Claire Davenport, a San Francisco resident pursuing her certification as a Special Education teacher, says that she has a strong affection for those young adults whose minds function outside of typical parameters.

“I think it’s important that their new modes of creativity be validated by intellectual and academic circles. Young people must know that they are already imaginative, inspired, creative thinkers.”

Davenport goes on to suggest that confining students to outdated models of story that are foreign and vague will only serve to alienate and demoralize emerging writers. Davenport also believes that traditional models for teaching writing have the adverse effect of persuading students that they are not smart enough and don’t have good ideas.

There is change afoot in things literary, conversational, theatrical, things written with ink and things written with microchip. That change can be called: absence of narrative, the non-narrative, a lack of point, or story line (at least in the ways we are used to).

This recent shift can be attributed to shows like Seinfeld, the NBC sitcom, now defunct except in daily reruns that unapologetically declared itself a show about nothing. No plot line, no rising and falling action, no conclusion. There is none of the stuff we thought we had to have to follow a good story.

The Simpsons and The Family Guy have similar tendencies. The twenty or so minutes of episodic, animated, dysfunctional family life could be described as thematic, but there is randomness of purpose evident in much of it, despite pithy references to more sophisticated material like Edgar Allen Poe, Dante’s Inferno and Homer’s Odysseus. The Simpsons exist for the sheer pleasure of their imagined lives. They are directionless, ageless, and ruthlessly unconcerned about following anyone’s need for order in the universe.

A similar pursuit can be found in the inbred relative to comic books: the graphic novel, or books with pictures. Scholars are taking this genre seriously, stamping literary credence to the best of it. This cousin to comics is more ambitious than its predecessors: Archie, Bugs Bunny, Mighty Mouse and the rest of the gang a certain number of us grew up with.

Some graphic novels are the retelling of significant literature -- with pictures. Many of Shakespeare’s tragedies have already been published as graphic novels. It will be debated for some time whether this retelling of our greatest literary tomes is merely fodder for semi-literate and disengaged teenagers.

Several recent movies have adapted graphic novels like: X-Men, Sin City and V for Vendetta. This is not just for the kiddies. These movies have received critical acclaim from nationally recognized, intellectually-minded critics from The New York Times, the Chicago Sun Times, and The New Yorker, to name a few.

There is narrative in most graphic novels, but it is provided in large measure by pictures, much the same way a movie will allow scenes without dialogue to further a story. Most interesting in the graphic novel market are contributions from the likes of Audrey Niffenegger, author of The Traveler’s Wife, and more recently, The Three Incestuous Sisters. A picture book for adults, this last story is virtually bare of text. Most of the narrative is to be presumed or interpreted by what Booklist described as a “shivery fairy tale in the form of an eerily beautiful novel in pictures.” Published by Harry Abrams, Inc. in 2005, The Three Incestuous Sisters is provocative and an artistic marriage of sexual explicitness and sepia-toned ghostliness.

Young people use the Internet differently. Here, literary anarchy reigns unimpeded by finger-wagging grammarians and linguistic dogma. Myspace.com, Friendsters.com, private ‘blogs’ and a million lesser companion sites are wide-open ranges for young voices using new language.

…I would

begin to drown on Jupiter . . .

. . . in a poison gas prison,

and I would run out

into the hallway –

- and the tiles would be

old bloodrings,

and broken glass,

and dynamite blasts

of funk and skunk

tails, and rusty pails . . .

and if I made it to

the street –

- the night was a better blanket,

and sometimes I’d

see howie or

marty incognito . . . . .

. . . down by the

essex

meat market . . .

and he’d follow me

into the subway

and take off his shades…

(excerpt from a personal blog at Friendsters.com)

Joanna Ricco, a ‘dot.com’ freelance writer with a B.A. in Media Studies from the University of Wisconsin, believes the origins of non-story telling began in the 1950’s with the beat generation movement of poets like Allen Ginsberg and Charles Bukowski. She explains that this free-form writing remained on the fringe for decades. Ricco theorizes that the explosion of pop culture media and the Internet have allowed non-traditional story telling to come to the forefront.

The last bastion of traditional literary form and function seems to be the English and Journalism classrooms in high schools across the country. Chicago Public Schools predict that about one half of current ninth graders in their system will not graduate from high school, and the Oakland, California school district records even more dismal failure rates.

It may feel like failure to surrender the rules and guidelines for language as we have known it. Or, it may be time to dive right in-maybe the water will be warmer than we think.

Jocelyn Pinkerton is a newspaper advisor and English teacher in a large urban public high school. She is interested in the sharing and rethinking of traditional models of writing for academically at-risk students.