Leah's ChLA 2019 Conference Paper: Making More Noise

What follows are the text and slides from Dr Leah Phillips's 2019 ChLA conference paper. In this paper, Leah begins setting out some of the ground that she and Dr Melanie Ramdarshan Bold will cover in their forthcoming co-authored Book Trade Activism and Anthologies: Advocating for Change in the UKYA Market. Please bear in mind, it is a talking script! The text in bold indicates transition between slides, which are included within the text. 

In this paper, I will argue that YA anthologies are offering what might be termed a new form social protest. By featuring voices in concert, championing topics often excluded from mainstream literature, and celebrating marginalised voices, YA anthologies are forging new ground, making space(s) for voices and stories of all kinds. To make this argument, I draw on an intertwining of ‘imaginary activism’, as coined by Megan Musgrave in Digital Citizenship in Twenty-First-Century Young Adult Literature and a sort of ‘living’ of my feminism à la Sara Ahmed in Living a Feminist Life.

In Digital Citizenship, Musgrave characterises ‘imaginary activism’ as (and as the slide shows) ‘a variety of activities that are depicted in fictional contexts and designed to instigate real-world discussion, engagement, and action’ (xi). For example, Musgrave demonstrates in chapter four how recent, realistic YA fiction texts such as Mari Mancusi’s Gamer Girl (2008) and Julia Durango’s The Leveller (2014) are framing gaming as a ‘gateway for civic engagement’.
 

​In Living a Feminist Life, Ahmed describes this living as a way of being that “does not mean adopting a set of ideals or norms of conduct, although it might mean asking ethical questions about how to live better in an unjust and unequal world […] how to create relationships with others that are more equal; how to find ways to support those who are not supported or are less supported by social systems” (2)

Through the intertwining of these concepts, I want to expand Musgrave’s focus on the imaginary forms of activism depicted within YA fiction to consider how YA anthologies are offering further instances of activism, while also “making more noise,” as a form of ‘living my feminism’, about YA anthologies and UKYA—a marginalised, in the face of the US juggernaut, area of YA fiction.

​This paper, as well as the one my friend and colleague Dr Melanie Ramdarshan Bold will give this afternoon, are early forays into our forthcoming Book Trade Activism and Anthologies: Advocating for Change in the UKYA Market.

Emerging from our work on the Adolescent Identities project, this volume will argue that YA anthologies — such as the ones depicted here  --  are making a direct intervention in the publishing industry by featuring minoritized authors, increasing representation, and taking full advantage of the short story’s capacity, as Dominic Head argues (2016), to depict marginalised experiences.

• Unbroken (2018) “explores disability in fictional tales told from the viewpoint of disabled characters, written by disabled creators”.

 

• It’s a Whole Spiel (2019) features, according to the book’s blurb, “one story after another that says yes, we are Jewish, but we are also queer, and disabled, and creative, and political, and adventurous, and anything we want to be”.

 

• Fresh Ink (2018) includes ten short stories, a graphic novel, and a one-act play all utilising a range of genre positions. Binding these diverse modes of storytelling together through the anthology offers another form of activism as it breaks down modal boundaries.

 

• Compiled by We Need Diverse Books Ellen Oh and Elsie Chapman, A Thousand Beginnings and Endings (2018) includes stories reimagining the folklore and mythology of East and South Asia.

 

• The Radical Element (2018) is a feminist historical fiction anthology focusing on girls who “were radical in their communities, whether by virtue of their race, religion, sexuality, disability, gender, or the profession they were pursuing”. Editor Jessica Spotswood deliberately uses ‘radical’ to shift the focus from the more common ‘outsider’ in her, and the anthology’s, framing of these boundary pushing girls.

 

• As editor Sungu Mandanna writes, Color Outside the Lines (2019) is about “race, and […] how being different from the person you love can matter BUT how it can also not matter. He goes on to say, “it’s [also] about Chinese pirate ghosts, black girl vigilantes, colonial India, a flower festival, a garden of poisons, and so, so much else…” It’s out in November.

You may’ve noticed, I skipped over two: Proud and a Change is Gonna Come. These two anthologies are both examples of UKYA that is they were first published in the UK and are by authors from the UK. Book Trade Activism and Anthologies will focus on these two ‘diverse’ UKYA anthologies as they were specifically commissioned in response to the lack of diversity in British publishing. In this book project (as well as in our work more widely) Dr Ramdarshan Bold and I utilise the We Need Diverse Books definition of diversity, which “recognises all diverse experiences, including (but not limited to) LGBTQIA, Native, people of colour, gender diversity, people with disabilities*, and ethnic, cultural, and religious minorities”. We’re interested in marginalised positions of all kinds and in how YA anthologies, especially UKYA anthologies, are working to change them. 

These two collections of UKYA short stories and poetry, published by (until just recently) independent publisher Little Tiger Press under their imprint Stripes Publishing, feature authors of colour in Change and LGBTQIA+ authors in Proud. The stories in both are intersectional and occupy a range of genre positions. Both books also deliberately include new voices alongside more established children’s and YA authors to actualise another form of activism: practically and tangibly supporting previously unpublished authors in the UK while concomitantly diversifying and expanding the field. Through a mixed method approach drawing on our individual research strengths — interviews with the authors in the collection, and the commissioning editors for the book, close readings of both anthologies, and reader reception of GoodReads and Amazon reviews — Book Trade Activism and Anthologies will examine how UKYA anthologies are working to disrupt the cultural hegemony in the UKYA market.

For now, I want to focus on a different UKYA anthology. Published in 2018 as part of the celebrations around the 100th anniversary of (some) women's suffrage in the UK, Make More Noise is a collection of 10 short stories by some of 'The UK's very best storytellers', as the back of the book declares. 

These stories — listed here — include a re-imagining of the night of the 1911 census, when many women hid from their homes as a protest against their lack of voting rights (Out for the Count), a parable describing a world that has been flooded by a witch’s tears and how a ‘green-hearted girl’ unites the world’s people to break the curse (The Green Hearted Girl). Two stories focus on the lives of real people, Olive Christian Malvery who spent her adult life campaigning for the rights of working class women (All Things Bright and Beautiful) and the 43 Group, an organisation begun by young Jewish ex-servicemen who, returning home from fighting overseas, found fascism present on their own streets. The young people of the 43 Group actively broke up the meetings of fascist organisations across London (Discuss, Decide, Do). There’s a ghost story (The Tuesday Afternoon Ghost), several stories address independence and deciding your own path—especially, Tea and Jam, On Your Bike, and The Race—while The Bug Hunters and The Otter Path include, among other things, finding friends, or allies, in unlikely places. In each of these stories, Musgrave’s ‘imaginary activism’ is present.

However, these stories — and the anthology itself—also blur the boundaries between, for example, inside/outside, real/not-real, non-fiction/fiction. That is, Make More Noise treads a territory between ‘imaginary forms of activism’ and the ‘real-world’ discussion, engagement, and change such depictions might inspire. For example, the book’s title – Make More Noise – comes from a speech delivered, by the British suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst, in Hartford, Connecticut in 1913. In the speech, Pankhurst, positioning herself as a “soldier who has temporarily left the field of battle”, declares:

You have to make more noise than anybody else, you have to make yourself more obtrusive than anybody else, you have to fill all the papers more than anybody else.

Make More Noise might be the title of an anthology of fiction short stories, but it is also a line from a speech, given by a ‘real-world’ activist as a call to arms. As such, I argue that Make More Noise (the anthology) occupies the space between the real and the imaginary adding an intertextual layer of meaning to the imaginary forms of activism depicted within the text.   

To explore this liminal positioning and taking a nod from Angel Daniel Matos in “The Undercover Life of Young Adult Novels”, I want to occupy the liminal space of Make More Noise’s cover for a time, while also taking full advantage of the liminal’s in-between positioning to occasionally step on either side of that boundary. As Matos demonstrates, book covers not only literally bind a narrative—a binding that becomes even more crucial in the case of an anthology’s multiple narratives and potentially multiple authors—but book covers are also ostensibly the first point of contact readers will have with the story, or stories, inside a book.

In Matos’s argument, the cover’s role as a liminal transition point between the ‘real world’ and the imaginary world of the story, positions the cover as a particularly crucial, as well as potentially fraught, ideological field. For example, Matos discusses the tendency for book covers to align with the dominant ‘normative framework’ prioritising White, heterosexual, cisgender identities, even when the narrative concerns otherwise (there’s a lengthy conversation to be had around sales and marketing, but we’ll save that for the forthcoming book). Here it’s sufficient to say, YA anthology covers — and Proud, with its rainbow solidarity fist, is one excellent example — are intervening in this narrative, as they intervene in other marginalisations.

In the case of Make More Noise, I’m interested in how the cover creates a sense of community by not merely featuring multiple authors on the front of the book but how the cover reinforces a sense of collectivity by placing the author’s names within that which is presumably coming from the megaphone. There’s an additional layer of connectedness. Finally, I’m also interested in the symbolic declaration of ‘real’ activism with the reference to Camfed, a charity supporting girls education.  

First, the multiplicity of voices is key. Make More Noise is not an individually authored work of fiction. There are ten names listed on the cover of this book:

Emma Carrol
Kiran Millwood Hargrave
Ally Kennen
Catherine Johnson
Patrice Lawrence
MG Leonard
Sally Nicholls
Ella Risbridger
Jeanne Willis
Katherine Woodfine

Each of these “storytellers” (as the book cover describes them) are the author of an individual story within the collection, but they are also part of the collective voice making up the whole of Make More Noise. Frameworks of community and relation, as counters to competition, are key to undoing dominant marginalisations.
 
If I had one complaint to make about the activism and intervention Make More Noise offers through its cover, there is a prioritising of a visual aesthetic, at the expense of readability, that is problematic. In all the good work of this book both inside and out, who is being left out by this design? (I’ve misread Jeanne’s name more times than I have not). Tangentially, in an otherwise alphabetical list, why have Ally Kennen and Catherine Johnson swapped places? Why is MG Leonard visually highlighted? These names are quite clearly part of a group—being on the cover and within the megaphone’s trajectory makes this clear—but even so representation isn’t necessarily equal.

Still — and with this slide I’m stepping outside of the book — the community (of women), represented by the names listed on the cover, directly intervenes in not only mainstream competition culture in which individuality and individual ownership are prioritised but also the normative frames in which authors of colour are frequently excluded, as Ramdarshan Bold details, likely later on today, but also in her recently published monograph Inclusive Young Adult Fiction: Authors of Colour in the United Kingdom.

Race and ethnicity aside, these women include a diversity of body shapes and sizes as well as ages and cultural backgrounds. Crucially, this diversity is reflected within the stories: MG Leonard’s The Bug Hunters offers an example I adore:

“Why does your hair look like that?” Amanda asked Sofia (the story’s protagonist).
 
“Like What?” Sofia put her hand up to the back of her head. Amanda had shiny brown hair in two long plaits.
 
“Short, like a boy’s. Did you get punished?”
 
“No, I like it like this,” Sofia explained. My mum says I look like a pixie.”

There’s certainly a parallel between Leonard’s hairstyle and that of her protagonist that’s interesting, but there’s also a normalising of difference at work in this passage: in the UK (at least), girls of this age overwhelmingly have long hair (indeed, long hair seems to have become conflated with a certain marker of femininity or ‘being-woman’) so to not only feature a protagonist who has short hair but to also walk readers through an exchange concerning that hairstyle is a form of micro-activism, of making space for difference.  

Finally, the cover also actualises activism, at least according to the reference to Camfed — a charity tackling poverty and inequality by supporting marginalized girls to go to school and to succeed, as the back of the book details.
​
According to the emblem on the front, £1 from the sale of this book will go directly to Camfed. Make More Noise, as a close reading of the cover demonstrates, offers a continual negotiation of the boundary between inside and outside, and in treading that liminal space, the collection enriches the forms of imaginary activism present within its stories, even actualising them through this relationship to Camfed. And this is the work of YA anthologies and that which we will be exploring in more detail in Booktrade Activism and Anthologies. ​

In my final few minutes, I want to close by making a bit ‘more noise’ (or perhaps a bit of noise) about a few UKYA books that aren’t anthologies but that are written by women and intervening in hegemonic norms and standards. Not only does concluding in this way actualise the activism I’ve been discussing around anthologies but it also opens a space for these voices and stories, expanding their reach beyond the UK (incidentally a number of these books are now available on Amazon, but I haven’t spotted them in a Stateside bookshop).  

• Savita Kalhan’s The Girl in the Broken Mirror tells a story similar to Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak but from the perspective of a British-Indian girl.

 

• Yaba Badoe’s Wolf Light is described as a “defiant call to protect our environment, to conserve our heritage and to hear the ancient power that connects us” and features a trio of young women from Mongolia, Ghana, and Cornwall.  

 

• Sophie Cameron’s The Last Bus to Everland is about finding your tribe and It includes LGBTQIA+ characters. Cameron is excellent for incidental diversity, for weaving a diversity of characters into her stories as if such a thing were normal.

 

• In Paper Avalanche by Lisa Williamson, 14-year-old Ro Snow has a secret (her mum’s a hoarder) and a list of rules to keep that secret hidden, until Tanvi Shaw “the girl who almost died comes tumbling back into her life”

 

• Scar, by Alice Broadway, is the final book of a brilliant trilogy following Leora as she navigates coming of age as a person from two different worlds.

 

• In Alexa Sheppard’s Oh My Gods, the half-mortal Helen has just moved in with her dad and older siblings who happen to be ancient Greek gods, living incognito in London.

 

• All the Bad Apples, by Moïra Fowley-Doyle, is an example of Irish YA. Just as the UKYA market (which does rather mean England but also technically encompasses Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland) is thriving and warrants some consideration as a field related to but different from YA (which does rather mean American), the Irish YA market is worth more consideration.

 

• Natasha Ngan’s Girls of Paper and Fire is an Asian inspired high fantasy world following Lei and Wren, the world’s ‘paper’ (lowest caste) female heroes who are also lovers.

I'm really excited by these books and the work they're doing, and in concluding in this way, I answer Pankhurt’s and Make More Noise’s call to, well, make more noise.   

Works Cited 

About Us – CAMFED - Campaign for Female Education. https://camfed.org/about/. Accessed 7 June 2019.

Ahmed, Samira, et al. Color Outside the Lines: Stories about Love. Edited by Sangu Mandanna, Soho Teen, 2019.

Badoe, Yaba. Wolf Light. Zephyr, 2020.

Bialik, Mayim. It’s a Whole Spiel: Love, Latkes, and Other Jewish Stories. Edited by Katherine Locke and Laura Silverman, Knopf Books for Young Readers, 2019.

Broadway, Alice. Scar. Scholastic Fiction, 2019.

Cameron, Sophie. Last Bus to Everland. Macmillan Children’s Books, 2019.

Carroll, Emma, et al. Make More Noise! Nosy Crow Ltd, 2018.

Clarke, Cat. The Pants Project. Sourcebooks Young Readers, 2017.

Daniel, Angel. ‘The Undercover Life of Young Adult Novels’. The ALAN Review, no. Winter, 2017, p. 7.

Drew, Ned, and Paul Sternberger. By Its Cover: Modern American Book Cover Design. Princeton Architectural Press, 2005.

Fowley-Doyle, Moira. All the Bad Apples. Penguin, 2019.

Giles, Lamar, editor. Fresh Ink: An Anthology. Crown Books for Young Readers, 2018.

Head, Dominic, editor. The Cambridge History of the English Short Story. Cambridge University Press, 2016.

Kalhan, Savita. The Girl in the Broken Mirror. Troika Books, 2018.

Lam, Anna. ‘YA Literature: The Inside and Cover Story’. The Journal of Research on Libraries and Young Adults, vol. 3, no. 1, Apr. 2013, http://www.yalsa.ala.org/jrlya/2013/04/ya-literature-the-inside-and-cover-story/.

Mancusi, Mari. Gamer Girl. Reprint edition, Speak, 2010.

Musgrave, Megan L. Digital Citizenship in Twenty-First-Century Young Adult Literature: Imaginary Activism. Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.

Ngan, Natasha. Girls of Paper and Fire. Jimmy Patterson, 2018.

Nijkamp, Marieke. Unbroken: 13 Stories Starring Disabled Teens. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018.

Oh, Ellen, et al. A Thousand Beginnings and Endings. Greenwillow Books, 2018.

Pankhurst, Emmeline. Freedom or Death. Hartford, Connecticut.

Ramdarshan Bold, Melanie. Inclusive Young Adult Fiction: Authors of Colour in the United Kingdom. Palgrave Macmillan, 2019.

Sheppard, Alexandra. Oh My Gods. 1 edition, Scholastic, 2019.

Spotswood, Jessica, editor. The Radical Element: 12 Stories of Daredevils, Debutantes & Other Dauntless Girls. Candlewick, 2018.

Various, and Darren Chetty. A Change Is Gonna Come. Stripes Publishing, 2017.

​Various, and Juno Dawson. Proud. Stripes Publishing, 2019.