Kids as Half-Formed People and Other Thoughts from Jason Reynolds

Image credit: Ben Fractenberg (link)

Jason Reynolds was interviewed on On Being with Krista Tippett.  Here are some remarkable perspectives, mostly about the young people.

In Tippett's introduction, she names that kids POSSESS and DEMAND compassion and clear-eyed honesty: 

Jason Reynolds is the National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature of the Library of Congress — and a magnificent source of wisdom for human society as a whole. He’s driven by compassion and the clear-eyed honesty that the young both possess and demand of the rest of us.

Reynolds describes his work in opposition to the "hack work" of many authors who Tippett describes as writing is "pain porn or trauma porn."  Reynolds says that we do a disservice to kids if we don't show the complicated and tough truth; and it treats kids as "half-formed."  This reminds me of the child psychologist Haim Ginott (who in another context talks about "you create the weather in the classroom") who says we should value the specific and short-lived powers of adolescence.

I think that the fervent nature of finding humor and lightness and levity is a remarkable gift of youth, honestly. And so for me, I’m not interested — look, I write that which I believe is real and things that happen, and I don’t want to shy away from things that are complicated and tough, but I also want to write whole stories about whole people. I think sometimes we reduce children and young people to half-formed things, and so we write half-formed stories about them. And even that ties to the way people talk about children’s literature. People talk about children’s literature as if it is a category that is full of half-formed work, but that’s because they too believe that children are half-formed. [laughs] And so I think those of us who acknowledge the humanity of young people, those of us who acknowledge the complexity and the beauty and sophistication of childhood know that when you’re writing it, all those elements have to be present.

Here, he coins the term "alchemy of language."  It's in a section where he talks about the important job of keeping the imagination of young people alive.

My whole life is around figuring out — is playing around with the alchemy of language. That’s my whole jam. I want to figure, what exactly are the chemical reactions that take place when you put this word next to this word? That’s something that — I think about the poet John Ashbery, that was his whole thing. It’s like, I don’t know what this means, but if you put these two words together, what does it make you feel? And I’m curious about that.

Here's Reynolds on the importance of imagination in a world that vacuums it from us.  He wants to "fortify" kids in mind, body, and spirit.  Partly the answer is just to go home a different way.

I think that my role, for as long as I am on this plane and as long as I am doing this work, my role will always be to figure out how to create fortitude in the minds and bodies and spirits of young people. I’m trying to fortify them. It’s also the reason why I do so much around imagination — this is a big deal for me — or why I do the whole “let’s create synonyms,” because at the end of the day, ultimately, I need young people — we, the collective we need young people to be able to activate their imaginations. If they cannot, if they don’t have — if, by the time you’re out of high school, your imagination is shot, we’re in trouble, bigtime. We’re in trouble. But how does one keep an imagination fresh in a world that works double-time to suck it away? How does one keep an imagination firing off when we live in a nation that is constantly vacuuming it from them? And I think that the answer is, one must live a curious life. One must have stacks and stacks and stacks of books on the inside of their bodies. And those books don’t have to be the things that you’ve read. I mean, that’s good, too, but those books could be the conversations that you’ve had with your friends that are unlike the conversations you were having last week. It could be about this time taking the long way home and seeing what’s around you that you’ve never seen, because most of us, especially city folk, we stay in our little quadrants. We stay on the five-block radius, wherever the coffeeshop is and the school and the church.  

On young people's "irreverence."

no one wants to live in a world where young people are not irreverent, first and foremost. A world where young people are not irreverent is not a world for me, because it is a world that is not growing. They have to shake the table. If you like your young person’s art and music, your young people are doing something wrong. The truth is that — right? It’s just the natural order of things. It’s the natural order of things. It is their time to mold what they want the world to look like

What's the role of adults?

In this moment, it isn’t just — I’ve heard people say, “We got to get out the way.” Here’s the thing. I think that they don’t want us out the way. Despite what you may hear, it’s not that they want us out the way, I think what they want for us to do is to listen to them, because I think — what I’ve learned over the years is that when we talk about entitlement, what we do is we say that young people are so entitled, yet I don’t know a group of people more entitled than adults and older people. I mean, we really believe that we deserve their respect simply because we have years on them, and the truth is that that respect must be earned. And I think what they’re saying is, “Please, make a seat for me at the table. You can’t talk about my life and not include me. You have to make a seat for me at the table.”

That is our role in this movement. It’s that simple. It’s like, look, I am here. If you need help, you need strategy planning, you need to understand how this works, you need some historical reference and context, I’m here to do all those things.

You need somebody to help you take some breaths, you need somebody to help you make sandwiches and make sure that you all got the proper shoes on, these simple things, and if you’re going to walk into harm’s way, I’m going to pull your coattail and say, “Hey, hey, hey, are we certain? Let’s go over the rules. Let’s make sure that we are doing what we want to be doing.” But if you are emotionally broken, if something happens that hurts you emotionally, then it’s my job to step in and say, “Let’s process what has happened. Let’s figure out where the failure is. Let’s figure out how to grow from it, how to get strong, and then we need to get back out into the street.”