Impossible to work

I helped out with a Bookmaking Field Trip at 826CHI yesterday. The students from Washington Irving School (one class of 7th graders) were great. They all really got into making a story and illustrating it. After everybody had finished making their books (including illustrating the front cover) each story was read (I think that 5 separate books were made). All of the stories were great. Some were very funny. One involved a rock and roll band with super powers. The story my group wrote was, well…..a coming out story. I swear, I had nothing to do with it. I just typed what they told me to type.

It wasn’t a story about a gay teenager coming out of the closet, but it was about as close as you can get: a boy who loves to dance but has a gift for basketball. The central conflict was this: Dad is excited about the big basketball game but his son won’t be able to play, because it’s the same day as his first dance recital. End result: Dad eventually shows up to the recital and not the game. So it’s a happy story about coming out as a dancer..yeah a dancer.

While the story has a very strong gay subtext, it wasn’t intended as such (in all honesty, the character was sort of a mash between the one boy in the group and the most outspoken girl in the group) but it certainly worked out that way. What made me happy was that my students wanted the story to have a happy ending where the father accepted that dancing was really his son’s calling in life. Isn’t that nice?

Maybe old phobias are dying out. These 7th graders certainly seemed open-minded and really liked writing”^a1a”. Then again, they might have changed their minds about the story had they learned there was a subtext in it (7th grade is before you start to get an inkling of an idea regarding what’s between the lines, isn’t it?).

In any case, I was happy to be present while they wrote this particular story.

1. The word on the street is that this class can’t wait to come back to 826. aaa