Transcript for OTW’s 10th Anniversary Chat with Tessa Gratton & Kate McNair

[otw_staff]

*Kate M.: And then the internet came to my house. And that little dial up connection changed my life. All of a sudden this comic from Japan was at my fingertips! I could find all sorts of websites about Sailor Moon and even more anime and manga. I devoured it all! I became almost as obsessed with these websites as I was with the series I was reading and watching. And soon I wanted to contribute to this community. I wrote my own, very bad, fanfic and went to make website to host the first few stories and fell in love with web design. Soon I was more interested in the web design part than I was in the fanfic (thank god, as I was very bad at writing fanfic). I started making websites about all my favorite series which lead me to all sorts of coding languages and information hierarchies. By that time I was working in my public library as a shelver…and they asked me to help them build a collection of manga and comics and I was hooked. I haven’t looked back since!

*Tessa: For a long time YA was the genre where you could do ANYTHING. Genre-bending, pushing the envelope re: sex and narrative, you could experiment—the only thing you had to have in the story was some kind of teenage experience. I do think that YA has specialized a bit more in the past five years, and it's united by the Teen Experience—regardless of genre—and opening up in huge ways to marginalized teen experiences.

I love the intimacy and immediacy of YA. Most of it, especially the successful books, put the reader right into the heart (narratively and emotionally) of a character, and pull the reader along unstoppably until the last page. YA is the kind of genre where you can hope for and even expect to not want to put a book down until you finish. Not because they’re all action-oriented page-turners, but because you become that character, and invest in them in a way that isn’t always present in other genres.

Did you miss our chat with author Tessa Gratton & Kate McNair of YALSA? If so you can check out the transcript of their talk https://goo.gl/FGo9pM