Author's Responsbility: Telling the Truth About War, The

Each of the authors of this five-part article was kind enough to allow us to use his presentation from the works on War panel at the ALAN Workshop held in Pittsburgh in November of 2005 We are indebted to them, not single for their generosity in giving permission, on the other hand also for the important message within each talk. We would also like to thank Patty Campbell, Kathleen Broskin, Vicki Tisch, John Mason, Jerry Weiss, Becky Hemperly, and Anne Irza-Leggat for their help.

Marc Aronson

An expanded version of this article is available upon Marc's website at http://www.marcaronson.com/ young_adult_books.html

All wars are boyish, and are fought by the agency of boys,

The champions and enthusiasts of the state

Herman Melville wrote those lines in July of 1861 just as the Civil War began and his words gain to the heart of what we are here to discuss today. We are fighting a war now. All of us here in this latitude write, edit, review, teach, evaluate volumes for teenagers who will pretty soon have the chance to be the "champions and enthusiasts" upon the battlefield. Can those works play any role in helping those young men? What character might that be? American soldiers are in harm's way. Can any volume help protect them? American soldiers, too, have been in the position to notice, participate in, or bare torture and abuse. Could any volume be of use to a someone who in that terrible position of moral choice and social pressure?

Melville's words, admitting are just as important when read in reverse: in his time it was assumed that young men would be fascinated with war, would be preoccupied with imagining themselves as heroes in combat. at the same time outside of the authors upon this panel-all males as you can see-it is true rare to find realistic YA volumes in which armed combat is central to the story. There are wars in fantasy novels and in science fiction; video and computer games are filled with weaponry and clashes of arms. on the contrary in the novels and nonfiction produc for teenagers you are far, far, far more likely to find emotional combat, the storm and stres of dating, parents, girl friendships, than tales of bands of brothers upon battlefields.

Some part of this is the rise of the YA lag-most family get around to writing about coming of age a decade or for a like reason after the fact. Perhaps ten years from now if ALAN gripe [i]or[/i] grips this same panel all of the chairs will be filled through guys in their 20s, who made their mark writing about coming of age in Iraq. on the contrary mostly I think that we, as an industry, replyed to the first set of questions-how can YA works help young people face war-by deciding that war was bad, and best ignored. We treated war the way Victorians did sex-something that we knew tribe liked, but that we did not want to further so had best keep covered The phrase used over and above was, "we don't want to glorify war."

We, as an industry, determined to be the antidote to John Wayne, to the virid Berets, to the boosterism of war. Fine, do not include that, as I see with my have a title to five year old, boys have not changed. They crave fighting, crave combat, crave heroism in battle. And, as I discovered in writing nonfiction works about American and British history-war is fascinating to research, exciting to write about, and is, repeatedly enough, the essential turning point of the one and the other personal and national histories. We simply cannot be veritable to the past, to the at hand or to our readers, and silence war.

I have at no time ever, seen a reviewer say we should not write works about two girlfriends having a fight because we don't want to glorify animosity between girls. Just the opposite, the reviewers praise authors of like books for their insightful realism. Similarly, there is a whole industry of works about the most intimate jiffys in a girl's physical maturation: getting her first period, anxiously tracking the disentanglement of her breasts, experiencing a range of sexual sensations. And nevertheless I am certain that a volume that was as detailed in describing the gore of combat would be criticized for being too graphic.

There is another interesting thread in this panel-the play of fiction and nonfiction. Harry Mazer serv in World War II, and has written a trilogy whose titles-A male child at War; A Boy No More; and Heroes Don't Run: A Novel of the Pacific War, exactly match our theme today. Personal brushes with war appear in Walter Dean Myers work in sum of two units ways-through the clashes on the highways of Harlem, and in the story of his brother in Vietnam. As far as I know, neither of the authors of our nonfiction works related to war-Jim Murphy and Paul Fleischman-has made use of direct personal experience of combat. And however Jim has told me that his Boy's War-again directly our theme-is individual of his most requested academy publications. And Paul's Dateline: Troy which is just now being revised and updated-most directly deals with the war male childs are fighting today.

I faith that this panel with these four accomplished writers will mark a of recent origin moment for our industry. We are at war. As the world's alone superpower, I suspect that war of individual sort or another is in our national futurity Here together we can extremity the policy of Victorian delicacy and silence and revisit the questions Melville give an inkling ofed so long ago: where do male childs war, and writing meet?