Hypertext Magazine asked Connor Coyne, author of Urbantasm, Book Two: The Empty Room, “Doesn’t your novel Urbantasm use the word ‘fuck’ a lot for a young-adult book?”
By Connor Coyne
Every parent, librarian, and teacher is going to have their own answer to this question.
As I’ve been working on Urbantasm, my own (nine year old) daughter has asked when she’ll be able to read it and I’ve said, “probably when you’re about sixteen.” We all have different comfort levels about what we want our children to read, and I think that the most important thing is that parents are a part of their child’s literary lives; ready to ask questions, give answers, provide context, and encourage opinions.
That said, I was a bit shocked by some of the responses I heard after pitching Urbantasm, first from agents and then from reviewers. This is a novel based on an adolescence in Flint, Michigan, and it is full of flawed and problematic characters, some of whom are casually homophobic, or sexist, or racist, and very few of whom are really aware of the injustices scaled into each others’ lives. I wasn’t sure whether first readers would see this as an act of testimony about a broken world (as I had intended) or as a sort of wallowing in our own worst tendencies.
But I didn’t hear much about these choices at all.
Instead, I got a lot of one kind of pushback: The book uses the word “fuck” too much.
“A young-adult novel might be able to get away with an f-bomb once or twice,” the argument would go. “But your characters use it once or twice on every page. And parents aren’t going to like it if your characters are just saying eff this and eff that. You can’t just drop the f-word all over the place.”
“Fuck,” I said. “I had no idea.”
Here’s the thing. I can’t speak for kids who may have had a different experience than I did, but at the tidy suburban junior high and high schools I attended, as well as at my friends’ gritty urban public schools, we did, indeed, hear the word fuck “once or twice on every page,” so to speak.
But I felt like there was a very revealing kind of smelling salt in the industry’s anxiety about this one word. Nothing like the bite of ammonia to cut through all the bullshit.
Their worry revealed a whole lot about the priorities and concerns of those who define and judge young-adult writing today. They didn’t, by and large, care about the characters’ homophobia or sexism or racism. They weren’t, on the whole, concerned with whether or not these characters were aware of their flaws and prejudices. They were, by practice and training, troubled by the optics of a naughty word to a readership to whom they would have to sell this book. And their attitude toward that naughty word helped me come to terms with all of those more genuinely disturbing elements in the novel I had spent 22 years writing.
Urbantasm is many things – serial novel, teen noir, magical realism – but it is above all an act of witness. When I was in high school I watched many of my friends going through unbelievable kinds of stress and turmoil. Situations and dilemmas that I could scarcely imagine from my comfortable home and my stable family in the suburbs. They were victims of bigotry and neglect and abuse and crime. The fact that their response to these situations often boiled down to a “fuck this shit, I don’t have time for the drama” reads, to me, as an incredible act of forbearance. A complaint modeled for understatement and discretion. Of course, sometimes “fuck this shit” wasn’t enough, and that’s when my friends would run away from home, or call in a tough cousin, or get so stoned that their messed-up world floated away for a while. Their problems and solutions were light-years beyond the tame travesty of a muttered “fuck.”
But acts of witness are disingenuous if they pull their punches, aren’t they? The whole point of witnessing is to say “I saw this,” and to speak truly, so that we can respond to what we have learned. So that we can try to build a better world for tomorrow. When I drafted Urbantasm, as a seventeen year old in over his head, and then spent two decades honing and sharpening its message, it wasn’t so I could present a safe and sanitized version of what it was like to grow up in Flint in the 1990s. To quote my young characters, “fuck that.” I needed to let the whole story hang out, in all its brokenness and trauma.
Besides, it’s not like the kids of 2019 have it particularly easy, do they? They are inheriting a planet in meltdown, a polity in crisis, the promise of their youth already shackled to the anchors of their parents’ and grandparents’ bad decisions. In short, we’re handing our young people a pretty fucked up world.
Related Feature: Excerpt: Connor Coyne’s URBANTASM, BOOK TWO: THE EMPTY ROOM
Connor Coyne is a writer living and working in Flint, Michigan. His novel Urbantasm, Book One: The Dying City is winner of the Next Generation Indie Book Awards 2019 Young New Adult Award. Hugo- and Nebula-nominee William Shunn has praised Urbantasm as “a novel of wonder and horror.” Connor has also authored two celebrated novels, Hungry Rats and Shattering Glass, as well as Atlas, a collection of short stories. Connor’s essay “Bathtime” was included in the Picador anthology Voices from the Rust Belt. His work has been published by Picador, Vox.com, Belt Magazine, Santa Clara Review, and elsewhere. Connor is on the planning committee for the Flint Festival of Writers and in 2013 represented Flint’s 7th Ward as its artist-in-residence for the National Endowment for the Arts’ Our Town grant. In 2007, he earned his Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from the New School. He maintains websites at http://connorcoyne.com and http://urbantasm.com.