Claire Cook writes about Sticking Up For Harry

I live my life based on the premise that there’s simply enough pain and suffering in the world without me adding to it personally. So I write fun novels, which means my book tour events tend to attract fun people looking for a fun time. My recent book tour was pretty much, well, a beach. Pina coladas (you ordered a “flip” for rum, a “flop” for no rum) served by cute college guys in hula skirts, a street studded with glow-in-the-dark shark signs, entire in-store beach scenes complete with sand, coolers, and beach chairs. (If you'd like to see for yourself, just go to www.ClaireCook.com.)

But one night a party pooper showed up. I could feel her negativity breaking through the force field almost
immediately. It was a lovely reading room at a fabulous independent bookstore. The place was packed with mostly women. Moms enjoying a night out with friends before school and soccer season geared up again, teachers with the summer off looking for a beach read, several mom/daughter duos and at least one grandmother/mother/daughter trio.

I told stories. Everybody laughed. Except this one woman. She scowled. I ignored her. I read a quick, fun excerpt of Life’s a Beach. I looked up. Everyone was laughing except, you got it, this one woman.

We moved on to the Q&A, usually my favorite part. Her hand shot up. I ignored her. Other people asked sweet, fun, interesting questions. The woman kept her hand up while I answered them.

I knew it wasn’t going to be good, but eventually I had to call on her. I looked right into her mean little eyes and gave her my biggest smile. “Yes?” I said.

“What,” she asked, “do you think of...” And here she actually sneered. “…Harry Potter?”

“Very cute, but probably a little young for me,” I said.

Everybody else laughed, but she was not amused.

I looked around the room for another hand. I looked back at the women. “I know where this is going,” I finally said. “But you’ll never get me to say a bad word about the Harry Potter books. I think they’re great. They’ve turned so many kids on to reading.”

She shook her head.

So I dusted off my soap box and climbed right up on it. I told the whole room that when I was teaching writing to middle-schoolers, the first thing I would ask my students at the start of the year was, “How many of you love to read?”

In a good year, maybe half the kids would raise their hands. “Great,” I would say, beaming at the already converted. “And the rest of you . . ." I’d continue, looking around the room and pretending to glare while they pretended to cringe. “. . . you just haven’t found your book yet. But don’t worry – you will.”

And because I think you just have to be an avid, joyful reader before you can be a writer, that’s where we’d start. The kids and I would bring in a crazy assortment of things -- novels, magazines, comic books, manga, biographies, encyclopedias. The readers in the class would bring in their favorite books, and Harry Potter was a part of the pack. I’d sprinkle in some award winners and some of the books that had first hooked me, antiques like the original Nancy Drew mysteries. We’d swap everything around and curl up in corners all over the room, and just read.

For the not yet joyful readers, the pressure was off. Many of them, I think, shy away from reading because it doesn’t come as easily to them as it does to some of their classmates. Maybe they’re slow readers, maybe there are some underlying learning issues, maybe they’d rather be out playing soccer. The way to make reading easier is to pick up speed, and the only way that’s going to happen is if you read a lot, and the only way that’s going to happen is if you give the kids some choice and make it FUN.

The truth as I see it is, once you fall in love, really in love, with that first book, you’ll never be able to stop. There will still be plenty of time to introduce the classics.

I stepped down from my soap box. The woman’s hand shot up again.

“Yes?” I said.

“What,” she asked, “do you think is the single most important thing high school teachers can do to turn their honors students into writers?”

Where to start? Did she miss what I’d said about becoming a reader first? Can you really turn anyone into a writer, and if so, why would it necessarily be an honors student?

I touched on these things briefly. Then I added, “I think the most important thing you can do for all students is to give them journals and the time to write in them….”

She scoffed. “In our system, we do that in grades one through three.”

I ignored her. “It will help them develop the habit of writing, and also give them a place to channel their raging hormones, to complain about life’s unfairness. Maybe they’ll become writers; maybe they won’t.” I smiled. “But one year they’ll have a really tough teacher to survive, and that journal might be the thing that gets them through it.”

She was long gone by the time I started signing books. But one after another, most of the other people in the room took the time to say, “Good for you.”