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AWP 2020 San AntonioPanel: Stigmatization and Misrepresentation of Suicide in YA Novels About Suicide, 1h15minsInfo:Number: S215Date/Time: 1:45pm - 3:00pm on Saturday March 7, 2020Location: Room 006D, Henry B. González Convention Center, River LevelDescription:1. How should we define the responsibility of YA writers and publishers to represent suicide as a public health issue, in order to avoid common misconception, stigmatization, or taboo associated with the topic?2. What genre conventions or narrative techniques are privileged over the understanding and analysis the topic deserves?3. What are some ways YA writers can better represent the complexities of suicide, in an effort to encourage young readers who experience suicidality to seek help?Statement of merit (not visible to the public):YA readers seek recognition and understanding. Multiple studies demonstrate empathetic reader responses to YA characters. YA "Suicide Fiction" sells millions of copies due to content and marketing. We, as writers, readers, and teachers, should critically analyze these novels to identify the ways they adhere to and undermine guidelines published by the US Department of Health and Human Services, which identifies adolescent and pre-adolescent suicide as a growing public health issue. Members: Panelists: Carly Susser (organizer), Brian Clifton, Spencer HydeModerator: Virginia Lee WoodProceeding:Panel Presenters brief introductions by moderator, greeting audience: (4 mins or so)Updated bios and brief banter.Bios:Carly Susser is a creative writer and instructor at UNT. She is a third-year PhD student studying American Literature and Critical Theory. Her prose and poetry are published in various journals online.Brian Clifton is the author of the poetry chapbooks MOT and Agape (from Osmanthus Press). They have work in: Pleiades, Guernica, Cincinnati Review, Salt Hill, Colorado Review, The Journal, Beloit Poetry Journal, and other magazines. They are an avid record collector and curator of curiosities.Spencer Hyde is the author of?Waiting for Fitz?and?What the Other Three Don’t Know. He is currently an assistant professor of English at Brigham Young University. Spencer and his wife, Brittany, are the parents of four children. His next novel is?about the thousands of unexploded bombs from the Second World War.Virginia Lee Wood is a PhD candidate at the University of North Texas and holds an MFA from Hollins University. She is a Korean American writer whose work appears or is forthcoming in The Minnesota Review, Cutbank, LIT, and Pleiades. She will start as a Visiting Assistant Professor at Austin College in the fall.Intro: (5 mins or so)See materials following the outline for more information.Panelist Presentations: (15-20 mins each, more or less as needed)See materials following the outline section of this document for more information about individual panelist talks.Q&A (15 mins-ish)First: Follow up on any specific questions raised during presentations, whether from moderator or among panelists.Second: Prepared questions Are there any particular works or communities that you want to bring into the conversation? Are there nuances that we haven’t talk about? Going forward in your work, how are these issues evolving for you? Does it stop you? Motivate you? Do you worry about raising your voice about issues you see?Have you ever avoided writing something because you worried about controversy?Have you ever experienced criticism on this topic, warranted or unwarranted, and what did you do, or what can you do?Are there things we didn’t bring up today that we should? Or alternatively, things we have been focusing in that aren’t as important as they seem?How does a writer do the writing when there is so much to worry about? How do you deal with that responsibility?What is your goal for this discussion? What do you want to leave the audience with?Third: Audience Q&A (rest of time. If does not fill time, return to first and second.)Panelist materials:Introduction | Virginia Lee WoodHello everyone. I want to thank you again for joining us today, this beautiful Saturday afternoon. I hope you have been having a good and productive conference. Today, we are talking on this panel about a topic with deep personal and social implications. Our three panelists will be talking about the conversations around suicide in YA literature from different angles, expanding the topic and revealing the wide reach of the impact of stigmatizing the topic of suicide in YA. When it comes to talking to young people about something as deeply serious as taking their own life, the impact of the way common tropes, binaries taken at face value, and shallow treatment of the topic cannot be understated. There is no question that when young people seek resources to help them understand and reckon with the things that they cannot talk about, they look to literature for answers.When the conversation widens to include such matters as the socioeconomic pressure present in publishing to perpetuate easy narratives, diminish nuance, and replicate other books’ successes, the many faces of the issue become visible. In fact, when those faces are exposed, we see how a culture of shame, silence, and heroes vs victims permeates at all levels. When mined more deeply, facets heretofore unseen but pervasive come clear. As writers, we know that we come to the work that we write for a reason. As instructors, we have all been in a position to encounter students in crisis. As people, we have all been touched by these conversations in various ways. When certain narratives around suicide are normalized, it becomes more difficult to navigate our writing, our work, and our lives. Part of the goal of this panel is to expose aspects of normalization of troubling language, perspectives, and barriers that make it more difficult for young people to find the stories they need. I think that if you are here today in the audience, it is likely that this issue has touched you personally, or that it is something that worries you. It worries us, too; it touches us, too. When we read, it is a responsibility that we hold to recognize and challenge aspects of the text that contribute to sociocultural trauma. As writers, that same responsibility is central. I am often given to think of the Toni Morrison quote from Playing in the Dark, that being “[As a writer I] rely on my knowledge of how books get written, how language arrives” (Morrison 5). As writers, part of our work is to recognize and understand the subtext, origin, and implications of the words we choose, and the ways we tell our stories. We recognize that when we write, the stories that belong to us begin to belong to others. There is no excuse to bind one’s tongue with false and hurtful narratives. But, without doing the work of exploring the way that traumatic narratives enter and are perpetuated in culture, it can be difficult to know how to work against them. It is our responsibility to do this work, and in doing so, work toward demonstrating to larger and prominent voices, as well as the smallest and most vulnerable ears, that there is a different way of thinking about this most personal of issues. There is a different way of speaking, hearing, helping.One of the worst experiences in life is to learn of a death that could have been prevented. The shock, the shame, the grief of wishing that we could have done more. What could we have done? In the grief process, we turn over our every word, gesture, facial expression. We replay and re-cast the scenes of our lives, and try to imagine a way through. If we are survivors ourselves, we know all too well how our lives can turn on a single moment. Being able to see a way out. Being able to recognize and hold onto the smallest of handholds. A way to get through not days, not hours, but seconds strung on seconds. If this is the case, isn’t it our responsibility to consider those smallest of matters? Those smallest of moments? As writers, scholars, as people who are just trying to save each other, save ourselves, what can we do? I want to thank you again for coming, and I look forward to hearing from our panelists, who I also thank for their willingness to talk openly and with great vulnerability. Without further ado, Carly Susser.Talk | Carly Susser I started this project when I heard about a student from my teaching community in New Jersey who took her own life. Let's call her Leah. Leah was fourteen, a freshman, a straight-A student. According to a letter she left her parents, she was depressed, and had been thinking about suicide since she was twelve. Her parents were shocked; their daughter seemed happy. Since their daughter's death in October 2017, they started a foundation to help end the stigma of depression that they believe had kept Leah silent.According to her mother, Leah loved the play, "Dear Evan Hansen" and would listen to the soundtrack repeatedly, particularly the song, "You Will Be Found" which repeats the title as the chorus. In May 2017, the play became a YA novel.When I heard about Leah's love for the play, I thought about my own teenage self, searching for answers to my dark moods in any books I could find. I remember selecting psychology books and scanning their pages for the words "sadness", "depression", and "suicide." I wanted to know more. Because I remember that feeling so well, I decided last year to embark on close readings of the most contemporary, wide-selling YA novels about suicide. These titles include Thirteen Reasons Why, All the Bright Places, My Heart and Other Black Holes, and Dear Evan Hansen.I cannot make any claims to what Leah was thinking or feeling when she watched or listened to Dear Evan Hansen, but I can imagine that she was listening for the way her own story fit, or for help. As a young teenager, I would study books about child psychology and eating disorders, and then I found Go Ask Alice; later, as an older teen, I found The Bell Jar, and the discography of Elliott Smith.It turned out that attaching to art authored by people who died by suicide only made me feel worse. Perhaps my parents could tell. All along, it seemed they knew what I was doing--they bought me those psychology books, after all. They heard the sad music coming from the bedroom. They didn't ask questions about it directly, but their awareness made me feel less ashamed and more open than if I had felt the need to keep secret. It made it easier for them to casually ask me if I wanted to talk to a mental health professional. When I was a teenager in the early 2000s, there were few if any YA novels marketed to be about suicide. The marketing was just not as overt. Now, it is as if readers are lured into these novels because of the controversy that surrounds them, or due to the "taboo" associated with the topic. The ethics of marketing strategies is the subject of another talk. Today, I wish to focus on the ways these novels can limit or compromise a readers' understanding of a complex topic that has individual and social implications. To begin, it has been well-researched that young adult readers unconsciously practice empathetic reading. That is, they have the capacity to identify emotionally with characters, imagining themselves or the people they know in the situations described. YA writers, instructors, and publishers should not take this information for granted, but use it as a means to get readers the help they need. It is not enough to simply tac on the phone number for a suicide hotline at the beginning and end of a book, especially when the reader's greatest fear might be someone "finding out." I argue that as long as such a book has a reader's attention, it should represent a balance of what are called Protective Factors and Risk Factors. These factors spring from four different spheres: Societal, Community, Relationship, and Individual. The YA novels I have researched tend to represent risk factors including "Mental Illness", "Impulsivity/aggression", "Substance abuse" (all in the Individual sphere); "High conflict or violent relationships" (in the Relationship sphere); and "Few available sources of supportive relationships" (in the Community Sphere). This means that these novels do not include representation of other risk factors such as "Barriers to health care" (Community); "Availability of lethal means of suicide", and "Unsafe media portrayals of suicide" (Societal), or at least not with much awareness.On the representation of Protective Factors, these novels do not include "Connectedness to individuals, family, community, and social institutions"; "supportive relationships with health care providers"; "safe and supportive school and community environments"; or "restrictions on lethal means of suicide." I argue that it is important to show what these factors might look like, and show their benefit.Above all, my main concern is that most of these novels privilege the narrative of Individual Risk Factors such as the broad category of Mental Illness without offering a corresponding Protective Factor, such as Coping and Problem Solving Skills. Only one of the novels (My Heart and Other Black Holes) focuses on coping and problem solving skills, and reasons for living.In All the Bright Places, Theodore Finch is disgusted by "labels" as he sits in a support group for teens who introduce themselves using their diagnoses. He wants to "get away from the stigma they all clearly feel just because they have an illness of the mind as opposed to, say, an illness of the lungs or blood" (Niven 284). In this passage, however, the stigma is not clearly defined. If anything, ironically, Finch is the one grappling with stigma: "'I'm OCD,' 'I'm depressed,' 'I'm a cutter,' they say like these are the things that define them. One poor bastard is ADHD, OCD, BDP, bipolar, and on top of it all he has some sort of anxiety disorder. I don't even know what BPD stands for. I'm the only one who is just Theodore Finch" (284). Here, we see Finch dissociating with teenagers who have diagnoses that may help them better understand themselves, which can lead them to "Supportive Relationships with Healthcare Providers." Meanwhile, it is Finch's egocentricity that prevents him from connecting with teens who are open. Finch's isolation increases his risk, and ultimately he takes his own life.But it does not have to be that way, and that is what troubles me. The book could end differently if Finch had opened up, instead of stigmatizing his peers and himself. I have seen this pattern across most of these YA novels: there are moments where there is a chance for a Protective Factor, but it is undercut with ideology that reinforces stigma and misrepresentation.In Thirteen Reasons Why, Clay's narration is at the service of Hannah, who has taken her life by the time Clay listens to her tape that details the specific betrayals that led to her decision. As Clay listens to Hannah describe nervous tension over her first kiss, he says, as if talking to her, "Hannah, if you kissed back then like you kissed at the party, trust me, he liked it" (Asher 26). The focus is not on Hannah, but on Clay's sexualization of Hannah. Later, as Hannah explains her humiliation when she found a note that categorized her as having the Best Ass in Freshman Class, Clay says, "...I had to agree. She definitely belonged in that category" (39). Hannah's torment is a result of sexual objectification, sexual assault, and violence, and yet in moments when Clay could respond with pause and inquiry, he reinforces the oppressive ideology that contributes to it.Similarly, in Finch's case, there could have been an opportunity for someone to call him out, even if eventually. Unfortunately, like Finch, Clay continues with his logic unchecked. This invites the question of authorial responsibility. Granted, Clay is a fictional representation of a teenage boy. So is Finch. In our mind, they do not need to "know better." But shouldn't the author? In All the Bright Places, Violet is a side-piece to Finch, who consistently ignores Violet's boundaries when she says "no" to spending time with him, which in turn actually endears him to her [a trope of romance]. The reader forgets that Violet, like Finch, was also contemplating jumping off the school roof in the begining of the book. Instead, over the progress of the novel, Violet self-subordinates to Finch, who is portrayed as irrational and erratic, which is behavior that is understood and accepted as suicidal. In comparison, Violet's suicidal behavior appears as "rational," or at least not taken as seriously. We know this when Violet suddenly decides to confront survivor's guilt: she deletes the writing blog she and her deceased sister shared, and begins a new blog that discusses romantic love, geared toward an audience of teenage girls. Thus, Violet "overcomes" her suicide ideation, as evidenced by her new blog inspired by her relationship to Finch, without whom, it is implied, she would not have survived.I mentioned earlier that "most" of the YA novels I analyzed repeat similar patterns, with the exception of My Heart and Other Black Holes by Jasmine Warga, which complicates the romance narrative in All the Bright Places. The book's narrator is Aysel, the first-generation daughter of a Turkish shop owner who murders a popular male high school student. Early on, Aysel states, "There's nothing beautiful or literary or mysterious about depression," in response to her English teacher's assignment to, line-by-line, analyze poems "by depressed poets" (Warga 14). Where her classmates search for significance and meaning, Aysel finds the exercise unhelpful and futile, depression being something that is "impossible to escape." However, by the end of the book, it seems her depression is transformed through her friendship-turned romance with Roman, a teenager who she met on a Suicide Partner website. The entirety of the novel is an exploration of the question, "will they or won't they," both on the count of their pact to take their lives together on a specific date, and on the count of their budding romance. As the date of their pact nears, Aysel and Roman get closer; Aysel begins to imagine a happy future with Roman, but Roman is still fixed on taking his life. Aysel attempts to persuade Roman by confiding in him her reasons for wanting to take her life (she is afraid that she has the same murderous tendency her father has), but this does not work, and Roman attempts suicide before their agreed upon date.So, while Warga initially sets up the expectation that Aysel cannot and will never learn to manage her depression because it is "inescapable," she ultimately writes Aysel as a character of great introspection, a young woman who relates her interest in physics to her interest in death and, ultimately, in life. Aysel's existential conflict is rendered well enough so that the reader has the chance to still wonder whether Roman will attempt suicide, because he has, more or less, shared in this conflict with Aysel. Warga's decision to have Roman take his life unannounced reflects the precarity of mental illness. Roman is a character who by outward appearances seems happy. Aysel, getting close to Roman, allows us to see the precarity along with her.Ultimately, Roman is hospitalized, and Aysel and Roman decide to keep their former pact a secret from Roman's therapist, implying that some life-saving transformation between the two of them has occurred. They agree to live for each other, despite the world being a dark place. Warga touches on some of those dark spots: Aysel's fathers plight as a Turkish immigrant and small business owner who is tormented by the kids in town. Warga also emphasizes Aysel's constant frustration with her boss, classmates, and teachers mispronouncing her name. Roman is the first person to recognize her name as Turkish. Roman's mother embraces Aysel's Turkish background by cooking her Turkish foods. By recognizing the subtle complexities of the immigrant experience, Aysel's individual conflict is better understood both to herself and to the reader. Lastly, while I cannot vouch for the play, the novel Dear Evan Hansen holds the fantasy that after you take your own life, you can return as a ghost to witness the aftermath of your suicide, tell your story, and potentially influence the trajectory of other people's lives. This fantasy can easily fall under the social Risk Factor, "Unsafe media portrayals of suicide" when we interpret "portrayals of suicide" as ideation, plans, attempts, and aftermath. In conclusion, I offer that YA novels about suicide should seek to challenge the "reasons" or factors that are alluded to in these novels. Where Protective Factors like connectedness with family, friends, social institutions, and reasons for living fail, authors should offer other Protective Factors like coping and problem solving skills, supportive relationships with health care providers, and safe and supportive learning environments, so that readers can see what these things look like and perhaps, through empathetic reading, put them into practice, or at least imagine the possibility.I would be happy to discuss any of the texts further in Q&A or with anyone willing, and welcome any discussion after. Please find links for further reading below. Thank you. For further reading:Dr. Stacy Freedenthal's blog: Risk and Protective Factors: National Strategy for Suicide Prevention: (chart on last page)Talk Outline | Brian Clifton Argument:The lyric might help authors render suicide more complexly on the page.Definitions:Lyric teases apart all the complexities of a single moment—allowing someone to stay with discontinuity and contradictory thoughts. Narrative looks at the consequences of actions over time and how they reveal character.(both from Ellen Bryant Voigt’s “The Flexible Lyric”)Discussion:I think a lot of times narrative and lyric are presented as contradictory terms—some writings are narrative (Harry Potter JK Rowling) and other writings are lyric (The Age of Wire and String Ben Marcus). This view that something is either lyric or narrative is a little too simplistic. Like most things, it’s a spectrum. Narrative gives the individuating particulars, and lyric draws out general forms to those particulars. One almost necessitates the other—even the most narratively driven Hollywood film has lyric moments in order to give its events significance. YA novels are no different. They are a mix. A prime example would be Thirteen Reasons Why. There’s a narrative—the consequences of many people’s actions (Hannah’s death) and the character that those actions reveal (Justin is a rapist, Mr. Porter is a terrible counselor, Hannah’s friend’s are mean, etc). Yet, all this narrative is relegated to backstory. The novel’s “plot” is mostly Clay wandering around trying to figure out why things are happening, what’s going to be revealed. This aspect is lyric—Clay, for the most part, is teasing out his “complicated” feelings (what did I do? why did Hannah die by suicide? why didn’t I see this coming?). I think this aspect of the novel does a lot to get at the incredibly layered and complex nature of suicide, of grief in general. For most of Thirteen Reasons Why we’re right there with Clay, working out our own thoughts and feelings about the situation in particular and death in general. This is a powerful thing to encounter on the page—especially for young adults who might be dealing with this sort of complexity for the first time. Yet, the book (and many like it) opt for narrative rather than lyric closure. Clay “understands” why Hannah died and his connection to the event. I think leaving the reader more in a state of flux, that is in a state where thoughts can be discontinuous and contradictory, where there is not really a resolution, could help generate more complex writing about suicide.Brief details | Spencer Hyde I'll read from Waiting for Fitz, but only for a few minutes, then talk about moves YA writers can make to represent the complexities of mental health (and suicide).[Note: As Dr. Hyde is a substitute panelist, he will focus on supporting other panel members and participate more in the Q&A] ................
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