What Gets Left Out
NASA’s fecal containment bag. Astronauts are true heroes.
One of the saddest things about writing nonfiction is that you just can’t fit all the cool stuff you find into one book. Thankfully, we have blogs for this sort of thing.
I’ve been hard at work on my biography of Neil Armstrong. Apollo 11 has just achieved the first moon landing and Neil, Buzz, and Mike are on their way back to Earth. But I only had a limited amount of words to describe this epic achievement, and one of the things that got cut for space was the fact that there were no bathrooms on any of the Apollo flights.
So of course you want to know how this was handled, don’t you? Alas, I do mean handled.
In classic NASA speak, the astronauts used “fecal containment bags.” Sad to say, they were not terribly well designed and sometimes did not do what they were supposed to do, leading to this immortal dialog, captured for history in the transcripts for Apollo 10 as it orbited the moon:
Commander Tom Stafford: Oh — who did it?
Command Module Pilot John Young: Who did what?
Lunar Module Pilot Eugene Cernan: Where did that come from?
Stafford: Give me a napkin quick. There’s a turd floating through the air.
Young: I didn’t do it. It ain’t one of mine.
Cernan: I don’t think it’s one of mine.
Stafford: Mine was a little more sticky than that. Throw that away.
A bit later on the same mission:
Cernan: They told us that–Here’s another *$*#@*@*#*$ turd. What’s the matter with you guys?
Stafford and Young: laughter
Cernan: A line of dialog which I shall omit, as I try to keep this blog rated PG-13
Stafford: It was just floating around?
Cernan: Yes.
Stafford: Mine was stickier than that.
Young: Mine was too. It hit that bag–
Cernan: When I stuck my finger in mine–mine was too soft. [The fecal containment bags had a “finger cot,” a sort of indentation where fingers could be inserted to, erm, encourage separation of the matter in question from the buttocks, as there was no gravity to help with this. Cernan was not actually sticking his naked finger in, you know.)
Young; Laughter
Cernan: I don’t know whose that is. I can neither claim it nor disclaim it.
I tell you, the stuff you can’t include in books just breaks your heart.
Read MoreThis Is Neil Armstrong
New year, new project! I’m gearing up for work on a biography of Neil Armstrong, the first human to set foot on the moon.
So far, my favorite quote is not “That’s one small step for man…” but actually comes from his sister, June: “He never did anything wrong. He was Mr. Goody Two-shoes, if there ever was one.”
You can fly fighter jets and fight in a war and blast off into out space and walk on the actual moon, but I’m telling you, you’ll never get respect from your little sister.
Read MoreNew England Vampires
JB exhumed skeleton beings studied at the National Museum of Health and Medicine.
Forensic science and folklore can piece together some truths about life (and the afterlife) in New England in the 1700s and 1800s. Like Mercy Brown in Mercy: The Last New England Vampire, JB was a real person, a Connecticut farmer who died of tuberculosis….and whose community dug up his grave after his death, convinced he was a vampire. The Washington Post details new discoveries about him here…one of the few so-called vampire burials to be exhumed and studied.
You don’t have to travel to Transylvania to encounter homegrown vampire folklore. The same legends that led to JB’s exhumation were the basis for my YA novel Mercy. Family, loss, terror, and love–the elements of a good horror story or a supernatural legend.
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We Need Diverse Books…and Let’s Not Stop There
Yes, yes, we need diverse books. We need books with black kids and brown kids, trans kids and gay kids, poor kids and not-so-poor kids, able-bodied kids and kids with disabilities. Kids of all kinds. I’m there, I promise.
But. But.
What happens next? What happens when the art is created and the words are written? What happens when we’ve created the books that act as mirrors (so every kid can see him/her/theirself reflected in the pages) and windows (so every kid can experience what life is like for people who don’t look or sound or pray like him/her/them?)
I’m a little worried about this part.
When I tried talking with the principal of our local elementary school about the fact that my daughter will have been there six years and will graduate without learning a thing about the Civil Rights movement or the Underground Railroad or the suffragettes or Native American tribes in our state, he pointed me toward the school and classroom libraries and encouraged me to channel my activism into getting diverse books on those shelves. Okay, good, I can do that.
But. Are the books getting taken down? Are they getting read? If they are read, are they getting discussed? Are kids finding ways to apply what they read to their own lives?
When I ran a before-school books and breakfast club and we read and talked about Wonder, my kid could relate the way Auggie was treated to unkindness a classmate was suffering. When we read Marvin Redpost: Is He a Girl? and talked about stereotypes, another mom told me that her second grade daughter quickly got adept at spotting them.
But that was because we talked. We discussed. We engaged.
What happens without that context? What happens if you read Freedom Summer without talking more about the civil rights movement and its heroism and struggles and triumphs and ongoing challenges? What happens if you leave young readers knowing that a town would rather fill its swimming pool with concrete than let brown and black and white kids swim together–and that’s all that those kids end up learning?
Yes, we need diverse books. We need diverse curriculum too. (And diverse teachers in our classrooms!) And once we have the books, we need to talk about them. Discuss, argue, praise, weep, think. Think hard.
Diverse books can’t save the world. Diverse readers just might.
#WeNeedDiverseBooks
#WeNeedMoreThanDiverseBooks
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Sarah L. Thomson
A children’s book author publishing award-winning nonfiction, poetry, picture books and novels including…
“Thomson focuses on newfound connection, magic, and suspense to conjure a fast-paced, heartwarming mystery. Thomson’s world is populated by resourceful protagonists, fanciful creatures, and quirky supporting characters.”
—Publishers Weekly