She also took no guff (or, well, shit) from sassy middle-aged boys. I was a timid girl with glasses, braces, acne and one eyebrow - it was mad empowering to watch the way Mrs. Landy handled jocks. Sure, she laughed them off at first, but then she came down on them in a whirlwind of thick glasses.
She made them journal. She made everyone journal. In her class, we each fillled three composition books that year. ("Just write anything," she said. "I don't care if you're doodling song lyrics. Just write.") At the time, it felt hellish, but in retrospect, it worked some magic. Last month, I self-indulgently reread my sixth-grade journals, reviewing my wrath at my friends, my wonderings about will-boys-ever-like me, my experiments with various handwriting. Throughout, Mrs. Landy's neat cursive comments remain consistent in the margins. ("Sounds fun!" at a retelling of my trip to Kentucky, or or "Very creative," when I began and promptly abandoned a novel).
She was also guaranteed to have the newest books from the Book Fair on hand. Mrs. Landy had the best library in the entire middle school. Three curving plywood boards stretched across the far wall of her classroom, propping up hundreds of precisely alphabetized Young Adult Fiction titles on rickety cement blocks.
I have those shelves to thank for the syllabus I drafted last week. This summer, I'll be teaching a group of talented 7th and 8th graders at an institute run by Duke in North Carolina. The course is called "From Wonderland to Hogwarts" - it's an introduction to fantasy, and our reading list is composed of my old favorites.
"Ella Enchanted" is on there, with its silly pathos and fairy tricks, and "The Ear, the Eye and the Arm", which, with its dystopian future and elephant masks with human teeth, terrified me more than "Goosebumps" ever did. I debated over which "Chronicles of Narnia" to assign, but eventually settled on "The Magician's Nephew", figuring we could compare it with Genesis and see what Lewis was really getting at while we thought he was just entertaining us.
"Enchantress from the Stars", my middle-grade favorite, was the only book I never questioned assigning. I'm still impressed by this book, which manages to be simultaneously a fairy tale, a dystopian future, and a Star-Trek-esque novel about wise aliens.
It was published in 1970; the following year, it was a runner-up for the Newbery Medal, the Pulitzer of children's literature. Oddly enough, none of the characters in the book are children; I was always confused about what exactly made it for kids. As it turns out, so was its author. (More on that later.) The book's badass protagonist, Elana, is semi-psychic, and is nearly done studying anthropology - the culture of alien races. She belongs to a Federation of advanced aliens who have sworn to help protect younger, sillier planets from destroying themselves or being destroyed. However, they've got to do this without letting the younger races know that such a Federation exists, lest said planets' collective self-esteem be mortally crushed.
With her father and fiancee, she lands on Andrecia, a planet of medieval-era humanoids which is under siege from another set of alien invaders. These guys are a sixties-esque group of imperialists with space-suits, thrilled about the habitable planet in their neighborhood, and to facilitate settlement, they're destroying forest with a giant clear-cutting machine. They're clearing area for a camp so that the medieval humans can be "resettled" (read: exterminated). They have no idea the Federation exists, since they're not advanced enough to be let into the clique.
In order to help the first race fend off the second, without tipping either of them off to the Federation's existence, Elana winds up having to disguise herself as an enchantress. She meets a handsome young woodcutter, she sets him the classic fairy-tale three tasks, and he attempts to slay the invaders' "dragon" - meanwhile, she's telling us about the Federation, and one of the invaders is bemoaning the fate of the simple Andrecian folk.
The entire novel works on three levels, from three perspectives. I loved the idea that three people can look at a thing and all of them, in their own way, feel correct. (Of course, Elana - with her empathy and anthropological training and super-cool wavy hair - ends up faring better than the medieval fellow and the imperialist, but even she is occasionally won over by, say, anger or passionate woodcutter lust.) Still, it was an antidote to the cliqueishness of middle school, the constant feeling that other groups knew better, and that adults knew best of all. It didn't talk down to me the way some other books on Mrs. Landy's shelves might have.
I must have reread it seven times that year - it's a mark of how much I loved it that, although I haven't encountered a copy since, I was able to recite the plot with only a small bit of help from the book's stubby Wikipedia page. Lois Lowry, who I ended up meeting in November (how great is Iowa City? She answered my question about "where is Anastasia Krupnik now?" and signed my trembling copy of "The Giver") is also a fan - she wrote the introduction to the republished version, and the post-script is the author's own.
In that post-script to the new edition, Sylvia Louise Engdahl wrote that she had an email address (hooray) and would welcome any messages. I'd always scoffed at the idea of writing a fan letter, imagining Ms. Engdahl's secretary discarding it immediately, but as I aged and my self-esteem increased and my monobrow dropped away and I became a writer too, more or less, I began to think that maybe Sylvia Engdahl might appreciate hearing from a reader. And then I wound up assigning her book, which gave me a reason other than "I just liked your stuff, yo".
So, after finishing the syllabus, I crafted a message (I am always so scared of writing to writer-people that anything I send turns out sounding a hundred times weirder owing to the constant revisions). Apart from the whole "my class is gonna love this book just like I did" bit, I added in a post-script:
"In an interview on your website, you said something along the lines of - you didn't start off intending to write a young adult novel, it was just more that you had an idea and it worked out in a way to which younger readers gravitated. I know exactly what you mean.... though I do intend to write stories for adult readers, in workshop, for whatever reason, I often hear that they sound as if they're intended for young adults. I suspect it might be due to the fact that I read so many great fantasy/sci-fi books like Enchantress growing up, but who knows, maybe it's just that kids will suspend disbelief long enough to really enjoy an idea."
I was kind of reaching, with that last bit - God knows - and I certainly didn't expect what happened to happen, which is that two days later, I woke up on my friend Meredith's couch (there had been an Iowa Review reading session, and then a poetry reading, and then a lot of wine, and my house is far away) and scrolled through my email on my phone to find a message, that read, in part:
"It means a lot to me to hear from my readers, and I'm happy to hear that you will be using Enchantress from the Stars with gifted 7th and 8th graders. Often it's given to younger readers, and while you yourself were mature enough to like it as a 6th grader, many children of that age find it confusing."
My brain didn't quite compute what was happening, though it did register the compliment. I scrolled on:
"I think that if you're told that your stories sound as if they are intended for young adults, it's not only that they would appeal to young readers but that they don't sound like today's adult science fiction, with which people in your workshop may be familiar. Devotees of the science fiction genre want fiction that is much further removed from reality than mine and tend to consider anything intelligible to general audiences as too simplistic to be considered "adult" by their standards."
BAZINGA, my brain went. SYLVIA ENGDAHL IS WRITING TO ME, and she is FULL OF ZINGERS.
She continued, "Personally I believe that there is a need for stories about future and hypothetical worlds that will be enjoyed by adults without a background in science fiction and are told in terms of life as we know it here and now -- I don't write about alien cultures and alien species that are portrayed as different merely for the sake of being different, and I don't want to confine my audience to readers of a specialized genre."
I had been right, I realized. She wasn't talking down to me - she was just trying to write the best book she knew how, and doing it in uncomplicated language, and because of that, because it had a fairy tale tucked inside it, publishers marketed it to children. After "Enchantress", she was sort of pigeonholed as a young adult author, and had to make it very clear in the afterword of the semi-sequel, "The Far Side of Evil", that this was not intended for much younger fans of Elana, taking her, as it did, to a jail cell in a torture-riddled Gestapo planet on the brink of nuclear war.
Fortunately, I read it at the proper age. "Far Side" is on my desk right now, next to a stack of student papers and near the box of journals I started in Mrs. Landy's class. I'm fortunate to have encountered badass women like Engdahl and Elana and Mrs. Landy, and I wouldn't be writing fiction (be it genre fiction or young adult fiction or just a blog entry about it) without them.
PS: Also, as I'm now a college English instructor, I could totally teach a "swear class" and have it be lecture-appropriate. I am so grateful for surviving sixth grade.
