librarypunk - 154 - Hal Schrieve

Episode Date: September 2, 2025

This week we’re talking with Young Adult author and children’s librarian Hal to talk about hir new book, vampires, monstrosity, the Old Internet, and the publishing landscape.    Pre-order Fawn���s Blood here: https://www.sevenstories.com/books/4753-fawn-s-blood  halschrieve.com  Media mentioned https://www.tumblr.com/librarycards https://www.tumblr.com/gatheringbones  Books/Literature Small changes over long periods of time https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/small-changes-long-periods-time/ Failure to Comply https://www.featherproof.com/catalog/failure-to-comply-sarah-cavar  Dead Collections https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/678855/dead-collections-by-isaac-fellman/ Carmilla https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carmilla Thirst https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/712422/thirst-by-marina-yuszczuk-translated-by-heather-cleary/ Peeps, Scott Westerfeld https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peeps_(novel)  Little F (formerly Little Faggot) https://www.feministpress.org/books-overflow/litte-f Mortal Companion, Patrick Califia https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/620928.Mortal_Companion  The Fist of the Spider Woman https://arsenalpulp.com/Books/F/Fist-of-the-Spider-Woman  Mermaid in Chelsea Creek https://store.mcsweeneys.net/products/mermaid-in-chelsea-creek  Cold, Mariko Tamaki https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250831569/cold/  Read at Your Own Risk https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250323354/readatyourownrisk/  It Better Be Worth the Trip – First gay YA novel (1969) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I%27ll_Get_There._It_Better_Be_Worth_the_Trip The Outsiders  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Outsiders_(novel) Speak, Laurie Halse Anderson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speak_(Anderson_novel) Looking for Alaska, John Green https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Looking_for_Alaska Books by Raina Telgemeier Books by Svetlana Chmakova Books by Tiffany Jackson Nathan Hale’s Hazardous Tales https://www.nathanhaleauthor.com/ We Are Palestinian https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/We-Are-Palestinian/Reem-Kassis/9781623717254  These Olive Trees https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/703283/these-olive-trees-by-aya-ghanameh/ Hilwa’s Gifts https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/774226/hilwas-gifts-by-safa-suleiman-illustrated-by-anait-semirdzhyan/ Movies Hackers (1995) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113243/ Dracula’s Daughter (1936) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0027545/  Nosferatu (2024) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5040012/ Daughters of Darkness (1971) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0067690 From Dusk Till Dawn (1996) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0116367/ Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0103874 Blade (1998) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120611/ I Am Legend Disney Channel’s Zombies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zombies_(2018_film)  Transcript: https://pastecode.io/s/wruy3we6  Join the Discord: https://discord.gg/zzEpV9QEAG

I'm Justin. I'm some kind of academic librarian and my pronouns are he and they. I'm Sadie. I work IT at a public library and my pronouns are they them. I'm Jay. I'm a cataloging librarian and my pronouns are he, him. And I'm Hal. I am a children's librarian and a young adult author and my pronouns are Z here. First see here on the podcast. I think so, yeah. Vintage. Yeah, well.

Got to catch them all. Yeah. So we were pitched on having you on for an episode by your publisher, who we met at ALA. We were just hanging out at house parties and wandering around and getting free books. So they're like, we have an author who is a children's librarian and writes about gay stuff. And I said, absolutely, why not? And I heard you before because I used to follow you on Twitter when I was still on there.

I appreciate that. Yeah. I hate Twitter. Yeah. RIP library Twitter. And then before that library Tumblr, which I noticed the Tumblr shout out in the book, Chapter 1. Well done.

We all met on Tumblr. Yeah. Yeah. Also, RAP Tumblr. It does still exist and there are still people using it, but it's a fraction of the user base that used to be on there. And like Twitter, it no longer has the utility that used to have for seeking and finding new information.

Yeah. Jay still uses Tumblr in a way that mystifies me. He's like, let me find a gift. set. I'm like, what? Why, why is this your default? Like, let me, let me find, why can't I find the gift set I'm looking for? He's just scrolling through all this stuff. It's like, no, where's the gay ones? And he just keeps going through it. And I'm like, I don't know how you expect to find information this way. I washed them do it. I, so there's, there's a couple of tumblers that I really loves that are very active still. And one is Sarah Kavaris Tumblr, which is Tumblr user library

cards and one is Tumblr user Gathering Bones and both post a lot of like primary sources from stuff that they are reading. Gathering Bones posts a lot of like Mad Theory and a archival primary sources about like lesbian history and also stuff about

anti-colonialism. Just like whatever that person is reading, they are posting PDF images like PDF scanned images and then like transcripts that you can scroll through as well as like their own takes on life. And then Sarah Kovar has this novel called Neat

failure to comply, which is about like a fascist society that punishes people who deviate from the norm and their Tumblr is is also full of like texts and stuff like that they're reading and processing and sort of thinking about mad theory and they're also a librarian. So yeah. Hell yeah. Yeah. Yeah. People still hanging out on that. I love those stuff. I mostly experienced Tumblr through Instagram now of just like kind of the best hits. I wasn't on Instagram for so long. Like I really really, really. resisted it. That's how I experienced TikTok is through Tumblr. So it's like the other way around. Yeah. I have a really old phone. So it doesn't really know how to load TikTok. And so I can go on TikTok, but it takes one million years and it uses up all of my phone's battery. Yeah. I'm most experiencing TikTok. I most experienced TikTok through Sadie's wife, uh, who would just send me videos to watch on TikTok. That's also how I experienced TikTok. But I just totally gave up on it. I'm like, this is bad for me.

This is like, I can feel it doing something bad to my brain. I can't be on this app. It's not good for you. When I got put in Twitter jail way back when I went on TikTok and I would get on it all day. And I was like, oh, I can't have this on my phone. Like the fourth time, it's like, hey, maybe you should stop scrolling. It's like, shut up. You don't know me.

Yeah, it's really, I have tried to use TikTok because I simply. want to be sharing book reviews with people. And so I have my like tiny little TikTok book review channel where I am like talking about trans books. But I have barely followed anyone on TikTok because again, it drains the battery of my phone to be on there. So I'm like, I post and I go away. But I posted a thing, I've been posting stuff about trans fiction for the most part and sometimes about gay nonfiction and history books and stuff. And then one time I was like, oh, I'm going to be like, grab three random nonfiction books from my bookshelf and talk about them. And they were about like the history of cannabis and illegalization. There were box Brown's book. It was a

book about Palestine and then a book about indigenous history. And it got like content block. Like it couldn't be shared. And it was like automatically muted until I appealed. And then I appealed it and they unmuted it. But it's not being shared with people. Like all of the algorithm things that usually make my videos viewed by people on TikTok because there's like a algorithm that delivers it to whoever watches trans stuff or whatever usually. It has not allowed people to watch that video. So there's like 100 views versus a thousand views on my other videos. There's like some kind of crazy censorship thing going on either about Palestine or about mentioning weed or something in a book review video. And then I scrolled through two videos on my feed and it showed me like a

video of somebody in the electric chair. Like it was on it was being delivered to me for who knows what reason because I don't I don't watch that stuff I don't watch anything on TikTok like the second video and the scroll was like somebody being electrocuted to death it's crazy what the fuck just on the lively TikTok feed yeah tick to talk's bad yeah it's really bad I wasn't on there for a long time and I open it up same account and it's like you're a Republican now right it's like okay sure it just looked like unfiltered YouTube like you ever been in on YouTube when it when you're not signed in and like the stuff at default shit shows you. That was what it was deciding that I was really into. Yeah. I, there's a union organizer on my

Instagram who was posting the other day about how she thinks that like kids should be allowed to have access to the internet and figure it out on their own. And I, I had to respond to her being like, I agree with you about 2014 internet. I am not sure how we as a society deal with young people interacting with the internet that is being rapidly constructed with a series of companies that control information and have these really, really, really, biased, really censorily overwhelming things being delivered

to both adults and children. Adults don't know how to deal with it. Children, their brains are very plastic. I'm not pro-censorship at all. But I'm like, we have to stop the internet until we figure out what's going on. Just slam the pause button for a second. It's just the

latest Homestar Runner video, which is just like, when the internet used to be websites, instead of the same four websites. Yeah. There used to be an end to the page. Mm-hmm. Like, it's not just like getting on weird message boards and telling your friends about it and, you know,

study hall or whatever. It's like, that's not what internet is anymore. And I think there's a really, really high lack of user ability to control what they're seeing. And there's a really encouraged by tech companies, like a lack of tech know-how among the youngest generation of users and also as each thing changes again and again and again, like the tech skills that I had acquired are no longer relevant a lot of the time and not just because I can't figure out how to make my microphone work. Yeah.

Make a webbering with your friends. Yeah. The first time I fried a computer after I turned 30, I'm like, well, this is it. We're downhill from here. Yeah. Because I tried to be cheap and change out of CPU with a slightly less out of date CPU. And I fried my whole computer had to buy a new. new one. But now it doesn't matter. There's no point in building computers anymore. You just

buy them pre-built. It's the exact same amount of money, probably even less. The skill I spent all my childhood wanting to learn with how to put together a computer doesn't matter anymore. Well, hopefully it will become relevant in the future when things are more tired. Yeah. We're like all like mad maxified. When I'm when I'm building a CRT TV out of like first concepts and just I've got two in my closet. that we were already there. Yeah, slowly exploding them by taking them apart improperly. Rapid unplanned disassemblies.

Okay. Anywho. No, this is good. We should talk about the internet. I mean, honestly, this conversation may be like, yeah, maybe we should get rid of Section 230. Like, maybe websites are publishers now. Maybe there is no more neutrality on the net. Maybe nothing of this matters.

Maybe I just think of that an onion piece. It's like AOL's winding, is getting rid of dial up. And it's like, hopefully this is the first step in winding down the internet as a whole. Yeah. I mean, I think it just, I love the movie hackers. Hack the planet, baby. Hack the planet. And I think that that is a movie produced at a critical juncture, probably a little bit too late.

But it's like, is asking the question of like, what will we allow the internet to become? Will it be like a network of people sharing information that, democratizes information that enables people to confront oligarchy or will it become a tool of the oligarchy. And I think that we now see what happens if you allow several companies to own everybody's ability to access information. It's scary. Yeah. That's what happens to get a bunch of Tumblr people on a podcast. We just start talking about how the internet used to be better. Yeah. Wait, how's your back feeling? Yeah, everyone on the call. I'm going to physical therapy for it. Tomorrow.

Oh boy. Yeah. Back in my day. Asking Tumblr users if their knees are okay is a completely different category of question. Anyway. I was hoping that would get you while you were still drinking. Oh, well. All right.

I got opinions. We know. You're looking at me. Bringing back an old segment, enemy of the pod. Sam Helmick, you're on notice. Being a Republican, president of the L.A. Everyone else, grow up. Don't fall for this shit.

All right, I'm done. Are you done? Get out of your system. Grow up. These opinions have not been vetted by Hal. I just did not put those in the notes. But these are mine and mine alone. And I also was like, I'm just going to, I'm too mad.

If you run around saying you're Republican, it's like, well, they're great. You don't have to do the drill quita. Boy, you got to hand it to them. No, you don't. That's the whole point of the drill tweet. You don't have to hand it to them. You don't have to hand it to ISIL and you don't have to hand it to someone who's walking around saying they're Republican. Oh, yeah.

I don't care if they're your friend. You wouldn't do. Okay. I'm going to stop before I piss all our friends off. Back to hell. Yes. Yeah. So, poor people who do not know, tell us about your book, because I want to know more.

Yeah. So my newest book, Fawn's Blood, is a young adult novel. It's about a teenager named Fawn who is living in. a smallish town and has one other transsexual friend whose name is Silver. And Silver seems to kill himself and disappears. And Fawn knows because she knows that Silver has actually faked his own death and become a vampire. Vampires in this world are known about, but they are not talked about they're somewhat taboo. Since the Vampire Recognition Act, the government has supplied vampires who declare themselves vampires with a regulated amount of blood in blood bags so that they

don't drink from people. And it's kind of a thing that you don't talk about with your children, and it's a thing that's known to exist in big cities. Silver is obsessed with vampires, and Fawn has, through Silver, come to be into vampires as well, though she thinks she's maybe not as into vampires as he is, until she takes west and she happens to run into a butch vampire trucker who takes her the rest of the way to Seattle and drinks her blood. Once she's in Seattle, she starts selling her blood to get by and is looking for her friend who she knows is a vampire. And then she encounters Rachel, who is the vampire daughter of a vampire slayer. And Rachel got turned into a vampire by her mom's nemesis, who's a guy named Kane, who runs a sort of vampire club in downtown.

And her mom has been trying to kill Kane for years and years and years and hasn't been able to do it. And in the process of continuing to fight Kane, Rachel, who's like 17, got turned into a vampire. and now the slayers don't trust her because they believe vampires are ontologically evil. So the story is about both of these girls in Seattle. Hell yeah. Do they have like a blood rave, like a blade in the club? Yeah, basically, except they're dorkier than that. I'm trying to picture like where in downtown Seattle I could picture like a vampire

It's right. It's right by a Pike Place Market. It's like in a Seattle underground building. Yeah. have you read, and the answer this is probably yes, have you read this short story by I think K.M. Sparza, I think that's he pronounced her name, called Small Changes Over Long Periods of Time. I think it's what it's called.

I haven't read that one, no. Oh, it's very good. It's about a trans man who is at a gay bar and he's outside pissing and gets bitten by a vampire. And this is a world where vampires are known about and they're legal, but they have to be registered and all that. And you can't just turn people without registering. And so it's about like he's and trans people aren't allowed to be turned into van empires because they don't know how it works anatomically and interacts with hormones and

everything. And so it's about this trans like this person who has already chosen who they want to be and transitioned and then being transitioned kind of again and like exploring that. And it's also very hot. Cool. they do be fucking in it. It's a very good short story. Hopefully. Yeah, it's, yeah, highly recommend it. It sounds like it would like go well with this story. That sounds great, yeah. I wrote this book partly in response to a different trans vampire book, which is Isaac Feldman's Dead Collections.

Yes, I love Isaac. Yeah, so I read that book and I was like, this is great in a lot of ways, especially because it's talking about sort of the being frozen in a certain point in your life and being unable to. to break out of it. It's a really good metaphor for that. Vampires are good kinds of metaphors for all kinds of different things. And I really loved the scene where the facilitator of the support group beats the main character up because they can smell that he just drank his girlfriend's blood and you're not supposed to do that. And I was like, well, with this book actually, what I want more of in this book is more blood drinking and more also social contact because the narrator of that book is in a really isolated place in his life. And so I was like, okay, so I clearly need to write a vampire.

community book. All of my books are about queer community. I have two other young adult novels, and there's a lot of like Y.A. romance in the world, and there is romance in my books, except for the first one, but all of my books are sort of dramas about queer community and encountering and finding friends or allies. Nice. Yeah. I just maybe think that the way you talked about, because I read through the first chapter, and I haven't read YA in a while, so it was very like jarring to like suddenly read YA and have not like in any way looked at a YA. And I don't, like, in any way, look at a Y. book since I was probably a teenager. And then just start reading the tone in which Y.A. is read.

And, like, it's very, it's very funny. I don't know if it's, like, intending to be funny, but the way that, like, the protagonist speaks always, like, just, like, rockets you back to, like, being a middle schooler or something. But anyway, just made me think when you were talking about how vampireism is miscentered in cities, I just thought of the thing that Jay always shows me. It's like, he moved into the city and now he's a vampire, which is the might. My son is gay skit.

You had, you mentioned, like, the vampire moment we're in. And I'm curious when you're, like, interacting with vampires as a myth and as a cultural shorthand, I feel like vampires and movies are sort of one of the main ways that we, like, experience vampires. So, like, what vampire movies do you take is, like, your biggest inspiration when you're writing about vampires and thinking about them? So I love camp things. I love Dracula's daughter, which is a 19th.

36 sequel to Dracula, which is it's so good. It's non-canonical. It's sort of canonically based on the film studio that made it like the sequel to Bella Legosi Dracula, but it's like he's dead and his daughter has issues and she kidnaps a psychiatrist to try to cure her of vampirism and it doesn't work because he has bad advice and she takes a girl in off the street with the promise of like sketching her for money and then like is lesbian at her but in a hayes code way because they can't show anything. So it's like you're zooming in on the woman's face as she gets more and more scared as she realizes that she's being lesbianically pursued by a vampire.

And it's so it's so over the top. It doesn't have any of a race or precision of like a more erudite horror movie. But like everything is always campy and it's good. It's good to be campy. It's bad if you're trying not to be campy. I did not care for the Nunoz feratu because it seemed to lose. It lost something in the decision to be really full. screen. It looks like a video game. We have put everything here. It loses the German

expressionist of it all. I love when a little guy looks a little messed up. And I really like also Daughters of Darkness, which is a 1970s movie that's also pretty gay and is also really ridiculous. Like, there's a point where a guy dies and it's because a vase breaks and it breaks cleanly in half and one half of the vase slices one of his wrists and the other half of the vase slices the other of his wrists. And then he bleeds out in immediately. dies in a big and then he's dead. And at the end, the vampire, sorry, not to spoil the ending.

Sorry, maybe not at the end. Maybe at a point in the movie that you randomly won't know. Somebody flies, just, just boink out of the car and is impaled on a tree branch and bursts into flame. It's amazing. And it doesn't match the tone of the rest of the movie, because the rest of the movie is like sultry and like silly, silly, but like slow moving. And feminist?

And actress and that is was like a huge feminist. Yeah. So yeah. And then I really, I really like from dusk till dawn just because of the sheer variety of vampires exhibited in that movie, because some of them are like, they've got fins and gills. Some of them are hairy and look like werewolves. Some of them look like classic nosferatu.

They're all kinds of vampires. Anything where practical effects and costume makeup goes crazy, I'm in for it. the more monstery a vampire looks, the more I'm in is kind of my vibe on vampire movies. I like the Bram Stoker Dracula with Gary Oldman in it because there's like, I don't like Gary Oldman as a person. There's allegations we must acknowledge, but like I think that the wet bat wolf man that is that vampire in that movie, it's like, yes, give us something new. And also, the more horror is soaked, the more it's dripping. Like, it's so silly, but it's also, that's Perfect. That's great.

That movie gave us beastiality and I applaud it. That movie went, it was fucked up. It's great. Yeah. And the Victorian dresses in it are like not period accurate because they're making them way too sexy. They're making them look like a 90s comic book. And I think that that you just got to go. Yeah. That movie's amazing. That's really good. That's the best Coppola film. It's better than the godfather. Fight me. I, I'm actually interested because you talked about like, you know, you like, you like how. the more like fucked up and monstrous a vampire is.

When you're when you're using vampires as a metaphor for like queerness in various ways, how does the monstrosity like translate? Do you like upping the monstrosity as a metaphor, like increasing that sort of intensity? Well, I think it's also literally like just aesthetic innovation that I appreciate. So I think that's part of it. And I also just like, I think it's kind of boring. I think Edward Cullen is boring. And my mom agreed when she read Twilight to vet it for my little sister, when Twilight era was happening.

She was like, I think this book might be too sexy. And then she got to the point where he's sparkling. And she was like yelling from the other end of the house. He's sparkling? Because it's like, it's nothing else. She thought he was going to turn into like a big monster or something in the sunlight. Like the sunlight was going to expose something about his monstrosity, which would have been more interesting. If he's just sparkling, there's nothing there.

There's no there there. And I think any vampire that is just a pretty guy with teeth, it's a different metaphor. It's like it's a metaphor about maybe abuse or it's a metaphor about like victimization to your desires or something. I think when it's queerness, like the things about trans people and the things about queer people that they hate, they're going to try to say that we're ugly that they're going to try to say we're deformed or freaks or whatever. And the only way that you win that game is by owning it and getting better at it and doing more innovation aesthetically and being like, this is cool actually. And yeah, and also I think getting a little bit furry with it, not a bad thing. We are fans to the fussy folk, as Jay says.

What vampire books do you like? I love Carmelah and I love Dead Collections. I enjoyed the book Thirst that is like a translation. I think it came out either this year or last year in English, and it's about Argentinian vampire who feasts upon people indiscriminately. She's a very monstery vampire. She's very inhuman. I like Poppy Z. Bright. And I like Patrick Caliphia had a vampire anthology a long time ago. Yeah. I'll have to read that. Yeah. I like Patrick. Yeah. I like, and there's a story in queer erotica anthology that I read when I was 16, because I found it in a bookstore. And it's called The Fist of the Spider Woman. And there's a great vampire story in that. That was also the first time I read Megan Milk's work, and I really like Megan Milk's work. Yeah. Very cool. And I liked

Anne Rice when I was at, I functionally, Anne Rice is the cornerstone of all of this, but I, I, I, I, you know, she is who she is. I have tried to. All the Tumblr always are trans-truthing about Anne Rice, because they, it's one of them read some sort of biography that, where Anne Rice was talking about, like, how she wanted to, felt like she was a boy or, like, wanted to be a boy or something. And all the Tumblr people are like, And she should have done that then. She existed in a time with transsexuals. I think at a certain point, it's just kind of like, well, if you coexisted in a timeline where there were transsexuals and you didn't transition at some point, unfortunately, like, you just didn't transition.

I think that's fine. She can have that if she wants to be on the grave. But what she can't have is creative control over the current Netflix series, which I think is doing a better job with her characters than she did. Yeah. It's amazing. I love that show. And I think that's a big part of the vampire moment that we are in.

It's returning to queer-baiting things from the past. Queer Beatty, like, obviously it's very queer, but it's also queer-bady in that, like, everyone in it is being imagined by someone who at least live their life functionally as a straight woman. And I think it's kind of reinvigorating it by making it a toxic poly pentagon or whatever. Yeah. As God intended, yes. Yeah.

Yeah, making everyone who watches it. realize something unsettling about themselves in the characters. Like, oh, ho, ho, I have a sense of humor. Oh, ho. I'm okay with you dating other men. Oh, ho. There's definitely nothing I'm seeing reflected of myself in this episode. We're about jealousy or contempt or something like that.

Or anyway, it's a great show. I mean, isn't that what a good vampire piece of media does is make you go, hmm, I hadn't thought about that before and I'm not sure I want to think about it. Yeah. I really like, so, I mean, what it seems to be. seems to currently be happening is we were all like, okay, Eric Bogosian is like the, he is the guy who knows and understands everything who's doing the right thing this whole time. And now we're getting to the part of the story where it's like, uh-oh, he's going to be messed up too. Like, yeah. Hooray. I say, gimme, give me, give me. I can't wait for Velvet Goldmine, but with vampires, like, let's go. I'm so excited for this third season. It's going to be great. Yeah.

curious about like when when we go through like different monster phases in pop culture although it all seems kind of like we're living at every nostalgia era at once but like how would you define the vampire moment like how are we conceptualizing vampires as a culture right now like is it getting more queer is it getting more something else I will say that vampires vampires vampires move through different moments right because some vampires are like hairy hand scary ugly vampires and some vampires are like sexy pretty man vampires. We're in a sort of sexy, pretty, and simultaneously increasingly censored and repressed kind of moment. So I think, I think the current vampire moment that we're in relates somehow to sort of a return to Ozympic kind of body standards and also like TikTok, FaceTune body standards, and also a kind of like paranoia and need for control culturally. There's, there's something going on there. There's a fear of sex that's really strong. There's a fear of queerness that is pervasive and horror just sort of responds to things going on culturally. I think for the zombie era

that was like I certainly was going on when I was in middle school alongside like a different vampire era or whatever, but like the zombie the zombie apocalypse literature and video games and everything that was going on is I think that that was like a isolation thing and it's about feeling like you might be the only real person in the world. And I think that that's about like the beginning of a consumer culture that completely alienates us from our neighbors such that we start to view them as non-persons. And I think that it's very fascist. Yeah.

It's very fascist. And like the kind of zombie media that was generally being made was not super sympathetic to zombies with a few exceptions. And then it's like there's there's always branches because you can do a bunch of different things with something. And eventually like it gets watered down and filtered down such that what you have is something like the Disney Channel's zombie movies, the zombie versus trail leaders movies. I don't know if you're aware of those.

Children, children do watch them. The zombies and those are pretty. Their only distinguishing characteristic is that they, they're pale and they can have red eyes, and they wear a device to stop them from going full I am legend zombie, like Will Smith, I am legend zombie. They are essentially chronically ill with the capacity to become powerful flesh eating monsters at any point. And there's a plotline in the first movie where one of them uses his zombie state, his his amped up zombie state as kind of a roid thing to do during football. And then he almost

loses control and hurt somebody. And it's this really interesting thing where the plot is about sort of civil rights for zombies, but then they also underlie this with, and the zombies could become dangerous at any time and hurt people. And it's like a, it's kind of an AIDS panic mixed with like a steroids panic. And it's, it's very confused politically about what it's doing, because it is also like a disnified apartheid state for the zombies and the humans within the world. It's a fascinating text. There are 11-year-olds who have watched the full series. The werewolves in this series are also not full werewolves.

They don't turn into wolves. It's all very, like, pretty-fied Monster High-style dollified teenagers on like a very poorly designed set performing these stories. And it's like once it gets there, then that era of Monster has probably filtered out and something else is going to take its place in a little bit. I am waiting for a truly a rich werewolf era again, but I don't know if we are. people just people don't ever go as full into werewolves that that leads me to like so I tend to like I remember when I was in high school I read some YA because this was like the era of like Scott Westerfeld yeah and like the hunger games was just coming up like I really liked Scott Westerfeld as well as like the book speak and like stuff like that like that was when I was in high school I really liked those books John Green was also really big at the time like uh was it looking for Alaska? Is that?

Yeah, yeah, I read that one a lot. And, like, you know, things happen in those books, especially the Scott Westerville book, Peeps, which is one of my favorite vampire books of all time. It's so good. But now it's like, I hate YA because I feel like it's very watered down. It's very written for 35-year-olds. A lot of the time, like, there's just a lot of the tone about it.

I don't like, not just because I'm, like, not a teenager anymore. I feel like there's something about the genre that has shifted. So as a YAA author, I'm curious, like, what your thoughts are on, like, the presence of, like, monstrosity and, like, the sort of, like, kind of bucked up nature of what it's like being queer or what it's like being disabled or what it's like being like all of these things. Like, how do you see that being reflected in, like, Y.A. writ large. What are trends you see in the industry of, like, things being watered down, of being dollified, of being pretty finely. see that happening or not. Yeah, I mean, I think in general there is always since the inception of a mass market for young people's literature. And I mean, the history of young adult as a genre really only

goes back about 50 years to the 70s, right? So there's like Judy Bloom. At the end of the 60s, there starts to be more non-idealized literature for teenagers that speaks to perhaps like a flawed person rather than an idealized sort of didactic teenager character. I just actually read the first gay YA novel that was ever published, and it was acquired by Ursula Nordstrom. And it's, it's like, I'll get there. It better be worth the trip, I think is the title. And it's the first one to deal with homosexuality. And it was published in 1969 before the Stonewall riots. Wow. It's about a 13-year-old who has a divorced alcoholic mom and loves his dog, and he messes around with a boy from school and then feels kind of guilty and weird about it.

And they talk about it. And it doesn't clearly resolve it. But it was part of a new wave of YIA books back then talking about concerns that teenagers might reasonably expect to face. It was published barely after the outsiders. And I think there's always been this tension in young adult literature about like whether it's depicting the real potential lives of teenagers or whether it's kind of a nostalgic and safe genre for adults to read to sort of imagine themselves as teenagers or have like a fun and fluffy time where they don't expect to think very much. Yeah. There's always a tension in that literature between those two things. And I think librarians in general, and it comes and goes in terms of publishers,

I think that there's people who are pushing for it to be a useful tool for young people to process the moment they're in. I think Scott Westerfield, I have political critiques of him, but I think he's fantastic at just putting everything going on in a blender and making it exciting to read and making it like worth talking about to your friends. Like he's processing body image stuff. He's processing anxieties about the end of the oil era. He's processing sort of ideas about whether free will is a good thing or bad thing for humans or whatever. He's putting it all in a blender. He's throwing it out there. It's kind of lowbrow, but it's also like got a lot of ideas in it. And I think that YAA should be something that a teenager wants to read, that is fun to read, and that gets at something useful for them to talk or think about it. And I do think that there are some way A authors that are still doing this. I love Mariko Tamaki. I will die for Mariko Tamaki over and

over again. I don't know if you've read her novels in addition. So she has novels as well as graphic novels that she does. She has one called Cold, that is a murder mystery, that is narrated partly by the ghost of the murdered teen who does not remember what had happened to him. And then there is also a girl who is realizing that her friend and her brother don't have an alibi. And it's excellent genre fiction. It is not too long. And it skewers some copaganda in there as it does things. And it's talking about real stuff while also being fun to read. And I think it's really skillful. And I also love Tiffany Jackson's stuff.

I think that there is a lot of things out there that are compelling. It is not everything out there because there is also, admittedly, like there is a very standardized form that's really, it's meant to be a light, fluffy romance that's functionally meant to be read by people older than teenagers. I don't think teenagers are reading light fluffy romances for the most part. I don't think they're mostly interested in that. There are some probably, but I think those kids are also reading manga. I don't think they're reading necessarily prose based on my rock of things. I think they're reading comics and manga if they're looking for like things that are aesthetic and light and fluffy because those have pretty pictures as well.

But I also, I do think that there's stuff that's good. It's just that the industry as a whole is trying to move units. And it's trying to move units in an environment to where there's fewer and fewer bookstores and where bookstores have massive discretion to not acquire titles that they don't think are going to move very much. There's not an interest and necessarily like a diversity of kinds of literature being held by Barnes & Noble anymore. The large box store format of bookselling, I think, has impacted what is written and produced into final form. And I think that also is true for middle grade literature. As a children's librarian, there is far too much realistic fiction about normal kids doing normal stuff for 300.

And I am going to say that there is an appetite among children to read realistic fiction stories where they're primarily dealing with real plausible emotional issues. But they want to read it in graphic novel form more than they want to read it in prose. And if you're going to put it in prose, it had better be under 200 pages in my personal opinion. There's not, sorry, I look at my shelves at my library and everything is 350 pages long. And I'm like, for an eight year old, I'm sorry, for an eight year old, That's insane. That's why kids aren't reading books anymore. Like when I was a kid, like you had so many of the Zach files or whatever and they were 100 pages long and they had they had real hard hitting stuff. You can do a plot in 100 pages. Now, I speak as somebody whose book is about 350 pages long. But if I was writing for small children, I would try to make it shorter. So I, and I think that's something about like something about marketing that is exterior to the desire of the reading public. That that can't be what people are asking for. I don't know. understand why that's happened. Yeah. It makes me wonder, as an author and as a librarian, you're in this interesting, like, interstitial space. You get to see kind of like two different ways of, like, thinking about publishing, right? So what's your read on the industry? As you mentioned earlier, like, we're going through a wave of like censoriousness, political fear, as someone who's, you know, talking to other authors and thinking very deeply about children's literature. what is your read on that world aside from like you know page limit formats and things like that but

you know what's what retreats I suppose are you like watching happening and what I guess what might concern you the most about them I mean I think that the the statistics are showing as far as I'm aware that like racial diversity in children's books has gone back down uh in terms of what's being published we're back to animal characters because people want to be safe in picture books and there is still diversity in terms of like, there's more authors of color who are bestsellers now, but I think that, I think there's a little bit of a retreat in terms of racial diversity,

and I think it's a little bit too soon to say, or maybe not, I don't know, I think that we didn't quite get to the point where there were too many good nonfiction books about queerness for kids. A lot of the ones that exist kind of, they weren't really good for children developmentally. Like, they just weren't.

And I don't mean in terms of like content is too adult for children. I mean the information was not presented in a style format where kids understand what's being said. There's too many definitions of terms that are going to change in two years books that got published in 2021 to 2022. And I don't think. They're for adults. And they're not beautiful to look at mostly. There's a few good biographies of queer people that have gotten out there. Actually, no, there's there's tons of biographies of Keith Herring that are pretty good.

that have happened in the last few years. And there's a few good biographies of other people. There's a great one by Tourmaline about Marsha P. Johnson. That's like a picture of biography. And those things are going to take a few years to wane because the publishing cycle takes a few years. I think it's yet to be seen if there will be a lockdown on trans content for children in U.S. children's publishing. I think that there are good things happening in children's publishing in terms of like adults still decry graphic novels for children. Parents come in all the time asking me for them to get something besides graphic novels for their kids.

there is so much beautiful stuff being made in graphic novels right now. The problem is people are not being adequately compensated for their labor in making those graphic novels. Advances on graphic novels are the same as four pros. And it is at least 10 times the amount of work. And that is a real big problem for the industry because a huger and huger portion of children's publishing is graphic novels. And a large portion of those creators are queer, I'm going to say.

I think a huge portion of children's graphic novel creators, that's going to scare the Republicans. But yeah, they are queer. And I think those people are being drastically underpaid. So that's an issue that I see happening. I think in general, like the big box store thing is the thing that really terrifies me because I think that really controls whether anyone is interested in the quality of narrative or the originality of ideas being circulated.

I think things being marketed on keyword is increasingly what is happening. And I worry about books not even getting read because they're just being marketed and sold on keyword and then being sold and put in on a shelf and not actually. being read the whole way through. And I think you've, oh, sorry, go ahead. I think the exception to this is with, like, speculative fiction stuff, which has a strong fan community. And then IP property stuff does get read because it has a fan community to speak to.

And I don't necessarily think that all of the fan community produces, like, a higher quality of literature, but I do, I'm at least confident that those things are being read because somebody is interested in them because of what they're connected to. And I worry about new titles and their ability. to get picked up and actually read within less revered circles of literature. Like there's capital L literature, and then there's paraliterature, which is like sci-fi and fantasy and comics, and then all of children's literature doesn't really ever count as true literature unless it passes a very specific kind of bougie artistic test.

And so I really worry about the ability of small new titles and authors to succeed in that field, I guess, is my concern for the field of publishing for children as a whole. But good things still happen. also a good thing that's happening in American children's publishing is picture books are adopting styles that are more similar to like the high artistic standards of Japanese and Korean children's picture books. There's more beautiful. I see a few more every year like really, really gorgeous beautiful children's books. And I think it's because of the influence of the Japanese and Korean children's book markets because they have really pretty picture books over there. I'm sure y'all have experienced this at in my PL, but like along with the sort of like big box bookstore thing, like, A thing we're facing it at my library is that like with places like Baker and Taylor or Ingram, like you know, the big like vendors that we, we buy things from, more and more of those types of like warehouse facilities are not stocking stuff for libraries or not wanting to sell to libraries like to prioritizing selling to bookstores because libraries don't bring in

the same amount of money that bookstores do. And so we've had to rely on like local, independent bookstore sometimes for newer releases. Wow. Yeah, no, it's been, it's been bad just because, like, we'll order so many of a new release and only get sent so many, and it might be months later. Just like, it's, it's been bad. I don't know if you all have experienced it in my, in my PL, but, like, I feel like that's another issue that could, like, in this pipeline facing libraries is just that, like,

not only do publishers, not like libraries, but these, like, sort of big vendors don't really like libraries either, and so it's going to be harder for libraries to also get these materials. Yeah, I mean, I know that there was a huge backlog in our ordering last January. I am not in the acquisitions department. NYPL is so big that I have no cataloging experience. I have no direct, like, putting it in the cart experience because somebody is in a different department doing that. I know that there was a really big slowdown in our ability to acquire new children's titles for a few months. That was really crazy. I wonder if it has something to do with the same thing. And I don't know how our supply chain works versus other systems. I don't know

if we have special access to books somehow. I know that we do work with independent bookstores for world languages because that's a different thing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I, let's see, where am I pulling from next? I suppose like speaking to that same, that same like long tale of change in publishing. Are you seeing any other change from your putting your children's library and head on? Any change in like reading behaviors or parental concerns or things like that? This is all anecdotal, but, you know, are you noticing any changes in sort of like reading habits from the library side of things? For children? Yes. I think that children who spend more time on screens spend less time reading books and I do think that it impacts literacy to not be consuming written

I think written content on a screen is still written content, but I think a lot of kids who have screens constantly in their lives are preferring video content, which is what makes me so worried about the way the algorithmic delivery of videos on YouTube works for kids, because it's like they're not watching something designed for children, usually. They're watching something designed to get a maximum amount of views. And I do notice it was a more profound sort of reading delay for the kids who were preschool through grade six. during 2020, I think, because I think it's just a reading lag. You don't, you have a different kind of learning happening for a year and all of your energy is going toward figuring out how Zoom works, basically, and figuring out how to navigate all the initial structures. I don't think it's happening. I mean, I'm mostly working with like younger kids, so I'm seeing people who are just emerging into literacy at age like four and five and stuff, but they, they seem like they are, kids are still interested in books if you put books in front of them. I am only seeing the kids making it into my library. There are a lot of kids who come to the library to use computers and they don't read books

necessarily. And there's also a stagnation that I see happening around age nine where some kids start reading the same books over and over and over again. And I think it's because they are not finding enough of whatever they're looking for in those books that's similar for them to read or move on to or they're not being directed toward it enough by people around them. It's the Jeff Kinney, Wimpy Kid, Dogman, Rutt. And I like Dogman. I don't like Wimpy Kid. But both of those books have been bestsellers that have been just oninistically cycling through bestsellerdom over and over and over again for for 10 to 20 years. And especially for boys, there's no new Percy Jackson to take it up to move them to the next level of prose narrative literacy. And there's a lot of great stuff out there, but it's not capturing all

of the readers. And there needs to be a hugely diversified realm of like narrative fiction for children to get those readers continuing to move on to new stuff and feeling like they have new stuff to read. And because publishers are really committed to making the same thing last and continue to pull new bucks in or whatever. That's why we have freaking 20-something or however many wimpy kids we have. I had to catalog some in Arabic last month. Yeah. I mean, like, good that you have them in Arabic. But I really want kids who are 9 and 10 to be moving on to reading, like, they're going to, ideally, I think the right move is that they read Wimpy Kid, they read more graphic novels. They get into like graphic novel, like a Wimpy Kid to Indie Graphic Novel pipeline is not

unimaginable, right? Like a whiny narrator thinking about their life, there's lots of indie graphic novels to cover that, but you need some kind of bridge in between Wimpy Kid and like adult indie graphic novels for those readers to find that track. And I just said there was tons of great graphic novels and there are tons of great graphic novels. I think that there is a specific level of literacy need that is not being met by the current system of book production. And I think that that's what causes people to say, oh, like, we're, we're losing our boys. Something's wrong with our boys. We're hurting our boys somehow. It's

boys. That's the problem. And it's partly because a lot of the really good graphic novels are written by women and are about girls. And that's not necessarily a problem because they should have stuff to read about girls. And a lot of the boys that do want to read those do read those. Like everybody reads Renate Tagalgemeier, everyone reads Svetlaj McCov. Because those are really good books. But There's not, there's not like the kind of fun multiplicity that you need to make sure everybody makes that leap that's being consistently handed down. Science comics are great. Nathan Hale's Hazardous Tales are great, but those only get like the nonfiction readers, I guess. I think it's the cycle. It's the bestseller cycle. It's just, it's not great. I don't know. Yeah. Kids love scary stuff too. And I think there needs to be more like silly slash scary series. Remy Lye has a great one that's kind of a wimpy kid format, but it's, about a book that curses you so your teeth turn into bugs. That one's so awesome. It's called Read at Your Own Risk by Remy Lie.

That one's great. There needs to be a bunch more things that are like the format of Wimpy Kid with pictures and not too many words per page, but have like a higher level of storytelling or a higher level of plot interest, I think, to get those nine-year-olds to make it to the next reading level. I don't know. That's my two cents. Yeah, right after Jay said he was cataloging Wimpy Kid in Arabic and he said, we need to get them on. we need to get them on. I'm like, to the Quran.

If we can move them up one reading level. I just had like a preacher just in my head kind of yelling about that for a little bit while you were talking. It's just like, I can't interrupt, I can't interrupt, I can't. Well, I will say that Muslim societies are pretty literate. Like a lot of Muslim societies are pretty literate because they're like

memorize the Quran. Yeah, exactly. I mean, that is... I mean, there's been a lot of great books about Palestine that have been coming out too. But those are for like kids. Those are for smaller children. Yeah. Hill-Wis Gifts is about the olive harvest. That's great. These olive trees by Agon Ahmed is about the 1967 displacement. That's great. The book, We Are Palestinian, is the most comprehensive book at any reading level about, like, all of the cities in historic Palestine and different, like, cultural traditions. It's great. It should be in every collection. It's fantastic. Yeah. I wonder with, when you're talking about, like, the kind of there's no new, like, Percy Jackson coming through, is it because, like, is it because the way, children read is like socially informed. Like they, they need their friends to be reading the same

thing at the same time to really get them into it. Because I feel like I read, you know, like Red Wall because a friend read it. But I'm sure there was tons of great books that I was missing in middle school because I was just focused on Red Wall. Yeah. I was just reading those like 30 books again and again. I think it is a peer delivery system. And I think, you know, we were talking about publishers kind of ignoring libraries perhaps. I mean, the middle school library or the school library is where a lot of discovery is likely to happen. And if you have a really well-stocked school library, you're going to be reading more. And I wonder, yeah, I wonder what discovery pathways exist for most kids in America, for example, like just in terms of finding those books and in terms of

like somebody in their life reading that book. And also if they are spending less time with their friends and more time at home or in activities, how much of their time is too regulated for them to be doing that discovery? Yeah, true. Yeah. I remember when I was in, middle school, a lot of the stuff that I read was because, like, we did the accelerated reader program. I don't know if that's, like, still a thing. And my reading level was so high, you know, flip my hair, my reading level was too high that, like, I was only allowed to read certain things in the library because of what my reading level was, and I had to read so many books and take the test so many times or whatever in order to do the program. And so when I was in, like,

fourth grade, I was sitting there reading like Mary Higgins Clark. mysteries and stuff because that was like the highest level thing in my middle school library or not fourth grade. This would have been like eighth grade maybe. I don't know. Yeah. But yeah, like a lot of what I read in middle school was because of the accelerated reader program and what I was quote allowed to read in order to satisfy testing requirements.

Yeah, I also did AR. I think, and I think the AR tests, something strikes me as unsavory about that whole thing, but also the good thing about it was that we had a lot of silent reading time in the class day. Like we had a period that was for silent reading. And I think that you do need that in schools if you want children to be literate. Like if you want them to enjoy reading, if you want them to spend time with reading, you have to build it into their day. And I think part of probably the literacy drop-off is that something about standardized testing, something, something about like kids' time use is like there's less encouragement of like mandated sort of reading time in the school day. spending less time reading.

Yeah. I like the accelerated reader program because I like taking the tests for books I hadn't read and seeing how many of them I could pass. Oh, yeah. I didn't finish Little Women. Yeah. Of course not. You know you took that test like five times because that was like at the most points

was Little Women. Oh, I never did it. And they were a Little Women. I didn't either, but I passed the test, I'm sure. So take my trans guy card away. I didn't read Little Women. I did eventually read Little Women, but not when I took it. Yeah.

The Foundling. Oh, Arthur? Yeah, come up. Yeah, any, any, the thickest books in the library, there were the most points. And then you could get the shitty eraser head that didn't work. I don't know why this was important to me. But I did enjoy like just trying to take the test and see if I could beat them. To me, this was, this was the important thing of school was to win. Yeah, there's a certain gamified aspect that I think probably was successful.

I think that there was a, at my school, there was like a competition to see who could get the most AR points in a classroom. and then that class got a pizza party. And I think that that was unfair because the already somewhat racially segregated Talented and Gifted Program, because the structure of Talented and Gifted Program was such that only white and Asian kids were in it. I think those classes were always getting the pizza party for the AR points. And I think that that is not realistically representing the level of intelligence or skill in those groups.

It's just sort of like what the priorities were in a certain set of. at the school. Anyway, yeah. Yeah. The thing is, gifted program was really good for me, but it was also really fucked up. We had a segregated class for ourselves. Yeah. And got to, like, do different stuff than the rest of the kids.

We only had it for two years, but it wasn't like a separate class. It was just like, like permanently, it was just like, oh, a class period that you got to go to, but you were in the rest of your classes normally. But when it only did it two years and the lady, like, quit or got fired or there was a scandal or something. I didn't get to really do it.

Yeah, so I didn't really get to do the gifted program for very long. Yeah, it was mostly good until I got put in a mental hospital. That was also the gifted year. Well, you know, you take the good with the bad. You mentioned when we were talking in the run-up to the episode about contact between queer generations. What was it you had in mind when you were bringing that up? I think the act of writing a young adult novel when you're no longer a young adult is inevitably just a contact between queer generations. and all of my

books are an attempt to try to give teenagers something that I feel like I needed when I was a teenager and then I feel like I am alive because of the efforts of previous queer people to do that for young people. I do think that it's just something that I want to say about my work and that I think is true about all attempts to produce a record of queer existence

are about this and then all attempts to write for young people about queer existence or about this of just trying to give something to people who are younger or coming to it later or something so that they know that there is a precedent and also hopefully so that there is some kind of support or care or sustenance that happens. And it also goes both ways because knowing that young queer people exist helps me continue to survive. And I think that like that was also what was happening for adults who are participating in like the queer support groups that I went to as a teenager, because they were getting something out of being there too and seeing young queer people be out.

and either having a bad time or a good time, it was like they felt like it was necessary to try to be there for us and whether or not they were successful and many times they were not completely successful. It was like, that's produces queer community because if we're all just boys in the band somewhere finding our clicks and disappearing into the woodwork, like we don't have a queer community,

it's about a statement to be public and to be who we are and to try to reach other people like ourselves in different age groups. Yeah, that's just, And that's kind of the project of all of the books that I've published so far is to try to talk about that contact and to try to perpetuate it. Yeah. I mean, it's what I constantly think about whenever any discussions of the modern AI hype comes up is all these things are care. And that's why the attempts to replace them with AI doesn't work because AI doesn't care for people. Like teaching is a care profession.

Being a librarian is a care profession and writing for young people is a care profession. ultimately these are like acts of caring that we put intent into and that intent sort of is qualitatively different from any imitation of it. Yeah. Yeah, when I was, oh, sorry, go ahead. Yeah, when I was, I remember being in high school again and maybe as I was like going into college on Tumblr, I remember this was when the sort of backlash from teenagers, well, it was maybe AstroTurfed by all the turfs on Tumblr, but like all of the teenagers. but like all of the teenagers were all of a sudden just very against John Green who was

very active on Tumblr and there was this whole like accusing YAA authors who put sex in their books which I think there should be sex in YA books. Teenagers are having sex. This is nothing new, right?

Like that because an adult is writing it that that's somehow creepy or bad or that adult is trying to groomed children or is being very predatory in some way. And this was weaponized against John Green who has, like, I think there's like a blowjob in looking for Alaska or something. Like, it's very tame.

But like this sort of like, and I remember like it was like teenagers and stuff doing this. There was a sort of like very anti-sex scare that that happened against Y.A. authors. And to my knowledge, John Green isn't queer or hasn't come out as queer. His father is. Oh, Hank is? Okay. Super Hank. But, like, I can only imagine, like, as a queer and as a trans, like, Y.A. author, like, what are, I don't know, like, how do you sort of, not manage, but, like, how do you sort of navigate that challenge of when you're, like, writing for kids and stuff, but, like, and putting stuff in your books that people might find.

objectionable or whatever. Like, how do you navigate that in this sort of climate that we're in? I mean, it's sort of still yet to be found out because my books are published with an indie publisher. So it's like I have not hit John Green level fame, which I think is a big part of the equation here with John Green especially. I think John Green did have dubious social interactions with all of his young fans. He had very young fans. It was the start of YouTube being really big. And he was getting a lot of direct interaction with teenagers while also writing for teenagers. And those teenagers were projecting a lot on him. They were big, big, big fans of his books. And he was experiencing like a, the rocket ship of early social media combined with like fan culture around YA. And, and I think he didn't

have the preparation to kind of set appropriate boundaries with fans after that happened to fast. So I think that that came at him from that angle. And also he is a straight man. Like, you know, just be normal, be a little more normal when you talk to teen girls. Because he was like giving them sex ed advice and stuff. And I'm like, just bring in like a different podcaster or something to take. The skeleton exists. Yeah. Yeah.

Something. Just distance yourself from that role. I, yeah. And I think that like if I rocketed to stardom, that would be something that I would try to do. I think it's about being, being cautious about what you say. This is a great question to ask Michelle T. Who has a book coming out soon called Little F that is ostensibly a YA. And it was called Little Faggot.

You can bleep that out if you want to. Oh, we say Faggit all the time. We are. We are, her publisher, her publisher feminist press, yeah, her publisher feminist press was like,

I don't think it would be allowed for a YA book to be called Little Fagot. I think you have to call it something else. So it's called Little F, and it is also about a runaway gay teen who has, like, has sex and has adventures and is getting into a lot of scrapes in a sort of realistic way for a young chaotic.

queer person. And I think, I think, like, Michelle T has written for teens before with Mermaid in Chelsea Creek, and she's kind of, she's, she's floating and bumastic and stuff, but, like, her style is so perfect for teenagers. Valencia is a great, not, I mean, it's not a WIA book, but it's a great book for teens to read. And I think that, like, if she starts being in a YA market, I really wonder how she will deal with that, because she is unable to censor herself at all, or like to be anything except like the queer, the queer cultural figure that she has been different spheres. And I aspire to that, honestly.

I would love to, I would love to be exactly that brave because I think that we don't gain anything by self-censorship. And I also think that like anybody who doesn't actually care about the well-being of young people will probably make themselves known eventually. And as long as we are rigorous and like sort of making sure that we're all taking care of each other, You know, like, I don't care if a, I mean, knock on wood, but I don't think I care if a right-winger calls me a groomer until I'm, like, deported or something about it, I guess. But I don't know how the landscape will unfold. I have currently not been famous enough to be a target. So I'm not too worried about it at this time. But I think that queer people can't sacrifice truth or trying to communicate with each other for a dream of assimilation that has already evaporated. Are you seeing teens? Because, like, I totally agree. There was like, that was very early in the sort of like, a sociality relationship kind of thing, like with John Green. And like, I'm still seeing people talk about it in the Year of Our Lord 2025. Like, y'all, that was a while ago. But, like,

are you seeing teens still acting that way, like reacting, like, forming those attachments with authors or even having those attitudes, like, towards sex in books or anything like that? I think it depends on the teen because there's a lot of teens in the world. Yes. Yeah. I think it really depends on the teen. I am in Manhattan, so I see the teens who go to the art high school near my library. And so those are entirely queer teens. I have also worked uptown in Harlem a little bit. I have worked on 78th Street a little bit. I feel like it's going to depend on the teen. I think a more sheltered teenager who's more scared of the world is going to be more anti-sex or more freaked out about the sex lives of authors writing books for them. I think that they can choose what they want to read

and they will figure it out hopefully. I do think that there is certainly an understandable fear of sexuality and contact with other people in a generation that had COVID happen during their adolescence. I think that is a really, and it's barely able to be discussed in a real way, but it's like, think about the AIDS generation and how crazy everybody is who lives, through that. And then like imagine every single person, every, in every sphere of your life, going insane in one way or another for at least a couple of years because of being terrified of a real virus, because of being like freaked out by a government conspiracy that doesn't exist, by being freaked out by government conspiracies now do exist. And then like not being able to kiss

anybody because it might, because it might tell you. Like people, people like, I don't know, like someone, someone that I know who has a little sister who was like in her senior year of high school and was figuring out, like, you know, which gender she was attracted to and stuff. She literally had to sneak out of her house because it was COVID. Because her mom was really scared that she was going to get COVID if she made out with anyone or had

any outside of the family bubble contact with anybody. So she was, and this is not like an insane mom. This is kind of a normal mom, but it was during COVID. And so like her developmental milestones happened under locked down secrecy because she did not feel like she could safely

tell anybody what she was getting up to because it was perceived as a public health threat. And so I think everybody who was adolescent during that time gets a pass from me on being a little weird, at least for a while. I think you can acquire skills gradually as you become an adult and enter the world and stuff. I do think our very isolated social media bubble from each other culture where we're terrified of like someone driving past us in a parking lot because they're going to be a sex trafficker or something. Like that is a problem that's not just with teenagers. That's with like adults as well. And I think that's a huge issue of just being so scared of your neighbors, no matter what the reason or what age you are. And I do think

that's a huge issue, but I don't think it's just teenagers. And I think if we're blaming teenagers, it's probably not just teenagers. Yeah. Yeah. And say to you at something. Yeah, I was going to say, I'm wondering if more of that sort of parisocial relationship that you were getting at, Jay has shifted from, like, authors to YouTubers and Kwonkent creators, at least among the small group of queer teens that I have regular interactions with, that seems to be more of the influence as opposed to interacting with, like, authors or even, like, musicians or other kinds of artists that, like, I mean, I'm 40, so, like, my high school year was, years were a very long time ago, but that was more what it was then. It was like bands and authors and that, you know,

that sort of thing. And now it's all YouTube creators. So. And I mean, John Green was a YouTube creator as well. So like, I think, I think it's about that twinning of like, you can consume infinite video content about this person and then potentially consume some other things that they created as well. Yeah. And I know, I don't remember what the YouTuber was, but there was like a middle schooler in one of my creative writing workshops who there was like a term. I was I was talking about pride flags and then she brought up like a term that she had heard on a discussion thread or something for it was a term invented for people who are attracted to this YouTuber. And that was, that was a sort of blank sexual that she introduced to the to the to the lingo. And she was like 12.

And none of the other kids were were experiencing adolescence in a sexual adjacent way yet. So all of them were like, gross, you used the word sexual. But like, she was, she was developing an early sexuality focused upon a YouTuber. It was a germa. I don't think it was that person. It was some, it was a video game play through person. I don't know who it was, though, because I don't know.

Aaron Hanson. I don't know that. Okay. That's so funny. In the discussion of pride flags, it's just, just adding to the acronym, LGBTQIA2SY. Yeah. And that's the only.

time I have tiptoed into like pride flag in a, I was like, it's June. I feel like at this moment, I'm going to do a, I'm going to do a pride flag workshop and it's going to be to design your own pride flag for something about you or whatever, because it was the proliferation of pride flags. I'm like, turn the 11 year olds loose on this, see what they come up with. I'm sure they have ideas. And so I was, I was doing very basic and desexualized pride flags and just sort of trying my hand at it. And mainly what I discovered is that they, they can't really do graphic design very well. So graphic design is my passion is a pride flag. Yeah.

And mostly they were pretty confused on what a flag might stand for about themselves. So it was, yeah. So I was like, okay, maybe we're moving beyond nationality and the need for flags. Yeah. I just saw this post that was all the pride flags, but they added the Welsh dragon onto it. And then someone just started like coloring the Welsh dragon in. It's like, see, this is what we need in vexia. Veximal.

Yeah. That thing. Someone I'm... Say, do you look that up? Someone I'm friends with did a fun flag that's the bear flag and the trans flag in quarters. It's like combined like a crest of arms sort of like bear flag, bear flag, trans flag. It's very ugly and it's very beautiful. You said bear flag.

All pride flags are ugly is my hot take. Yeah, they are. And the same person, the same person did this as a joke. But then his, he is very serious. seriously against any stripy pride flag, basically. He's like, we have too many of them. We need to stop. And then, of course, because he's a gay guy in his 40s,

he's like, a more aesthetically pleasing vision would be the entire color spectrum just printed on a flag. Just like the gradient, like on paint or whatever when you're selecting. Like a hex gradient? Like when you're selecting a color or whatever, it would just be the entire color spectrum printed. And I was like, you love the color of the sky, but it's a pride flag. Yeah.

Pride flag. And I'm like, I don't think that would scan as much. I feel like the thing that Pride flags are useful for is a simple glyph to tell something about you. And the progress Pride of Flag works currently because it is a simple glyph to know that this person is trying not to be racist and trying not to be transphobic and supports gay people. And if that's on a coffee shop, they might still hate crime a trans woman, but they might not. So it's useful for something. It's so ugly, but I'm like, okay, we have to do it. I just don't like the Chevron. Yeah.

I posted the Progress Pride flag with Ireland's colors added in. And someone was like, why do we? Because Blue Sky just is a place of strange people. Someone was like, why do we need other flags? I thought Pride Flag already covered all of them. And I was like, you know how? I just talked to them like I was talking to a child. I was like, you know how there's a United States flag and a States flag?

It's like that. And they were like, oh, okay. I was like, why did that work about this shippost about adding Ireland's tree color to the progress life? Massachusetts right now is coming up with a new flag or there's like joke submissions to it or something. Choose the Irish flag. Well, one of the jokes submissions is basically the Irish flag, but with the Duncan colors. But the Duncan colors are also the lesbian flag colors. So it looks like a lesbian Duncan flag.

And I'm like, well, all the lesbians are Massachusetts and Duncan's. or I think we should pick that one. Like, I think that's the only good one. That's in Ireland. That's fantastic. Yeah, the Duncan colors and the lesbian flag colors. I will say that the orange in the Irish flag stands for like Ulster Protestants. And I think dubious as to whether they are broadly committed to the project of a, of a, you know, a democratic nation.

So it's all becomes very complicated when you get talking about nationalities, which is the problem with flags in general. I think both the U.S. flag and state flags should be abolished. No nations. Yeah. Okay, we do the starry plow, but in the lesbian colors. It's for your island heads out there. Okay. I was just listening to the starry plow because I was adding my drops back into the drops dashboard.

For some reason, I had the entirety of the song, the starry plow, in my soundboard folder. So if anyone wants to listen to that for the next three, minutes. I can click that button. Okay, fine. Howell thanks so much for coming on. I Thank you for having me. Wrap up. Is there any place, anything you want to plug in terms of people like where they can find you or do you want them to leave you alone? I don't want them to leave me alone because I have a book coming out. I'm going to have a book event at all she wrote books. In, I believe, your city in Somerville, which I believe is part of Boston, I think. It's adjacent. Is it. Yeah. So I will be having that on the 27th. at 6.30 p.m. with Finn Leary, who is also a YAA author, who lives, as I understand it, in the state of

Massachusetts. And so that will be a Massachusetts event for people who might live in New York. I'm having events on September 15th at Hive Mind Books at 7 p.m. and September 17th at Starbar, which is going to be a night of vampire and monster themed readings from different trans people, including myself. And then I'm going to be in Seattle on the 26th of September and in my hometown of Olympia, Washington on the 25th, and I listed those chronologically out of order, but I forgot about my hometown for a second there. And halashreev.com has more information about my work. Great. Just having all the secret chat. Okay. Well, thanks so much for coming on. And I would love to have you back on again when we have more questions about children's librarianship, because this has been really

enlightening for me. I think you're the first children's librarian we've had on. Cool. There's probably a lot of different opinions from different children's librarians, too. So I can also try to connect you with additional children's librarians if you need it in the future. But thank you so much for having me. Yeah, of course. Good night.