Category: Culture

Suki, Self-publisher

Posted on by Suki

I never thought I’d self-publish a book. Of course, having a blog is like self-publishing your own magazine, so it’s not like I have a general problem with the idea. But as someone who once owned a small publishing company, I liked the idea that there was someone else vetting my work, helping me make it better, then putting their stamp of approval on it.

Then along came Hanna.

My daughter (who is not named Hanna!) went through a phase where all she wanted to read were chapter book series. Judy Moody, Ivy & Bean, Ramona the Pest, junie b. jones, and even Captain Underpants were her favorites…and were all about school. One day she stood in front of the chapter book section at our library and asked mournfully, “Are there any books about homeschoolers?”

Hanna, Homeschooler
Hanna is on sale now at Amazon.com and BN.com.

We looked for them, and there were a few. I keep a list of books about homeschoolers here. But there was nothing like the trials and tribulations of a young child at her studies—nothing like the books my daughter was obsessed with.

Back then, I homeschooled during the day and as soon as dinner was over, handed the household reins to my husband so I could go upstairs and work. That night, I went upstairs and invented Hanna, a young homeschooler who sits at the window seat in her grandmother’s house and watches her young neighbors leaving for the first day of school.

What I hoped to put into the book was the experience of homeschooling the way that other chapter book writers attempted to catch the joys and confusions of school. From what I have observed, most schools are more similar than different, whereas each homeschool is unique unto itself. I could no more contain the full homeschooling experience in a book than I could catch the unique details of each child in the world.

So Hanna, Homeschooler of necessity reflects my own experiences: a homeschool run by a mom who was ambivalent about the choice at first, an eclectic mix of structure and unschooling, a secular approach that includes education about religion, a dad whose job keeps him from being the primary educator but isn’t checked out from the daily lives of the kids.

I also added some fictional complications: My children’s own paternal grandmother never lived with us but in the story she is reimagined as the somewhat curmudgeonly denizen of the lion’s den downstairs. The father in the story is trying to better his family’s life and in so doing, has become less present in his daughter’s life. They have moved from the hippie mountain enclave that I imagined for them to a more conservative Central Valley town where they struggle to find like-minded families.

I wrote the book, got some feedback, and told my agent about it.

There’s this thing that agents do when faced with their client’s pet project that will never sell. “Well, certainly we could consider trying to find a home for the book, but let’s focus on the other manuscript first.”

In fact, my agent told me, she’d recently sold a book with a minor homeschooled character to a publisher. The publisher made it a condition of the sale that the author remove the homeschooled character from the story! “There’s no market for homeschooling stories,” they said.

Of course, I know the market for homeschoolers. You find it in households in every type of neighborhood. You find it amongst the upper crust and the barely getting by. You find it in libraries, in museums on free days, and anywhere they offer LARP. Homeschoolers are everywhere, yet largely invisible.

I agreed, however, that Hanna was hardly guaranteed to be a bestseller. I put her away, but she kept nagging at me. Why not just self-publish? she’d ask me. I don’t want to self-publish, I’d answer. Let someone else deal with it.

Finally, at a writing conference last spring, I attended a round table about self-publishing. As a former publisher, I had all the skills I needed save illustration. And all the other reasons I wasn’t self-publishing this book? Well, they didn’t seem to hold up when I tried to voice them.

“Go for it,” my fellow writers said.

“Well, I can’t think of why not,” I told myself. “So I guess I should just do this.”

So here she is, my girl Hanna: 

I didn’t do this alone, of course. I got a number of adult and kid readers to help me with revising and making it a better story. I hired a professional illustrator I knew whose kids had attended school with my son. I am reaching out to my friends and colleagues to help me get the word out the way word usually travels in our circles, from homeschool to homeschool.

I hope those in the homeschool community enjoy my little tale. I could imagine some families with children in school might enjoy it, too. But mostly, I am pleased to be adding one more little voice to the ongoing story of our culture that writers create, each day as we tell our stories. Not every child goes to school. Hanna doesn’t, and though she wonders about school, she ends up happy and thriving in homeschool.

Vive la différence!

On not living the fearful life

Posted on by Suki

Really bad things happen out there in the big world, bad things that people bring about.

If you read even the oldest texts that humans have passed down, we know that bad things have happened as long as stories have been told. And if you look at the forensic evidence that archaeologists present, you know that bad things have been around as long as humanity.

I’m not referring to any of the natural or even unnatural disasters that no one person is in control of, but rather the bad choices that people make.

Bad news

En garde!
Free play without adult interference is so important for our children’s development.

Recently in the news, there have been lots of bad things, including shootings at colleges. Recently in my local community there have been some very high-profile bad things, especially those involving children. These bad things have parents scared. Parents of younger kids are afraid to allow them the amount of independence that is healthy for them. Parents of teens worry as their teens go to college classrooms or live in dorms.

The media has decided that its job is stoking our fear. Let’s face it: the media’s real job is selling us stuff. And their advertisers have found that scared people buy more crap than happy, secure-feeling people. So they egg the media on to keep scaring us more and more.

The feedback loop

I believe the media frenzy for bad news creates a feedback loop in which people who were already vulnerable get pushed further:

  • People who are vulnerable to acting out from fear get egged on to go do violent things.
  • People who are vulnerable to feeling fearful are more likely to retreat from the world.

The first category is, frankly, a small sliver of humanity. Most of us don’t act violently out of fear. Most of us, when we’re fearful, retreat.

But in this case, retreat is also a form of defeat. Parents who keep their children from playing on their own outside are defeated in their parenting. Letting go and allowing our children to experience the world as individuals is one of our hardest and most necessary parenting jobs. (See Good People, Bad People, and the Rest of Us for my take on that.)

Risk reality

School bus
Riding in a school bus and being in school are two extremely safe things for your child to do, statistically speaking.

What the media doesn’t want us to remember, because this knowledge doesn’t lead people to go out and buy things, is that the biggest risks we take on a daily basis are ones that we don’t worry about: Statistically speaking, if you’re worried about your kids’ safety you should never drive a car, or for that matter, cross a road on foot. Of course, anyone who is worried about these things to the point where they won’t do them is assumed to be mentally ill.

We don’t give up driving our cars and crossing streets because that’s part of living the lives that we want to have.

Though you wouldn’t know it from all the scary stories, playing outside is not a major risk factor in children’s lives. And a college classroom is one of the safest places on earth to be.

As people who know and understand risk, we can’t retreat.

Being an example

What we have to do is stand up for what’s right, live our lives boldly, and know that our example inspires other people. A friend of mine posted an email on our local homeschooling list after a horrible local tragedy about how she let her kids go to the park across the street from her house alone the next day. I was really grateful for her to showing her vulnerability publicly like that, and reminding people that the most dangerous thing she allowed her children to do that day was to ride in the car with her.

We can’t let the relentless pursuit of advertising clicks rule our decision-making.

My teen goes to college classrooms, where one of the subjects being taught now is how to do a lockdown.

My almost-teen plays alone outside, rides busses alone, and is developing an admirable sense of self-confidence.

I feel confident that we are doing the right thing, though I am no less vulnerable to fear implanted by scare stories than anyone else. I hope more and more parents join me, my friend, and others who are fighting back against the hysteria that our relentless focus on people doing bad things has stoked.

Risk-taking and lifelong learning

Posted on by Suki

As adults, it’s sometimes hard to remember that feeling of vulnerability that kids have when they’re learning new things. That’s one reason why I continue to value the experience of trying new things out in the world—I think it helps me be a better teacher.

One thing I’ve been doing recently is solo jazz singing. Although I’ve sung in classical vocal ensembles for years, I got shy about performing as a soloist. Last spring I decided to defeat that shyness, one way or another!

I took a jazz singing workshop at my local community college, which was a blast.  [See “In praise of adult ed”] Another thing I’ve been doing is going to a jazz open mike to perform.

Suki singing
This is a picture of me singing with a jazz ensemble.

It’s great to get up there and be nervous about how well you’re going to perform, but then realize that the important thing is the joy of learning and expanding your boundaries. The people who come to this open mike range from rank amateurs who are just learning to pro’s who want a friendly audience to work through new material.

It’s hard to remember, when I’m there, that this is an unusual experience for most adults. For most of us—and I include myself in this category much of the time—life is about doing what we’re used to and what we feel comfortable with. Once we’re adults and we have a career (or not), we are less likely to take the sorts of risks that kids take for granted.

It’s possible, in normal adult life, to go months without going to a place we’ve never been before, have in-depth conversations with new people, and choose to do something in front of other people that we aren’t sure we can do.

Yet it’s this sort of striving that keeps us alive and learning. Certainly, we can go for months without having a conversation that pulls us out of our comfort zones, but those are the months that get lost in the mists of our memories. We’ll have these long stretches of time from which we can remember next to nothing, but then retain vivid memories of one conversation we had at a school gathering we didn’t really want to go to.

If we adults make an effort to keep striving for new and challenging experiences in our lives, it makes us better teachers and parents. My students, I try to keep in mind, do the equivalent of getting up in front of a jazz band nearly every day of their lives. They are always facing something new, and their bravery is inspiring!

My Aha! Moment

Posted on by Suki

A while back I was contacted by the Aha Moment crew about taking part once they got to Santa Cruz. I had never heard of them, so of course my first instinct was that this was some new kind of phishing invented to fool Internet-savvy homeschooling moms. It turned out it wasn’t—it’s a real thing and a real job. This really nice group of young people travel the country in a trailer tricked out as a TV studio, interviewing locals at each stop and putting their interviews up on the Web.

I had two reactions to the idea of taking part:

1) I don’t really have “aha moments,” so it wouldn’t be authentic

2) Why would I bother?

After watching videos from the first location that popped up, I decided to watch videos from San Francisco. That’s what sold me. I realize that this is just another way for Mutual of Omaha to try to make us like them, but it’s insidiously wonderful in a weird little way. As soon as I switched to San Francisco—though the trailer, the lighting, and the editing were the same—it was a whole new experience. Those were San Franciscans I saw on the screen. It was so cool to see my former city of residence, the place that I always wanted to live until I lived there, and then always wanted to go back to when I could, represented in this funny little modern sociological experiment.

It felt cool. I decided to do it.

Then I had to find my “aha.” As I said, I don’t really think that way. But once I did, what I wanted to talk about became obvious.

I’m not saying you should go watch me, but I will say that this is a fun and curiously interesting portrait of America that those fuddy duddy insurance guys are bankrolling. I got very little time to chat with the crew, but I could see why they enjoyed their jobs so much.

Choose a city and watch! It’s lovely in a weird, millennial sort of way.

And, OK, you can watch mine here:

On manufactured non-controversies

Posted on by Suki

One of the Internet’s less noble qualities is its ability to help people get up-in-arms about things that are non-issues. If you use Facebook or other social media, you’re probably hit with it on a daily basis—forced hyperbole that translates to simple clickbait.

andertoons4419I heard about the so-called sunscreen controversy some years ago when my kids were small. According to people who got their PhDs from Google, the use of sunscreen has not slowed the rise of skin cancer—it has caused a rise in skin cancer. [Read this article to understand the argument and then this article to understand why the argument is based on faulty reasoning, shifty argumentation, and sleight of hand.]

This non-controversy rests on a treasure trove of examples how people misunderstand science, and how people with preformed agendas (e.g. “everything natural is good“) misread scientific data to serve their own purposes.

These non-controversies almost always rest on the same set of fallacies, including:

Playing on your fears

We live in a pretty scary world, I’ll admit. A few hundred years ago, most people lived in villages and only knew what was happening nearby. Now, when a non-custodial dad grabs his child in Sacramento, we read about it in lights over the highway across the state. In our villages, we ate what we grew, wore clothing we made, and lived in houses we built. Now we are all depending on strangers around the world to care for our health and well-being. We trust a factory worker in Vietnam not to put contaminated food into our frozen meals. We trust a medical technician in Israel to formulate our kids’ inhalers correctly. We trust a flooring company that sources materials from China not to allow hazardous chemicals that will poison us while we sleep.

This is all pretty scary, and non-controversies play on those fears.

Vilifying science and scientists

When did it happen that the scientist went from pathetic geek to evil genius baby killer? People in general have never trusted science that much, but it’s only been recently that our culture has been placing evil intent at the heart of science. We’re told that “scientists who speak out” feel threatened. We’re told that the reason you haven’t heard about this life-saving idea is that corporations and the scientists they employ are out to sell things that they know are killing us.

The fact is that scientists argue with each other all the time—it’s at the heart of what they do—so scientists disagreeing on any issue is hardly news. And yes, of course scientists have biases and sometimes the ideas that end up being proven to be correct are ignored for some time. However, the aim of scientists is certainly not to silence dissent and make us all sicker. Arguments that rest on that premise are false from the get-go.

Cherry-picking science

One of the most maddening things about science is that it’s hardly ever conclusive. When it comes to something as complex as the healthy functioning of the human body, science may never be able to be conclusive enough to convince a jury of uneducated citizens. So when an article trying to fan the flames of a non-controversy cites science, it does so with a careful process of ignoring the subtleties of scientific research.

No single study proves a hypothesis—scientists pretty much agree on this. But they also agree that science advances by following the advance of knowledge, not by ignoring what doesn’t fit your agenda. Looking at the history of scientific research, you can find studies that validate pretty much any idea—and then you can find the avalanche of studies that followed showing that the preceding study was flawed or inconclusive. Cherry-picking allows disingenuous Internet fakers to grab your attention without requiring them to face the subtler reality of conflicting scientific data.

Confusing correlation and causation

This is probably the most common confusion that non-controversy articles play on. For a good laugh, look at a few of the charts at Spurious Correlations. My favorite is how “murders by steam, hot vapors, and hot objects” correlates well with the age of the reigning Miss America.

So in the sunscreen non-controversy, a big deal is made of rising skin cancer rates that correlate with rising sunscreen use. It seems so tempting to come to the obvious conclusion that sunscreen use is causing cancer, but scientists who have attempted to prove that relationship simply haven’t been able to do it. This is not to say that no relationship exists, but rather that so far no one has been able to prove it. For some people, that lack of certainty is maddening. It leads them to prefer manufactured non-controversies because they are so simple and direct.

Blinding us with numbers, facts, and statistics

“She blinded me with science!” the scientist exclaims in Thomas Dolby’s song. And that’s what these non-controversies attempt to do. They cite fact after fact, number after number, name after name, and they seem so believable. But a preponderance of numbers doesn’t create fact; it simply creates confusion in the minds of people who aren’t trained to understand the numbers. And confusion leads to fear, which leads to… see above.

Why do people assign evil intent to scientists? I think it’s because of a fundamental misunderstanding of what science is—and what its limits are.

There are people who are trained to understand all the numbers, facts, and statistics, and they’re called scientists. And yes, scientists are human, all of them have biases, and some of them even have agendas. But who should we trust: someone who has dedicated his/her life to learning, investigation, and improving the human condition, or someone who has dedicated his/her life to fanning the flames of non-controversies in order to get more clicks?

I’ll trust the scientists.

What science “knows” will always be flawed and incomplete, and it will always be subject to bias and preconceived notions, but a skeptical trust in science is an improvement over living in a village that tries to solve its epidemic of bubonic plague by drowning all the cats.

Getting through this complex modern life we’ve been born into involves a lot of trust that we can’t avoid. The big question is how you’re going to make informed decisions about all the details that face us daily. Listening to the manufacturers of non-controversies might be appealing, but it’s not going to make you any healthier or safer.

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