For the past 15 years, Amy Goldwasser has written and edited at magazines from Seventeen to The New Yorker, Outside to Vogue, The New York Times Magazine to Metropolis. She’s also a longtime volunteer at the Lower Eastside Girls Club, where she was astounded by the quality of the girls’ work and inspired to bring teenage writing to a greater audience. Edited by Goldwasser, Red: The next generation of American writers — teenage girls — on what fires up their lives today collects 58 essays by teenage girls on topics ranging from gym class and global warming to suicide attempts. While the provocative content creates a new standard of writing for its teen genre, Red also serves as a valuable model for bringing underappreciated voices to a mainstream audience, across media. “The whole idea of Red is that the creativity at the root always comes from the girls,” says Goldwasser. “What we do is provide professionals, whether that’s an editor, a music supervisor, a fashion designer, whoever can make it happen.” Goldwasser sat down after a recent reading in Los Angeles to discuss the response to the book, the challenges of working with teen writers, and the importance of authenticity.
You’ve expressed frustration about not being able to publish more teen voices. Did Red come out of your experience at magazines where you couldn’t accomplish this?
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I tried to start teen-written columns at Seventeen and then at New York, a City Girl column. Both times the submissions I got were incredible, but things don’t happen at magazines for various reasons. So I’d end up leaving consulting jobs with these fat files of wonderful submissions from teen girls.
And no one would want them?
No, it wasn’t that at all, and people were really excited about them. It’s just that the work expires when you’re dealing with writers this young. So you can’t three years later say, that didn’t work for the redesign of New York but I want to do it here, because the girls have moved on. And I felt terrible I was wasting their essays. But the good news is that teenage girls write really quickly.
Yes, that’s something you say in your introduction. The culture of being a teenager now means you’re always writing: You have a MySpace page, you’re texting with your thumbs all day, you have a blog. Would you say, get me a few pages of work and they’d crank it out, no problem?
It was pretty amazing because I thought I’d get more pre-written essays — leftovers from school assignments or college applications. So they’d send me an email and say, “I heard about the book, what do you want me to write about?” And I’d say the whole idea is that I don’t tell you. You write about what you want to write about, but if you tell me what you’re into maybe I can pick out a few things. Someone would say, “I learned how to play the drums last year,” I’d email back, “that sounds cool.” Then an hour later I’d get a 12-page essay about learning to play the drums.
Something no professional writer could ever do!
Yes, it was an editor’s dream in two ways. One is the enthusiasm and output of these writers. They were constantly trying to update their essays. They’d say, “I’m a senior now, can you add this to the end?” And then send me 20 pages. Then second was the rare kind of editing I got to do. I didn’t rewrite a word in that book. The only words I wrote were in the introduction. I don’t believe in rewriting, and I don’t believe that it’s a given that as writer you turn in a story and your editor rewrites your lede. For this book, all I did as an editor was ask a million questions. The words always came from the girls. You just have to keep asking them why. The crazy thing about some of the essays is that if you could see them annotated, they’d be 50 emails cut-and-pasted.
Can you talk about how you found the girls?
I originally sent out an email to about three-dozen friends. It was a little pointed because I wanted to reach people who worked with schools or volunteered, who had contact with teens. It ended up on a lot of message boards, it was on a national English teachers’ association site, libraries loved it, regional groups, and then the girls spread the word. It turns out the kids like the Internet! The cool thing with them is they have friends they’ve never met, all over the country. It ended up on the Freakonomics blog, Stephen Dubner is a friend of mine, and I have to thank him for the majority of the essays I got, including a ton of international, India, Israel, all over Europe, Japan. One of my ultimate favorites was a Japanese girl writing about American rock bands.
And you got 800 essays in eight weeks?
I didn’t even set up a separate email address, my life was ruined! I had one of the first Earthlink accounts, in 1996, and I won’t give that up. I was like, “Oh my God I ruined my early-adopter address.” I’m a fool. I had no idea.
Do you think it was so successful because there’s no physical spaces or groups or communities for young writers where they can contribute and be heard?
On a local level there’s a lot of that but what’s missing is the prize of it. These girls are so over the concept of being published because they’re all “published,” there’s nothing special about that. Turns out they cared about the oldest medium because it was something different: They really cared about a big fat book. It was something their friends haven’t done, they’re the only ones who are in a hardcover, dead tree book. And that’s a nice kind of backlash. I hope it speaks well for future books. Though I realize that adding a level of competition is taking away the great democracy of the Internet, and I hate to be that person.
| I did have a few calls to make sure I wasn’t a 65-year-old man. |
Do any of these girls aspire to be professional writers?
One girl has a book deal, and a few are working on novels, which they’ll sometimes share with me. There are 58 girls in the book, and I bet about six or eight of them say, “I’m a writer or I’m going to be a writer.” I love the non-preciousness of that.
Do they talk about what they want to be?
It’s funny because a lot of people ask them that at readings and they think it’s a silly grown-up question. They say, “I’m a sophomore, I have no idea.” They actually use a lot of writers’ weapons and the things you learn in class but the best part is that they don’t think of it this way. That’s what Web writing has done. This generation’s writing experience isn’t based on a teacher saying you need to have a topic sentence here and use only this much stream of consciousness. I never knew what I was getting, and I loved the element of surprise when they’d say, “Here’s my essay, attached.” One would be a giant sentence going on for a page, with a sex scene, and another one would be all dialogue. Then Johnny Depp, then a suicide attempt.
And I can imagine you had to deal with clearing that kind of content with the parents?
Definitely some angry parents, but we worked it out. They all signed and notarized a document saying they’d read and approved the essays before publication. To me, the parents are heroes too. There’s the girl whose essay ends “what a bitch” about her parents’ breakup, but her mom’s been at the New York events. That’s a big deal because I imagine the wrath of her peers. I think about all the backhanded compliments. It’s pretty incredible about the parents. I did have a few calls to make sure I wasn’t a 65-year-old man.
I want to talk about the name of the book, which, as you say, is “Red, not pink.” And after seeing them today this is the perfect way to describe these girls. Britney Spears and Paris Hilton are not their heroes.
They’re not! And you know, grownups are so afraid of teenagers and they’re afraid of what they know, and they’re afraid of them talking about some of the things they talk about. I don’t know if you saw some of the responses to Eliza Appleton’s essay on Salon about grinding. These people got so upset, because she was essentially talking about sex, even thought the entire point of her essay was that grinding is a safe alternative to sex. Why do grownups get so freaked out? And people were calling her a slut and saying I feel sorry for her mother who has to rein her in. Young ladies aren’t supposed to swear or talk about sex, whereas I feel if it were boys the same age, I think people would be okay with it. It’s about getting adults to really listen to them.
You’ve created a Web site with a networking component and launched 58 blogs, one for each author. What else? You were just approached a few minutes ago by someone about wanting to turn this into a play!
I love the play idea, because you can really see what happens live. I love making up magazines, there’s nothing I like more. The idea is the book becomes an annual thing, where we’re publishing young people’s writing, they’re submitting it all year round via the Web site. The site and social network are really the heart of it, and the best of that will get edited by professional writers. My fantasy is to hire a staff so I’m not doing all this, and to pay all the people who did this out of the goodness of their heart. So it’s year-round, professionally-edited, with an annual book of essays, then international, boys, and possibly regional.
But the magazine idea I really like because I love them visually and really believe the girls do, too. They are so much about making video and taking photos. I think about a fashion shoot in a magazine that’s really teen-driven, and you could call in the same clothes that a professional could call in, and do it at a real event, like someone’s birthday party, and you give a camera to one of the girls, and then they’re also the reporters. And the rest of the staff are high-level professionals. So on a regular magazine staff, two or more of us get replaced by teenagers.
Do you think in literary world, you might be able to forge a new kind of respect for this genre?
That’s the idea. It was important we went to an adult publisher, Penguin, part of Hudson Street Press, and had a hard cover, and an adult international imprint. It’s tricky because this category of YA non-fiction is new. And bookstores are trying to figure out where to put it. Even shopping the book — I don’t have much experience in that — but I imagine it was unusual because we had such a range of interest from big houses and from these super YA marketing machines. It’s taken a lot of education, too. So we went to someone who doesn’t necessarily do YA. The fact that it’s hardcover for the holidays is really unusual, unheard of. But it’s all about legitimizing the girls, because I want them to be looked at as writers and these honest, true documentarians.
Five tips for capturing teen attention across media
1) Remember your date of birth — and that it disqualifies you as the expert
No one is better at sniffing out a fraud, an old person pretending to be down with the kids, than a teenager. Always give them the final word on matters of their generation — they’re the authorities, they’re living it. If you play at being a teenager or use your newfound grownup powers to try to take back some wrong from your high school experience, they’ll sense it immediately. Plus, they’ll make you feel like much more of a dork than you ever feared you were in high school…
2) Resist labeling
This may seem really basic, but there’s not an adult out there who’s not prone to overgeneralizing about this age group — after all, if you can say teenagers are this or teenagers are that, they’re a lot less terrifying. They become knowable. I had to keep reminding myself that there are 58 independent people who wrote this book, with every nuance and variation of personality 58 adults would have.
3) Ask them what they think
For the most part, teenagers — like all of us, though moreso — just want to be heard. They want to know their opinions are valid. Solicit those opinions, and you’ll learn a lot. They tend to be the most honest ones you’ll hear.
4) Know that what they ultimately care most about is themselves — and each other
They’ve grown up with social networking and the opinions of their peers on everything. So you don’t want to dictate anything from above, from a place over-20. They endlessly generate ideas themselves and build on each other’s. They work in teams without thinking of it that way. Encourage interaction on all things creative. I’ve been amazed at what great editors, critics, fans they are of each other’s essays in the book, and how much one author’s comments enrich another writer’s next blog entry on the site.
5) Edit, don’t rewrite
This applies to editing writers of any age: If you’re patient and ask the right questions (sometimes relentlessly), you’ll get answers in their words. And their words, the writer’s, are always going to be better than yours.
Alissa Walker is an editor of the mediabistro.com blog UnBeige.
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