McKinley: literature for today's young adults(long!)

in case anyone is still wondering which edition of _literature for today's young adults_ robin's essay was published in, it's the 5th edition, published in '97, edited by kenneth donelson and alleen pace nilsen. her essay's entitled "on the school assignment letter," and one thing it emphasizes is the supremacy of tale over teller, that is, that we should be more interested in robin's printed word than in her personal life. luckily much of robin's own personality comes through in her characters, so knowing them i feel i know her almost as well as the friends i see every day. after reading the essay i really will try not to wonder too much about her private life(how often she walks her whippets, how often she waters her rose bushes, etc) but one thing i couldn't help wondering about when i saw the article was her picture - she looks like a completely different human being than she does in the other picture i have of her - she doesn't look much older, and she looks beautiful in !
both pictures(i don't know why
she's so self deprecating when it comes to her appearance - she's no more right about her "plainness" than beauty was about hers) - she is smiling more in the later picture, but that can't account for her looking like two entirely different people. i know this obssession over what the "real robin" looks like is exactly what she was warning against in her essay, and of course she's always de-emphasized the importance of physical appearance, but i don't think she realizes how much people(at least how much i and many of my friends) look up to her as a truly brilliant, amazing human being. it's great to have aerin and harry and beauty as heroes(heroines), but it's also wonderful to have a living hero in robin herself, and part of viewing her as a kind of hero or role model is needing a way to visualize her, the same way we have posters of our favorite singers and movie stars. i know this kind of idolization would only make robin herself uncomfortable, and i know i shouldn't need a!
 physical picture, that a mental impression of her should be enough, but it's hard to get around the need for graven images, etc. seeing the two pictures of robin would be analogous to envisioning harry as the way robin describes her in _sword_, then suddenly being shown a picture of harry as a short, freckled brunette - the two images are fine in themselves, but side by side the discrepancy is unsettling - i know it shouldn't matter, but i can't help wondering which picture i have is of the "real" robin, and which is just a fluke of camera lighting... if anyone wants a copy of her essay and can't get it from the library, just let me know and i'll post it on this list...(she may have essays in more than one edition of _literature for today's young adults_, for all i know, but this was the only one i could find, and i couldn't do robin justice merely by summarizing it here...)
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Received on Tue Sep 1 22:24:01 1998