Signal Failure at Imagination Station

Y'all, I'm drawing a complete blank and imagination is literally all I'm good for...

When I was 10 years old, I moved to New York, and started a new school. I was in fifth grade, which was the first year of middle school at this K-12. This new school had a playground that, to my bafflement, everyone else in my class, who had mostly been at this school since they were toddlers, blithely referred to as the Imagination Station.

I don’t really know what to say. I don’t know what to say about the future of this country, or of the world.

The Imagination Station was honestly the most boring playground I had ever seen. It was just faded wood bridges, stairs, and one only sorta twisty slide. I didn’t particularly like playgrounds regardless—I don’t know if this is going to surprise you, but I’ve always been more of an indoors girl. But that being said, because of my parents’ jobs, I moved around a lot as a kid and saw a lot of, shall we say, improvisational communal play stations. I’ve played in a ravine thirty steps away from a highway. One playground vaguely affiliated with my elementary school had a giant yellow tarp hanging several feet off the ground that we just jumped into, from a platform 20 feet off the ground. In third grade, every recess was just a wide, steep, icy hill. We’d throw one person down it and then form a human-backpack-baseball-bat-stick chain to drag them back up.

That was an imagination station. The Imagination Station was just a generic pile of lumber.

I don’t know what kids are going to do now.

Maybe some kids had really elaborate stories play out on that playground, which is gone now, by the way, replaced by newer equipment. Starting in middle school, I found a different way, which, to the great detriment of my GPA and in an unconscious perfect collaboration with my then-undiagnosed nonverbal learning disorder, required me only to not pay attention to what was going on around me while also looking very much like I was paying attention. I made up a game—a word game. I had very scenarios with scaffolding—magic school, time travel, portal fantasy—and I would fill in the details by the random words I heard people (teachers, parents, my friends) say.

Usually, the way it worked is I’d take the first two letters of a given word, “apple,” say, and come up with four options that could fit into the given detail slot, derived from the letters “a” and “p.” Then I’d pick which one was the one, by using the letters of the word that came next--if “n” or “e” came first, it was the first one; if “t” or “o,” the second; “r” or “i,” the third; and “l” or “a,” the fourth.

This game both destroyed and saved my life. The scaffolding though, I needed help with. I read a lot. I could have had a big imaginary life without the individual words and letters. I couldn’t have gotten into the habit of imagining anything without a lot of good scaffolding.

It’s easy to forget that when I was a kid—the 90s mostly—we were aggressively, as a nation and a generation, bribed to read. There was the Pizza Hut rewards at the library. There were whole floors of “young adult,” that were really books for kids, in Barnes & Noble, Borders, Waldenbooks. There was Borders and Waldenbooks, period. There was the Scholastic Book Fair, for god’s sake. And then, when I was just a little older, it became clear to corporations that there was money to be made here, and the true YA golden age started, in the 2000s.

I don’t know where kids find books now.

This is not a small or abstract problem. Libraries and book fairs are war zones now. Even big bookstores were swallowed up by Amazon and algorithms, and the ones that are left, don’t buy first-run middle grade books anymore, only ones with proven sales. Gone are the days of a kid being able to wander stacks, and find something they didn’t know they were interested in. And publishers themselves are voluntarily ceding territory to book banners and AI thieves, as they slowly push out anyone who likes to read in favor of shipping executives who love “data.” Here’s some data: that segment of the book market that all the energy is going to? You know, the promised land, Booktok? The only books for which that platform actually drives sales is in romance and some SFF, and it’s because the readers of those books are addicts.

Addicts who were addicted during the golden age of YA publishing. In serving only that segment of the reading market, they’re boxing out any future addicted generations. In addition to being bad for people’s brains, it’s just bad business. And I’m an English major saying that.

I don’t know where kids find scaffolding now.

In the last year, I’ve developed an afterschool world-building program called Portal Quest. (Side note: teachers and librarians, I’ve got openings and adaptable curriculums, hmu). In this class, I roll out a big piece of large-format drawing paper. I draw designations for North, South, East, and West and say, “This is our map. Pick a corner and go.”

I love teaching this class. Sometimes, it worries me, teaching this class.

The very first thing most groups do is draw extremely hard borders. I’ve had more than one group develop an aggressive “trademarking” policy, all on their own. But then, slowly the kids get bored of the borders, and start, almost against their wills, connecting their worlds: forming alliances and solving conflicts. Sometimes, I have to step in and encourage the latter, but that’s OK. That’s my job. I’m a teacher, and a storyteller. That’s what I’m there for.

Some kids take to this like a starving man to a buffet. Some kids say they have no ideas, frustrated before they even start. Some of those kids can be inspired by the other things in their lives if you show them how, whether its soccer or Minecraft or Dragon Ball Z or Owl House (it’s mostly Minecraft). Some kids will insist they’re done, they don’t have anything else to add to an entire (fictional) universe…until you ask them just the right question.

Some kids actively don’t want to tell stories. They actively resist using their imagination in any way. And, given where they’ve grown up, and when, I…can’t blame them.

Those are the kids I worry about. Those are the kids who, when they do ask questions—about the real world, not the fantasy ones I’m trying to get them to make—those questions make my heart stop, because they generally come from lack of exposure to any kind of empathy with people who live in ways that aren’t like them.

I always have thought of myself as having a good imagination. It’s my defining characteristic, and the thing I am proudest of. Generally, if I see a problem in the world, I can at least begin to imagine how to fix it. I can at least form an initial sketch, even when I know I don’t know what I’m talking about.

I don’t know how to fix what’s happening in this country. I’ve been thinking about it for almost two weeks straight now, and I’m coming up completely empty. A black spot where my mind’s eye should be. I don’t know how to change the minds of people who just didn’t vote, while also keeping the people who did vote for sanity, while also acknowledging the anger of the people who voted for insanity without knowledge of policy specifics. I don’t know how to make people read about policy specifics, or care about the rules. I don’t know how to care about the rules anymore. I don’t know how to counteract the effects of a generation being deprived of books as a safe space. I don’t know how to make it safe for kids to imagine a different world, because it sure as shit doesn’t feel safe to me now, and I’m fucking almost 40.

So, I keep drawing a map, and hoping that one of them comes up with something.

It’s the only route open to me.