North Carolina

I was next. I was next, and my heart was in a million places at once, and my mind was struggling to run through the hundred million things I wanted to say. How do you summarize a lifetime of admiration and respect into a single, three-minute interaction?

*Record scratching*

Yep, that’s me. I bet you’re wondering how I got myself into this situation.

Our story begins somewhere in the mid-2000s. Without a bookstore to sustain her, Yours Truly was scavenging the library shelves, reading anything and everything she could possibly get her hands on. Moving on from the Junior Fiction section to Young Adult felt like a rite of passage, and it was there that I found Sarah Dessen.

I latched onto her books in a way that I still can’t quite understand. Even now, as a Grown-Up reader drifting farther and farther from the core YA demographic, I find myself growing the Dessen collection on my shelf with every book she releases. Every time I think I’ve moved on from the young adult section of the bookstore, she drags me back, and I find myself once again invested in a teen summer love story. She shaped my adolescent reading habits and set the standard for the contemporary styles I still enjoy to this day. Her books have been a solid constant for more than half of my life.

More than that, though, she came to be a role model of sorts. She was so honest about the writing process and how hard it was. I would grow to appreciate this more than I initially realized; when I struggled with my writing, when it became so hard and scary that I doubted whether I had it in me to keep going, I would see photos of her own abandoned projects, see her tweets about her doubts and frustrations, and I would sink in relief. I wasn’t alone—the struggles and doubts were a normal part of the process. Sarah showed me that writing was allowed to be hard.

Fast forward to summer 2017. I packed my entire life—or at least, all that would fit—into a suitcase and flew down to Orlando in May. I got to live my dream of living in Disney World, making magic, meeting amazing people, and going to the parks on almost every day off I had. In fact, there were only three instances in which I didn’t spend my day off in the park: 

1) When I went to the beach and got horrendously sunburnt, even though I put on sunscreen. Twice.

2) When I flew home to surprise my sister for her high school grad, immediately after getting horrendously sunburnt. (Even though I put on sunscreen.) (Twice.)

3) When I took an overnight train to travel through four states to Raleigh, North Carolina, for what amounted to a 12-hour day trip.

Here’s the thing about living in Canada: nobody comes here. Sure, select cities may see a few tour stops from popular bands, but anyone living outside the GTA knows the pain of being skipped over by their favourite artists, musical or otherwise. This is most prevalent in places like southern Manitoba, a location which Taylor Swift has skipped during her last TWO (2) tours. The closest any of the authors on my shelf have ever gotten to Manitoba is Toronto—which is to say, not very close at all.

But as luck would have it, my Disney internship wasn’t the only thing that was happening that summer. In June 2017, Sarah Dessen would be releasing her then-newest novel, Once and For All, followed up by a book tour in select cities across the United States. For the first time, I felt like I had a real chance to actually meet her. Then in May, the dates dropped: 11 stops across six states, and guess which city didn’t make the cut?

So I did what any sane person would do—I looked up every city on the map, found the closest stop to Orlando, and booked a nine-hour train ticket to Raleigh, North Carolina.

The plan was simple: stuff a backpack full of essentials, save money on accommodations by sleeping on the train, successfully meet one of my biggest creative inspirations, and arrive back in Florida in time for work the following evening. All I had to do was get one of my shifts covered, and I was good to go.

I made it to the train station in downtown Orlando with little excitement and fanfare. The station was busier than I expected, filled with families carrying armloads of plastic Disney park bags—a hallmark of the ending vacation. I had travelled by train only one other time in my life. The car then had been barren, but this time the train was packed. “I’m visiting family in Raleigh for the week,” the man sitting beside me said. “What about yourself?”

I told him that I was only going up for a day, for a book signing.

“You wrote a book?” he asked, and he sounded so impressed that I almost didn’t want to correct him. The truth was far less exciting.

Even I had to admit that the whole adventure seemed rather crazy—coming all this way for such a short interaction. But I also knew that I couldn’t miss this opportunity. There was this weird sense of urgency attached to the trip; it may not be my only chance to meet Sarah, but it would definitely be my first real chance, and it would almost certainly be my best chance. Because even when Sarah did make the trek to Canada, she was always farther from me there than she was now, this faithful summer.

Which brings us back here—to me, standing in a bookstore in a city that I hadn’t known existed until a few weeks prior. I could never hope to express to Sarah just how important her writing has been to me, and I certainly couldn’t do it in such a brief encounter. I’m not even sure I remember what I said in the end. Something about being from Canada, but also somehow Orlando, about the long and complex journey I had taken to find myself standing in front of her—the journey I had hardly expected to take at all. 

And then, it was over. I was ushered along, dazed and jittery, to make room for the next reader.

The sun was already setting by the time I boarded the train back to Florida. The lights in the car were dimmed, other passengers more tired and wary than I hunkering down to get some sleep. I knew that I should probably be doing the same—I had to work the next day, after all, and who knew how much time I’d have for sleep by the time I got back home. But when I curled up in my seat, I instead pulled my new book out of my bulging backpack, tracing over the signature on the first page, revelling in my proof that this whole thing had happened. 

Plus, the whole trip counted as my monthly “cultural activity,” as required under my J-1 work visa. So y’know. Two birds, one stone, etc.

Until later,

- Justyne

Magic

I am not a Harry Potter fan. I tried—I read the first book, I’ve seen many of the movies. I gave it every chance I could. It’s not even that I dislike it, really. It was just...never my thing. And when I announced such a confession on Kilimanjaro Safaris in Animal Kingdom, the woman in front of me whipped around so fast that I thought she was going to throw me straight into the lion pit. Forgive me, book community, for I have sinned.

But despite what any Buzzfeed article may lead you to believe, not every avid reader was born a Potterhead. While Harry Potter may have been the gateway to the Magical World of Reading™ for many people, for me, that gateway was the Baby-sitters Little Sister series by Ann M. Martin. I’m not sure why. All I know is my mom gave little seven-year-old me secondhand books from a garage sale, and next thing I knew, I was getting my first library card and powering through six books a week like I was getting paid.

Reading is more than a source of distraction; it’s experience-sharing, an “act of empathy,” as John Green puts it: “an imagining of what it’s like to be someone else.” I read for the opportunity to discover new places and new people, to see new worlds through new perspectives. As I started venturing into telling my own stories, I became fascinated by the mechanics of it all—the narrative, the structure, the very words themselves. For me, it was never just about reading at all, but about the magic of storytelling itself.

I wholeheartedly believe that books are magic—or at least, the closest to thing we have. Let's break it down. All books are a collection of lines marked on slices of dead tree, bound together with glue. They’re all made the same, they all look the same. But those lines form letters, and words, and sentences, and paragraphs, all arranged in such a way that anyone who understands the language can share an understanding of the text.

Intertextuality is the relationship between texts, the way the content of one book interacts with the content of another. Language forms the basis of intertextuality, a common thread of what would otherwise be an unfamiliar collection of symbols. When the alphabet is rearranged in a careful, deliberate way, it can transport a reader somewhere beyond reality. That’s beyond just art or linguistics. That is straight up magic.

Go to your nearest bookshelf and grab two books. Read or unread, long or short, it doesn’t matter. Open one to any page and start reading. Now open the other and do the same. You can jump between them, one page at a time, and travel across continents and universes to find yourself surrounded by completely new people, without ever leaving your couch. It’s like a movie in your head. If that ain’t magic, I don’t know what is.

Books contain whole other worlds. By learning the art of writing, I was learning to transport people beyond the ink printed on the page to a place that is as real as it is fictional. The point of fiction is to make things up, yes, but to do so in a way that speaks to readers on a deeper level, in a special way.  Anyone who has ever gotten lost in a good book knows how magical stories can be. By learning the art of writing, I was learning how to make magic. 

There will never be anything more thrilling to me than flipping through an old journal. Looking at pages and pages filled with my thoughts and my words and my ideas fills me with a sense of unending pride and glee. Even if it’s all awful, every word, they are entirely mine, made by me alone. And isn’t that magical—the fact that I took a blank page and made it mean something, if only for a little while?

Some people needed that belief that a letter would arrive on their doorstep, or that a magic wand would select them out of so many others as worthy of its companionship. But I never needed a boy wizard to show me that magic exists. I suspect I never needed a Baby-sitters Little Sister, either. Discovering the magic of words and falling in love with it was inevitable. 

And now, I can make all the magic I could ever need.

Until later,

- Justyne

The Literary Canon is BALONEY

In my final year of university, one of my biggest assignments (we're talking, like, 50% of my grade) was to make a documentary. In my frantic search for B-roll material at 2am, I discovered a video criticizing the lack of required courses for the "literary greats." As an example, they referred to UCLA, whose English Literature program requires a selection of literary courses around topics like gender, race, critical theory, etc....but "not a single course in Shakeseare."

I had two problems with this:

1) I studied a different Shakespeare play in every year of high school, plus his sonnetts in my Intro English 1 class at university—there is definitely no lack of mandatory Shakespearean studies in the academic world.

2) Putting all issues of racism, sexism, and politics aside: who decides the literary canon? And who the hell decided it was so important?

(It's also worth noting that UCLA does require one course in each of four different historical periods, one of which will almost certainly cover Shakespeare, so the reliability of this creator is....questionable, at best. But I digress.)

In case you've forgotten: I was an English major. I didn't like English at first; we read Beowulf, sonnets, Shakespeare, and all the other old and stuffy material that is consistently considered part of some overarching and universal "Literary Canon." I hated the literary canon. It was boring, it was hard to understand, and—no matter what my high school English teacher said—I just couldn't see how studying stuff written over a hundred years ago could possibly help my writing skills in the present day.

But in the latter half of my studies, I started taking courses studying things like fairy tales, graphic novels, Disney movies. Almost immediately, I started enjoying my studies more. I was also frequently met with incredulous expressions and questions of amazement whenever I detailed my academic escapades. And I'll admit—writing a research paper analyzing themes of romance and sacrifice in Tangled and The Little Mermaid hardly felt like "real" school.

One of my absolute favourite courses in my degree was called "Popular Literature and Film." My professor emphasized, over and over, that you can do a close reading analysis on anything—anything. We started with Inside Out and The Marvelous Land of Oz, and worked our way to Carrie and Fast Times at Ridgemont High. The point of the class was to see that there is meaning in everything, not just in "literary" media.

Really, all you have to do is take a step into any fandom community to realize the true magnitude of this lesson. Fans notice everything—every pause, every miniscule action, the implications of every editing choice or cinematographic element. Have you seen those Taylor Swift easter egg articles? This one opens with an analysis of a music video release date. Fans dig deep.

But they dig deep because they care. They're motivated, they're interested, so they huddle over media over and over and over again, looking for any scrap of meaning they can find.

I think sometimes people are hesitant to extend media and literature studies beyond the accepted literary canon because there's this ongoing perception that entertainment is incompatible with artistic integrity. Or that there's a departure in quality between "good" (ie: "conventionally literary") books and stuff designed to entertain the masses—like the difference between an indie, avant-garde film and a blockbuster action flick.

But you can read something BOTH for its critical, thought-provoking content AND still read it as simply enjoyable. I learned more about how to think critically when I was thinking about media that I enjoyed, rather than media that came with a Spark Notes study guide. In fact, I'd argue that learning to think critically about media you enjoy at face value can be far more beneficial than looking for the same Great Gatsby symbolism that everyone else has already found.

I think it's increasingly important that we don't start with the stuffy, the hard, and the boring; we should be focusing on the light, the fun, and the interesting. All throughout high school, I think I studied maybe one book that I liked. And don't get me wrong, university had more than its fair share of bad books—but I also had the priviledge of both finding and studying books that I genuinely enjoyed, which ultimately resulted in papers that (now, outside of the bleary, nocturnal habits of a procrastinating student) I'm actually kind of proud of.

ENGLISH CLASS CAN BE FUN! It doesn't have to be about interpreting character emotions through curtain colours. It can be about interpreting new symbolism from your favourite movie, or discussing performative ghostlore in a Shane Dawson video and a 4chan thread. (I would know; I wrote that paper.) How am I supposed to know if a program is a good fit when the first thing we study is a text so old that it has to be translated to English...from English.

This is, of course, not to dismiss or diminish the actual important of the older works that make up "the literary canon." The stuff we write today is influenced, however subconsciously, by all that stuff written 200 years ago. And the canon hasn't stuck around for no reason, either; the stories and themes continue to be relevant and relateable. They speak to us and appeal to us, and thus continue to be important. But, if anything, this makes it all the more valuable to study the canon alongside the more "popular," the more "modern," or any other works that we often exclude form the literary canon. Studying both allow us to notice the similarities and trends and to more fully understand why the older texts are important in the first place.

But to assume that the literary canon is the only source of valuable and critical interpretation is...well, ignorant. And boring. Not to mention kind of gatekeeper-ish. I promise, there is just as much academic benefit in studying recent Canadian graphic novels as there is in any Charles Dickens book you throw at me.

Until later,

- Justyne

MFM: Shadows Among Smoke

A fog settles between the ground and the sky, like a cloud that has sunk too low. The fog is thick and heavy, creeping into every inch of space and squeezing the oxygen out of my lungs. But people continue to march on through, as if the air is clear and the sky is blue and the clouds are out of reach as they should be.

Among those people, solid and real, are figures as pale as the fog, fading in and out of vision like a shadow among smoke. They lean in close, to the business suits and the dark-eyed students and the elderly alone on benches. Their mouths move in blurs, whispering secrets and spells. The reactions are subtle, but undeniable—shoulders sag, backs quiver, chests exhale in longing.

I hear it: a voice that doesn’t form words but sends chills down my spine and into my toes. It makes my heart twist and ache, makes my fingers reach for someone who isn’t there. I flinch as a figure floats past me, through me. He moves on, to new victims of the same whispers, unnoticed by all—except, evidently, me.

I stare as he turns unexpectedly, catching my eye and matching my gaze. He freezes, brow furrowed. Then he smirks, wiggles his fingers adieu, and dissolves away into nothing.

And yet I know, somehow, that he’ll be back.