Engaging with On and Offline Reading Communities by Alexia Casale

The landscape of YA publishing is ever-changing – and changing so rapidly it’s hard even for those who live and breath it to keep up. But that’s one of the things that make it so exciting. Our community and world isn’t a fixed, static thing but constantly being created and recreated so there’s always space for new people and new ideas. It’s like the ideal high school, where everyone is welcome and the weirder you are the more you’ll fit in. The best metaphor must be the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party – only with half the teapots full of prosecco.

One of the reasons it moves so quickly is social media. The UKYA and UKMG world comes together for events – launches, festival, author events, UKYAX – but usually it’s only a small part of the community apart from two key dates: YALC and YA Shot. In between, our community lives online: we dip in and out of hashtags, Twitter conversations, scheduled chats and on-line events like the #YAtakeover, touching base with each other often multiple times a day. Twitter is very much the UKYA/UKMG office ‘water cooler’: it hosts a lot of what happens in our community, providing continuity to relationships between opportunities to meet in person.

Before becoming an author, I was really worried about Twitter. I thought it was a space where strangers told each other random, meaningless facts about the minutiae of their lives then never spoke again. The online book world isn’t at all like that. Many of my author friends are people I first met on Twitter. I still remember going to Edinburgh Book Festival when The Bone Dragon was only just out and lovely Cat Clarke coming up to hug me and launching back into a conversation we’d been having a few days earlier on Twitter. For the first time, I felt like I was at a party where I knew people and had something to say.

Twitter has continued to be crucial to my feeling of belonging, to my personal and professional relationships, and to my happiness. It’s amazing to have a space filled with wonderful book-loving, liberal-minded people to retreat to when the world is awful.

Twitter is also a great equaliser for the publishing industry and I love that. It’s much easier to join a conversation online – and often surprising people will respond if you’re legitimately joining in rather than trying to force an opportunity to make a person engage with you. Twitter means that everyone’s invited to the party and no one has to stand in the corner alone if they don’t want to. This replicates itself, though to a lesser degree, at events. Yes, authors are onstage and then behind signing tables, but the closeness of the online community breaks down some of the formality and barriers that would otherwise exist. It’s why the atmosphere at events like YALC and YA Shot is so friendly – so happy. It helps us create an ‘all of us’ feeling about UKYA/UKMG spaces so that authors and readers and publishing people know they can mix freely and talk to anyone they want to.

The fact that the UKYA/UKMG world is so bound up with the Twittersphere means that rich but free opportunities are available to publicise events and to reach out to all sorts of people to say ‘you are welcome, everyone is welcome’. This makes a huge impact in YA Shot’s ability to put its ethos of inclusivity and generosity into practice. An obvious way is the YA Shot Blog/Vlog Tour, which involves most of our authors and around 60 bloggers and vloggers each year. But there’s also our Internship Programme, which I am incredibly proud of. Although we do reach out specifically to local universities, particularly Brunel, social media means that we can get the word out quickly and easily to a far wider range of people. Yes, only those on social media, but let’s face it… most young people who want to work in the UKYA/UKMG fields are on there – or should be! – as it’s such a huge part of the job and the world of publishing nowadays.

YA Shot is an organisation built on transparency and equality above all else: we explain what we’re doing whenever anyone asks and we say why. Social media makes that not only possible but an on-going conversation, as it should be. Above all, it helps us reach out as widely as possible so everyone knows they’re welcome. It’s why our Internship Programme is full of diversity. We don’t select authors or interns based on personal characteristics: instead, we make sure we throw our net so wide that we can choose the best people each year and find that translates (as it should) to a diverse pool of authors and interns, bloggers and visitors. If the playing field is level, then there will be equality and, quite naturally, there will be diversity. Social media and the online world helps us turn that ethos into reality.

A related way that social media shapes the UKYA/UKMG world is that it gives people who want to listen to different voices the opportunity to do so. Yes, some people misuse the opportunity. And, yes, some lack nuance and/or the ability to articulate their perspective. And, yes, it isn’t always fair who gets the most ‘air time’. But everyone can speak and that’s a start.

So come and say hi! Join us on the #YAShot and #YAShot2016 hashtags. Join us at YA Shot itself! Let us know if you want to steward in exchange for a ticket! From August 1st, join us for over 60 stops on our Blog and Vlog Tour! We’ll see you at YALC too… and of course on #UKYAchat and #YATakeover, always with a cup of tea… though a teapot of prosecco may well be the way forwards now our Mad Hatter Tea-Party metaphor has put the idea in our heads.

About Alexia:

A British-American citizen of Italian heritage, Alexia is an author (The Bone Dragon and The House of Windows), editor and writing consultant. She also teaches English Literature and Writing. She is the visionary behind #YAShot and she will be taking part in the "Growing up and Moving out" author panel alongside Keris Stainton for the #YAtakeover on the 21st August.

Find out more information about #YAshot

Follow Alexia on Twitter (@AlexiaCasale)

Buy House of Windows on Foyles and Waterstones.

'The Art of Being Normal' Review

 

'The Art of Being Normal' by Lisa Williamson
Review by Sarah Nuttall

Summary:

David Piper is a fourteen-year old boy who has kept a secret for years. A secret that makes him feel different, scared and alone, yet the implications of revealing the secret could shatter David’s world. For David knows that he is a girl in a boy’s body, he has known for years and the secret is slowly weighing him down to the point where he feels he is drowning. Leo also has a secret, one that he would prefer to keep hidden from the world and has switched schools to hide. Leo knows this secret could shatter his new life so he keeps people at bay. However, when the mysterious Leo befriends David to protect him from being bullied, they both recognise that each is holding onto a secret. This friendship allows both David and Leo to take the first steps into the adult world allowing them to understand themselves and offering them acceptance, independence, love and happiness. 

Review:

The Art of Being Normal is the debut novel from Lisa Williamson and based simply on the quality of this debut, I have high expectations of what wonders she will bring to the YA genre. Although this book wants to discuss the wider issues of the LGBT community, it is secondary to creating memorable, original and well-crafted characters that I loved spending time with. I felt like I could identify with all the characters in the book despite not facing the same challenges and obstacles in my life. The book is so beautifully written that I cried several times and for days afterwards, I thought about the characters and the world they inhabited. I raved about this book to anyone who would listen that that they needed to read this book as I wanted to share the brilliance with everyone and discuss the issues raised.

I absolutely adored this book and think it is one of the most important YA books of the last ten years and marks a milestone in the understanding and reflection of an important issue in the LGBT community. Its central character is aware he is transgender and is viewing his options for transitioning to become, on the outside, a reflection of who David is on the inside. It is the first book I’ve read in YA that contains characters that are transgender and are at different stages of their transitioning and I hope it opens a door for further books on the subject. It eloquently depicts the wide-ranging issues that the transgender community face and how challenging this can be in the context of high school.

I find the high school setting to be one of the book's greatest strengths. There is nothing scarier in the world to a teenager than the loss of routine (school-life and home-life), friends and family and David’s secret has the potential to shatter them all. The fear that to become who David truly is, might cause those he loves to turn their back on him and destroy not only his home-life but also school-life, is a truly terrible possibility; one that would strike fear into the hearts of all teenagers and a fear David lives with daily. It is incredibly difficult to be unique in high school where the pressure to conform to the status quo is overwhelming. David’s choice is incredibly brave and moving and it is a pleasure to follow David on his journey. I do not want to go too deeply into the challenges David faces as the route David takes is unexpected and thrilling and I found the book was far more emotionally thrilling and unpredictable the less I knew. What I can say about this book is that it is a character-driven story and rich in plot with unexpected twists and turns that are believable and allow our characters to discover more about themselves.

The transgender/transitioning is a major plot point of The Art of Being Normal and it is treated with the upmost respect, love and understanding rather than being used for shock value or to sensationalise. The book is also realistic in portraying that there is still ignorance within society with the concept of transgender and transitioning and that this is not the end for David; there will be more challenges to face; more adversity to overcome. It is for this reason alone thatThe Art of Being Normal deserves the acclaim it has received. It has shined a light into a community that is under-represented by the media and society at large and often misunderstood. It also highlights the dangers the community faces from this ignorance, even though this year has seen several high-profile members of the transgender community speak out about their experiences such as Caitlyn Jenner and the development of the first Miss Transgender UK however there is still too much work to be done.

In the US alone this year, 17 transgender women have been murdered which is more than the entirety of the previous year. Acts of violence against the transgender community are not rare. Transphobia is real. According to the American Psychological Association, transgender children are likelier to face harassment and bullying than their peers and ¾ of transgender children reported feeling unsafe. It is a sobering thought that children can feel unsafe simply because of their sexual identity. The Art of Being Normal is therefore not only a well crated novel with a message but a book that can provide a little hope for the future whether it is allowing transgender children to feel less alone or providing non-transgender children a glimpse into a world they don’t know but the more we understand, the better a world we can make for everyone.

Rating: 5/5 Stars  ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

Sarah Nuttall

Sarah is an active contributor for the YAfictionados blog site. She has written posts for the Waterstones blog and has worked as a bookseller (for 9 years), a Children's bookseller (for 6 years) and is now a manager at her local bookstore. Needless to say, Sarah is a valued member of the YAfictionados team - a true Children's and YA literature expert.