Thursday Thoughts: YA Isolation, Bring Them Recommendations On!, Personal Pronouns & YA

This is a feature that will be looking at blogging, books, and anything of any relevance to the YA Blogosphere in short form. It's meant to start a discussion by offering quick thoughts from Mari and P.E. on a variety of topics. 

Where's the YA?

by P.E. 

Montreal is a rather bilingual city, and it's gorgeous and fun. My only complaint is that I'm having a hard time finding the YA community here. In high school, I had Mari and a bunch of others. In university, I've met so many people that read, but not YA. To make matters worse, locating a library with a large collection of English YA reads that isn't too far has been hard. They exist, but they're all about thirty minutes away. And when that thirty minutes includes a ridiculously steep hill. It really makes me miss living in a primarily English speaking city with a library five minutes away. It's hard to feel connected to the YA community sometimes, except then I read tweets and posts and I realize how much I miss it. So, I'll soldier on with my BFF NetGalley!

Bring Them Recommendations On!

by Mari

People don’t often realize it but once you become known as the booky, you can never go back.

Once upon a time I would be speaking with someone and in the conversation they would recommend a book for me. Now, they take a moment reason it out and ask if I’ve read said book.

Yes, I’ve probably read or heard of most of the YA stuff you can think of but hey, we can still share our common interest in them. If I haven’t heard of them, then all the more awesome because I want to hear about new books. Believe it or not, bloggers and bookys do end up missing a lot of the books that come out. So don't be shy and recommend away.

Pronouns and YA

by P.E.

When you live in residence, you're required to take what's called "Rez Life", which is a workshop dedicated to creating a better environment in res. It mostly focuses on sex (assault), and questions of gender. The biggest thing I learned from this, and from my school in general, is not to assume someone's personal pronoun before they define themselves. In floor meetings, we introduce ourselves like, "My name is P.E., and I prefer 'she'." It's a big thing in society, and I guess the concept that genders aren't binary was something that I very well knew, but I never really thought about it to some depth until the workshop. So naturally I started thinking of real world applications, and I realized that there are major problems in writing. First, what kind of pronoun can you use that won't assume people are binary, and that supports a spectrum? And, how can it be portrayed in writing that the person may have the sex of female, but not identify as female? Because writing is all about she and he. In real life, you can say, "Hey you!" or gesture towards someone. When an author is attempting to describe a character, they always include "he" or "she". And well, I feel like more can be done. I'm not an expert on this subject, so I'm very curious to see what you guys think should happen. 

-P.E. & MARI