Akata Warrior and a Very Important Instruction at the End

Overconsumption is a universal human trait,” Orlu pointed out. “And so is ignorance. - Nnedi Okorafor, Akata Warrior

I'm told that beards are going out of style, which I guess is a shame because the brief period in which they were was the only time I can think of when I was in style. It's also a shame if I decide that being in style is something I'd like to continue pursuing now that I've tasted the delicious savor of looking like the guys in men's magazines, if only between the bottom of my nose and the top of my Adam's apple. Because folks, I hate shaving.

I do shave, though, and daily. I was in a creative writing class once and there was a guy in our class who only wrote fiction in the Star Wars universe. Not only that, but the entirety of his fiction was based on his campaign in a dungeons and dragons-style pen and paper role-playing game. That's all fine, by the way, if you're someone who likes to write but hates even the prospect of being able to collect money for said writing. But he was also kind of mean. He would just tear apart everyone else's writing while refusing to accept any critique of his because nobody else understood what he was doing.

It should probably go without saying at this point that this man had a neck beard. Years later, when I first heard "neckbeard" as short-hand for the kind of guy who sits in his basement and writes multiple-page-long screeds about women not liking nice guys, I lost my mind with laughter. His single status is not a result of, as many of us would have guessed, his never leaving the basement; instead it's because women only like men who are awful and he refuses to let himself sink to that level. He is noble, this man, and his only requirement is for a woman to like Star Wars, but understand that she could never like Star Wars like he does (also she must be fit, beautiful, low-maintenance, never wear makeup, cook well, and understand her role in the relationship, which is to say she will give everything and will never receive anything of meaning in return).

Is shaming men with hair on their necks OK? No. Is it OK if he is also the kind of man who also spends hours online telling women that they should shave their legs daily? I submit to you that it is not only OK, but in fact the only way through this dark period in each of our lives that starts about halfway through kindergarten and ends at death. When I'm not sure where your nose hair ends, your mustache begins, or am sickly fascinated by the fact that there seems to be no delineation between beard hair and chest hair I think your opinion is less valuable.

There are times in my life where the only way to break myself of a bad habit is to see how I look from the outside when I meet or talk to someone with the same or similar habit. I felt like pretty hot stuff writing a novel during national novel writing month until I went to an event at the local library and saw another dozen people doing the same thing. Where I was thinking of myself in a tweed jacket and a pipe banging out a masterpiece, seeing the sweaty, desperate people just like me writing out pages and pages of words only a mother could pretend to enjoy deflated me a bit.

My creative writing friend from college with his gross black hair trailing down his neck like an advancing army of Sith warriors from the Old Republic made me touch a hand to my own nerf-herder scruff and reevaluate my life. Since then I have at least been able to keep it clean neck-wise, but I've sure hated it. I cut myself all of the time, which reminds me of a time when I went on a date as a teen. Like most of my social outings, it consisted of a free movie at the theater where I worked. We walked in, I said hi to people I worked with, and at some point in the movie I scratched my neck and found a wad of toilet paper I'd used to stop the bleeding of a now-routine shaving nick. I asked my date, annoyed, why she hadn't pointed it out, and she said it was to see how I reacted when I found out. She wanted to see if I had a sense of humor about embarrassment. It was a test I failed.

All of this dovetails into a goal I've had for the last six months or so that I'm trying to double down on as we enter the arbitrary frontier known as a "new year." That goal is to be an adult about stuff. Like all good goals it has very few measurable qualities and at no point will I know that I've accomplished anything, but the general gist of it is asking myself if the thing that I am doing or I am about to do is something an adult would do. It sounds awful, but it really isn't. It doesn't mean don't be silly, or go down waterslides, or laugh when a baby is clearly pooping in his diaper but is trying to be chill about it. It means taking stock of my day-to-day decisions and deciding if they are going to leave me in a better or worse place afterward.

I'm not sure if it's a generational thing or it's just more obvious to me because I'm living through it, but I feel like men my age figured out who they were at 16 or so and have just stayed there. Their hobbies and sensibilities and maturity level don't seem to have increased much since then. I'm including myself in that camp. When I was 16 the main thing people knew about me was that I like Mountain Dew. That was a stupid way to define myself then, and it's even more obnoxious now. It reminds me of an old co-worker who, at 50, still quotes Fight Club like the satirized viewpoint of its main characters' toxic masculinity is a relevant and even remotely valid point of view.

Here are some upshots of these decisions: I've stopped collecting old video games and have slowly replaced much of my video game time with reading good, solid, weighty books. I pay closer attention to how I dress given the circumstances I'm dressing for. I noticed how little soda the people I tend to look up to consume and am trying (this one is the hardest one, you guys) to cut down. I'm learning how to improve my cooking. What I've found over and over is that with a little extra effort and some learning curve, there are better and more satisfying ways to do everything. The newest addition is this: I'm trying to shave like a man.

See, for Christmas I got a starter set for a safety razor style shaver instead of the eight-blade disposable jobbies all over the place. Honestly up until now I thought the only use for razor blades anymore were to hide them in your mouth so that you can cut yourself out of a jam when you get captured. Instead of using the gel and quickly shaving in the shower and then dealing with bumps and ingrown hairs that make it a misery, I'm now whipping up shaving cream with a brush like Mad Men Man got for father's day that one time. I'm using aftershave, which up until now I assumed only existed so that novelists could lazily evoke memories of their fathers.

Not a sponsored post. Yet. Call me, you guys.

Like so many things I learned to do poorly as a teen (sleeping, eating, talking to human beings) and have spent decades attempting to do the right way, shaving this way is harder but better. For example, my whole life I've been taught to shave against the grain because that's how you get a closer shave. That's wrong! When you do that you shave under your hairs and that creates those ingrown hairs that suck so bad. Also, when you start paying attention to how the hair on your face and neck grows, you realize that it's going in all kinds of directions. You guys I haven't even started shaving my face yet and already just on my neck I'm dealing with four different directions. For someone who approaches every 4-way stop with the trepidation that should be reserved for only the biggest of decisions, it is a daunting undertaking.

Another benefit is instead of furtively cleaning up that nasty neckbeard in the shower, I'm doing this whole routine in front of a mirror which forces me to consider my current level of fitness in a way that is profoundly disappointing. I'm all for body positivity, my dudes, but that's for other people. Your boy has decided that if he's going to be shaving in front of a mirror for this long, luxurious regimen, he's gotta get cut so it's not so grody up in there.

I'm still getting the hang of it, but that's the whole point I'm trying to make. I think that so many of the things that make modern life modern give us 70% of the quality in exchange for removing the learning curve. The best example of this is cooking. Since being diagnosed with kidney disease I've learned how to make my own sauces, stocks, and soup bases. I've grown more of my own food every year since my first garden. Once you put in some initial work, though, the effort is about the same as the crappy alternative and the outcome is significantly better. Like, how can someone call no-bake cheesecake the same thing as the baked kind? There should be a law against that. It's obscene.

I learned how to braise, you guys

I get so mad about that cheesecake thing.

Anyway, the value of obtaining of knowledge is one of  the things that stuck with me about Akata Warrior. It's in Akata Witch, too, but I didn't think about it as much. If you remember from my last review and also from the book which you inevitably read because I said it was good, you'll recall that people who can use juju are called Leopards, and those who can't are called Lambs. In the Leopard world the only form of currency comes from obtaining knowledge. It's called chittim and it falls at your feet whenever you do learn something new. This could be from reading or someone explaining something to you, but is most often earned by doing something you didn't know you could do.

I was super fascinated with this idea as I powered through this wonderful, wonderful book and loved the idea that there was an immediate tangible reward for knowledge gained. In real life there is, too, it's just not as quick. Further complicating matters, there are a million different ways now to circumvent the gaining of knowledge for something that's almost as good and just happens to make someone else rich. From bread makers to frozen dinners to bagged salad, someone is happy to charge you extra to ensure that you don't learn the skills that they've convinced you that you don't need to have but were at one point considered vital.

I said that Akata Witch was a lot like Harry Potter. That wasn't a bad thing, but it's also impossible to ignore. Akata Warrior is its own book in every way. Once the initial world-building is in place, it gives Okorafor the chance to really explore in a way that is, to me, profoundly deeper than the Potter universe ever does. It's clear that with this book we're only getting the briefest glimpse of what the world she's created is and does, and unlike a lot of books and movies that dig deeper into unique fantasy worlds, it doesn't fall apart with further exploration.

"Leopard People read books by everybody and everything. We look outside and inside. But you have to be secure with yourself to do either..."

Sunny, after defeating a serial killer attempting to bring Ekwensu, one of the biggest and worst masquerades into the world, is starting to see visions of a city in ruins. She assumes it's the end of the world that the return of Ekwensu will bring about, starting with oil spills in the Niger delta and followed by mass fires. While that threat looms, she's also dealing with a brother who has gotten involved with a nasty gang, a freaky djinn, and some friction between her fellow warriors. It's all way fun and imaginative and was a great post-holiday read.

Anyway, that's my thing this week. Learn something new that improves your life in a way you can physically touch. Replace the quick way with the right way. Google how to bake banana bread, or better yet, use my favorite recipe. Make this roast chicken. It's one million times better than the rotisserie chicken at Costco and the stock it makes will improve everything you cook with it. Learn to knit. Take up carpentry. Bake me a cheesecake. The options are endless as long as you definitely do that last one.

History of Wolves, Kids, and Wetlands

Maybe there is a way to climb above everything, some special ladder or insight, some optical vantage point that allows a clear, unobstructed view of things. Maybe this way of seeing comes naturally to some people, and good for them if it does. - Emily Fridlund, History of Wolves

I feel like 80% of the books I read have a blurb about "coming of age" on their back, and still I don't know what it means. My guess is that any book that features a teen but isn't for teenagers qualifies. If I were forced to come up with a definition, I'd guess that it means the point when a human being makes the transition from thinking that the world is a relatively safe and wholesome place to finding out that oh my gosh it is not. Please do not force me to make this or any other decision my life is stressful enough as it is.

I think about this a bunch because I have a 15 year old and my guess is that some of the messed up garbage I read in these books have happened to him or someone he knows personally and that's maybe the scariest thing I've thought about in my adult life. It's even worse thinking that it's probably similar for my 11 year old and maybe even my 9 year old. My kids live a pretty sheltered life; they don't watch a lot of TV, don't have phones or social media, and even PG-13 movies and T-rated video games are screened by one or both of their parents before our kids see them. I'm not saying that's the only way to raise kids, just how we do. I remember being in 4th grade and having kids tell me plot points from the Nightmare on Elm Street movies that gave me nightmares but they seemed fine about it and probably aren't serial killers (probably).

Recently I helped in my daughter's 6th grade classroom during a party, and was reminded again at how vastly different the backgrounds are for various kids and how bananas it is that we put them all in the same room and expect them to behave the same. Class sizes are large in Utah, with an average of 25 per class in elementary schools compared to a national average of 16. In my kids' school, it's even higher than that. Child Protective Services estimates that the rate of child neglect or abuse is 9.2 in 1,000, which translates roughly to one kid for every one hundred. In my kids' school, that's one per grade.

And those are only the reported cases. It's estimated that one in four kids goes through some form of maltreatment in their life. Of those, 78% is neglect, 18% physical abuse, and 9% sexual abuse. If you're reading this and like me were lucky enough to not experience any of that but still thought that school was hard and sometimes terrifying, just imagine what it's like for a kid who is hungry, afraid, or emotionally traumatized. I honestly can't. 

What I've learned is that you can't just look at a kid and know that he or she is going through something that even us adults wouldn't be able to handle. I knew kids in high school who came from rich families and dressed like the only clothes they had were found in Eddie Vedder's dumpster. I also knew kids who were scrupulously clean and only wore designer clothes who sometimes didn't see their parents for days and ate cold spaghettios for dinner some nights and nothing others.

When I volunteer at the domestic violence shelter, a lot of the time I'm playing with kids. That sounds tough, but it isn't. It's actually super fun. Most of the time you'd never know that they'd been exposed to abuse of some kind; they're just regular kids. Some of them look unkempt and have messy hair (like my kids sometimes), and sometimes they look really skinny, but others look like they are always either on their way to or from a photo shoot for a sponsored post on a mommy blogger's Instagram. Sometimes they might be clingy or grumpy or whatever, but guess what? So are mine. I'd be willing to bet that unless they are licensed therapists, anyone who claims they can tell a child is in an abusive relationship just by looking at them has probably sent at least a thousand dollars to a Craigslist scammer at some point, too.

We complain a lot about kids growing up too fast and a lot of us parents spend much of their time trying to preserve the innocence of our young kids. Most of us have spent some time looking through pictures of our children, starting with when they were babies up until whatever age they are now, and watched their smiles fade over time. When they were toddlers everything was a delight and they laughed and laughed and the only time they cried was because their little cheeks hurt sometimes from smiling too much. They seem so sad now, we think. The light in their eyes is faded. Their shoulders sag from the combined weight of too much homework in their backpacks and the knowledge that the only time people care about fairness anymore is when billionaires expect something in return for their campaign contributions.

I wonder if the tragedy is two-fold for us. Like, on the one hand it's so sad to watch these little happy monsters whose sole existence is filled with joy while reality dawns on them. But also we're faced with the knowledge that we couldn't fix it. We're the adults now and it's still not safe out there and it feels even less safe sometimes and that's happening on our watch.

That's depressing as crap. But this wouldn't be the HBC if we stopped there. The good part is that you and I still experience joy on the regular. Somehow in spite of all the headlines and horrible stories we read here in Howie's Book Club of which you are a member just for reading (you're welcome), we still experience awe and wonder and intense love and super funny memes. Sometimes my cheeks still hurt from smiling too much, like both times I've watched Thor: Ragnarok.
As a habitat biologist, one of my main goals for ecosystems is resilience. A resilient ecosystem is one that can be flooded, burned, dried, buried in snow, or any other number of natural disasters and still thrive. Healthy environments are, by definition, resilient. It's why sometimes you might go hiking with me and remark on how beautiful it is and get a lecture in return about how precarious that beauty is. "Don't fall in love with those trees," I might say. "If this place burns once you'll never see them again." It's one reason people don't invite me to go hiking with them (the other is my motto that when it comes to hiking short, there's no such thing as too short). 

This is why there's such a premium placed on wetlands. One reason we think wetlands are so important is that they act as filters for polluted water before they go into larger water bodies. They also soak up floodwater like sponges, preventing damage to the surrounding areas. Americans used to call them "swamps," and converted them to farmland. Now a city in Illinois is engineering wetlands instead of spending millions on constructing and maintaining water treatment plants, because wetlands manage themselves.

Nature is like that. Many times when things are out of whack environmentally it's because we removed a part. Aldo Leopold said, "To save every cog and wheel is the first precaution of the intelligent tinkerer." We get rid of wolves and we have too many elk; we drain the swamps and get fish-killing algae; you take the Jedi out of Rogue One and get... the best Star Wars movie in almost 40 years. OK, that last one doesn't work, but you get my point. The point is that human beings are animals and we're part of nature, even if your clever fashionista friend on Instagram insists that the only outdoors she's interested is the one opposite the "in" door at REI. We are the result of the same evolutionary pathway that created wetlands, aspen stands, poisonous snakes, and frickin' cheetahs. Our history is littered with war, disaster, and famine and our ancestors survived and passed the best on to us. Each one of us is built to weather the worst there is; it's all written there in our code.

A professor and a journalist tried to figure out why human beings laugh, and in their research found that there are two kinds of laughter. One is the spontaneous kind that happens whether we want it to or not, like if someone farts while saying a prayer. The other is social, and evolved in primates later:

This sort of laughter was a signal that things at the moment were OK, that danger was low and basic needs were met, and now was as good a time as any to explore, to play, to socialize. “What the humor is indexing and the laughter is signaling is, ‘this is an opportunity for learning,’” Gervais told us. “It signals this is a non-serious novelty, and recruits others to play and explore cognitively, emotionally and socially with the implications of this novelty.”

 What that article tells us is that we've been laughing for somewhere between two and four million years. You guys, that's a shload of memes.

By their nature, it came to me, children were freaks. They believed impossible things to suit themselves, thought their fantasies were the center of the world. They were the best kinds of quacks, if that’s what you wanted—pretenders who didn’t know they were pretending at all.

That's the kind of thing you'll read in Emily Fridlund's History of Wolves, which is a mesmerizing story about the year that changed 14-year-old Madeline's life. She goes by Linda most of the time. Or commie. Sometimes freak. This might surprise you at this point, but she's kind of an outcast. She grew up in a collectivist cult/commune started by her parents, but by the time we meet her it has been disbanded so now it's just her and her mom and dad in a cabin with no plumbing or electricity on the shore of a Minnesota lake popular for its walleye fishing. She's the extreme version of a free-range kid.

Madeline's coming of age story isn't the traditional one. She doesn't fall in love with a boy or have an adventure with her friends during her last year of high school and reflect on the bitter sweetness of growing up. Instead, she witnesses what she considers "one of the best accounts of the origin of human evil." I can almost guarantee that it's not what you think. Of the various profoundly flawed individuals in her life, herself included, there is no sneering villain. Instead, it's humans doing what they think is the best for themselves who hurt each other the worst.  

At the trial they kept asking, when did you know for sure there was something wrong? And the answer probably was: right away. But that feeling faded as I got to know him.

Madeline befriends Patra, a young mother from across the lake and her young son Paul and ingratiates herself in what seems like a very normal family. Patra's husband is finishing up a manuscript in another state, so she's grateful for the responsible teen who teaches Paul about Minnesota life in the woods and on the lake. There's a new teacher in school who fascinates Madeline, and a beautiful, broken girl named Lily in her class. All this is set against the backdrop of a lake community in flux from the sleepy cluster of houses that explodes with tourists to a permanent luxury community; something the adult Madeline no longer recognizes. 

We are treated with periodic flashes forward of her as an adult, sometimes not recognizing the young girl and her decisions that year. Other times she reflects on how it impacted her life later.

Later, I could get that drizzle feeling just about any time I saw a kid on a swing. The hopelessness of it—the forward excitement, the midflight return. The futile belief that the next time around, the next flight forward, you wouldn’t get dragged back again. You wouldn’t have to start over, and over.

Throughout History of Wolves, characters find themselves in impossible situations and sometimes do drastic and awful things to escape them. With the exception of one, they are survivors all. But their survival can sometimes come at deep costs to themselves and others.

It's a fascinating book that stuck with me. It makes me think of the little town it's based in. From a short-term perspective, the housing boom around the formerly near-pristine lake will be devastating to the local environment. From the long-term, though, I think nature wins. It might take a hundred or thousands of years, but it always does. Like children still laughing while playing a game during a class party when home is at best empty and at worst violent, it survives.

Brown Girl Dreaming, Zelda, and Some Pretty Deep Sh

If someone had taken that book out of my hand said,
You’re too old for this maybe
I’d never have believed that someone who looked like me
could be in the pages of the book
that someone who looked like me had a story. - Jacqueline Woodson, Brown Girl Dreaming

I'm going to get to the book eventually but there's a thing I can't stop thinking about and that thing is The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. You guys I am very late to this party, but party it is. The kind of party I was never invited to because to me parties were just an excuse to have your mom buy soda and chips and do the same thing you did with your friends every other weekend except without the soda and chips. We did not have girls at parties, for example. Oh my goodness no. Or music or disco balls or whatever.

On TV parties seemed to consist of groups of attractive people standing around in small clusters in a living room while music played and people made out in the multitude of bedrooms that are in the house that belong to apparently nobody. That's not the kind of party I'm talking about, either. Breath of the Wild is like the kind of party that lasts several days and outrageous things happen but somehow every one of those strange things was supposed to happen and you can't imagine life in a universe where it did not happen.

I've lost the thread when talking about parties. What Breath of the Wild does is make me feel like a kid again, which is apparently the only goal my entire generation has anymore. Check out the mall sometime and you'll see. Everything is throwbacks to my childhood. It's hard not to be a narcissist when it genuinely feels like the entirety of modern commerce is aimed directly at you.

Look at this hallway, for example. You probably can't read all of the titles, but in one hallway in the movie theater we have a screen showing a Justice League movie, two showing a new Star Wars movie, and a Thor movie. 

Adult me to teenage me walking out of Batman and Robin, sure that another comic movie will never be made and already grieving the disaster that was the Star Wars re-releases with the special 90s era computer graphics shoehorned in: hang in there

I used to collect these pink little wrestler action figures called M.U.S.C.L.E. I had no idea at the time, but apparently they were based on a Japanese Manga. I just thought they were awesome. Like so many awesome things (like hair), they went away as I grew up.

That is until my generation got careers and our own kids and (some of us, not me) ended up with a lot of disposable income.

So those are back. So are Garbage Pail Kids and Terminator 2 action figures and a Funko Pop for every. thing. that. ever. happened. The only thing I'm really missing to make it complete is for someone to sell me something embarrassing I can wear to really show how middle-aged I now am- WHAT IS THAT

OK, does that cup come with green slime in it or instructions on how to make it? What was that Nickelodeon green slime made of, anyway? Of course the internet knows. According to Marc Summers, at least, it's vanilla pudding, applesauce, oatmeal, and green food coloring. I wish I'd looked closer to see if we're dealing with a liquid, a solid, or a plasma here.

I've got more of this, you guys. I take pictures of it every time. Remember how bad Saved by the Bell was? It was so bad. Of course I need a Bayside jacket.

This is another aside. I recently ran into an old friend and my wife was asking about him. The closest thing I could come up with was to compare his group of friends with a group she knew in high school. "Oh," she said. "They aren't popular, but everyone likes them."

She summarized everything wrong with high school, and perhaps humanity in that one sentence. Of course that's what popular means, and yet it did not. Popular has nothing to do with how many people like you, and everything to do with who. It is the hyper elite group of kids who very few like but everyone envies. They're like bitcoin. They were popular because they were popular. In retrospect, such an existence must be terrifying in its fragility. What if everyone suddenly realizes this house of cards is built on a foundation of lies? The Bayside kids were regularly manipulative and terrible, and left a trail of broken spirits and ruined lives in their path on the regular. If Zach Morris were a senator now, we'd be calling for his resignation.

Obviously we don't really like this stuff, because most of it was demonstrably bad and arguably damaging to our very psyches. No. What we want is to feel like kids again because when you were a kid a lot of things were possible that we've since realized were bald lies. Santa Claus, Easter Bunny, basic human kindness, a president who you would actually be excited to meet in real life who would not make comments about your weight before giving you candy. As adults we learn that these things do not, in fact, exist. Like, when you're a kid, who's to say that dragons don't exist somewhere. I mean, dinosaurs are real. The only difference between a pterodactyl and a dragon is the fire thing and the fact that pterodactyls are famously and severely allergic to gold. 

We don't really want to hold Nintendo cartridges or our old TMNT Party Wagons again. We want to believe in dragons again. No amount of plastic stuff made poorly in China with terrible box art will ever make that happen. I'm sorry to break it to you, but I also think I might be saving you a lot of time and money and freeing up some shelf space on which you can put your children's drawings or pickleball trophies or whatever it is you decide to do with your free time now.

What I'm saying is that Breath of the Wild makes me believe in dragons again. When I was a kid the first Legend of Zelda came out and somehow fulfilled every promise made by that gold cartridge. It was chock-full of secrets that we shared with one another during recess, a bunch of indoor kids crouched in the shade so that our pale, pale skin wouldn't burst into flames. I didn't have a Nintendo, so I played at my friend Billy's house, probing around in the world for secret passages and lighting bushes on fire. There's nothing that has captured that feeling until the new one. Oh, and also it has dragons.

This post isn't about video games, though, that's just where I could go with it because I couldn't figure out what to write about and realized what sweatshirt I was wearing.

It's this one.

What it's really about is Brown Girl Dreaming, Jacqueline Woodson's memoir of childhood. I realized that my posts have been super political for the last, oh, year or so for no reason that I can really think of. I could definitely go there again here, because Woodson grew up black in The South. All of that stuff is in here, and I don't want to downplay that. I'd be deeply ashamed if she read this post and thought that my main takeaway from her brilliant book was to talk about a video game with a white male protagonist.

Ms. Woodson, I'm delighted and amazed that you are here, and I want to thank you for the many and deep conversations I had about race and inequality with my kids while reading them your book.

We all have the same dream, my grandmother says. To live equal in a country that’s supposed to be the land of the free. She lets out a long breath, deep remembering.

I've talked about the subject a lot on here, and plan on talking about it more. I also think that Brown Girl Dreaming transcends that topic and explores so much more. Woodson writes with astonishing clarity and memory of childhood, which was filled with many wonderful and beautiful moments.

The empty swing set reminds us of this--
that bad won't be bad forever,
and what is good can sometimes last
a long, long time.

The entire book is written in free-form poetry, which may sound exhausting unless you read it out loud. It forces a rhythm that sounds real and authentic. My kids listened intently when I think they could have easily zoned out if instead it were prose, a form which Woodson is also pretty great at. It also reminds me what's fun and scary and traumatic and sad about being a kid. Her brother suffers from lead poisoning, her grandpa rocks with her on the swings and she helps him garden, her uncle brings lavish gifts until one day he goes to prison instead.

Woodson suffers from something like dyslexia. She has a hard time immediately understanding words, instead reading the same stories over and over until she can recite them from memory. Maybe this shapes her ability to write her own verse and poems. One day her teacher calls her a writer, and she realizes it's true. 

It's easier to make up stories
than it is to write them down. When I speak, the words come pouring out of me. The story
wakes up and walks all over the room. Sits in a chair, crosses one leg over the other, says,
Let me introduce myself. Then just starts going on and on.

Here we go, and I want you to hang on tight. The Legend of Zelda's lead designer, Shigeru Miyamoto, said that the inspiration of the game was based on his own explorations as a child in the woods near Kyoto. The dungeons were based on his childhood home, which he thought of as a maze with identical paper doors. Miyamoto wanted to feel like a kid again, so he made something that wasn't an exact replica of his childhood, instead he created what his childhood felt like.

The developers of Breath of the Wild wanted to make something that brought back the feelings the first one did, the kind of thing that led to children again sharing hints on the playground, so the director had the designers come up with a 2d version of the game that mimicked the original. The result wasn't just a nice new coat of paint on the old game, but something entirely new.

When Jacqueline Woodson approaches her childhood, it's with spare freeform poetry. The writing is simple and unadorned, but uses a very advanced technique. You can watch someone who is a master with words put herself in that old place. Using the words she knew as a young girl, she forms them into patterns where every letter is slaved over and every break in the sentence structure designed. Like all incredibly difficult things, it looks effortless. Kind of makes you think there is magic out there still.