Life Writing through Texts and Images – Picture books by Celebrities

In the last 15 to 20 years a lot of celebrities have published novels and or picture books for children and adolescents. This article will contextualise this international phenomenon within a theoretical framework of celebrity studies and research on life writing and intermediality. As will be shown, these literary texts for young people by celebrities represent an intermedial life writing that combines texts, illustrations, photographs and forms of online and offline self-curating as well. It is especially the picture book that seems to carry an archival function with respect to the authors’ lives. Here, the celebrities tell about themselves in words and images, they stage themselves as private and authentic persons. Understanding children’s and adolescents’ literature as part of intergenerational communication, these literary texts show different kinds of strategies to prolong the knowledge of a public person in societies’ collective memories.

Beyond Boundaries. Authorship and Readership in Life Writing: Introduction

On 24 and 25 October 2019, a conference on life writing for young readers took place at Tilburg University, the Netherlands. This conference was organised by Helma van Lierop, Jane McVeigh and Monica Soeting. The main issue of the conference was that of boundaries with respect to authorship and readership in life writing.

Voice and Silence in Jacqueline Woodson’s Brown Girl Dreaming

In 2014, the American writer Jacqueline Woodson published Brown Girl Dreaming, the story of her childhood in free verse, which was classified as young adult literature. Most US reviewers characterized and appreciated the book both as a human rights narrative of a young brown girl’s coming of age against the socio-political background of racism and the Civil Rights Movement in the United States of the 1960s, and as a personal history of her development as a writer. In this article the major focus will be on how Brown Girl Dreaming as both a political memoir and an autobiographical narrative of identity formation is fleshed out. On the basis of my analysis of these two plot lines, I will further argue that its categorization as young adult literature disguises that the novel addresses a dual audience of adult and young readers. In my argumentation related to the political and personal character of the novel, as well as in my discussion of the crossover potential of Brown Girl Dreaming, I will focus on the presence of voice and silence.

Youth Life Writing, Networked Media, Climate Change: The Challenge of Testimony to the Future

This article examines some of Greta Thunberg’s life writing as an example of the creativity and ingenuity with which some young people engage with the identity category of ‘youth’ in their life writing. It argues that Thunberg’s activism uses personal testimony in order to amplify expertise testimony as an epistemic source that demands action on climate change. This strategic use of life writing produces a paradoxical, but seemingly effective, form of life writing in which Thunberg provides personal testimony to the future. The article analyses how this paradoxical form of testimony is produced by situating Thunberg’s life writing in the context of the social and political investment in youth as an identity genre central to understanding of the human life course, and to how political responsibility is figured in contemporary western democracies. Drawing on theories of new media as an affective site in which life unfolds, rather than being represented, the paper concludes by reflecting on how Wendy Chun’s argument that networks involve the twinning of habituation and crisis mirrors Thunberg’s argument that action on climate change demands that habitual ways of living and acting must be rethought in response to the climate crisis.

Virtual Reality Life Writing and Young Adult Media Practice

This article investigates the impact of digital technologies on the production of life writing texts and media for and by young adults. Five categories in total are examined: (i) Fan Fiction, (ii) life simulator games, (iii) SNS (social networking sites), (iv) VR (virtual reality) documentaries and (v) Webtoons. The article begins by synthesising numerous critical studies on children’s and digital life writing, before analysing two IVR (immersive virtual reality) documentaries in depth. It concludes by discussing the relationship between these on-the-go, online and immersive VR modes and fantasised futures, narratives of extremity and the slice of life genre.

Writing when Young: Bart Moeyaert as a Young Adult Author

Duet met valse noten (1983) started as a diary when Bart Moeyaert was twelve years old. After it was disclosed by an older brother, Moeyaert rewrote it during his teenage years as a novel about first love. This article studies the genesis and early reception of Moeyaert’s novel to reflect on young authors who fictionalize real-life experiences and desires. On the one hand, they are credited for being experts on youth and said to have a particular appeal to young audiences for that reason. On the other hand, when texts by young authors are published, they are often edited and mediated by adult professionals. For some scholars, such adult intervention compromises the authenticity of the young author’s voice, while others argue that having your work revised is an inherent part of being published. The genesis of Duet met valse noten displays a complex interaction involving several actors, including young voices. The deletion of controversial passages (a toilet scene, the longing for cigarettes and sexual scenes) illustrates this complexity: the decision to adapt them was only in part governed by adults, and while the young Moeyaert was dissatisfied with some revisions, they also contributed to his aesthetics as a poetic rather than explicit writer.

A Victorious Roman Holiday: Life Writing and Loving Beyond Boundaries

Immobile during the Coronavirus pandemic, I question the PhD I am currently working on because it focuses on life writing about frequent international migration in childhood. Feeling stuck and disheartened, I look for a little ray of hope in order to escape my Covid-19 limbo. Thinking about how the life writers I am studying would deal with recounting the past experiences of my mobile family, through this Creative Matters piece, I ultimately win endurance and optimism by telling my parents’ story of conquering love beyond boundaries.

Stranger spaces: Embodiment, space and language in the collaborative life writing novel The Fortune Finder

The present study takes The Fortune Finder (2008) by Edward van de Vendel and Anoush Elman as a case in point to demonstrate how interactions between material bodies, space and power constitute some characters as strangers or, in other words, as bodies deemed out-of-place. The novel is an example of collaborative life writing and describes how a young, Afghan refugee and his family flee the Taliban regime and seek asylum in the Netherlands. Building on Sara Ahmed’s work (2000), I demonstrate how their bodies are recognised as stranger bodies through a demarcation of social spaces, which involves including or excluding particular bodies based on matters of normativity and deviance. Protagonist Hamayun and his family are implicated in shifting relationships with power and space that cause their bodies to be recognised as out-of-place in various ways, dependent on their circumstances. The notion of dwelling takes centre stage in these dynamics. It denotes the actual spaces that Hamayun and his family (are allowed to) inhabit, but it also features in a metaphor that links friendship with spaces of belonging. An implied lack thereof suggests how Hamayun eventually seems to perceive himself as a kind of stranger.

Yvonne Delhey, Rolf Parr and Kerstin Wilhelms (eds.), Autofiktion als Utopie // Autofiction as Utopia

This volume, emerging from a conference, brings into conversation research on the two title-words autofiction and utopia. It focuses on what the introduction defines as the point of convergence of these genres or writing modes: the desire to shape reality according to one’s individual vision, which, the editors note, can serve as critical commentary on society (1). In exploring this intersection, the volume takes up an important strand in the discussion on autofiction, namely the one about its potential functions both for individual authors and for society more broadly. Autofiction has been argued to not only allow individuals to express and transform themselves, but also to, for example, empower author and readers with narrative agency by challenging dominant cultural narrative models (Meretoja 2021) and work towards post-conflict reconciliation (Dix 2021).

Tattoos Tell Stories: Children’s Literature Tattoos as a Form of Life Narrative

Tattoos and children’s literature seem to have little in common, but they come together in the form of children’s literature tattoos, which I argue in this article to be a new form of life narrative. A lot of literary tattoos are inspired by children’s literature such as the Harry Potter-series and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Despite being inspired by a literary work, the tattoos function as personal memoirs of childhood as well as a reflection of the tattooees’ hopes for the future and who they want to become. I empirically study these children’s literature tattoos as life narratives by combining three data sets: blogs with personal stories related to literary tattoos, an online questionnaire about the meaning of children’s literature tattoos for tattooees themselves, and semi-structured interviews. Based on my research, I argue that children’s literature tattoos tell personal stories about the tattooees and their lives and can thus be considered a form of life narrative. Children’s literature tattoos narrate what someone has been through, what someone likes, but most of all the things that shape the person and that they hope will continue to shape them in the future.