I am suspicious of the genre (or should I say market?) known as the young-adult novel. Of course, as a niche, it is exceedingly popular and has made many an author wealthy, but it is a new niche, canonically speaking, and I am prone to be conservative. "In the old days, sonny, young adults read Sir Walter Scott, and they liked it. They didn't need a special genre." Moreover, so much young-adult literature is badly written. The Harry Potter books have some of the worst dialogue I've ever read; and all of Rowlings's cute fantasy references just aren't going to cover up the fact that, as attempts at art, they're clumsy and bland.

Yet I am the parent of an 11-year-old boy who loves young-adult fantasy--his current favorites being Percy Jackson and Eragon. And he's not alone: the 4th and 5th graders at the Harmony Elementary School are fearsome readers, trading novels like Pokemon cards and competing to see who can belong to the most number of reading groups. I don't have to tell you that, in a town such as Harmony, where only a tiny percentage of adults have college experience let alone a college degree, this is an educational coup.

So I've been toying with submitting my long narrative poem "The Story of Phaeton" to a young-adult publisher: partly as way to undercut my own prejudices about the market, partly because the popularity of the Percy Jackson series proves, once again, that the lure of the Greek myths is eternal, partly because my poem is better written than a lot of the crap that gets published. 

Of course, on the down side, it is a poem, even if it is an easy-to-comprehend story about a boy and his dad. That will probably do it in immediately.