Writing Youth by Alexander Jonathan;Banks William P.;Black Rebecca;

Author:Alexander, Jonathan;Banks, William P.;Black, Rebecca;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Lexington Books/Fortress Academic
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Notes

1. The text of the additions, which are subject to change but can still be traced through the “history” of the document, may be found here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cecil_Castellucci.

2. Levithan recently released (2015) in book form, with glossy cover, the full-length “play” of Tiny’s drama.

Chapter 4

Kids in the Aftermath

The Politics of Hurricane Katrina in

Young Adult Fiction

Visiting my local public library, I came across a display for a new book, published in February 2015: A Penguin Named Patience: A Hurricane Katrina Rescue Story, a picture book for children by Suzanne Lewis and Lisa Anchin. I couldn’t help but stop and leaf through this attractive volume about how penguins living at the New Orleans Audubon Aquarium of the Americas faced sweltering temperatures in the aftermath of the storm and flooding and had to be transported to San Diego’s zoo to keep them safe and healthy.

I was impressed by the persistence of Katrina in the cultural imagination. Nearly ten years after the catastrophe, we can point to numerous stories that grapple with the multifaceted dimensions of this devastating event—many by major writers and cultural producers: Dave Eggers’s nonfiction novel Zeitoun, HBO’s television series Treme, Spike Lee’s documentary When the Levees Broke, Josh Neufeld’s graphic book A.D.: New Orleans after the Deluge. As someone whose father died during the evacuation from the area and who has some family who came out okay but some who lost everything in the flooding, I was intrigued to find out how the writer and illustrator of A Penguin Named Patience would approach children with the tragedy. They do so gently, using animals to talk about the loss of home and the need to rely on one another in the face of calamity—worthy lessons for a children’s book.

In thinking about books for young people, though, I couldn’t shake the sense that Katrina and the flooding are the stuff of dystopia—a natural catastrophe combined with a massive engineering failure and often pitiful government response and support. The storm and its aftermath seemed to play out real life hunger games, and I began to wonder if other writers might be teasing lessons out of Katrina for young readers. And indeed, several children’s and YA authors—some quite well-known—have written books for adolescents about the catastrophe.

Yet many of these books, such as Jacqueline Woodson’s Beneath a Meth Moon, Jewell Parker Rhodes’s Ninth Ward, and Paul Volponi’s Hurricane Song, are anything but dystopian—at least on the surface. Each is an earnest and moving account of young people trying to survive and to understand the unfathomable. The plots of all three narratives are relatively simple: characters have to figure out how to live in the aftermath of a traumatic event. The assumption is that they “have to,” as giving up isn’t offered as much of an option. That “figuring out” takes different forms, suggesting varied understandings of the conditions that make living through and after trauma possible, or even worthwhile.

What’s intriguing from a writing and literacy studies standpoint is the extent to which such books often represent

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