Echoes of Le Guin, Part V: How Will They Come Home?

Welcome to The Burning Hearth’s “Echoes of Le Guin” series.

Roughly a year ago, the idea for this series began to percolate in my mind. I’m finding it difficult to believe I am already on the penultimate issue, and what an issue it is. In this post’s question, I ask the authors to talk about the development of children’s creativity and imagination in the age of smartphones and social media. I penned this question in December of 2022, which was before ChatGPT was unleashed in full upon humanity. It was before PimEyes came into the public sphere boasting a technology that even Google deems is too dangerous for said public. It was before the Israel-Gaza War, which has led schools to encourage parents to delete social media apps from their children’s devices.

You will learn about my thoughts on social media and smartphones in my question to my guest authors: William Alexander, Kylie Mirmohamadi, Susan DeFreitas, Julie Phillips, Isaac Yuen, and Kyle Winkler. I can’t help but wonder how their answers might have deepened, and in some cases even changed, if I were asking them this same question today. But before diving into Part V, I asked my featured author, William Alexander, a few questions. I have many things I could say about William, but mostly, I just want to say, that even though I have never met him, he is one of the kindest, most generous people I have interviewed. Onward ho!

Interview with William Alexander

BH: You are an instructor at the Vermont College of Fine Arts, which, according to VCFA’s profile on X, is “The first low-residency MFA program in the country to focus exclusively on writing for young readers.” What aspect of teaching those aspiring writers for young people brings you the most satisfaction and joy?

William Alexander: I love seeing new writers rediscover the sorts of stories that their younger selves desperately needed to read. Susan Cooper insisted that “there are ways, partial, fleeting, of looking again at a mystery through the eyes we used to have. Children are not different animals. They are us, not yet wearing our heavy jacket of time.” Finding those partial, fleeting ways, without nostalgia or the slightest shred of condescension for the children that we used to be, requires a kind of time-travel—and it’s a lot of fun to mentor aspiring time-travelers. 

BH: What, in your opinion, lights up young readers most, and keeps them reading; especially, when there are so many things in today’s world competing for their attention?

William Alexander: Young readers often find delight in the games and patterns of words themselves. The first page of Ursula’s Steering the Craft describes that delight:

The sound of the language is where it all begins and what it all comes back to. The basic element of language are physical: the noise words make and the rhythm of their relationships… Most children enjoy the sound of language for its own sake. They wallow in repetitions and luscious word-sounds and the crunch and slither of onomatopoeia; they fall in love with musical or impressive words and use them in all the wrong places. Some writers keep this childish love for the sounds of language… Others “outgrow” their oral/aural sense of language as they learn to read in silence. That’s a loss. I think an awareness of what your own writing sounds like is an essential skill for a writer. Fortunately it’s one quite easy to cultivate, to relearn, reawaken.

To earn a young reader’s attention we also need to offer them respect. They have no patience for belittling or condescension. Nor should they. Ursula pointed out in Cheek by Jowl that “children don’t mind you talking over their heads—they’re used to it, and used to figuring it out. Anything is better than being talked down to.” 

BH: It has recently been announced that you are joining a multi-author chapter book series titled The Kids in Mrs. Z’s Class published by Algonquin Young Readers. This sounds like an inspired project. How did it come about? Also, I understand there are 18 protagonists. Who are they?

William Alexander: The whole project was conceived and created by Cheryl Klein and Kate Messner. They recruited a whole bunch of authors to write separate novels set in the same third-grade classroom. Each book will have a different protagonist created by that individual author; those characters will also show up in cameos and supporting roles throughout the whole series. 

This is amazing company to be in, and we’re having tons of fun. My character, Memo Castillo, loves fantasy and role-playing games. He tries to understand his own family history in fantastical terms. (My young brain did something similar at his age by conflating the Cuban diaspora with Atlantis and Númenor.) I can’t reveal too much about the other characters (yet), but this PW article offers a few more details…

Echoes of Le Guin

Part V: How Will They Come Home?

BH: I believe that curiosity and imagination are directly linked. If one does not possess curiosity, how does one activate her/his imagination. Further, I believe one must have imagination to have vision, and without vision how does one expand and evolve?

In her essay “Reading Young, Reading Old,” Ursula states,

“Children have a seemingly innate passion for justice; they don’t have to be taught it. They have to have it beaten out of them, in fact, to end up as properly prejudiced adults.”

I believe the same holds true for curiosity and imagination. But I fear we are beating these out of children in a far more insidious way than just a teacher who tells students to paint within the lines.

As a dance teacher, I saw nothing kill curiosity, and therefore imagination and vision, more than smartphones. It was amazing how quickly my once alert, eager, students’ senses dulled, upon receiving a smartphone. I watched their interest in class be overcome by a Pavlovian itch to know if they had received a text in the last minute, in the last minute, in the last minute. I painfully watched their ability to memorize evaporate before my very eyes.

I love technology, don’t get me wrong. I’m a huge Trekkie, and the day I held a flip phone in my hand, I was ready to be beamed to faraway lands where those different worlds I imagined, existed. But technology seems to be taking people, especially children, more inward. And not, in the Way kind of way.

Parents who know my 14-year-old daughter doesn’t, yet, have her own smartphone (she texts with her friends on mine), ask me how my husband and I have held off giving her a phone as they are panicked over the to give or not to give dilemma they face with their own children. My response is always the same. “Give your child a phone when you are ready to lose them. There’s nothing a parent or teacher can do with their children that is more attention grabbing or desirable than what is waiting for them on that device.”

How do we recapture the curiosity and imagination of children once they’ve been given something that makes the world out here seem dull in comparison to the world in there, behind the glow?

Harkening back to Ursula’s acceptance speech, she invokes:

“Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom — poets, visionaries — realists of a larger reality.”

As those very people she is enlisting, how do you envision an awakening of a generation who will have known nothing but the world post smartphones and Meta and Google and Amazon? How will they remember something they’ve never known? How will they come home?

Kylie Mirmohamadi

Kylie Mirmohamadi: ‘How will they come home?’

It’s such a beautiful, profound, perhaps unanswerable, question. Except to say that we, all of us, are always coming home.

The language of the Kesh honours it. hirai, the longing for home. irai, home; being home. To be home, at home. iraiwoi dad, to go home. karai, homecoming. To come home.

So, this question. What role can writers play in hard times and perhaps harder ones to come, in awakening others to alternative ways of being, of remembering, of dwelling in this troubled, cabled world?

As you suggest, it must be through nurturing the imagination, the red beating heart that pulses through childhood, and beyond. In believing in the life of the mind, its endless curiosity and eternal searching. In making worlds and creating people that don’t exist but feel, for as long as they are dwelt in and with, as if they do. In accessing the inner life, our own and others’, which is so often crowded out by light and noise and notifications and incessant data. In not letting go of the stories, the mythology, the fables, the tales, that have made us human, that have taught us to be so, and to accept being so, and to accept that one life has limitations, and an end, but to tell the story of one life is an act of importance, audacity, subversiveness.

Ursula showed us the way.

Isaac Yuen

Isaac Yuen: I don’t think there is a magic solution that will reset things to a pre-social media age. Pandora’s box has been opened, and home in some sense is always a place we have never been.

I think the shift will not come so much as an awakening but rather an increasing disillusionment around the use of these platforms. I think we are seeing this now, with people abandoning one platform for another in increasingly quick succession. But what is the endgame here? I don’t know. What we may need is an off-ramp towards better and healthier means of engagement with the world. Maybe here lies the power of art and the power of stories of the real and the unreal, to both ground and reveal alternatives through imagination in ways that resonate. Whether that shift is sufficient or comes quick enough to save us from our predicament is unclear. Toward that end I’m reminded of a passage in an essay by Ken Liu, published in Orion magazine, titled “The Age of Stories”:

“But we are a story-born, spell-bound species, and there is no way out of our hell except more stories. The only comfort I can offer is that the book before us appears to still have blank pages, and the next chapter has yet to be written. May we all get to tell the story we want to tell.”

We just have to keep trying, keep creating, keep on telling and enacting stories. We will. On that I have no doubt.

How do we create a world where the child’s natural instincts of imagination are not only encouraged, but essential to the creation of a desired future? How do we as a society arrive at valuing those qualities rather than neglecting or suppressing them through pedagogy? If we as a society decide those qualities are critical, then we will do everything we can to nurture and nourish them.

Perhaps the acknowledgement that we currently do not value those elements and regard them as childish in the most negative sense of the word is important. Capitalism has molded the expectation of what a useful, productive, and desirable adult should be—in most cases being too imaginative or curious run counter to that ideal. But things can change. There are alternative systems out there and we would do well to see how those education systems are cultivating children.

William Alexander

William Alexander: You’re absolutely right about curiosity. Jeff VanderMeer wrote in Wonderbook that, “Nothing is more essential to a writer than sustaining an inquisitive nature—being actively interested in the world and the people in it.” That constant state of curiosity is a bit difficult to maintain while everything is on fire, though. The crew of the Enterprise can’t pause to conduct intriguing scientific experiments when the ship is on red alert. Fantasy helps. Shifting perspectives to make the strange familiar and the familiar strange can soothe the relentless noise of red alert klaxons and restore our inquisitive nature.

Never Say You Can’t Survive: How to Get Through Hard Times by Making Up Stories by Charlie Jane Anders is also pretty great.

As for the next generation, they already seem to be awake and aware. Every protest and rally I’ve attended in recent years included young speakers—fourteen and fifteen-year-olds—and every single time I’ve been deeply impressed by their command of language, rhetoric, and the issues of the moment. Smartphones haven’t confiscated those abilities. The kids are already remembering a kind of freedom that doesn’t exist yet. They already seem to know where they’re going.

This doesn’t mean that we should sit back, defer responsibility, and rely solely on the next generation to rescue a broken world. They might be awake, but they lack sufficient agency and trust. We should offer both.

Lowering the voting age would be a good start.

Julie Phillips

Julie Phillips: The self-making that teenagers do is also the work of the imagination. They can’t do it alone. They need to do it with their own people, and sometimes they need the internet to find them.

I think the human imagination is too powerful to be hemmed in by technology. Humans have been trying and failing to repress the imagination for millennia. It always finds a way.

For what it’s worth, at 15 your kid will probably start closing her bedroom door and you won’t see her for a year. That’s what both my kids did at 15. It’s what I did at 15. You’re not losing her. She’ll be back. It’s like what you said earlier about intense passages in fiction: when you’re that age just being out in the world is a dramatic scene, and you need to have some quiet moments.

Kyle Winkler

Kyle Winkler: I mean, I’m going to be contradictory here. I’m not convinced that we’re going to lose a generation of kids to technology. Or all of history. It is essentially the same argument that our grandparents made of our parents with rock and roll or the TV or MTV and cassettes or whatever. Everything New will destroy the Old, etc. etc. However. Let me ask a question: How long has the book, or codex, been around? Millennia. How long has the iPhone been around? A little over a decade? Which is more prepared to last a long time into the future from right now? I’d put my money on the book. 

Moreover, to think that every generation abandons every single medium of cultural interaction when a new one comes along seems unnecessarily apocalyptic. Ursula’s warning is well-taken, and we should always heed her and it, but I would never negate a new technology for my favored technology’s sake. My god, we’re talking about a woman who wrote in a genre that relied on unforeseen and galaxy-changing technologies! I’ll return to my earlier concern. I’m less flustered about the future than I am about the present. We want kids to be more aware? More adults right now need to get off their own phones and internet and start reading more. Start interacting more. They need to model what curiosity and intellection and care look like. Subsequent generations won’t have to wonder where home is, where the past is, if they’ve been taught and told and shown where it is by us, right now. 

In any case…Let me end this way, in a more positive manner. There will be poets in the future. There will be writers in the future. 

Susan DeFreitas

Susan DeFreitas: I believe all of us who are living in the age of smartphones and social media are facing the same challenges—it’s not just the young, though the issue may be most obvious with them, because their behavior around it is most obvious, and perhaps the most extreme. But I think that’s just because young people must focus on their social networks, their peers, for their very survival: they are about to leave their families, and make found family. They are hard wired to prioritize communication with their peers over just about anything else.

So: I think the challenge all of us face in this time is the challenge of being intentional in the ways that we use our time and attention—not to let that be dictated by “obsessive” (addictive) technologies.

I think the current generation is simply going to see the fruits of that struggle writ large: the neuroses and dissatisfaction that will arise, in time, from continually seeking external validation, and on the other hand, how extraordinary our lives can be when we actually make conscious choices about how we use our time and attention.

Thank you for stopping by and spending time with The Burning Hearth and these amazing authors, who so thoughtfully, answered my burning question.

I can’t believe there is only one more installment to go. And what a slam bang finish it is going to be, featuring Julie Phillips, Ursula’s official biographer.

Also, in December, I, along with group members from Electric Sheep, will be paying tribute to UKLG and this series with a Voices of the Winter Solstice issue themed “The Ending Place.” Posting on the solstice, it will be a collection of speculative flash focused on, you guessed it, endings.

If you read this post and enjoyed it, please post a comment here or on X or Bluesky. I’m so appreciative of these authors and the time and care they gave to this series, I would love for them to hear from you, if you feel the same. Any reposting would be deeply appreciated as well.

Until next time,

Constance