Starting a blog!

Hello, and welcome to the Queer Books for Kids blog!

I'm starting this blog for a couple of reasons. First, I'd like to get back in the habit of blogging. Before twitter, and perhaps even before I was really on facebook, I started the dixitque andreus blog as an online outlet for my political rants and arty musings. I didn't ever find a consistent tone, though. The fact that that blog didn't have a topic or a theme probably didn't help things, and of course eventually the various social networks took over much of the function of that blog, and I got out of the habit entirely. But I still think there's a great value to sitting down and composing a solid 300, 600, 1200 words on a topic that has caught one's attention. That's the habit I'd like to cultivate here. So that's reason number one.

Reason number two is a complicated confluence of the personal, professional and academic. Yes, as a gay man who is both a children's book-seller and a literature student, it's obvious that I would be interested in gay books for kids and books for gay kids. Lately I've been working on focusing my interest, experience and expertise by reviewing books more often (sometimes for Broken Pencil, more recently for Xtra!). And I'm just starting a project at school where I'll be reading through as many queer kids books as possible between now and December. I'm taking this as a felicitous opportunity to put some thoughts, reflections and reviews on the internet with some frequency. The idea is that my school project will help to build my blogging habit, and I'll keep writing about gender and sexuality in kids books for ever and ever! It's going to be great!

For school, I'll be looking at the ways in which queerness is represented in kids books, and reading some relevant queer theory to go along with that. I'm going to be posting up my responses to these readings, and the tone will be informal but the posts will be focused on my academic concerns. But I will also be putting up more general-interest posts, too, and I hope that the result will be engaging.

Thanks very much for reading. I hope you enjoy my new blog!