High School Reference and Canadian Street Lit

My current field placement has me in a high school library. I do quite a bit of circulation; mostly iPads, because the school has eighteen iPads for use in the library. And they go like hotcakes. I have assumed a sort of stewardship of them: I make sure they're all turned off, I check their battery levels and put them on chargers when they're below 50% (or just really low, since there were a lot of low batteries the first time I checked them all), I run their software updates when they're charging; I also check for photos taken and delete them, because wow, that could go so wrong. Sometimes I even check out books!

I find I'm doing a lot more reference work, which is good practice. And difficult! Trying to get to the bottom of what a student actually wants/needs is a bit tricky; I have to ask a lot of questions to try to get different answers. Usually I get the same answers, but every once in a while I manage to find more details about whatever project they're doing, which helps. Some topics I've encountered:

• Fish: ...any particular kind of fish? Is this for a project? Taking care of fish? Well, let's check the catalogue. Okay, books about fish are here. Tropical fish will do? Sure. I hope that's what you were looking for!
• Saint Nick: Which Saint Nick? We have these encyclopedias of Saints, but nothing specifically for a Saint Nick. Bonus: I remember doing this project, I think, and taking an obscure Saint just to do something different. And then regretting it when I couldn't find anything.
  • Trivia: My favourite Saint is Saint Sebastian, because his thing is having arrows sticking out of him. Or arrows in general, and apparently sometimes swords, but when I found that out I just pictured him in group shots hangin' out in the back with Saint Francis and his bird and Saint Christopher with the kid on his shoulder - you know, much nicer iconography, still okay at parties and social engagements. And there's this dude next to them with arrows sticking out of him, chilling out. I don't even know if there's a painting like this at all, but that's how it lodged itself in my mind. Where was I?
• Biography of Julius Caesar: Specifically Julius Caesar. We had to settle for entries in books about Roman leaders and such. I suggested the public library and told her how to get a card.
• Burj Khalifa: World's tallest building. Only completed in 2009 (and opened in 2010), it wasn't something we could really find in the high school library. The girls didn't need info so much as another resource to list - they had online sources and wanted an actual book. I looked at the Guinness Book of World Records, but we didn't have the most current version or it didn't have an entry on the tallest building or something. I suggested they look for articles and they seemed to like that idea.
• And then, by far the most difficult: Canadian Urban fiction. I'd heard about street lit before - I think probably via working on this blog and I'm pretty sure it was mentioned in my teen readership advisory class - but I didn't know much. I still don't. But! I was pleased that I at least eventually grokked what she was looking for. I even found a book in our library - Push, by Sapphire. Except that wasn't Canadian.

  I left the school's catalogue and did some searches; there was Concrete Voices, a collection of short stories that might have fit the bill, but the school library didn't have it. A challenge.

  What is urban fiction? A genre featuring black writers and black characters, often criticized for being 'low brow' - too much sex and violence - but also credited with making teens readers and being more accessible, more true to life. This article in the New York Times ("From the Streets to the Libraries", Anne Barnard, October 22, 2008) seems to explain the concept pretty well:

  As a teenager in Far Rockaway, Queens, where she still lives, Ms. Miller read gritty novels set in urban black neighborhoods of the 1960s and ’70s, by Donald Goines and Iceberg Slim. Then there was a dry spell. She made do with Jackie Collins until a new generation of urban fiction sprang up in the late 1990s.

  “I read what I can relate to,” she said. “They’re writing about what I’ve experienced. It’s easier than reading about Beverly Hills and Rodeo Drive.”

  Which is not to say Ms. Miller, a mother of four, has ever murdered anyone, worked as a prostitute or been draped in diamonds by a drug-dealing boyfriend. (Her husband of 19 years, an ex-Army man, is a garbage collector.) What she recognizes are the characters’ fashions and pleasures (door-knocker earrings, clubbing), their problems (few jobs, drug dealers offering your children fast cash, people you know getting shot or stabbed) and their aspirations (striving for a better life).

  So she has made it her mission to bring more urban fiction into the Queens libraries, which she visits as many as five times a week, checking out books she reads on her subway rides to Manhattan to visit her son Tad, 17, who has been hospitalized for four years with brain damage from a near-drowning.

  Her oldest, Raishon, 19, reads his favorite urban titles aloud to Tad. Some nurses blush at the profanity and sex; others ask to borrow the books.

  “A lot of people ask me, ‘How can you let him read that?’ ” she said. “He lives it every day. This is cotton candy compared to what they hear out there. And it shows him there are consequences to living such a fast life.”

  So, uh. New York, sure. Canada? Maybe Toronto? What's out there? Some possibilities that might qualify (I don't know, I haven't read them):

  • Out of My Skin, Tessa McWatt

  Maaaybe not. Urf.

  Next thing I tried: checking the public library catalogue. Also not super helpful; I wish I could cross-check categories. Or maybe I can and I've forgotten how. Will look again later. Might ask reference librarian or teen librarian from first field placement.