I went to a presentation on Saturday for my Writing for Young People tract at Antioch University. All of us in W4YP had to go and it was one of the coolest things I have attended as a writer. G. Neri, (http://www.gregneri.com/) a writer who has had immense sucess with his Children's and Young Adult stories, was receiving the Horace Mann Upstanders Award. This is an award given to writers who have written for social justice and are upstanding members of the world. I had read three of Greg's books before the conference, so I was very excited to see him speak.
     He won the award for his book Ghetto Cowboy which is about cowboys in the poorest part of Philadelphia. He had seen a story in Life magazine that there are people in urban ghettos who save race horses from slaughter houses and care for them in abandoned, run-down areas of cities. He thought the same thing I did: What!? How have I not heard of this and how are there not already stories about it!? He began to do research.
     My favorite parts of Greg Neri's work is that he writes about things he sees in the world that interest him: the truth is stranger than fiction. He dared me to break one of the rules frequently pushed on me in my undergrad. As a young writer everyone told me to "write what you know." Greg said however, "write what you don't know. That's what is interesting; what will inspire you. What you don't know can fill books." I thought this was awesome, because I also like to take bits and pieces of things I experience or read or hear about in the real word and apply it to my fiction. I love being able to research for my work--learning keeps me interested in a piece I am working on. If I just wrote and never experienced something new and interesting why would I be entertained enough to keep going?
     My other favorite thing about Greg's work is that, like the award shows, he is an Upstander for social justice. He talked about going to readings at schools and detention centers where he met kids who had never read before they encountered his books. Some of these kids told him that his story Yummy, about an 11 year old pawn in a gang war, saved their lives. There was another student Greg told us about who had never read before finding Greg's book, Chest Rumbler, a work of poetry-like prose. The student began asking the school librarian for more books like that one. Eventually the student was reading Shakespeare, writing his own poems and being accepted into a high school for the arts. How cool would that be to know that you had provided the catalyst for a kid to go from not caring about school or reading to being a poet and reader of Shakespeare?
     I hope someday I'll be reading in a classroom. This is truly why we write: so that someone somewhere will read what we have written and maybe, if we're lucky, even if it's just one person, someone will love our words, our ideas.