The Cambridge stop of the Diversity in YA tour, held last Thursday at the gorgeous main branch of the Cambridge Public Library, featured three inkies – Cindy Pon, Malinda Lo, and Deva Fagan – two other YA fantasy authors, Holly Black and Sarah Rees Brennan; and Francisco X. Stork (referred to at one point, by the moderator, as “realism, down there at the far end of the table”).

Not surprisingly, given the lineup, the panel was packed. Unfortunately, I was late, due to the fact that I’m one of those people who needs a GPS for walking. When I arrived, the discussion was about representation of diversity on covers. 

Malinda Lo started things off by saying that she didn’t think disguising books was always necessarily a bad idea; putting a person of color on a cover can sometimes be the wrong decision for a book, especially if the book is not about race. Cindy Pon agreed that accuracy on covers can create pre-conceived notions – for example, the Asian cover of the Silver Phoenix hardcover may have made people think it was for Asians, or fans of Asian films, when really she wrote it for fantasy lovers. What I took away from this discussion was that while they both agreed that misrepresentation is not okay, there is room to suggest that blatant presentation is not always necessary. One way to accomplish this, suggested by Deva Fagan, might be covers without people on them; though she cautioned that if there is no picture, people will generally default to assuming that the character is white.

 The panel went on to discussing ways to get readers to go beyond their comfort zones. The moderator, Roger Sutton of the Horn Book, pointed out that often, all it takes is one really good book. There was also some discussion about how welcoming and friendly the YA community is.

 During the questions section, a member of the audience brought up the issue of disabled characters, and the moderator pointed out the troubling trend wherein disabled characters are either treated as “magical” in some way, or are magically healed by the end of the book. In this context, Francisco Stork talked about the importance of starting with the character, not the disability. He mentioned that when writing Marcelo in the Real World, he didn’t realize until he had created Marcelo that this character would probably be diagnosed as autistic. Sarah Rees Brennan added her take: “People who are different need to be either identifiable or totally hot.”

 The last question asked by the moderator was: What about the issue of “you have to be one to write one?” The panel unanimously said no (Cindy Pon: “You’re talking to someone who wrote from the perspective of a teen eunuch boy.”) Malinda Lo did point out, however, that she thinks it’s especially important to support people who write about characters like themselves, because in a way it is harder; there is an added level of exposure of yourself, and people are always going to assume you’re drawing from your own experiences.

Wow, this was long – maybe it’s a good thing I missed the beginning! But I’ll end with a cool factoid: I looked at Marcelo in the Real World on amazon while I was writing this, to check something, and Amazon informed me that “people who bought this book also bought… The Demon’s Lexicon.” What do you think the connection is?