There are some gigs you get asked to do and you do a little fist pump sitting at your desk. For me, Reading Matters is one of those. For those who don’t know, Reading Matters comes around every two years and is the Centre for Youth Literature’s conference on all things YA for librarians, booksellers, teachers and YA artists. The CYL team always put together an exceptional program – informative, engaging and surprising – and I’ve been lucky enough to be asked to host panels for the past two years.
This year I facilitated a panel on politics in YA fiction with local authors Lili Wilkinson and Jane Harrison, and American author AS King. The conversation was as excellent as I hoped it would be. All three authors write books where their protagonists (all women) are living and breathing social justice and politics. The discussion explored domestic violence, environmentalism, teens as agents of social change, racism in fantasy works vs racism in realism (and why we are more comfortable with the former than the latter), feminism and why personal stories can engage more fully with a political concept than dystopian trilogies do.
I left the session feeling really positive. Life is mostly about keeping a seven month old alive and happy at this point than it is engaging with politics, literature and words. That’s okay, but it felt damn good to be back using my brain to tease out a really juicy topic with three writers I admire. I recently received a request to chair some sessions at another upcoming festival and after yesterday I’m even more excited to start preparing for those.