Where the Wild Thoughts Are

I appreciate the chance to reflect on the question of which texts to assign, in the spirit of Clare Vaye Watkins in her amazing essay from before the #MeToo movement, “ On Pandering .” She writes, “Let us embrace a do-it-yourself canon.” When I was in high school, Toni Morrison’s Sula and Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine expanded my own personal canon (windows for me!). I still love those books. And if I had to choose right at this moment what to teach seniors in high school, maybe I’d include those authors. (But I’m also feeling very open to and excited about considering new options!) I’d definitely include poetry—a big, glorious mix of poetry from all kinds of writers, which I’m counting as one book in response to this question: Ross Gay and Marie Howe and Solmaz Sharif and Danez Smith and Leila Chatti and other wonderful poets in a homemade anthology of sorts. I love that poetry can breathe such life into a short span of time, and give a class the latitude to explore so many moments...

I had to laugh at my assertion on our discussion board this week that children’s literature is full of “wonder, imagination, and earnestness” after reading Meghan Cox Gurdon’s article “Darkness Too Visible.” I must have romanticized the field of children’s/YA lit based on some particular favorites from my own childhood. Cox Gurdon asserts her impression that YA books are growing more violent. She worries that reading these books as entertainment will “not merely gratify taste, after all but create it,” and worse, might normalize the behaviors or situations portrayed. I'm not sure I agree, though I'd be interested in what research tells us on the subject. I just read Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous , a disturbing and beautiful (not YA) novel. It didn’t make me feel like engaging in violence or drug use. It did make the world seem more complex, wider than my experience. Sherman Alexie rebuffs Cox Gurdon in “Why the Best Kids Books Are Written in Blood,” showing th...