Reading: The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt
Also Reading: Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake
Also Also Reading: Dragon Wing (the Death Gate Cycle vol. 1) by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman
Also Also Also Reading: Make Time by Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky
Drinking: Coffee out of a Mesiree mug
Reading: Nona the Ninth
Also reading: Feel-Good Productivity
And reading: Reader, Come Home
And finally: Building the Cycling City
Watching: The Sword and the Sorcerer
I used to buy a lot of comic books. So many, in fact, that I often didn’t get around to reading them each month, and then more books would come the next month, and I would fall further behind. But I continued to buy them, and store them in those plastic bags with cardboard backing to keep them straight, and I swore I’d read them some day.
Then, when that some day came, I didn’t read them. I decided to sell them back to a store and make some money and free up copious amounts of bookshelf space.
But I still really love comics. I’d love to buy them again. I just don’t know what to do with them once I’ve read them? Keep them? Sell them back? Give them away?
Comics (the floppy magazine comics, not the trade paperbacks) are in this weird space between disposable and keepable (yeah, I know that’s not a word).
This is all to say that I took my daughter to Free Comic Book Day 2024 and we brought home a haul of comics, and now I’m itching to start subscribing to a few books, but what do I do with them once I start buying them? I don’t want to have boxes and boxes of comics again. Do I read and purge right away? But then what if I want to reread the comics? I might (I tell myself). And comics aren’t cheap. So I’m spending four or five bucks per month (or more) on something I’m just gonna get rid of?
This is why I’ve started reading comics on the Hoopla app from the library. One, they are free. Two, I don’t have to worry about them taking up space.
But still, as a person who loves physical media, there’s something wonderful about holding a floppy comic book in my hands. Going to Free Comic Book Day reminded me of that feeling.
Maybe I start small. Start with one or two subscriptions. See how it goes. And if the issues start piling up and space gets limited, then off-load them. Sell them or put them in my classroom or something.
Now which series to start with… The new TMNT looks pretty good…
(Free Comic Book Day did it’s job, I guess. It got a new customer.)
I told them that input could be whatever they wanted, so I have to refrain from being judgy about their choices, but after looking over their input logs from the first week, I think it might be time to talk about high-quality input versus low-quality input.
It’s a tricky subject because it reminds me too much of the snobbish position that certain kinds of literature are better than others, that comic books and video games are worthless, that pulp literature and Hollywood movies are for the unwashed masses, etc. etc. All that elitist crap.
I’m a “more/and” kind of person. A “yes” person. I like liking things, to quote Abed. And for too long, science fiction and fantasy were looked down on as “lesser-than” by the literary establishment, and I don’t want to contribute to that kind of judgment, a judgment more often born out of snobbery and cliquishness than actual merit and quality.
But. But, but, but…
There are certainly artistic avenues and byways my students could be exploring that they aren’t, and if they did explore those byways, they might find them rewarding and much more satisfying than what they are reading/watching/listening to right now.
I’m tempted, therefore, to maybe give them more required reading/viewing/listening/etc. Not a lot, but a few assignments each week that they have to engage with. “Read X by Wednesday and we’ll talk about it in class.” That kind of thing.
Yeah, I’m backtracking a little from what I said at the beginning of the term, but I think/hope it will help them see that it’s not about which art is “good” and which is “bad” so much as it’s a question of whether the art I’m inputting is expanding my life as a writer or limiting it. If it’s limiting/narrowing/same-old-same-old, then what’s the point? A kind of familiar numbness? The comfort of hearing my old notions parroted back to me? Inertia?
Or is it that they don’t know what else is out there? If I’m going to assign better input experiences for them, then I need to meet them where they are. Maybe something like the book recommendations John Warner does? They give me a list of their last five input experiences and I put together a list of five more to explore that are of a potentially better quality. It’s worth a shot.
We’ll be watching Richard Linklater’s School of Rock in Week Three, partially because I want to introduce the concept of going back and exploring the influences of those who influence you.
I feel like I’m only in Week Two and the year is almost over. These quarter-long classes we do at my school just don’t feel like enough time, especially this fourth quarter with senioritis hitting hard and Easter and all the random days off and schedule changes. There’s SO MUCH we could be doing in this Creative Writing class. If I am going to teach it next year, I’ll need to scale back my ambitions for the class considerably. At the moment, there’s too much I want to do and no time in which to do it.
I need to repeat my mantra from the beginning of the year: “Slow learning.”
We don’t have to do it all. We can leave a few chips on the table. We can do less. We can go deeper on the things that matter for us right now, not some predetermined schedule.
I need to remember that. I’m building a space for them to write creatively and develop ideas and skills. It takes time to build that space, and maybe we only start to build it together, and it’s up to each student to finish building it on her own (or with each other, after the last bell has rung on the school year).
Whenever I want to do too much, I end up regretting it.
For now, we’re looking at input. Better quality. Exploring influences. Finding the good stuff that will expand your imagination. Leaving the stuff that limits you.
I’ll go down this road with the students until I feel like we’ve gotten what we need. Then we’ll move on. Maybe that’s by the end of Week Three, maybe it’s by the end of Week Four. Maybe we stay on this for the rest of the school year — IF it’s yielding fruit and helping us all grow.
Otherwise, we can keep going down the road: going slow, but going beyond the surface of things.
Reading: Finished Harrow the Ninth (then grabbed a copy of Nona the Ninth)
Listening to: “Spawn of the Changing Raven” by Black Tiger (HDK 54) and “Journey Through Realm and Region” by Unsheathed Glory (HDK 154)
Watching: The Tempest (Stratford Festival 2019)
Playing: old NES and Sega games like Super Mario Bros. and Golden Axe
Recently, a student asked why I like the Middle Ages so much.
This was in a short fiction elective, and we’d been reading lots of genres, some sci-fi, some fantasy, some realistic, some fairy tale-ish, some Southern Gothic, some suspense. During one of our discussions, we somehow came around to my particular tastes as a reader, and I said that I’ve always been drawn to stories about the past, particularly the medieval period in world history, and one student spoke up, a bit bemused, asking why.
“Because for as long as I can remember, I’ve like that era,” was what I said, which isn’t a good answer.
Why do you like something?
Well, because I always have.
Not a good answer. Circular reasoning. But I didn’t have any answer to give. Why did my tastes develop the way they did? Was it the media I consumed as a young child that influenced me? Was it something genetic, something intrinsic to my personality?
I honestly don’t know. But for as long as I can remember, I’ve been drawn to stories with knights and castles and forests and monsters. Sometimes those stories were older than medieval (Greek myths preoccupied a lot of my late-elementary years), sometimes they weren’t medieval at all (I had quite an obsession with both Oz and Candyland as a wee youngster), but even if I strayed at times from Ye Olde Medieval Times, I always returned to knights and castles and forests and monsters eventually.
It might have been the media I consumed, the stuff floating in the air. The 1980s were a time when medieval fantasy was emerging as viable mass entertainment: the Conan movies, Red Sonja, Dungeons & Dragons, Legend of Zelda, etc.
As a kid, I was devoted to shows like The Gummi Bears, and to movies like The Princess Bride and Labyrinth (neither of which is strictly “medieval,” but they’ve got some of the trappings, i.e.: castles, goblins, sword fights, kingdoms), and when Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves came out, I was ALL IN. I had the action figures, the soundtrack, and the ticket stubs to show my devotion.
I also had books, like Rosemary Suttcliffe’s Arthurian novels for young readers. And the Endless Quest D&D books. And Narnia. And The Hobbit. And the Prydain Chronicles.
Going to my first Renaissance Festival as an eight-year-old cemented this obsession. Once you’ve wielded a wooden sword from the Renaissance Festival, there’s no going back.
Basically, there was a lot of medieval-ish stuff in the world for kids in the eighties and early nineties. I was exposed to a lot of it, and I loved it.
But why did I love it? That’s the thing I can’t explain. Not every child who grew up in America back then ended up loving the Middle Ages. Not every child who traipsed around the local Ren Fest ended up loving the Middle Ages. Not every kid who saw Conan grew up to be obsessed with sword and sorcery, and not every pre-teen who watched Kevin Costner shoot a bow and arrow ended up loving the Middle Ages as much as me.
What gives?
I didn’t have a good answer for my student, and I still don’t. She made it quite clear that she finds all this medieval stuff to be boring as hell, and I told her that’s great. Different strokes for different folks. The world would be boring if we all liked the exact same thing all the time.
But why do we like what we like? How much is driven by innate personality and how much is driven by outside influence? Nature vs. nurture, etc.
I can try to explain why I love the Middle Ages to my student, why I’m drawn to it, but those explanations won’t really have an impact on her. She’s not interested (nor does she need to be), and my enthusiasm won’t make her enthused, no matter how passionate my defense.
I do think it’s interesting that she was so curious to know. My love of the Middle Ages was so foreign to her experience that she was driven to seek an answer, to get an explanation. For her, my love of the medieval period was as strange as my love for black coffee. She was mystified by my tastes, as I often am by people who take an interest in Real Housewives or eat Velveeta cheese.
But that’s just it. Taste is taste. We can’t explain it, not fully. We can hunt for past experiences, for childhood affinities, for memories and upbringing to explain it, but when it comes to it, our tastes are what they are, and it’s no use arguing someone out of their tastes nor for arguing someone into your tastes.
We can share. We can gush and be enthusiastic, and maybe that will get others curious, maybe help them explore something unfamiliar and strange. Who knows, maybe several years from now, this same student will remember my passion for the Middle Ages and become curious enough to read the Brother Cadfael Chronicles, or The Once and Future King, or Beowulf, or whatever.
Or not.
There’s no explanation for taste. It’s a kind of alchemy, but it’s also a kind of magic. The spell either works or it doesn’t.
Or maybe, eventually, it does. When we least expect it. The heart wants what the heart wants.
And my heart — now and then and hopefully always — wants castles and knights and swords and dragons.
© 2026 Jennifer M. Baldwin
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