‘We Will Shape the Story Together’
Author John Green empowers students to be their best selves in a campus conversation
A chilly springtime downpour couldn’t dampen the hum of excitement in Lorimer Chapel April 15 as hundreds of students, community members, and fans from far afield gave an audible cheer of welcome to acclaimed author and digital creator John Green.
The conversation and question-and-answer period with the writer was this year’s keynote event for the Center for the Arts and Humanities and the culmination of a two-year humanities theme of “play.” Green, a funny, quick-witted speaker whose words and works are undergirded by a thick vein of humanism, touched on topics as diverse as his writing process, the importance of play, and how creating art and building community can help people survive difficult times.
That last thought clearly resonated with the audience, who sat in silence for a moment to absorb what he said before erupting into applause.
“It’s so easy to feel like this is the end of the story. And I don’t blame you if you feel like this is the end of the story, like, the human story,” Green said. “This is, in fact, the middle of the story, and together we are going to invent a different end. I don’t know what the end will be, but we will shape the story together. And that is itself, I think, an act of hope—to remember that this is the middle of the story and it falls to us, together, to write a different and better end for ourselves and for each other.”
Understanding the humanities through the idea of play
In a sense, many of the students who attended the event have grown up with Green, whose books for young-adult readers feature smart, relatable protagonists, sometimes-heartbreaking storylines, and lend themselves to multiple rereadings. He has written the New York Times bestsellers Looking for Alaska, An Abundance of Katherines, Paper Towns, The Fault in Our Stars, which was adapted into a blockbuster movie in 2014, Turtles All the Way Down, The Anthropocene Reviewed, and the new book Everything is Tuberculosis.
He and his brother, Hank Green, are the co-creators of the Vlogbrothers video blog channel and the educational series Crash Course on YouTube, which has millions of subscribers and viewers, including lots of the folks who came to Lorimer Chapel.
Green’s conversation at Colby was part of the Center for the Arts and Humanities’ “play” theme.
The center was founded more than a decade ago as a way to return the humanities to the heart of a liberal arts education, even as colleges and universities around the country were seeing dwindling interest in core humanistic subjects such as English, foreign languages, philosophy, and history.
The themes serve as a way to unite the campus around a central idea that has to do with humanistic inquiry, with previous themes including Food for Thought, Freedom and Captivity, Boundaries and Margins, and Energy/Exhaustion. Next up will be Islands, according to Dean Allbritton, associate professor of Spanish and director of the Center for the Arts and Humanities, who introduced Green.
For months, students have participated in a John Green book club, reading and holding lively discussions about his books. There was also the John Green Countdown, a series of community events held in conjunction with Waterville Creates, the Maine Film Center, and the Waterville Public Library.
“It’s wonderful to have John Green here to celebrate the culmination of our two years of thinking about play together,” said Margaret McFadden, provost, dean of faculty, and the NEH/Class of 1940 Distinguished Professor of the Humanities, as she welcomed the author. “His work captures so much of what the humanities are all about, and why they’re so important to our lives.”
McFadden described how the author has also galvanized thousands of young people to raise funds to help people in need around the world, and said that she has a theory as to what makes his work so important and successful.
“In a world that often dismisses or exploits the concerns of young people, he takes teenagers and young adults seriously. He takes their intellect and their deep curiosity about the world seriously,” she said. “Yes, he’s hilarious, and yes, playful. And in a world where it’s often seen to be cool to be cynical and disengaged, he dares to be earnest, to care deeply, to be corny, even, and he invites us to be our best selves. Indeed, to be awesome.”
Imagining other lives
Green was joined onstage by Nathan Dunn ’27, a biology major and chair of the center’s Student Advisory Board, and Associate Professor of English (Creative Writing) Sarah Braunstein. She started the conversation by asking about the author’s experience with play and how it has changed over the course of his life.
“Part of what play is to me is a chance to imagine what it’s like to be someone else. A chance to imagine what it might be like to live a different life, see the world out of a different set of eyes, have a different consciousness. Reading is also a form of play for me,” Green said. “When I read Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield isn’t my friend or my spouse or anything. I’m as close to being Holden Caulfield as I can be, and that’s magic for me. And so play is very interlinked with my desire to seek magic in the world.”
He also talked about how playing through imagining different possibilities has helped him navigate challenges posed by his “moderate to severe” obsessive-compulsive disorder, which he described as empowering.
Green encouraged young people to keep playing throughout their lives. He got laughs from the audience when he said that when he was young, he used to imagine adulthood as a “zombie apocalypse virus,” i.e., something to avoid as long as possible, but which gets everyone in the end. But it’s not like that at all.
“The reason it’s not like that is because you don’t stop playing,” he said. “You continue to grow and change, and part of the way you continue to grow and change is through play, through the experience of pushing back against the perceived boundaries. You’re not going to be on a one-train track your entire adult life. You’re going to be able to do lots of different things.”
‘Failure is part of the process’
When Braunstein, herself a novelist and short story writer, asked Green about his creative process, he told her about an ecological dystopian novel he had once written that was set on a desert island. It was long, complicated, and full of twists and turns. After he finished it, he put it away in a drawer for a few weeks, then took it out to read it over again.
“There was nothing there. It was heartbreaking. I just remember reading it in a hotel room and crying because there was no guts to it. There was no heart to it,” he said. “The characters were flat, the whole thing was useless, and it wasn’t going to do anybody any good.”
Green shelved the novel, telling the room that out of the 70,000 words he had written, he only liked one sentence. After that, he decided to take another look at what he had written when he was a 22-year-old hospital chaplain and had befriended a 16-year-old who died of cancer. Meeting her became the impetus for writing The Fault in Our Stars, which is about teenage cancer patients experiencing love and death. In it, he included the single sentence from the other book: “It was kind of a beautiful day.”
“Failure is part of the process. Failure is not bad news,” he said. “Of course, I would have preferred for the desert island novel to make its way into the world and be a good book, but I had to write the desert island novel to write The Fault in Our Stars. They were contingent upon each other.”
Green also talked about his new book, which had its nucleus when he and his wife visited a hospital in Sierra Leone where tuberculosis patients sought treatment. Before that visit, the author said, he had thought of the disease as one that primarily affected 19th-century British Romantic poets. But he learned that more than a million people—including 219,000 kids—die of it every year, even though it is curable. Everything is Tuberculosis is about the fight against the world’s deadliest disease, and the recent news that the federal government is gutting USAID and other programs means that the odds of the fight just got much worse, he said.
“It’s such a difficult moment, and it’s almost impossible not to respond to that with a measure of despair,” he said. “The problem with despair, of course, is that all it makes is more of itself. It’s like a bacteria or a virus. It doesn’t motivate us. It doesn’t help us get out of bed in the morning. It doesn’t help us make change. It doesn’t help us fight back.”
An antidote to despair
Despair is powerful, and it tells a story that makes sense and has an internal logic that’s hard to fight. If everything, and everyone, are terrible, then there’s no reason to do anything because nothing matters. On the edge of despair, there’s anger and disgust: feelings that Green said he has to fight against “all the time.”
“The problem is that it doesn’t work. It has incredible explanatory power, but it’s not true because the truth is so much more complicated than that,” he said. “The truth is, yes, we are a horror, and we have visited horror upon each other countless times throughout our history. But we are also so much else. We can also be so much else for each other. I know that, because I’ve seen it.”
During the question and answer period, people—mostly young, all women—lined up at two microphones to take turns sharing thoughts with Green and the room. One of the things they often wanted to express was an appreciation for books that have often helped them combat despair, or hopelessness, or the feeling that they were alone in the world.
“I feel like I, and so many others, can relate to finding almost a liberation in your work,” one student said, before asking his advice on how to create community after leaving college.
As with all the questions, Green listened carefully and answered from the heart.
“I mean, it’s really hard. I think Kurt Vonnegut said once that the main thing that you have to do in adulthood is find ways to cure the terrible disease of loneliness, and that’s a responsibility that you have for yourself and also for the people around you,” he said. “My biggest recommendation is to check in [with friends and others]. … And continue to be friends with your college friends if you can, because that’s also a gift. Having a friend for 20 years is so special because you have this shared language and experience that’s hard to get anywhere else.”
After the event, Tina Cheng ’27, a biology major with a concentration in neuroscience who is a member of the Center for the Arts and Humanities Student Advisory Board, said that Green is a writer who brings people together.
“Everyone knows him. I saw so many of my friends here from every single field of study and discipline,” she said. “We all, in some sort of way, got something from John Green when we grew up.”
