It’s been a couple of weeks since my novel Internal Lockdown has come out. So far, so good on the criticisms. It has been affirming to read the positive comments. I’ve been asked to sign books–like I’m somebody important!
Which of course brings up the issue of what do you say?
“I hope you enjoy the book” is not a sentiment I want to convey, necessarily. In a way, I hope people can empathize with the horror that the characters are experiencing. Internal Lockdown, I hope, allows the reader to “feel” the anxiety and pain of the characters.
When I was teaching, I could tell that critics of education, and sometimes our own parents, really believed that education was simply children sitting in their desks quietly taking notes while a teacher spewed “knowledge” through a lecture. Then the material was regurgitated onto a test.
No.
Teaching the optimal way is so much messier and more unpredictable than that. And that’s on a normal day.
The longer a lockdown or some other unexpected event goes, the messier and messier it becomes–as I tried to portray in the book.
One of my goals in the novel was to impress upon the reader the point of view of the teachers and students trapped, without knowing what is happening, where the shooter is etc. The book got very messy.
There have been so many real shootings in the last nine months that we have become somewhat desensitized to the experiences of those who have been attacked and assaulted.
Now, the NRA has inadvertently started an empathy movement on social media. Recently, when some medical personnel spoke up about gun violence, the NRA scolded them to “stay in their lane”, which resulted in #ThisIsMyLane, among other hashtags. First responders, doctors, and nurses posted firsthand accounts and photos (like the one above) illustrating the horrors of gunshot wounds.
The pictures being posted and the testimony of the posters are vivid and gut-wrenching. An empathetic human being cannot look at those pictures and read the accounts without thinking: “My God, this is horrible! What can we do to keep this from happening again?”
So, the sentence I am most comfortable signing in the front of the book is: “I hope the book is worth your time.” I also hope the thought that readers are left with is: “My God, this is horrible! What can we do to keep this from happening again?”
The Q-View 