Consider this book trailer for Laurie Halse Anderson's YA novel Wintergirls.
Now, it would be easy to dismiss this novel as just another story about teen angst and anorexia, but after flying through this emotional story last week, I can say it's much more complex than that. In fact, this is the beauty of talented YA authors: they masterfully present issues and scenarios that appeal to wide audience in compelling narratives. I would even submit that this book gave me more perspectives of the inner workings of those who suffer from eating disorders than a stack of scholarly papers could provide. The transformative power is in the narrative.
How exactly does fiction do this? We studied a Time article ("How Reading Makes Us Smarter and Nicer") and the embedded video below as a class last week to attempt to understand the physiological and emotional effects of literature, and the discussions and student blog posts that it ignited thrilled me. Most students made the connections between deep reading, empathy, and the worth of pouring through their selected novels--a difficult feat in a distraction-heavy world.
How exactly does fiction do this? We studied a Time article ("How Reading Makes Us Smarter and Nicer") and the embedded video below as a class last week to attempt to understand the physiological and emotional effects of literature, and the discussions and student blog posts that it ignited thrilled me. Most students made the connections between deep reading, empathy, and the worth of pouring through their selected novels--a difficult feat in a distraction-heavy world.
Our brains (and souls) benefit from the stories authors artfully lay out on pages, and when we run across a line or passage that contains that empathy-evoking, life changing power, we can't help but marking it, folding the corner of the page, and pausing to appreciate its beauty.
Spend a moment with these excerpts from Wintergirls.
That's the power of fiction.
Spend a moment with these excerpts from Wintergirls.
- “I am the space between my thighs, daylight shining through. ”
- “This girl shivers and crawls under the covers with all her clothes on and falls into an overdue library book, a faerie story with rats and marrow and burning curses. The sentences build a fence around her, a Times Roman 10-point barricade, to keep the thorny voices in her head from getting too close.”
- “I lift my arm out of the water. It's a log. Put it back under and it blows up even bigger. People see the log and call it a twig. They yell at me because I can't see what they see. Nobody can explain to me why my eyes work different than theirs. Nobody can make it stop. ”
That's the power of fiction.