Category Archives: art

What’s the difference between a Mystery that deflates and a Mystery that elevates?

5 July 2012

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Everything Christian Wiman says seems to resonate with me. He has a rare form of cancer. He has an incredible insight into life.

What is the difference between a mystery in which, and by means of which, one’s whole spiritual and intellectual being is elated and completed, and a mystery that merely deflates one’s spirit and circumvents one’s intellect? The latter, you might say, occurs in quotes. Nothing is more frustrating than listening to an inept or unprepared preacher (or poet!) defer to the mystery of existence and God when more mystery is the last thing his words need or can bear—nothing, that is, except perhaps plowing through some twelve-volume Teutonic tome explicating every last letter of the laws of God. I begin to think that anything that abstracts us from the physical world is “of the devil,” as we said in the baked—and sometimes half-baked—plains of west Texas where I was raised, though there we were more inclined to blame Satan for tempting us too close to the sweet stinks of the earth. What I crave—and what I have known, in fugitive instants—is mystery that utterly obliterates reality by utterly inhabiting it, some ultimate insight that is still sight.

(via Image Journal) Also listen to this interview with him.

Creativity Series: Tyler Braun “The Blinking Cursor and My Rising Pulse”

12 June 2012

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The Bereshit Bara Creativity Series asks 13 Creatives to wrestle with how they make the first move, write the first word, fling the first brush stroke, peel back the first layer of clay? What inspires them, what moves them, what drives them? I’d also like to hear from YOU. Send me your thoughts or a link to your post wrestling with these questions at rossgale4@gmail.com.

If you comment on today’s post you will be entered into a drawing to win Tyler Braun’s debut book Why Holiness Matters. You have until Friday to enter and I’ll announce the winner over the weekend.

Download episodes or Subscribe to the Podcast on iTunes by clicking here.

Listen to the podcast:

Those of us who write know the awful feeling of staring at a blinking cursor on a blank page. For those who paint, it’s the bristles of the paintbrush sitting in the paint while staring at a blank canvas. For those who write music, it’s the fingers resting on the keys of the piano waiting for inspiration to come.

I liken it to staring out into the empty expanse of the desert. We see seemingly no life. Everything around us is dead.

Something I can only describe as God-breathed or magical (depending on your worldview) happens between the blinking cursor, my rising pulse, and the finished product of beauty.

I could write about the four principles that drive me from beginning to end, but those principles won’t work for you. We love to create a formula for creating. The problem is each of us was made differently. We each have different passions, desires, and experiences. Why is it that we then try to formulate overcoming the blank page into tried and true principles and action steps? We should know better.

Here’s the reality I’ve come to know about creating out of emptiness: It takes humble submission.

Creatives don’t need more confidence or more inspiration to do the work. Nope, creatives need humility in order to create well.

Somewhere in the midst of the blinking cursor and my rising pulse I have a moment of clarity when I realize I’m incapable. I cannot do this creation on my own. I do not have the ability. My own worldview informs me that it is the God inside of me who begins His inspiring work once I’m able to get my own arrogant agenda out of the way. Why must I learn this lesson over and over I wonder?

—

In the creation account found in Genesis 1, God has created much of the world we see around us, even the cosmos our own eyes cannot see. He made it and called it good. But the work continued on as God created Adam and Eve.

Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness.” (Genesis 1:26)

Think of the implications of this as it relates to our own ability to create:

1) We are created in the “likeness” of the Creator.

2) The same creative power that breathed the universe into existence lives in us.

We could translate Genesis 1:26 by saying God created us to be His “icons” or reflections or windows. We were made to point to Him.

So what does any of this have to do with overcoming the blank page? Everything.

As we lay down our own agendas and our own creative arrogance for the sake of serving the Creator we have an opportunity for Him to work through us. We were made by Him, with His creative imprint, to go about our lives creating for the sake of our Creator.

Between the blinking cursor and the finished product is the place where we humbly sacrifice ourselves for the sake of becoming people the Creator can use in order to create through us.

True creation comes through no other way.

Creatives need to humbly submit themselves to the Master Artist.

Tyler Braun is a 27-year-old INTJ living in Portland, Oregon with his wife Rose. He works full time as a worship leader, while also finding time to study at Multnomah Biblical Seminary in pursuit of a masters degree. Tyler’s first book releases in August of this year through Moody Publishers and is available for pre-order now. You can find Tyler on Twitter, Facebook, or his blog.

Beauty Will Save the World

7 June 2012

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This kind of beauty won’t be saving anything but women from marriage.

The one year anniversary of Gregory Wolfe’s Beauty Will Save the World is almost one week away. If you are a writer or an artist wrestling with the significance of faith and art then you need to read this book.

Wolfe lays out history showing us from where we came in order to guide the direction we move toward, but equally as important his book is “about making connections that draw us together,” rather than “restoring a past order.”

Wolfe examines the Catholic voice in literature and art while stitching together the polemics between left and right, liberal and conservative. He doesn’t hide the chasm, but proposes a unifying vision of hope of beauty that he draws from literature and art.

In any case, public discourse has increasingly come to be dominated by warring academic elites; there are fewer and fewer men and women of “letters”—non-academic artists and writers who balance a passion for truth and goodness with the concreteness that beauty demands—involved in the conversation…

I’ve been drawn to the ways that prophetic culture can be placed in tension with the imaginative cultures, precisely because they need each other so much. What happens when prophecy meets art, heaven meets earth—when divine imperatives meet the tangled human condition? When two cultures meet, they challenge one another, preventing them from the excesses particular to their own natures. Faith asks art to be about something more than formal virtuosity and to consider that meaning itself is already inherently metaphysical, even religious. Art asks faith to become incarnate in the human condition without compromise—or evasion—and remain compelling.

Creativity Series: “Hello” by Elizabeth Myhr

4 June 2012

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• Download episodes or Subscribe to the Podcast on Itunes by clicking here.

From Ross: The Brazilian philosopher, Rubem Alves, retells a Gabriel Garcia Marquez story about a dead body washing ashore a small and lifeless fishing village. As the women prepare the body for burial, their imaginations alight with new stories, speculating who the dead man might be, what his voice sounded like, where he came from, who his family was, who he loved, who loved him. The men watching became jealous and made up their own stories. The village became alive with these imaginations, full of new thoughts and stories. The dead man resurrected their conversations and brought with him new joy. His death brought the village life.

The poet, Elizabeth Myhr understands the intrinsic power of words and elucidates this new life writers bloom into the world with her meditation titled “Hello”.

Listen here:

This writer does not jump into creativity. Creativity bumps into her on its way through the world.

I walk around, go to work, take care of my family, drive up a long, shaded city street and for just one moment the words drift into the brain from right to left. The brain sees them out of the corner of its internal eye, a phrase, incomplete, but unmistakably new. This is the beginning.

One who is not a writer does not pay attention, or sees and lets go of the gift. The gift’s living nature is to be ever moving. It has the quality of light. It is not a product of the human brain.

The writer has a tool called language by which she pins this light down on paper. There it listlessly flaps its beautiful wings, its shine vanishing. Then it dies.

The writer pins it to a board we call a document. Then the writer’s work starts. Using this tool and this board, the writer creates the world around this piece of captured light, this butterfly. When she’s finished with the construction, she pulls out the pin. The resurrected creature lifts its antennae, the wings fold up, and with a quick, tiny jump, it flies away.

Look, there is a reader with a butterfly net.

For the writer, there is only one word, the word of recognition: “hello.”

Elizabeth Myhr is a poet, editor and product development manager. Her debut book of poetry the vanishings & other poems, was published by Calypso Editions in October of 2011. She holds an MFA in poetry from Seattle Pacific University and lives in Seattle with her family.

Bereshit Bara Creativity Blog Series: Introduction

3 June 2012

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Download episodes or Subscribe to the Podcast on Itunes by clicking here. The podcast box will be located at the bottom of each post. Feel free to put on some headphones and meditate on our Creatives’s words. I’ve added a little ambience to them as well.

Listen here:

When I asked the 13 Creatives to wrestle with how they found the courage to create many of them responded either in their meditations or in our conversations that good art often comes out of suffering and hardships, obstacles and challenges.

I expected to receive thoughts about creativity which helped me understand how the Creatives began their work, how they fought against writer’s block or discouragement.

But in reading these meditations my whole idea of creativity has been turned upside down. I feel as if I’m falling and I don’t know when or if I’ll ever land. It’s a scary place to be when you don’t know where you stand and you’re surrounded by darkness and mystery.

Through the 13 Creatives and our blogging community wrestling with these questions about creating, I’ve been changed.

The depths of everyone’s work will challenge you.

So I ask that you approach this series with an open heart and mind, prepared to wrestle with these questions as well as the concepts and metaphors.

I believe, like me, you’ll be changed in the process.

Tomorrow’s meditation comes from Elizabeth Myhr. She is a poet, editor and product development manager. Her debut book of poetry the vanishings & other poems, was published by Calypso Editions in October of 2011. She holds an MFA in poetry from Seattle Pacific University and lives in Seattle with her family.

When you comment on Elizabeth Myhr’s post you will be entered to win a copy of her book the vanishings & other poems. I’ll pull a name out of a hat on Wednesday.

Wednesday’s meditation will feature Derek Smith. He teaches language arts at Renton High School in Renton, Washington, and earned an M.F.A. in creative writing from SPU in 2011. He edits and contributes to Magical Teaching and is working on a memoir called Mr. Smith Is Magic — And Other Fantasies of a First-Year Teacher.

My younger fellow novelists are greatly preoccupied with technique. They seem to think a good novel ought to follow certain rules imposed from outside.

16 May 2012

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I want to lace together snippets of François Mauriac’s 1953 interview in the Paris Review, specifically where he’s talking about the novel. I lived unaware of Mauriac until I read Gregory Wolfe’s Beauty Will Save the World. His best books I can’t even buy at Powell’s. He was highly influential for many of America’s esteemed writers.

My opinion hasn’t changed. I believe that my younger fellow novelists are greatly preoccupied with technique. They seem to think a good novel ought to follow certain rules imposed from outside. In fact, however, this preoccupation hampers them and embarrasses them in their creation. The great novelist doesn’t depend on anyone but himself. Proust resembled none of his predecessors and he did not have, he could not have, any successors. The great novelist breaks his mold; he alone can use it. Balzac created the “Balzacian” novel; its style was suitable only for Balzac.

There is a close tie between a novelist’s originality in general and the personal quality of his style. A borrowed style is a bad style. American novelists from Faulkner to Hemingway invented a style to express what they wanted to say—and it is a style that can’t be passed on to their followers…

I believe that the crisis of the novel, if it exists, is right there, essentially, in the domain of technique. The novel has lost its purpose. That is the most serious difficulty, and it is from there that we must begin. The younger generation believes, after Joyce and Proust, that it has discovered the “purpose” of the old novel to have been prefabricated and unrelated to reality…

The crisis of the novel, then, is metaphysical. The generation that preceded ours was no longer Christian, but it believed in the individual, which comes to the same thing as believing in the soul. What each of us understands by the word soul is different; but in any case it is the fixed point around which the individual is constructed.

Faith in God was lost for many, but not the values this faith postulates. The good was not bad, and the bad was not good. The collapse of the novel is due to the destruction of this fundamental concept: the awareness of good and evil. The language itself has been devalued and emptied of its meaning by this attack on conscience.

Observe that for the novelist who has remained Christian, like myself, man is someone creating himself or destroying himself. He is not an immobile being, fixed, cast in a mold once and for all. This is what makes the traditional psychological novel so different from what I did or thought I was doing. The human being as I conceive him in the novel is a being caught up in the drama of salvation, even if he doesn’t know it.

kristen_dalton

Operating in the Zone a Drill Called Perfection; a Review of Jonah Lehrer’s Imagine: How Creativity Works

14 May 2012

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This is a guest post by Kristen Dalton. She’s a Journalist for Greater Media Newspapers covering the Greater Red Bank Area in New Jersey. She won the 2011 Williams Prize for Poetry and graduated from Lehigh University where she played basketball for the Mountain Hawks in the Patriot League (DI), helping them win two PL tournament championships while earning two NCAA Tournament berths and a WNIT bid.

We started off every basketball practice the same way: with a drill called Perfection.

It was a simple drill, really. Full court right hand lay ups. Full court left hand lay ups. Two-player passing into right hand layups. Two-player passing into left hand lay ups. Three-man weave. Michigan (another full-court layup drill). And finally, three-man shooting. That was the order, and only when everyone completed each section could the team move on to the next.

Everything was full-court, down and back, and they were all elementary drills to be doing at the Division I collegiate level. Yet everyone hated it. Everyone hated the drill because it had to be done perfectly. Any missed shot, any dropped pass, any untouched line meant your group had to sprint to the end of the line and do it again. Until everything was perfect.

The entire team had 8 minutes (or less) to complete all the components of the drill. If it was 8:01, everyone had to do Perfection all over again. On the bad days, we could waste a half hour of practice doing a drill that had did not remotely emulate playing a game in real-time.

Now, I understand the philosophy behind the drill: practice makes perfect. But my issue was even more straightforward: the game is not perfect. It requires you to be creative and rely on your instincts. So I had a hard time coming to grips with doing a drill that was counter-intuitive to the way I played the game. You’d be surprised how hard it became to make lay ups when you knew you’d have to do it all over again, and worse, sometimes be the only one. It was embarrassing, humiliating to fail so often at the easiest shot in the world. A shot that until then, you had never given a second thought to.

This drill unraveled those basketball instincts as mental doubts disrupted years of engraved muscle memory. This is also known as “choking,” “wearing a size two collar,” “caving under pressure,” and “the Boston Red Sox.”

Or as Jonah Lehrer says in his book, Imagine: How Creativity Works,

We are so worried about playing the wrong note or saying the wrong thing that we end up with nothing at all, the silence of scared imagination.

Creativity is about letting go. Say goodbye to the inhibitions that stifle our internal rhythms and prevent our innovative ways from surfacing. Lehrer spoke with composer Yo-Yo Ma about breaking through the barriers to true performance.

When people ask me how they should approach performance, I always tell them that the professional musician should aspire to the state of the beginner,” Ma says. “In order to become a professional, you need to go through years of training. You get criticized by all your teachers, and you worry about all the critics. You are constantly being judged. But if you get out onstage and all you think about is what the critics are going to say, if all you are doing is worrying, then you will play terribly. You will be tight and it will be a bad concert. Instead, one needs to constantly remind oneself to play with the abandon of a child who is just learning the cello. Because why is that kid playing? He is playing for pleasure. He is playing because making this sound, expressing this melody, makes him happy. That is still the only good reason to play.

This is why I turned to creative writing in the midst of my collegiate basketball career. I needed a creative space that countered the cookie-cutter operation of my school’s athletic program. There was a cognitive dissonance that unsettled me for years. It became clear fairly quickly that I didn’t fit the mold and would instead be modified to a much smaller role that sacrificed the creative, adaptive, run-and-gun style of play for a more slow and deliberate robotic scheme. And we were successful, won championships, went to the NCAA tournament twice. But in an effort to become perfectly efficient, there came the disappointing realization that we still hadn’t reached our truest potential. It also made it harder to come to terms with the individual sacrifices we all made.

For the first time, I realized success and potential could be mutually exclusive. The occurrence of one did not influence or result in the other.

Perfection was wrong about making mistakes. They are not failures, nor should they be punishable or embarrassing. If striving for perfection were going to turn me into a soulless basketball player then I’d rather pick up the pen and try to make myself a whole human being. So that’s what I did.

“There is something scary about letting ourselves go. It means that we will screw up, that we will relinquish the possibility of perfection. It means that we will say things we didn’t mean to say and express feelings that we can’t explain. It means that we will be onstage and not have complete control, that we won’t know what we’re going to play until we begin, until the bow is drawn across the string. While this spontaneous method might be frightening, it’s also an extremely valuable source of creativity” (Lehrer).

Most creative people understand this. They’re actively pursuing that moment of insight when neurons connect in unexpected places and open neural pathways that carry messages in new ways. They are the metaphors of our minds, bridging the gap between life as we know it and the life as we wish it to be. This requires an imagination, and our cells do this every day at the most basic level. It’s like making a pass that threads the needle: you can’t practice for it and no one can see it until it happens. You just have to be ready to make it happen. You have to be willing to look for new ways to say something, to create something, to fire a rope and rescue an unspoken emotion. A two-point lay up.

It is impossible to practice for these moments. They usually happen in the wake of mistakes.

So don’t suppress the quiet tug of your instincts for the sake of attaining perfection. You’ll never be successful fulfill your potential.

Instead, welcome the first mistake.

That’s what Yo-Yo Ma does.

Because then I can shrug it off and keep smiling. Then I can get on with the performance and turn off that part of the mind that judges everything. I’m not thinking or worrying anymore. And it’s when I’m least conscious of what I’m doing, when I’m just lost in the emotion of the music, that I’m performing my best.

Creativity is not the performance though. It’s the magic that makes you disappear. And even though everyone can see you, they’ll all be wondering where you went.

Kristen’s writing is featured in The Morning Call (Allentown, Pennsylvania) and in 2009 had her article “Global Branding: Li Ning vs. Nike” published in the Lehigh Review. She is the creative writer and founder of Inspired Scribble, which is offering its first creative writing scholarship in June to a student enrolled in the AP Humanities class at Monmouth Regional High School.

My Mom on Creativity Now She’s Facing an Empty Nest

13 May 2012

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This month my brother will move out of the house, the last child to do so, and my parents for the first time since the first few years of their marriage will have the house to themselves. They met in college, my mother an art education major. She’d planned to teach art in high school, but then had a son who became severely disabled and the only time she taught art was when she home-schooled us.

I remember her water color paintings of sheep in pastures, of hockey players, a night time baseball game, and intricate weaving hearts. I remember her pencil sketches of detailed faces and her doodles on napkins while she chatted on the phone. I can say she is an artist. But for the past decade or more her art has stalled and now, with an empty home, she’s buying art supplies.

My mother:

There’s an art store down on Hawthorne I found the other day. It was very small and intimate. The clerk shouted out a hello as I walked to the back. I acted like I knew what I was doing, but felt like I was in a foreign country unable to read the signs. I was very intimidated, but I found the printmaking stuff. It wasn’t much, just a small section about 2 feet by 2 feet. Everything seemed to be student quality, meaning cheap. That made me happy. I don’t want to invest too much money on something I might stare at for a couple of weeks or months. Paper always draws me, so I grabbed a stack of white printing paper. I asked the clerk which was better, the 10 set of cutting tools or the one tool for the same price (what an idiot!). I grabbed the one cutting tool.

When I looked at the Linoleum, which is what you use to carve your print, there were three kinds. One was too soft, one was too hard, and one was just right, or so I thought. The clerk said most printmakers will choose the hard one since it will make finer details. I mumbled “I wasn’t into that,” under my breath, hoping he didn’t hear the idiot speaking. I grabbed the linoleum that was just right. A whole piece about 1 foot by 1 foot in which I will cut smaller pieces so I can create more prints. At home I still had my brayer which rolls the ink on the linoleum and some other cutting tools that are just a few years old. I have had them since college. Quit COUNTING! They are not old, just vintage, as long as they do not fall to dust when I touch them.

Alas, that is the point. Every thing is sitting on the dining room table, mocking me. Waiting for that one creative thought in which I can start carving.

Maybe it will come today…but I really should clean the toilets.

That’s where the 13 Creatives enter the story, because they’ve faced the empty void. They’ll be an encouragement, an inspiration, and a spark for all us Creatives. Maybe even my Mom.

Go check out these 13 Creatives who will be guest posting here from June through August:

Tyler Braun, manofdepravity.com
David Clark, davidclarkart.com
Dyana Herron, dyanaherron.com
Diana Huey, possibly a hermit
Chris Hunter, possibly a recluse
Elizabeth Myhr, elizabethmyhr.wordpress.com
David Jacobsen, jacobsenwriting.com
Adele Konyndyk, adelekonyndyk.wordpress.com
Shannon Huffman Polson, aborderlife.com
Britt Tinsdale Staton, alivestudios.net
Chad Thomas Johnston, chadthomasjohnston.com
Derek Smith, magicalteaching.com
Alissa Wilkinson, alissawilkinson.com

The New Future to Social Media and Blogging

12 May 2012

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Brian Andreas thinks social media fragments us more than brings us together. And since we’re all here through a form of social media, I want to examine this room we’re in for just a second and then offer a small solution for what I want to do about it. Because I really want to do something about this:

Being constantly inundated with our social updates tires us out—we’re fatigued and we’re annoyed with each other. Here’s why: while it is true that no one care’s about your trip to Mexico, your weird tastes in music and the dinner that you just made, we still want to be involved. But we hate the self-serving. We’re re-pinning and re-tweeting without context, without collaboration. The Internet will always suffer from social media fatigue until it allows for seamless collaboration among multi-platforms, multi-dimensions, and multi-media. This may be idealistic view but it’s not impossible.

I feel like social media is a dark room in which I throw into it things I like and things I create. And then I expect something to happen. And I get disappointed when nothing happens. I am fatigued with it. I hate having to constantly add new platforms. Pinterest? A Facebook Fan Page? An email newsletter? Those are all things I’m considering adding to my repertoire in order to better “connect”. And I’ll do it. But I won’t like it.

So I’m not doing any of it (except maybe the email newsletter after the summer). None of it at all. I refuse (except that one thing.)

This is what I’m doing instead…

During the summer months because of the “Bereshit Bara” Blog Series on Creativity my writing won’t be featured here as much, which is a good thing because other more talented writers will be. But since I won’t be at the forefront of my own blog I thought it makes the perfect opportunity for a new approach that will keep me writing.

I’ll still write my blog, but instead of posting it here I’ll send it to you on a Postcard.

That’s right, through the mail system. I know it’s sort of old fashion but who doesn’t love receiving mail?

This doesn’t immediately address “seamless collaboration through multi-platforms.” Not yet anyway.

But I want to do better. And not just better writing, but better community building.

And you help me do that.

By writing a Postcard to you it will help focus my attention and force my words to be precise and my heart to be true. I’m not kidding. I’ll get more out of this than you.

If you want into this “Blog by Postcard” then email me your mailing address at rossgale4 at gmail dot com.

I’ll do it until it’s unfeasible, or my wife gets frustrated I’m stealing her stamps, or I’ve got to pay thirty bucks to mail a postcard to Greenland or something similar.

I’ll do it as long as I can really, truly connect and really, truly write well. That will make it worth it and maybe merge the many fragments.

She fell in love with a Cuban General, had his baby, and then moved home to San Francisco because Cuba was no place to raise a child

11 May 2012

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I had a fascinating American Literature professor. Her favorite student was a psychology major and she allowed him to speak, but often cutoff anyone else who wanted to talk about meaningless things like symbols which don’t speak to anything at all in a story, so she said. (The image above is an example of a smug psychology student. Just judging everyone.)

She told us about how she fell in love with a Cuban General, having his baby, and then moving home because Cuba was no place to raise a child. She never did say Cuba. I guess it could have been Panama or something similar. But I met her son randomly at a friends house. I didn’t ask him about his biological father. He’d been discussing a trip he took with his adopted father, a doctor, where they volunteered at a clinic in Port au Prince.

But this fascinating professor talked longingly about teaching at a well respected university where she could have longstanding conversations about literature with her adept and well-attuned students. Instead of us–except for the psychology student–Portland students. She was Jewish, an atheist, and adopted two girls from China.

From her I learned about structures and tropes and that Gertrude Stein’s sentences are like branches upon branches.

Of my work she said, “I like your voice, but you need to say more.”

Which was nice because I want my writing voice to be liked and also because I have a little bit of pride for my holding back. And this might be a silly pride because I don’t often write beyond what I think needs to be said. Which isn’t much. I could stop here. I’m fighting myself not to stop here.

I’m an introvert. Whatever that means. But it doesn’t mean I don’t have things to say. It’s just that in order for me to form my thoughts I must write them out first. So writing is often more than just saying what I want to say, it’s also wading through my subconscious to figure out what I feel and believe. I am hidden from myself.

Again, I’m fighting. I feel like I’m through. I don’t have an opinion any more.

Last thought then: writing for me is hard because it often involves a super-concentrated form of thinking mixed with an unknown and hyperactive agent called feeling. I can write when I don’t feel, but it’s often dull and lifeless. But it’s close to impossible for me to write when I don’t concentrate.

So when I’m stuck, when I’m tired and I don’t want to think, I imagine my American Lit professor, turning away from the class and facing that smug psychology student and asking his opinion. And then I start writing. I start saying more. Because I hate smug psychology students who know so much about literature that they don’t major in it. And I also hate when professors condescend.

Another thought, now that I imagine myself in the class again: I wasn’t prepared for American Literature. I needed milk, but I was fed beef. I hadn’t prepared myself, that’s for sure, but I didn’t know how to prepare. I wonder if literature would thrive with more priming. I took every literature and writing class in high school. High-brow literature needs the equivalent of a gateway drug. Maybe that’s what they call Young Adult lit. Or maybe I’ve become smug.