by Ann Angel
In exploring beauty, the authors acknowledge our culture’s obsession with physical perfection, often as defined by the media, but they refuse to accept beauty’s myths. Their stories redefine beauty, showing that it can be a stunning moment of self-recognition, or a friend who knows when to sit without judgment at your side, or a moment in nature, or one special person who charms you with his or her honesty or uniqueness. Real beauty is more than a pretty face.
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
1) What are the unwritten rules for the physically beautiful, depicted in Ron Koertge’s short story, “Such a Pretty Face”? Are Melissa’s efforts to negotiate these rules successful? Do you observe unwritten rules or expectations for those who are deemed beautiful in your own world or group of friends?
2) “I felt sorry. For her. ’Cause you know what? I really liked her. And you know what? In those moments when I could stop seeing me where she was supposed to be? Cherry was really pretty,” says the narrator in Chris Lynch’s “Red Rover, Red Rover.” Why can’t he see Cherry’s beauty when he sees himself in her?
3) What does it mean to be swan beautiful in a family full of ducks, or duck beautiful in a family full of swans, in Jamie Pittel’s story, “What I Look Like”? In what ways do you believe most teens feel swan beautiful in a world of ducks?
4) Mary Ann Rodman’s story, “Farang,” looks at cultural beauty. In this story, the Thai girls try to be more American, and the American girls lust to be thin and tiny like the Thai girls. The protagonist, Lauren, recognizes that there’s a different sort of beauty inside each person’s heart. “But good hearts don’t show,” she concludes, “the way that light skin and long shiny hair do.” What does she mean when she draws this conclusion? Do you agree or disagree that this is the way it is?
5) In the story “Ape,” protagonist Ford Gordon talks about the myth of uniformity and conformity, explaining that his grandfather, who immigrated to the United States at a time when Greeks were looked on suspiciously, hid his heritage by changing his name to Gordon. Ford himself has learned to blend in by ridding himself of a Boston accent. He says, “Now I speak a perfect California tongue, flavorless as tap water. Here in Sacramento, people converse with perfectly blended uniformity, as similar as the pastel tract homes we live in.” Still, he stands out because of his physical appearance. When he tries to hide his hirsute appearance in order to blend in, Ford is giving in to contemporary myths about physical beauty. He is taking them on as reality. What are some beauty myths, and how do we act when we believe they are our reality?
6) “I think it’s payback because I like being beautiful. Because . . . maybe I’m not so nice to people who aren’t,” says Zelly of her truly bad-hair-day experience in Lauren Myracle’s short story, “Bad Hair Day.” Zelly and her best friend, Kristin, agree that everyone makes secret fun of others’ flaws. Even their saintly friend, Scout, probably says mean things behind people’s backs. Do you think this is true, that most or all people poke fun at others when their flaws become apparent?
7) Beauty, in Norma Fox Mazer’s story, “How to Survive a Name,” recognizes early on that she is no beauty, but it is a note from a classmate that makes her realize how much it hurts to know others see this lack of beauty. How does she handle this realization?
8) After Tiny finds the semiconscious Bella under the stage trapdoor in Tim Wynne-Jones’s story, “Bella in Five Acts,” he tries to help her find beauty in life. For Tiny, what is beauty? How does he bring this beauty to his world?
9) Tiny tells Bella that in crossing over High Lake to Graduation Beach, you need to keep your tips up. What does he mean with this metaphor? How is he keeping his own metaphoric tips up?
10) Ellen Wittlinger’s “Cheekbones” allows readers to see more than one response to physical beauty through the eyes of Lucy and her mother. How do the two characters view the importance of physical beauty? Is there one correct interpretation?
11) The loss of physical beauty plays a small role in Anita Riggio’s “Bingo,” but this is actually a story about Peter Roscoe learning to appreciate the natural beauty of life through his friendship with Maeve. What does it take for Peter to recognize all that he has?
12) In Jacqueline Woodson’s story, “My Crazy, Beautiful World,” readers watch Angela face the shock of seeing herself and her group through the eyes of outsiders. In seeing herself this way, how does Angela define beauty in her own life?
13) Two stories, Louise Hawes’s “Sideshow” and J. James Keels’s “Ape,” contain references to carnival freak shows, where carnival-goers would pay to look at people who stood out from the norm, people considered freaks. Why do you think that the theme of beauty would draw writers to consider these shows?
WRITING ACTIVITIES
1) Tiny, in “Bella in Five Acts,” tells Bella that Shallow Lake, the lake where his family owns a cottage, is in his mind High Lake. He says some people waterski and others swim across to Graduation Beach. He has learned that, if you plan to ski across, you have to keep your tips up. Write about the method you would use to cross the lake and include what you’ve learned about the possible problems or obstacles in making this crossing.
2) Write about a time when you learned something about how you experience beauty in your world.
CREATIVE ART
1) Using magazine cutouts, drawings, words, and phrases, create a collage that defines beauty as you perceive it.
2) Create a collection of found objects that depict natural beauty. List words to describe beauty and create a list poem that can be placed with your collection.
3) Using whatever media you wish, draw or paint your vision of beauty.
AN INTERVIEW WITH THE EDITOR
Q: What attracted you to creating an anthology about beauty?
A: It seems that all my life I’ve watched how definitions of beauty affect the people around me. Growing up, I never felt I could measure up to physical standards of beauty. I was short, my nose was soooo long, my hair was as straight and frizzy as Janis Joplin’s—and I didn’t even have her voice.
Over the next decade, models grew thinner and thinner. By then I was teaching, and I saw my female students attempt to emulate them. All these beautiful people, with curving bodies and wide smiles, seemed to grow gaunt and pinched.
Then when I had my own culturally mixed family, I saw how my children went through stages in which they compared themselves to their siblings. Their differences became perceived flaws, and they felt they came up short. Our culture had created an obsession with looks and with an ideal that is impossible. It seemed that, everywhere I looked, we were all in danger of losing our sense of ourselves as beautiful to something that wasn’t ideal at all.
Meanwhile, the world is full of such natural beauty—everything from thunderstorms that light up the sky to reveal startling sights, or gentle winds that push leaves in swirls against stone buildings, to good people with generous hearts and souls.
But sometimes, we get lost in our obsession with the airbrushed pages of celebrity and model “beauty.” We lose the ability to see the truly gorgeous aspects of life around us.
I wanted to gather writers who had demonstrated their own beauty through their written work, but also through friendship and through mentoring one another, to create an anthology that challenged cultural expectations and redefined beauty in broader terms, on their individual terms.
Q: When selecting the stories for this anthology, what did you look for?
A: I looked for stories that offered fresh perspectives through an individual character’s experience. I wanted each story to give the reader pause, a chance to reconsider what is, in fact, beautiful. I wasn’t looking for only stories about the physically beautiful; I wanted to see beauty in each story from an emotionally or even spiritually aesthetic perspective.
Q: Your very first story is about a physically beautiful girl, so beautiful that no one can relate to her. Why did you include that story? Isn’t it just encouraging stereotypes of beauty?
A: In order to live up to a physical ideal, those who support that ideal create expectations that become unwritten rules. The “beautiful” people in our world are given a tremendous amount of privilege and attention, but it sometimes costs them the freedom to be who they really are. Some of this occurs because the rules for beauty are that you must always be beautiful; nothing less is allowed, and nothing more is expected. You shouldn’t get your hands dirty, and you don’t need a brain. Don’t ever allow yourself to be ugly. Attention and admiration aren’t earned, because all that the beautiful person must do is be physically attractive. The beautiful person is shunned if he or she deviates from these expectations, and so that person is often made to feel shallow, undeserving, and isolated. Ridiculous ideals of physical beauty hurt everyone—even those who come closest to meeting them.
Q: You include stories in which characters behave badly toward others, particularly the older brother in “Sideshow.” How does behavior define beauty?
A: The stories that captured ugliness in its rawest form were those that captured truly hurtful behavior, which is truly ugly. To define true beauty, I thought it was important to recognize what is ugly. By arranging these stories next to stories that capture natural beauty or beautiful moments or behavior, true beauty is heightened because we can see the extremes.
About the Contributors
Louise Hawes, who lives outside Chapel Hill, North Carolina, has written books for all ages, her last three for young adults. Rosey in the Present Tense was an ALA Popular Paperback of 2000; Waiting for Christopher was a 2003 New York Public Library Best Book for the Teen Age; and The Vanishing Point, a 2005 New York Public Library Best Book for the Teen Age, was also nominated as an ALA Best Book for Young Adults. Louise, whose first picture book debuted in 2006, will prove she “covers the waterfront” when the University Press of Mississippi publishes a collection of her short fiction for adults in 2007. “Beauty,” she claims, “is not an inherent quality, but a perception, a moment. Everyone and everything is beautiful sometime, and no one and nothing can be beautiful forever.” For more on Louise, check out www.louisehawes.com.
J. James Keels has self-published chapbooks, contributed to various underground zines, and read at Bay Area poetry readings. He holds a BA in sociology and human sexuality studies from San Francisco State University. He later received an MFA in writing from Vermont College. A regular faculty member of the Community College of Vermont, he is now an MA candidate in elementary education at Johnson State College. He lives in Vermont and is currently at work on a young adult novel. “Physical beauty,” he says, “has nothing to do with those unrealistic, unhealthy media images many strive toward. Beauty comes with self-actualization—from our own unique substance. Beauty cannot be planned or calculated. Beauty cannot be purchased in a store. When we are true to ourselves, and not external pressures, we are truly fabulous.”
Ron Koertge is a master at capturing teenagers’ voices—often in witty repartee—and that is fully evident in his Margaux with an X, the story of a sharp-tongued beauty and a quirky, quick-witted loner. Another unlikely pairing is found in Stoner & Spaz, Ron’s funny, in-your-face tale of a young cinephile with cerebral palsy and the stoner who steals his heart. A faculty member for more than thirty-five years at Pasadena City College, he taught everything from Shakespeare to remedial writing. In addition to his young adult novels, Ron writes poetry. His novel in poetry Shakespeare Bats Cleanup is entirely in free verse, with examples of several poetic forms slipped into the mix, including a sonnet, a haiku, a pastoral, and even a pantoum. The Brimstone Journals is another poetry novel, with fifteen different teenage characters narrating four or five poems each. Ron grew up in an agricultural area in an old mining town in Illinois, just across the Mississippi from St. Louis, Missouri. He and his wife live in South Pasadena, California, where, he says, “I like to bet on thoroughbreds, and there’s no lovelier sight than having them turn for home with my choice running easy at about ten to one.”
Chris Lynch proved he isn’t afraid to talk about the difficult emotions in our lives, such as rage, with his novel Inexcusable, a 2005 National Book Award finalist. He is the Michael L. Printz Honor Award–winning author of Freewill and several other highly acclaimed young adult novels, including Gold Dust, Iceman, Gypsy Davy, and Shadowboxer—all ALA Best Books for Young Adults. He is also the author of Extreme Elvin, Whitechurch, and All the Old Haunts. He holds an MA from the writing program at Emerson College. He mentors aspiring writers and continues to work on new literary projects. He lives in Boston and in Scotland. “My take on beauty?” he says. “Same as everybody else—your beautiful soul, love.”
Norma Fox Mazer lives in Montpelier, Vermont, with her husband, the writer Harry Mazer. She has published nearly thirty novels and short-story collections for young adults. Her novels, including Missing Pieces, Out of Control, When She Was Good, and the Newbery Honor Book After the Rain, are critically acclaimed and popular among young readers for their realistic portrayal of teens in difficult situations. In her novel Girlhearts, she brings back the memorable characters from her beloved book Silver, who continue to deal with life’s hardest moments through their honest and touching relationships. In her new book, What I Believe, she tells the story of Vicki through a variety of narrative and poetic forms, including letters, dialogues, free verse, sestinas, pantoums, and even a villanelle. Her character Beauty, in “How to Survive a Name,” will be featured in an upcoming novel. She says of beauty, “The word beautiful is an abstraction, but useful as shorthand for the almost unbearable pleasure of certain simple, lovely things in this complex world of ours, like the sun setting in a flush of pale green, or a baby gazing fresh at the world.”
Lauren Myracle has written many novels for teens and young readers: Kissing Kate, Eleven, ttyl, Rhymes with Witches, ttfn, The Fashion Disaster That Changed My Life, Twelve, and l8r, g8r. They’re all pretty good, and she thinks you should read them. Or not—whatever you please. As far as beauty goes, she has this to say: “People will tell you it’s what’s on the inside that counts, and they’re right. But let’s face it, the way we look on the outside plays a big role in the world too. Maybe it shouldn’t, but it does. So don’t beat yourself up for caring how you look. Just keep some perspective. And if it comes down to painting your nails or saving the world from evil incarnate, well, you know what to do.” Visit Lauren at www.laurenmyracle.com.
Jamie Pittel holds an MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults from Vermont College. Her story “What I Look Like” is excerpted and adapted from a novel in progress titled The East Pole. Another story, “Peloria,” appeared in Cicada magazine. Jamie lives in Somerville, Massachusetts. About beauty, she says, “I think words on a page are beautiful, and chopped vegetables sautéing in a cast-iron pan, and also the ocean. What we look like has a lot to do with how we decorate ourselves.”
Anita Riggio has illustrated more than two dozen picture books, six of which she also wrote. “Bingo” is her first published story for young adults. Her first novel, Jitterbug, is forthcoming. Anita currently mentors other writers in the low-residency MFA in Creative Writing program at Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She and her husband live on a cove in Connecticut, where they raised their two grown children. Simply put, she says, “Beauty is grace manifested.”
Mary Ann Rodman’s books include Jimmy’s Stars and Yankee Girl, both middle-grade novels. She has also written two picture books, My Best Friend and First Grade Stinks. Music is important to Mary Ann because she always writes to it. She lives in Alpharetta, Georgia, with her husband and daughter. When talking about beauty, Mary Ann defines it personally: “For me, it is a perfectly expressed thought . . . the kind that needs no further clarification or distillation.”
Ellen Wittlinger has published ten novels for young adults and many short stories. One of her books, Hard Love, won a Lambda Literary Award and was a Michael L. Printz Honor Book. Her latest novel is Blind Faith from Simon & Schuster. She l
ives in western Massachusetts. “Beauty is that which inspires me,” she says. “Most young people are beautiful because of the hope and love and vulnerability that radiate from them. The fact that very few of them believe in their beauty can be heartbreaking.” Visit Ellen at www.ellenwittlinger.com.
Jacqueline Woodson recalls the way her fifth-grade teacher’s eyes lit up when she said of Jackie’s writing, “This is really good.” Jackie says that was when “I—the skinny girl in the back of the classroom who was always getting into trouble for talking or missed homework assignments—sat up a little straighter, folded my hands on the desk, smiled, and began to believe in me.” Her books have won numerous awards, including the YALSA Top Ten Best Books and 2005 YALSA Quick Picks for Reluctant Young Adult Readers for her most recent young adult novel, Behind You. Her novel Show Way was a 2006 Newbery Honor Book. Her novel in poetry, Locomotion, was a National Book Award finalist, a Coretta Scott King Honor Book, and received the 2003 Boston Globe–Horn Book Award for fiction. Some other award-winning novels include Hush, If You Come Softly, and Miracle’s Boys. Speaking of beauty, Jackie says, “I think true beauty is having the ability to see ‘beauty’ in everything—even something ‘tragic’ or ‘heartbreaking.’ To not close one’s eyes to the world around us, but to be in each moment fully—no matter what.” To learn more about Jackie, visit www.jacquelinewoodson.com.
Tim Wynne-Jones says, “Beauty takes your breath away and keeps it in a glass locket. There is no picture in the locket, only your breath, hanging there below her smile.” Tim has written more than two dozen books, including adult novels, picture books, short-story anthologies, and young adult novels. He has twice won the Canadian Governor General’s Award for children’s literature: for Some of the Kinder Planets and The Maestro. He also won the Boston Globe–Horn Book Award for Planets. His work has been translated into Japanese, Korean, Danish, Dutch, German, French, Italian, and Catalan. His novel The Boy in the Burning House won the Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America, and the Arthur Ellis Award from the Crime Writers of Canada, and was shortlisted for the Guardian Award in Great Britain. His most recent young adult novel, A Thief in the House of Memory, made the Best Book lists of both Publishers Weekly and Kirkus. He lives with his wife, Amanda West Lewis, in Perth, Ontario. His three grown children live in London, Halifax, and Toronto. To learn more about Tim, visit www.timwynne-jones.com.