Last weekend I gave a talk at the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators’ Marvelous Midwest Conference. The topic was “Writing For and About Children in the #MeToo Era,” a topic I originally proposed as a panel but was asked to turn into a lunch keynote. I knew, going in, that the audience was likely going to be at least 90% women. Perhaps you see why I said in last week’s letter that I was nervous?
Before agreeing to the talk I had to ask myself if there was something new I could legitimately bring to the conversation, and I realized that there was. I also kept thinking about the Disney animated feature, Beauty and the Beast (my favorite as a kid), and it wasn’t until I rewatched it that I realized why: Beauty and the Beast is all about masculinity and femininity – it’s all about gender norms. So, taking cue from Robert Bly’s Iron John, which I read with DB and was one of the books that first kicked off the exploration of masculinity I began in my late twenties (and continue to this day), I structured the talk around a deep “read” of the film.
