About this episode
In this episode, M.T. takes us on his own journey to embracing these genres as a writer, he talks about the growing relevance of their ability to offer societal critiques and representation in the increasingly hostile censorship movements, and he tells us about his new story where he uses a new perspective to learn about the world (his dog’s).
“If you write about the world as it is, there's too much of a danger of it just feeding into our assumption that everything that we live with is right and normal. Whereas if you start to say, well wait, let's project this into the future, or let's see where this comes from in the past, suddenly it opens up a whole new vista about what the present is doing." - M.T. Anderson
M.T. Anderson's home in small-town Vermont is rumored to be haunted and he relishes the ghost stories told about it. Despite his analog lifestyle and lack of belief in the paranormal, he spends a lot of his time dreaming up sci-fi and fantasy adventures. Aside from just being fun, he considers the genre to hold a unique power in removing our own preconceived ideas and giving us fresh eyes to rethink our values and society.
M.T. has demonstrated that ability in books like Feed, Landscape with Invisible Hand, and even his historical fiction duology Octavian Nothing. But to realize the power of the genres, he had to overcome the stigma that sci-fi and fantasy were inferior to traditional realism, or as he calls it, “New York realism.”
For his reading challenge, Hometown Lore, M.T. challenges readers to find the magic and weird stories hidden in their hometowns. Reading challenges from other author guests are always available at thereadingculturepod.com.
This episode's Beanstack featured librarian is Iuyana Miller, the media specialist at Young Middle School in Atlanta. Along with being the 2022 Media Specialist of the Year for Atlanta Public Schools, she is also referred to as the “book fairy” by her elementary students. Iyuana shares a story of how she ventured beyond her comfort zone to meet her middle school kids where they are and engage them more than she ever imagined.
Contents
- Chapter 1 - The Ghost and the Corgi (2:07)
- Chapter 2 - The Forest of Massachusetts (4:44)
- Chapter 3 - Moominland Midwinter (in winter) (9:46)
- Chapter 4 - Building on ruins (16:08)
- Chapter 5 - Aliens Make Everything Better (20:18)
- Chapter 6 - The truth behind the fantasy (26:37)
- Chapter 7 - The magical dog (31:22)
- Chapter 8 - Hometown Lore (34:17)
- Chapter 9 - Beanstack Featured Librarian (36:05)
Author Reading Challenge
Download the free reading challenge worksheet, or view the challenge materials on our helpdesk.
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M.T. Anderson:
I really believe that literature should take us away from where we are right now so that we can see where we are right now with new eyes. If you write about the world as it is, there's too much of a danger of it just feeding into our assumption that everything that we live with is right and normal.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
M.T. Anderson has devoted his career to writing stories that do exactly this, presenting us with a way to reevaluate the world around us. From the dystopian fiction of his book, Feed, to the sci-fi satire of Landscape with Invisible Hand, to the National Book Award-winning Octavian Nothing, M.T.'s books cross many genres.
But a common thread throughout his wide-ranging work is the skillful use of imagination and fantasy to challenge young readers to rethink what they consider normal in society and in their lives. What's more, M.T. believes that once-maligned genres like sci-fi give writers ways to make emotional connections with readers that traditional realism doesn't offer.
M.T. Anderson:
This is not simply a gadgets and aliens genre. This is a way for me to understand the human condition at its heart. And so you're getting this beautiful crop of writers in all these things that were previously considered as genre ghettos.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
In today's episode, M.T. joins us to talk about the sneaky relevance of sci-fi and fantasy, how he enjoys being just a dot in the continuum of history, and how his dog taught him to write his latest middle grade novel.
My name is Jordan Lloyd Bookey, and this is The Reading Culture, a show where we speak with authors and reading enthusiasts to explore ways to build a stronger culture of reading in our communities. We dive into their personal experiences, their inspirations, and why their stories and ideas motivate kids to read more.
I feel like where you're sitting and whatever's behind you is exactly how I might have imagined where you'd be sitting and what's behind you.
M.T. Anderson:
Yeah, so I live, most of the time, in a little haunted 18th century house up in the hills of Vermont. So I'm sitting here in my study. Yeah, I agree, it looks a little bit like a Jane Austen novel in here.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
How do you know it's haunted?
M.T. Anderson:
Well, I was told before I moved in. People warned me, they were like, "It's super cheap, but it's haunted."
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Oh my God.
M.T. Anderson:
I was like, "Well, I don't really believe in ghosts, so I'm fine with that." People said, "Well, there's a child that wails outside of one of the windows." And I was like, "Well, if the child's wailing outside of the window, it's not the homeowner's problem. It's not inside the building. It's not my problem. It's not like a plumbing problem." I moved in and indeed, three days after I moved in, I was sitting here writing a speech, most of the house was absolutely empty because it had to be fixed up. It was in terrible, terrible shape. And suddenly, I did in fact hear a wailing outside the window.
Well, first of all, I've never had the experience of actually feeling yourself go pale before. I mean, I'm already pretty pale, but still, I could tell that just the blood had drained from my face. And then I immediately started to Google the cries of local mammals. And I don't know, I don't know what it is. But I did find a couple of letters under the floorboards upstairs from the kids who lived here to the ghost.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
No way.
M.T. Anderson:
Yeah, and they were incredibly sweet because it's like this little girl saying, "Dear Ghost, I love you. I think you are cute. I hope your mom gives you a corgi so you can ride on it. Do you like to ice skate?" That was the text of it, and I loved it because it was like-
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
They must have pictured her very small to have a corgi that she's riding on. Okay.
M.T. Anderson:
Totally. Yeah. In fact, I kind of wonder if that, I don't know, isn't from something. But what I loved about it was that there's this weird compassion that this child is showing for the ghost, feeling that the ghost somehow is lonely and wanting to take care of it. But at the same time, it's a way of a child who might be frightened of being upstairs alone making a ghost that is approachable and human. So I think it's kind of a beautiful move by this kid that she comforts herself and the ghost at the same time.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yeah, I love that image, that idea. But you're in Vermont and you grew up in Massachusetts, so let's go back to the beginning. What was growing up in Massachusetts like?
M.T. Anderson:
I loved growing up in Massachusetts. I mean, I loved the fact that in my town there were houses that went back to the 18th century. I loved just the sense of history there and also of the mystery of the forests. The town I grew up in had been an agricultural community serving Boston up until the 1950s with the introduction of refrigerated cars and things that could bring food from far away. Up until then, the town had been basically farms. So the cool thing was by the time I grew up there, it was filled with forests because those farms had become obsolete. And so it was just a town filled with this woodland. And then unfortunately, I had to watch, as I was in my 20s, and of course as the suburbs spread, and then it basically became a suburban community.
That really affected my reading too because it meant that there were these kind of fantasy landscapes all around me. I was a big lover of fantasy, and here I was in the middle of all these forests with paths going through and old crumbling walls and that kind of thing. So it really sparked my imagination. I had a great childhood for that kind of reason.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Did you have siblings growing up?
M.T. Anderson:
Not for the first 10 years. My sister was born only when I was 10 years old. So I was an only child, I pretended a lot by myself in the woods, which I think was probably also a really important experience. In terms of becoming a writer, you start to make up stories on your own.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Was it a pretty rural environment then? What was your school life like and did you live by a library? That kind of stuff.
M.T. Anderson:
It was much more suburban-feeling than, I mean, it might not have looked like a suburb, but it still felt suburban compared to where I live now, where, for example, the town I live in now in Vermont, there are 100 miles of road and only two of those roads are actually paved. So that's much more rural than where I grew up where it was a lot of old crumbling farms and things, but at the same time, I took the bus to school like everyone else, and I had a very standard small-town experience, I think, growing up.
There was a library that I totally loved. All of the descriptions in Ray Bradbury's books of libraries as this place where down one aisle is Egypt and down another aisle is Thailand and that kind of thing, where he's talking about the power of libraries to allow you to travel to places that are far away or places that haven't ever even existed. That kind of thing was so true for me when I was a kid. I loved that library. And it was one of those old Carnegie libraries, so it looked kind of like a castle. It had a turret. So that made the adventure all the more exciting.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
More magical.
M.T. Anderson:
When I read John Bellair's books, for example, they're often set in a small-town-feeling place with that sort of library where it's clearly supposed to be a kind of Carnegie library, brick, that kind of thing, and those always spoke to me a lot for that reason. I loved that sense of the library is a place of secrets, a place of mysteries, a place of an adventure.
And I think that that's actually a really important way to get kids involved in reading, but more than that, just to get them involved in the wider world is to say, "Look, knowledge is an adventure and that's what's so great about learning things."
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
What were some of the books that you remember that shaped your early childhood?
M.T. Anderson:
Dr. Seuss's books were totally fundamental to my thinking, even the ones that now I would actually probably not necessarily pass on to a kid. I did lectures about 10 or 15 years ago about those books that I loved so much and about how there's a whole set of Dr. Seuss's books from his middle period that are all about an imaginative boy who transforms the landscape sometimes for better, sometimes, especially from a modern point of view, for the worst.
He creates a circus in an abandoned lot through his imagination. He makes a giant omelet out of all the most precious and unusual birds in the world. That idea of imagination was really, really important to me, and the idea of a bored boy in the middle of nowhere whose imagination transforms things. And now I've come to see that as being also, as I think Dr. Seuss himself, he turned away from that narrative later in his work. I mean The Lorax, it's all of the same pieces of narrative, but turned to the opposite direction as those middle period books. But nonetheless, that idea of the transforming power of imagination, that was really important to me.
The sky was almost black, but the snow shone a bright blue in the moonlight. Inside the house was warm and cozy. Heaps of peat were quietly smoldering in the central heating stove down in the cellar. The moon looked in sometimes at the drawing room window lighting on the white winter covers of the chairs and on the cut glass chandelier in its white gauze bag. And in the drawing room also, grouped around the biggest porcelain stove of the house, the Moomin family lay sleeping their long winter sleep.
They always slept from November to April because such was the custom of their forefathers and Moomins stick to tradition. Everybody had a good meal of pine needles in their stomachs, just as their ancestors used to have. And beside their beds, they had hopefully laid out everything likely to be needed in early spring.
The silence was deep and expectant. Every now and then, someone sighed and curled deeper down under the quilt. The streak of moonlight wandered from rocking chair to drawing room table, crawled over the brass knobs of the bed, and shone straight in Moomintroll's face. And now something happened that had never happened before, not since the first Moomin took to his hibernating den, Moomintroll awoke and found that he couldn't go back to sleep again.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Moominland Midwinter is the sixth installment in Swedish-Finnish author, Tove Jansson's Moomins series. The series chronicles the lives of Moomins, tiny creatures who lived deep in the forests of Finland. It kind of reminded me of when Kate DiCamillo was on the show and she talked about one of her favorite books, The Borrowers.
The first Moominland story was released in 1945, and Jansson would stick with the creatures until 1993, writing nine chapter books, five picture books, and a comic strip. There's even a Moomin World theme park in Finland. This novel marked a turning point in the tone of the series, as Jansson began to use the fantastical setting to delve deeper into emotional themes. Despite being the sixth installment, Moominland Midwinter was M.T.'s first venture into the imaginative world of these little creatures.
M.T. Anderson:
There I was, it was a snowy evening. I was sitting by the fire in the house. It was warm and cozy, and I'm reading this book about a boy confronting winter. And I just remember, I mean even though he's a boy that has a giant snout and a tail, I remember just feeling that wonderful sense of connection with the book. And then reading the books by this woman became a big thing for me, and in fact, still, when I was writing the novel of mine that's about to come out, Elf Dog and Owl Head, I still was really thinking of her as a model because I love her work so much even as an adult.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
I could imagine, like there's this whole other world you didn't know, some whole other reality that was just right underneath the surface or happening when you weren't there.
M.T. Anderson:
Right. And also, I think these are books in particular that are really good at depicting the emotional life of children where oftentimes, they don't exactly have the words to explain what the emotions are, and there are these moments of rage or of euphoria or whatever where, as a kid, you don't really know what's going on. You're just along for the emotional ride, you know what I mean?
And these books, they're good at depicting emotions that don't really have a name, and that's what I think as a kid I was like, "Oh, wow, there's not just happy and sad. There's also this thing like melancholy. I don't even know exactly what it is, but I kind of know what it means now that I've read this." In a way, you need to find the word for an emotion to know even that you've experienced it sometimes. If we don't have the language to describe the things we're feeling, sometimes we can't even recognize that that is what we've felt.
Also, I'll say that they begin, when she's first writing them, they're very adventure-oriented, it's going on quests and that kind of thing. And then the cool thing, but the odd thing is also, as they go along, they become less and less exterior and more internal. The final one, Moominland in November, the Moomins aren't even in their own valley. It's about a bunch of people coming to their house to meet them and finding them gone and sitting around waiting for them to return. And so the whole book is about absence. And then finally, the very final scene is-
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Like Waiting for Godot.
M.T. Anderson:
Right, exactly, it is. And the final scene is you just see a boat on the horizon and you know that they're coming back and that's the end.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Oh my God, so you don't get closure. Okay.
M.T. Anderson:
No.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
M.T.'s experience of huddling up in a cozy country home in the middle of winter, reading about these fascinating little creatures sparked a deep interest in otherworldly and imaginative ideas. The works of Ray Bradbury would also become some of his personal favorites.
M.T. Anderson:
He's an incredible writer too. I mean, just his sentences are really beautiful.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Growing up, he found himself surrounded by magical settings minus the actual magic. Allowing his imagination to wander, he was drawn even further into sci-fi and fantasy stories.
M.T. Anderson:
During my formative years, basically almost before I can remember, like when I was four and five, my dad was posted to a military base in Italy. So we lived in Italy for a year and a bit. And there, we rented an apartment that was in a repurposed medieval monastery. There was a crumbling old castle in town, and so I was living in this landscape. Europe is where so much fantasy, especially the fantasy written then, it's based on that history.
So I came back and one of the stories I like to tell is that when I got to kindergarten in the US, they actually were worried at one point because when they gave me blocks to play with, I would just make these tumbled piles. And when they asked me about it and why don't you make a building, I was like, "Well, I'm building a ruin." I think that in some ways what I still do as a writer is build ruins.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Interesting. Can you talk a little bit more about that, you're building ruins?
M.T. Anderson:
Well, I mean, I think I do a lot of stuff that is historically based or whatever else. So it's like my Octavian books, which are kind of gothic novels set during the American Revolution, they are in the guise of something that survives secretly from that time until this. It's like, "Oh, here is this book by this person who then disappeared into the wilderness."
I really believe that literature should take us away from where we are right now so that we can see where we are right now with new eyes. If you write about the world as it is, there's too much of a danger of it just feeding into our assumption that everything that we live with is right and normal. Whereas if you start to say, "Well, wait, let's project this into the future, or let's see where this comes from in the past," suddenly it opens up a whole new vista about what the present is doing in the same way that so many figures, like wise man, wise woman figures from the past would speak in parables. Because you tell that little story and then suddenly someone realizes, "Oh, that can also mean this about my life."
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
What strikes me about you as a person, I think, is that you're in a place that has not the best internet with the dirt roads and very analog lifestyle in a lot of ways. And it seems like the way you're talking about libraries and the rows of books, I mean, that's what I think it seems like brings you all this joy and grounding. But then the other side of you, it's like you're very futuristic. You're seeing all these things. Many of your books are telling the future and you love fantasy and sci-fi. And so it's kind of an interesting dichotomy, I guess.
M.T. Anderson:
Yeah, and I mean in some ways it's because I'm concerned about the future that I embrace the past, I think to some extent. But also, I think that one of the great joys of being alive is recognizing that we're just this tiny little spot in a human continuum that goes so far into the past and so far into the future we can't even see the ends of it.
And so I love the idea participating in the whole history of the human race, and I feel like it's such an exciting thing for us. It's one of the great pleasures of being human is to say, "Oh, look what happened to us in the past. Look what things we did. Look what we accomplished or look what we didn't accomplish. Look at the ways we were blind." And then to also say, "What are people in the future going to look back at and say, 'Oh, I can't believe they did that'?"
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
I think some people view that as scary, like when you realize, when you have that moment that everybody does where you're like, "Oh, wait, I'm just this dot in this very long continuum, and this is just once." But a lot of people, I think, view that as a, I don't know, that have a different perspective of it.
M.T. Anderson:
Yeah, I mean, in some ways it is scary. We want to matter more than we do, I guess, in a way. On the other hand, it's part of trying to participate fully in life. We're only here once, and so we have to be aware of the world around us and aware of all the things that are sad about that as well as the things that are joyful. And I think that's a really tremendous thing. I mean, when you suffer a loss, someone you love or whatever else, one of the ways to get through it, and I know that this is small consolation in many cases, but is to say, "But I had the beauty of loving in the first place. And I can tell how beautiful that is by how sad I am now."
That's one of the ways people get through that kind of thing and I don't think that that's just being somehow Pollyanna-ish. I think it actually is a fundamental spiritual thing where we can recognize that suffering and sadness are all part of this tapestry of being alive. We have to embrace them all.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Throughout the years, science fiction and fantasy have had an uphill battle in being taken as seriously as other genres, or in some cases seriously at all. They were often perceived as campy and lacking depth to the point where some of the most famous writers to embrace the genre such as Kurt Vonnegut were averse to being labeled as sci-fi writers. While stories like 2001: A Space Odyssey helped open the door for people to understand the true depth science fiction can hold, the stigma was, and to some extent still is present.
M.T. Anderson:
I think that the deal is that up until around 2005 or 2010, there really was a sense of literary fiction as being exalted and as a genre unlike any other genre. So it was kind of like, it's not separate but equal, it was actually better. So for example, in MFA programs and in writing programs, when you wrote woodenly and badly people could be like, "Oh my God, this is like a YA novel," or, "This reads like sci-fi." That was definitely a negative thing back then, and yet, those were the things that I totally was into.
At that time, I felt like there's not a novel in the world that's not improved by an alien abduction, I would've said around the year 2000. I'm not sure about that now, but the point is, I think one of the great things is that people have realized that literary realism, which was this bulwark of the literary world, it is its own genre with its own conventions.
And that means that also, that the quality of science fiction, for example, has gone way up because people who might not have wanted to write in that genre previously, now were like, "Well, wait, I can really explore the depth of human emotion in this. This is not simply a gadgets and aliens genre. This is a way for me to understand the human condition at its heart." And so you're getting a beautiful crop of writers in all these things that were previously considered as genre ghettos.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Okay, so in 2019, you received the Margaret A. Edwards Award for your, quote, "Significant and lasting contribution to writing for teens." And in your acceptance speech, you said this, "When future scholars of literature look back on the 21st century, they're going to see the first few decades of this millennium as a golden age of young adult literature, when books for teens went from being the unloved byproduct of picture book publishing to becoming an art form of central importance to the culture as a whole."
I wholeheartedly agree with that, and I'm wondering if you feel the same about science fiction and fantasy.
M.T. Anderson:
I mean, there always have been wonderful writers in sci-fi or fantasy or mystery or whatever, but what would happen is that if someone got particularly literary, say Thomas Pynchon, as a sci-fi writer, he would kind of suffer an apotheosis and suddenly people would be like, "You're allowed to come upstairs now. Come up to literary fiction." And so he's no longer considered a sci-fi writer, he's a literary writer, you know what I mean?
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yeah.
M.T. Anderson:
Or John Le Carre, they're like, "You're not a spy writer anymore." You know what I mean? It's like you receive the benediction from the Pope or something. And now instead, I think the really helpful thing is that everyone is just like, "No, there can be great writers who write about things that are not in our normal course of human life, not in our daily life or whatever else." There can be great writers in any genre, and we don't have to actually keep them all separated and segregated to preserve the purity of this one thing that was really New York-based realism, which was so important for a lot of the 20th century.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
New York-based realism, I like that. So you've spoken a lot about how society oftentimes underestimates the intelligence of young readers, and I think it's interesting that a lot of your books, despite being for teens, can be perceived as or are really challenging. So do you think that historical fiction or sci-fi and fantasy offer the ability to add that complexity and allow you to write in more challenging ways for young readers?
M.T. Anderson:
I'm mainly thinking about the wanting to depict the emotional realities of their lives. When I set out to write a book like that, it's because there's a part of me that is still that age, and I want to write to that. But I do think that it is true that if you look at what, especially people like teachers, librarians, writers, all these people who end up saying, "Oh, this is going to be too complicated for a kid," if we look at the stuff that we read as teens, we inevitably say, "Well, I mean, I was reading, whatever the example is, The great Gatsby, at age 12, and I loved it, but it's really too complicated a text for other 12 year olds." What kind of hubris is that? Of course, if we can understand it, then they can.
And a lot of it is the cultural feeling around knowing things that is so complicated in this country right now. I mean, think about this, we're having a conversation at a time of censorship in a way that we haven't for decades that has not been this big an issue, like counterfactual information, like people praising ignorance, left and right, which is really, really frightening.
And so I think that the other side of that is that we are emotionally and biologically capable of understanding incredibly complicated things at a really young age, but American culture has always had a kind of anti-intellectual bias to it that unfortunately, I think has become really dangerous in our country. It's become a real political danger.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Science fiction and fantasy provide a sandbox for authors to explore deep topics in unbound ways. Additionally, they provide a safe way for writers to tell stories and commentary on more complex and dangerous topics. In an increasingly difficult and dark time for literature in America, these genres could see more utilization as the fight over censorship wages on.
M.T. Anderson:
Well, I mean, if you look at the role that science fiction and fantasy play in dictatorships, things like the Strugatskys who are a couple of brothers who wrote science fiction in Russia, or Cixin Liu, who is a really now globally successful Chinese science fiction writer. And it's really, really interesting to see the way that they can say things that normally would get someone locked up. There's always deniability that comes with the set of unreal symbols that they're working through.
One interesting thing that I've been looking into recently is there's a series on Netflix called The Untamed that is actually based on a set of Chinese novels. And the interesting thing about it is, it is pretty much overtly a gay love story between these two young wizard martial arts fighters. It has a big chunk of it that is essentially like if you had a gay Harry Potter situation. They're at this school, this conference, blah, blah, blah, they're falling in love.
Now the thing is that of course, homosexuality is basically forbidden in China at this point, in fact it's gotten even harsher over the last few years. And the author of this series I have heard, who goes by a pseudonym, supposedly spent time even in jail because of this. But the series, what it does is it allides all of the moments that would be kissing. The plot doesn't work if they're not in love with each other. And yet at the same time, it never says these two guys are in love with each other. It's just entirely clear.
So anyway, I think that's also a really interesting example of how you can get around censorship by putting something in a magical world where no one's going to pay as much attention.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yeah, definitely. So right now we're going through our own censorship battles in America. What do you think is a path forward from here?
M.T. Anderson:
I think it's a tough one because the problem is that the path out of it is education, but at the same time, it is education that has the ax laid to the roots right now. And then that's why the ax is laid to the roots because education is in fact the transformative institution in any nation. If we can convince people that science makes sense, that the rest of the world exists with us in an equilibrium and we have to understand that equilibrium and we have to know who are our actual opponents and who are people who just irritate us, all of that kind of thing we have to know about. We have to deeply know and understand other cultures if we're going to move forward in any strategic way. All of that stuff is being thrown out the window in favor of a really coarse, simplistic mythology.
And it's funny because you and I have been talking a lot about fantasy, and yet, when it comes down to it, the American fantasies of power and of opposition and that kind of thing, those are some of the more dangerous ones. Those are the ones that are shaping our world certainly, and in many cases, are shaping the lives of people all around the world.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yeah, that is very interesting. I hadn't thought about it, about that side of fantasy.
M.T. Anderson:
Take one example. I think it's so interesting that YA fantasy novels so frequently, without thinking about it, we replicate feudalism. So the happy ending is that the peasant turns out to be lord or lady so-and-so, or a princess of something, or whatever, and then they take power and they are what the 18th century would've called an enlightened despot. You know what I mean?
Fantasy, because it's based on feudal models, whether in the East or in the West, tends to be really, really politically retrogressive, like the power of democracy, how do you start some kind of thing about the power of democracy if you're setting it in a world where it's full of warlords and kings?
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
We've talked a lot about the complexities in M.T.'s work and how he uses fantasy to exaggerate ideas in order to challenge the real world. Often his style lends itself well to older readers, mostly falling in the young adult category. But in his new story, he's taking that style and applying it to a middle-grade novel. Elf Dog and Owl Head is a story about a young boy, Clay, who encounters a magical dog that has escaped from a kingdom under the mountains. They have a magical and unexpected series of adventures in the woods near Clay's home.
While researching the episode, I found pictures of M.T.'s old dog who sadly has passed away. I noticed that his dog looks strikingly similar to the one in the story. I was curious to learn if there was a connection.
M.T. Anderson:
The way the book came about was actually that right before the pandemic in around the end of 2019, my dog, who was about eight years old at that time, suddenly developed this terrible tumor. On my birthday I was told, "This dog probably has three or four days to live. You should actually set up an appointment for euthanasia by the end of the week."
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Oh my God.
M.T. Anderson:
And I just was like, "Okay." I was so deeply, deeply sad about it, but at the same time, I still took her out for little walks. I mean, all she could do was around the yard and that kind of thing. And the miraculous thing was, over the next two months, she recovered in a way that it was like it was magical in a sense. By a month later, we were going on a walks of five or six miles a day through the hills once again, and she was gaining weight again, and the growth of the tumor appears to have stopped. As I said earlier, there are a 100 miles of unpaved road in this town, we walked them all. That was my goal, was to walk all around the town.
So the pandemic hit, and I live alone in this, as I said, little 18th century house up in the hills here. That dog, LaRue, was my one companion for that whole time. For four months, she was the only creature I saw. Every day we would go for a walk and it just filled me with such joy and such gratitude that I had the love of that creature.
And also, you walk through the woods and you realize that you now see things through the dog's eyes and you hear them through the dog's ears. The dog teaches you how to understand the world in a different way. I mean, earlier we were talking about fiction doing that, how does fiction show you the familiar things so they become unfamiliar? And being with an animal who you're totally synced with, that also shows you the miraculous in the world around you.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Which she literally does in the book.
M.T. Anderson:
Right, exactly, right. I just made it literal. Exactly. Yeah, she shows him other worlds.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
In any place he's lived, whether it be a repurposed medieval monastery in Italy or a small haunted country house in the forest, M.T. has always found a sense of magic. For his reading challenge, Hometown Lore, he wants you to do the same.
M.T. Anderson:
My reading challenge is to read a book that is about the history or the weird lore of your own area, your own town. It used to be, for example, when I was going on book tours a lot, especially that you do that in the fall and in the spring especially. And in the fall it would be October, I'd be in some obscure part of the country, talking to people and that kind of thing and I would always, as a souvenir, buy a ghost book from that region. So like Ghosts of Central Michigan, that kind of thing.
And it was so fascinating because you read those and suddenly we're differentiated by our ghosts. Different parts of the country have different ghosts. Like down in Louisiana, there are pirates, that kind of thing. And then up in New England, there are Puritans.
So what I think would be really a great challenge would be for people to either something like one of these ghost books or books of weird and crazy and interesting sites right around you, or a book that interests you of some kind of local history. Something so that you know the stories of the place that you live so that you can feel like, "Oh, I live in a place that's like no other place."
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
You can check out M.T.'s challenge and all of our author reading challenges at thereadingculturepod.com. And today's Beanstack Featured Librarian is Iuyana Miller, the media specialist at Young Middle School in Atlanta and the city's Librarian of the Year last year. She shared the impact she saw when she stepped way out of her comfort zone to meet her middle school students where they are.
Iuyana Miller:
I started this last year because being in middle school, you have to get creative. And our whole theme here at the school is rebuilding the legacy. So TikTok was kind of, but I was like, "I don't need a TikTok. I don't want a TikTok. I'm not downloading TikTok." And our VILS coach, last year, she called me, she's like, "Ms. Miller, let's do a TikTok video." She was like, "Grab a book and talk about it." And I was like, "Okay."
And she did it, I grabbed a book, did a quick little spiel about it, and it took off like wildfire. And so I ended up doing a TikTok book of the week, and then lo and behold, I had random people saying, "Hey, I saw you on TikTok." And I was like, "Oh my gosh." And then I would highlight and tell them, "Oh, that's the book of the week." They was like, "Yeah, I saw it on TikTok." So that's what I did especially for my school in this environment. I had to find a way to meet them where they were.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
This has been The Reading Culture. You've been listening to our conversation with M.T. Anderson. Again, I'm your host, Jordan Lloyd Bookey, and currently I'm reading an Ember in the Ashes by Sabaa Tahir and Finding Me by Viola Davis.
If you've enjoyed today's show, please show some love and rate, subscribe, and share The Reading Culture among your friends and networks. To learn more about how you can help grow your community's reading culture, you can check out all of our resources at beanstack.com, and join us on social media, @thereadingculturepod, for some amazing giveaways.
Be sure to check out The Children's Book Podcast with teacher and librarian, Matthew Winner. It's a book podcast made for kids ages 6 to 12 that explores big ideas and the ways that stories can help us feel seen, understood, and valued. You can find it wherever you listen to podcasts.
This episode was produced by Jackie Lamport and Lower Street Media, and script edited by Josia Lamberto-Egan. We'll be back in two weeks with another episode. Thanks for joining and keep reading.
I really believe that literature should take us away from where we are right now so that we can see where we are right now with new eyes. If you write about the world as it is, there's too much of a danger of it just feeding into our assumption that everything that we live with is right and normal.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
M.T. Anderson has devoted his career to writing stories that do exactly this, presenting us with a way to reevaluate the world around us. From the dystopian fiction of his book, Feed, to the sci-fi satire of Landscape with Invisible Hand, to the National Book Award-winning Octavian Nothing, M.T.'s books cross many genres.
But a common thread throughout his wide-ranging work is the skillful use of imagination and fantasy to challenge young readers to rethink what they consider normal in society and in their lives. What's more, M.T. believes that once-maligned genres like sci-fi give writers ways to make emotional connections with readers that traditional realism doesn't offer.
M.T. Anderson:
This is not simply a gadgets and aliens genre. This is a way for me to understand the human condition at its heart. And so you're getting this beautiful crop of writers in all these things that were previously considered as genre ghettos.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
In today's episode, M.T. joins us to talk about the sneaky relevance of sci-fi and fantasy, how he enjoys being just a dot in the continuum of history, and how his dog taught him to write his latest middle grade novel.
My name is Jordan Lloyd Bookey, and this is The Reading Culture, a show where we speak with authors and reading enthusiasts to explore ways to build a stronger culture of reading in our communities. We dive into their personal experiences, their inspirations, and why their stories and ideas motivate kids to read more.
I feel like where you're sitting and whatever's behind you is exactly how I might have imagined where you'd be sitting and what's behind you.
M.T. Anderson:
Yeah, so I live, most of the time, in a little haunted 18th century house up in the hills of Vermont. So I'm sitting here in my study. Yeah, I agree, it looks a little bit like a Jane Austen novel in here.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
How do you know it's haunted?
M.T. Anderson:
Well, I was told before I moved in. People warned me, they were like, "It's super cheap, but it's haunted."
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Oh my God.
M.T. Anderson:
I was like, "Well, I don't really believe in ghosts, so I'm fine with that." People said, "Well, there's a child that wails outside of one of the windows." And I was like, "Well, if the child's wailing outside of the window, it's not the homeowner's problem. It's not inside the building. It's not my problem. It's not like a plumbing problem." I moved in and indeed, three days after I moved in, I was sitting here writing a speech, most of the house was absolutely empty because it had to be fixed up. It was in terrible, terrible shape. And suddenly, I did in fact hear a wailing outside the window.
Well, first of all, I've never had the experience of actually feeling yourself go pale before. I mean, I'm already pretty pale, but still, I could tell that just the blood had drained from my face. And then I immediately started to Google the cries of local mammals. And I don't know, I don't know what it is. But I did find a couple of letters under the floorboards upstairs from the kids who lived here to the ghost.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
No way.
M.T. Anderson:
Yeah, and they were incredibly sweet because it's like this little girl saying, "Dear Ghost, I love you. I think you are cute. I hope your mom gives you a corgi so you can ride on it. Do you like to ice skate?" That was the text of it, and I loved it because it was like-
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
They must have pictured her very small to have a corgi that she's riding on. Okay.
M.T. Anderson:
Totally. Yeah. In fact, I kind of wonder if that, I don't know, isn't from something. But what I loved about it was that there's this weird compassion that this child is showing for the ghost, feeling that the ghost somehow is lonely and wanting to take care of it. But at the same time, it's a way of a child who might be frightened of being upstairs alone making a ghost that is approachable and human. So I think it's kind of a beautiful move by this kid that she comforts herself and the ghost at the same time.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yeah, I love that image, that idea. But you're in Vermont and you grew up in Massachusetts, so let's go back to the beginning. What was growing up in Massachusetts like?
M.T. Anderson:
I loved growing up in Massachusetts. I mean, I loved the fact that in my town there were houses that went back to the 18th century. I loved just the sense of history there and also of the mystery of the forests. The town I grew up in had been an agricultural community serving Boston up until the 1950s with the introduction of refrigerated cars and things that could bring food from far away. Up until then, the town had been basically farms. So the cool thing was by the time I grew up there, it was filled with forests because those farms had become obsolete. And so it was just a town filled with this woodland. And then unfortunately, I had to watch, as I was in my 20s, and of course as the suburbs spread, and then it basically became a suburban community.
That really affected my reading too because it meant that there were these kind of fantasy landscapes all around me. I was a big lover of fantasy, and here I was in the middle of all these forests with paths going through and old crumbling walls and that kind of thing. So it really sparked my imagination. I had a great childhood for that kind of reason.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Did you have siblings growing up?
M.T. Anderson:
Not for the first 10 years. My sister was born only when I was 10 years old. So I was an only child, I pretended a lot by myself in the woods, which I think was probably also a really important experience. In terms of becoming a writer, you start to make up stories on your own.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Was it a pretty rural environment then? What was your school life like and did you live by a library? That kind of stuff.
M.T. Anderson:
It was much more suburban-feeling than, I mean, it might not have looked like a suburb, but it still felt suburban compared to where I live now, where, for example, the town I live in now in Vermont, there are 100 miles of road and only two of those roads are actually paved. So that's much more rural than where I grew up where it was a lot of old crumbling farms and things, but at the same time, I took the bus to school like everyone else, and I had a very standard small-town experience, I think, growing up.
There was a library that I totally loved. All of the descriptions in Ray Bradbury's books of libraries as this place where down one aisle is Egypt and down another aisle is Thailand and that kind of thing, where he's talking about the power of libraries to allow you to travel to places that are far away or places that haven't ever even existed. That kind of thing was so true for me when I was a kid. I loved that library. And it was one of those old Carnegie libraries, so it looked kind of like a castle. It had a turret. So that made the adventure all the more exciting.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
More magical.
M.T. Anderson:
When I read John Bellair's books, for example, they're often set in a small-town-feeling place with that sort of library where it's clearly supposed to be a kind of Carnegie library, brick, that kind of thing, and those always spoke to me a lot for that reason. I loved that sense of the library is a place of secrets, a place of mysteries, a place of an adventure.
And I think that that's actually a really important way to get kids involved in reading, but more than that, just to get them involved in the wider world is to say, "Look, knowledge is an adventure and that's what's so great about learning things."
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
What were some of the books that you remember that shaped your early childhood?
M.T. Anderson:
Dr. Seuss's books were totally fundamental to my thinking, even the ones that now I would actually probably not necessarily pass on to a kid. I did lectures about 10 or 15 years ago about those books that I loved so much and about how there's a whole set of Dr. Seuss's books from his middle period that are all about an imaginative boy who transforms the landscape sometimes for better, sometimes, especially from a modern point of view, for the worst.
He creates a circus in an abandoned lot through his imagination. He makes a giant omelet out of all the most precious and unusual birds in the world. That idea of imagination was really, really important to me, and the idea of a bored boy in the middle of nowhere whose imagination transforms things. And now I've come to see that as being also, as I think Dr. Seuss himself, he turned away from that narrative later in his work. I mean The Lorax, it's all of the same pieces of narrative, but turned to the opposite direction as those middle period books. But nonetheless, that idea of the transforming power of imagination, that was really important to me.
The sky was almost black, but the snow shone a bright blue in the moonlight. Inside the house was warm and cozy. Heaps of peat were quietly smoldering in the central heating stove down in the cellar. The moon looked in sometimes at the drawing room window lighting on the white winter covers of the chairs and on the cut glass chandelier in its white gauze bag. And in the drawing room also, grouped around the biggest porcelain stove of the house, the Moomin family lay sleeping their long winter sleep.
They always slept from November to April because such was the custom of their forefathers and Moomins stick to tradition. Everybody had a good meal of pine needles in their stomachs, just as their ancestors used to have. And beside their beds, they had hopefully laid out everything likely to be needed in early spring.
The silence was deep and expectant. Every now and then, someone sighed and curled deeper down under the quilt. The streak of moonlight wandered from rocking chair to drawing room table, crawled over the brass knobs of the bed, and shone straight in Moomintroll's face. And now something happened that had never happened before, not since the first Moomin took to his hibernating den, Moomintroll awoke and found that he couldn't go back to sleep again.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Moominland Midwinter is the sixth installment in Swedish-Finnish author, Tove Jansson's Moomins series. The series chronicles the lives of Moomins, tiny creatures who lived deep in the forests of Finland. It kind of reminded me of when Kate DiCamillo was on the show and she talked about one of her favorite books, The Borrowers.
The first Moominland story was released in 1945, and Jansson would stick with the creatures until 1993, writing nine chapter books, five picture books, and a comic strip. There's even a Moomin World theme park in Finland. This novel marked a turning point in the tone of the series, as Jansson began to use the fantastical setting to delve deeper into emotional themes. Despite being the sixth installment, Moominland Midwinter was M.T.'s first venture into the imaginative world of these little creatures.
M.T. Anderson:
There I was, it was a snowy evening. I was sitting by the fire in the house. It was warm and cozy, and I'm reading this book about a boy confronting winter. And I just remember, I mean even though he's a boy that has a giant snout and a tail, I remember just feeling that wonderful sense of connection with the book. And then reading the books by this woman became a big thing for me, and in fact, still, when I was writing the novel of mine that's about to come out, Elf Dog and Owl Head, I still was really thinking of her as a model because I love her work so much even as an adult.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
I could imagine, like there's this whole other world you didn't know, some whole other reality that was just right underneath the surface or happening when you weren't there.
M.T. Anderson:
Right. And also, I think these are books in particular that are really good at depicting the emotional life of children where oftentimes, they don't exactly have the words to explain what the emotions are, and there are these moments of rage or of euphoria or whatever where, as a kid, you don't really know what's going on. You're just along for the emotional ride, you know what I mean?
And these books, they're good at depicting emotions that don't really have a name, and that's what I think as a kid I was like, "Oh, wow, there's not just happy and sad. There's also this thing like melancholy. I don't even know exactly what it is, but I kind of know what it means now that I've read this." In a way, you need to find the word for an emotion to know even that you've experienced it sometimes. If we don't have the language to describe the things we're feeling, sometimes we can't even recognize that that is what we've felt.
Also, I'll say that they begin, when she's first writing them, they're very adventure-oriented, it's going on quests and that kind of thing. And then the cool thing, but the odd thing is also, as they go along, they become less and less exterior and more internal. The final one, Moominland in November, the Moomins aren't even in their own valley. It's about a bunch of people coming to their house to meet them and finding them gone and sitting around waiting for them to return. And so the whole book is about absence. And then finally, the very final scene is-
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Like Waiting for Godot.
M.T. Anderson:
Right, exactly, it is. And the final scene is you just see a boat on the horizon and you know that they're coming back and that's the end.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Oh my God, so you don't get closure. Okay.
M.T. Anderson:
No.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
M.T.'s experience of huddling up in a cozy country home in the middle of winter, reading about these fascinating little creatures sparked a deep interest in otherworldly and imaginative ideas. The works of Ray Bradbury would also become some of his personal favorites.
M.T. Anderson:
He's an incredible writer too. I mean, just his sentences are really beautiful.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Growing up, he found himself surrounded by magical settings minus the actual magic. Allowing his imagination to wander, he was drawn even further into sci-fi and fantasy stories.
M.T. Anderson:
During my formative years, basically almost before I can remember, like when I was four and five, my dad was posted to a military base in Italy. So we lived in Italy for a year and a bit. And there, we rented an apartment that was in a repurposed medieval monastery. There was a crumbling old castle in town, and so I was living in this landscape. Europe is where so much fantasy, especially the fantasy written then, it's based on that history.
So I came back and one of the stories I like to tell is that when I got to kindergarten in the US, they actually were worried at one point because when they gave me blocks to play with, I would just make these tumbled piles. And when they asked me about it and why don't you make a building, I was like, "Well, I'm building a ruin." I think that in some ways what I still do as a writer is build ruins.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Interesting. Can you talk a little bit more about that, you're building ruins?
M.T. Anderson:
Well, I mean, I think I do a lot of stuff that is historically based or whatever else. So it's like my Octavian books, which are kind of gothic novels set during the American Revolution, they are in the guise of something that survives secretly from that time until this. It's like, "Oh, here is this book by this person who then disappeared into the wilderness."
I really believe that literature should take us away from where we are right now so that we can see where we are right now with new eyes. If you write about the world as it is, there's too much of a danger of it just feeding into our assumption that everything that we live with is right and normal. Whereas if you start to say, "Well, wait, let's project this into the future, or let's see where this comes from in the past," suddenly it opens up a whole new vista about what the present is doing in the same way that so many figures, like wise man, wise woman figures from the past would speak in parables. Because you tell that little story and then suddenly someone realizes, "Oh, that can also mean this about my life."
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
What strikes me about you as a person, I think, is that you're in a place that has not the best internet with the dirt roads and very analog lifestyle in a lot of ways. And it seems like the way you're talking about libraries and the rows of books, I mean, that's what I think it seems like brings you all this joy and grounding. But then the other side of you, it's like you're very futuristic. You're seeing all these things. Many of your books are telling the future and you love fantasy and sci-fi. And so it's kind of an interesting dichotomy, I guess.
M.T. Anderson:
Yeah, and I mean in some ways it's because I'm concerned about the future that I embrace the past, I think to some extent. But also, I think that one of the great joys of being alive is recognizing that we're just this tiny little spot in a human continuum that goes so far into the past and so far into the future we can't even see the ends of it.
And so I love the idea participating in the whole history of the human race, and I feel like it's such an exciting thing for us. It's one of the great pleasures of being human is to say, "Oh, look what happened to us in the past. Look what things we did. Look what we accomplished or look what we didn't accomplish. Look at the ways we were blind." And then to also say, "What are people in the future going to look back at and say, 'Oh, I can't believe they did that'?"
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
I think some people view that as scary, like when you realize, when you have that moment that everybody does where you're like, "Oh, wait, I'm just this dot in this very long continuum, and this is just once." But a lot of people, I think, view that as a, I don't know, that have a different perspective of it.
M.T. Anderson:
Yeah, I mean, in some ways it is scary. We want to matter more than we do, I guess, in a way. On the other hand, it's part of trying to participate fully in life. We're only here once, and so we have to be aware of the world around us and aware of all the things that are sad about that as well as the things that are joyful. And I think that's a really tremendous thing. I mean, when you suffer a loss, someone you love or whatever else, one of the ways to get through it, and I know that this is small consolation in many cases, but is to say, "But I had the beauty of loving in the first place. And I can tell how beautiful that is by how sad I am now."
That's one of the ways people get through that kind of thing and I don't think that that's just being somehow Pollyanna-ish. I think it actually is a fundamental spiritual thing where we can recognize that suffering and sadness are all part of this tapestry of being alive. We have to embrace them all.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Throughout the years, science fiction and fantasy have had an uphill battle in being taken as seriously as other genres, or in some cases seriously at all. They were often perceived as campy and lacking depth to the point where some of the most famous writers to embrace the genre such as Kurt Vonnegut were averse to being labeled as sci-fi writers. While stories like 2001: A Space Odyssey helped open the door for people to understand the true depth science fiction can hold, the stigma was, and to some extent still is present.
M.T. Anderson:
I think that the deal is that up until around 2005 or 2010, there really was a sense of literary fiction as being exalted and as a genre unlike any other genre. So it was kind of like, it's not separate but equal, it was actually better. So for example, in MFA programs and in writing programs, when you wrote woodenly and badly people could be like, "Oh my God, this is like a YA novel," or, "This reads like sci-fi." That was definitely a negative thing back then, and yet, those were the things that I totally was into.
At that time, I felt like there's not a novel in the world that's not improved by an alien abduction, I would've said around the year 2000. I'm not sure about that now, but the point is, I think one of the great things is that people have realized that literary realism, which was this bulwark of the literary world, it is its own genre with its own conventions.
And that means that also, that the quality of science fiction, for example, has gone way up because people who might not have wanted to write in that genre previously, now were like, "Well, wait, I can really explore the depth of human emotion in this. This is not simply a gadgets and aliens genre. This is a way for me to understand the human condition at its heart." And so you're getting a beautiful crop of writers in all these things that were previously considered as genre ghettos.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Okay, so in 2019, you received the Margaret A. Edwards Award for your, quote, "Significant and lasting contribution to writing for teens." And in your acceptance speech, you said this, "When future scholars of literature look back on the 21st century, they're going to see the first few decades of this millennium as a golden age of young adult literature, when books for teens went from being the unloved byproduct of picture book publishing to becoming an art form of central importance to the culture as a whole."
I wholeheartedly agree with that, and I'm wondering if you feel the same about science fiction and fantasy.
M.T. Anderson:
I mean, there always have been wonderful writers in sci-fi or fantasy or mystery or whatever, but what would happen is that if someone got particularly literary, say Thomas Pynchon, as a sci-fi writer, he would kind of suffer an apotheosis and suddenly people would be like, "You're allowed to come upstairs now. Come up to literary fiction." And so he's no longer considered a sci-fi writer, he's a literary writer, you know what I mean?
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yeah.
M.T. Anderson:
Or John Le Carre, they're like, "You're not a spy writer anymore." You know what I mean? It's like you receive the benediction from the Pope or something. And now instead, I think the really helpful thing is that everyone is just like, "No, there can be great writers who write about things that are not in our normal course of human life, not in our daily life or whatever else." There can be great writers in any genre, and we don't have to actually keep them all separated and segregated to preserve the purity of this one thing that was really New York-based realism, which was so important for a lot of the 20th century.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
New York-based realism, I like that. So you've spoken a lot about how society oftentimes underestimates the intelligence of young readers, and I think it's interesting that a lot of your books, despite being for teens, can be perceived as or are really challenging. So do you think that historical fiction or sci-fi and fantasy offer the ability to add that complexity and allow you to write in more challenging ways for young readers?
M.T. Anderson:
I'm mainly thinking about the wanting to depict the emotional realities of their lives. When I set out to write a book like that, it's because there's a part of me that is still that age, and I want to write to that. But I do think that it is true that if you look at what, especially people like teachers, librarians, writers, all these people who end up saying, "Oh, this is going to be too complicated for a kid," if we look at the stuff that we read as teens, we inevitably say, "Well, I mean, I was reading, whatever the example is, The great Gatsby, at age 12, and I loved it, but it's really too complicated a text for other 12 year olds." What kind of hubris is that? Of course, if we can understand it, then they can.
And a lot of it is the cultural feeling around knowing things that is so complicated in this country right now. I mean, think about this, we're having a conversation at a time of censorship in a way that we haven't for decades that has not been this big an issue, like counterfactual information, like people praising ignorance, left and right, which is really, really frightening.
And so I think that the other side of that is that we are emotionally and biologically capable of understanding incredibly complicated things at a really young age, but American culture has always had a kind of anti-intellectual bias to it that unfortunately, I think has become really dangerous in our country. It's become a real political danger.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Science fiction and fantasy provide a sandbox for authors to explore deep topics in unbound ways. Additionally, they provide a safe way for writers to tell stories and commentary on more complex and dangerous topics. In an increasingly difficult and dark time for literature in America, these genres could see more utilization as the fight over censorship wages on.
M.T. Anderson:
Well, I mean, if you look at the role that science fiction and fantasy play in dictatorships, things like the Strugatskys who are a couple of brothers who wrote science fiction in Russia, or Cixin Liu, who is a really now globally successful Chinese science fiction writer. And it's really, really interesting to see the way that they can say things that normally would get someone locked up. There's always deniability that comes with the set of unreal symbols that they're working through.
One interesting thing that I've been looking into recently is there's a series on Netflix called The Untamed that is actually based on a set of Chinese novels. And the interesting thing about it is, it is pretty much overtly a gay love story between these two young wizard martial arts fighters. It has a big chunk of it that is essentially like if you had a gay Harry Potter situation. They're at this school, this conference, blah, blah, blah, they're falling in love.
Now the thing is that of course, homosexuality is basically forbidden in China at this point, in fact it's gotten even harsher over the last few years. And the author of this series I have heard, who goes by a pseudonym, supposedly spent time even in jail because of this. But the series, what it does is it allides all of the moments that would be kissing. The plot doesn't work if they're not in love with each other. And yet at the same time, it never says these two guys are in love with each other. It's just entirely clear.
So anyway, I think that's also a really interesting example of how you can get around censorship by putting something in a magical world where no one's going to pay as much attention.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yeah, definitely. So right now we're going through our own censorship battles in America. What do you think is a path forward from here?
M.T. Anderson:
I think it's a tough one because the problem is that the path out of it is education, but at the same time, it is education that has the ax laid to the roots right now. And then that's why the ax is laid to the roots because education is in fact the transformative institution in any nation. If we can convince people that science makes sense, that the rest of the world exists with us in an equilibrium and we have to understand that equilibrium and we have to know who are our actual opponents and who are people who just irritate us, all of that kind of thing we have to know about. We have to deeply know and understand other cultures if we're going to move forward in any strategic way. All of that stuff is being thrown out the window in favor of a really coarse, simplistic mythology.
And it's funny because you and I have been talking a lot about fantasy, and yet, when it comes down to it, the American fantasies of power and of opposition and that kind of thing, those are some of the more dangerous ones. Those are the ones that are shaping our world certainly, and in many cases, are shaping the lives of people all around the world.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yeah, that is very interesting. I hadn't thought about it, about that side of fantasy.
M.T. Anderson:
Take one example. I think it's so interesting that YA fantasy novels so frequently, without thinking about it, we replicate feudalism. So the happy ending is that the peasant turns out to be lord or lady so-and-so, or a princess of something, or whatever, and then they take power and they are what the 18th century would've called an enlightened despot. You know what I mean?
Fantasy, because it's based on feudal models, whether in the East or in the West, tends to be really, really politically retrogressive, like the power of democracy, how do you start some kind of thing about the power of democracy if you're setting it in a world where it's full of warlords and kings?
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
We've talked a lot about the complexities in M.T.'s work and how he uses fantasy to exaggerate ideas in order to challenge the real world. Often his style lends itself well to older readers, mostly falling in the young adult category. But in his new story, he's taking that style and applying it to a middle-grade novel. Elf Dog and Owl Head is a story about a young boy, Clay, who encounters a magical dog that has escaped from a kingdom under the mountains. They have a magical and unexpected series of adventures in the woods near Clay's home.
While researching the episode, I found pictures of M.T.'s old dog who sadly has passed away. I noticed that his dog looks strikingly similar to the one in the story. I was curious to learn if there was a connection.
M.T. Anderson:
The way the book came about was actually that right before the pandemic in around the end of 2019, my dog, who was about eight years old at that time, suddenly developed this terrible tumor. On my birthday I was told, "This dog probably has three or four days to live. You should actually set up an appointment for euthanasia by the end of the week."
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Oh my God.
M.T. Anderson:
And I just was like, "Okay." I was so deeply, deeply sad about it, but at the same time, I still took her out for little walks. I mean, all she could do was around the yard and that kind of thing. And the miraculous thing was, over the next two months, she recovered in a way that it was like it was magical in a sense. By a month later, we were going on a walks of five or six miles a day through the hills once again, and she was gaining weight again, and the growth of the tumor appears to have stopped. As I said earlier, there are a 100 miles of unpaved road in this town, we walked them all. That was my goal, was to walk all around the town.
So the pandemic hit, and I live alone in this, as I said, little 18th century house up in the hills here. That dog, LaRue, was my one companion for that whole time. For four months, she was the only creature I saw. Every day we would go for a walk and it just filled me with such joy and such gratitude that I had the love of that creature.
And also, you walk through the woods and you realize that you now see things through the dog's eyes and you hear them through the dog's ears. The dog teaches you how to understand the world in a different way. I mean, earlier we were talking about fiction doing that, how does fiction show you the familiar things so they become unfamiliar? And being with an animal who you're totally synced with, that also shows you the miraculous in the world around you.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Which she literally does in the book.
M.T. Anderson:
Right, exactly, right. I just made it literal. Exactly. Yeah, she shows him other worlds.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
In any place he's lived, whether it be a repurposed medieval monastery in Italy or a small haunted country house in the forest, M.T. has always found a sense of magic. For his reading challenge, Hometown Lore, he wants you to do the same.
M.T. Anderson:
My reading challenge is to read a book that is about the history or the weird lore of your own area, your own town. It used to be, for example, when I was going on book tours a lot, especially that you do that in the fall and in the spring especially. And in the fall it would be October, I'd be in some obscure part of the country, talking to people and that kind of thing and I would always, as a souvenir, buy a ghost book from that region. So like Ghosts of Central Michigan, that kind of thing.
And it was so fascinating because you read those and suddenly we're differentiated by our ghosts. Different parts of the country have different ghosts. Like down in Louisiana, there are pirates, that kind of thing. And then up in New England, there are Puritans.
So what I think would be really a great challenge would be for people to either something like one of these ghost books or books of weird and crazy and interesting sites right around you, or a book that interests you of some kind of local history. Something so that you know the stories of the place that you live so that you can feel like, "Oh, I live in a place that's like no other place."
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
You can check out M.T.'s challenge and all of our author reading challenges at thereadingculturepod.com. And today's Beanstack Featured Librarian is Iuyana Miller, the media specialist at Young Middle School in Atlanta and the city's Librarian of the Year last year. She shared the impact she saw when she stepped way out of her comfort zone to meet her middle school students where they are.
Iuyana Miller:
I started this last year because being in middle school, you have to get creative. And our whole theme here at the school is rebuilding the legacy. So TikTok was kind of, but I was like, "I don't need a TikTok. I don't want a TikTok. I'm not downloading TikTok." And our VILS coach, last year, she called me, she's like, "Ms. Miller, let's do a TikTok video." She was like, "Grab a book and talk about it." And I was like, "Okay."
And she did it, I grabbed a book, did a quick little spiel about it, and it took off like wildfire. And so I ended up doing a TikTok book of the week, and then lo and behold, I had random people saying, "Hey, I saw you on TikTok." And I was like, "Oh my gosh." And then I would highlight and tell them, "Oh, that's the book of the week." They was like, "Yeah, I saw it on TikTok." So that's what I did especially for my school in this environment. I had to find a way to meet them where they were.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
This has been The Reading Culture. You've been listening to our conversation with M.T. Anderson. Again, I'm your host, Jordan Lloyd Bookey, and currently I'm reading an Ember in the Ashes by Sabaa Tahir and Finding Me by Viola Davis.
If you've enjoyed today's show, please show some love and rate, subscribe, and share The Reading Culture among your friends and networks. To learn more about how you can help grow your community's reading culture, you can check out all of our resources at beanstack.com, and join us on social media, @thereadingculturepod, for some amazing giveaways.
Be sure to check out The Children's Book Podcast with teacher and librarian, Matthew Winner. It's a book podcast made for kids ages 6 to 12 that explores big ideas and the ways that stories can help us feel seen, understood, and valued. You can find it wherever you listen to podcasts.
This episode was produced by Jackie Lamport and Lower Street Media, and script edited by Josia Lamberto-Egan. We'll be back in two weeks with another episode. Thanks for joining and keep reading.