?  It was at a school.  A lovely school of a certain educational philosophy that was rather anti-technology and fairly set in its ways.  I sort of knew this when I started,...
Post a Comment
Read more