I am going to try to articulate something I can't quite explain and it involves several threads, trying to tie them all together in a way that makes sense.
Background: I love Redwall and I have always loved Redwall and Redwall is foundational to me as a person in a way I didn't really appreciate until Harry Potter stopped taking up so much damn space in my brain/bibliobiography - for multiple reasons that deserve their own space. I still call my childhood best friend "Mouse" because of Redwall; she recently had a baby and, had that baby been a girl, she would have been named after me.
Something else I did not realize about Redwall until it had receded into the hazy mists of nostalgia and then been sought and found to comfort me (during the 2020 phase of the COVID-19 pandemic) was how much I identified with Matthias. I've said it before and I'll say it again: If I was 10-12 years younger, I would be Matthias fictionkin. Rereading Redwall for the first time in many years was like being told the story of my own (past?) life.
It occurs to me now that Redwall is literally part of a past life: Redwall belonged to another girl, before I was Meep - Redwall belonged to a girl with two living parents and Redwall is a bridge back to that girl, a part of the woman* she grew up to be that my dad would recognize, even if other things about me now are a surprise.
Do you see what I mean? Redwall is, in some stupid way, inseparable from my identity,
… which brings me to the next part: I've been thinking about The Lioness Quartet, a series I read and I appreciated its significance to the history of feminist fantasy YA but never really obsessed over like, say, Redwall. It felt like required reading something I, as a girl and a fantasy fan, was supposed to read and appreciate and I think that rubbed off some of its shine. (I was very moved by the scene where Alanna gets her period, though.)
I've been thinking about Alanna because of Esme Symes-Smith's Sir Callie series, about Callie as a … corrective? an expansion? of what Tamara Pierce started with Alanna (who she has since said is gender-fluid). Alanna started it and Callie came up after to deepen, to expand, to build on it.
So I was thinking, What would that look like for Redwall, my foundational series that has not gotten an update? (I am thinking, for example, of Amari and the Night Brothers and Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, or - going back further - The Golden Compass and The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe*.*) The obvious thing would be to question the medieval allegory racial hierarchy, where mice are always good and stoats are always evil and cats, for some reason, are the only morally grey animal.
…but for gender stuff, I was thinking: probably because of my (over)identification with Matthias (and, thus, Martin), I never felt stung by Redwall like I felt stung by, I don't know, the Pokemon games pre-Crystal. I belonged in that world; ironically, it was the lack of representation (Mariel doesn't get the sword, no girl gets the sword until Triss and, for some reason I can't explain, Triss being a squirrel, not a mouse, means it doesn't feel the same) that made space for me as a genderqueer person. If there was a girl who got Martin's sword (I'd mostly aged out of the series by Triss), I would've been encouraged to identify with her - instead, my identification with Matthias (Martin) helped make space for my genderqueer identity.
I asked on Twitter yesterday, "what's the opposite of a mentor text?" and Kaille suggested "nemesis text."
I'm currently working on two picture book biography drafts and my nemesis texts are She Made a Monster: How Mary Shelley Created Frankenstein and Mary Wears What She Wants - both for essentially the same sin: making stuff up.
In She Made a Monster, the author (Lynn Fulton) admits that she made up the deadline and the contest to make the story more dramatic instead of writing about what really happened. It's such a good title and the art is perfect for a Mary Shelley picture book biography but biographers writing for adults can't just make stuff up and neither should biographers writing for children: it's an insult to your audience.
Mary Wears What She Wants takes the true story of Dr. Mary Walker (more truthfully told in Mary Walker Wears the Pants, also a picture book biography) and makes Mary a little kid in an apparently post-racial world full of antebellum pre-Civil War fashion norms? Excuse me, what? Mary Walker was a Union army surgeon; she did not (we do not) live in a post-racial world. Again, it is an insult to the child reader to condescend to them in this way. Either write a modern story about an actual child bucking contemporary gender norms ("girls should only wear skirts/dresses" is a fringe belief in the U.S. in the 2020s, you're not brave for writing a picture book about fighting it) or tell the true story of Dr. Mary Walker, Civil War hero - on the side of abolition.
This is a reminder to myself as I write two new picture book biography drafts and revise three more.
I have read thousands of books since my dad died in 2003 and none of them have I wished I could give him like Blood in the Machine.
The version of the Luddite story that my dad told me was this: the Luddites were guild members who were protecting their interests by destroying machines - which is, basically, true… but my dad's version of the story (not, I think, uncommon) was that the Luddites were the bosses, the upper middle class, protecting their social position from upstarts? which, honestly, now that I'm thinking about it as an adult, makes very little sense: upstart child workers? upstart factory owners? The factory owners weren't "upstarts," they were wealthy (often ~nobility, this is England we're talking about) businessmen exploiting "unskilled" labor (often children) and the Luddities weren't bosses protecting their ill gotten gains; they were working class folks fighting back against the degradation and poverty of factory work.