Hello, and welcome to The Monster & The Child, where childhood studies and monster studies collide! I am Dr. Kathleen Kellett, and I am thrilled to announce that the pilot program of Youth Monsterology is full steam ahead and ready for enrollment – as are both teen and adult monster book clubs! So if you or someone you know might be interested in connecting with other fans of monster stories, diving deep into literature, and possibly crafting your own independent project with close one-on-one mentorship, this video is for you.

            We will start with Youth Monsterology. This is the program of teen book clubs and educational mentorship that I have been fundraising for. That campaign on Indiegogo is still ongoing, and I am still hoping to get some more contributions before May 31, when the campaign will end. However, it has at this point been successful enough that I can officially get this off the ground, and for that, I could not be more grateful to everyone who contributed, as well as everyone who just watched and interacted with that launch video. Thank you all so very much.

            So Youth Monsterology will therefore hopefully begin on June 28^th of this year, pending adequate sign-ups. It is a pilot program insofar as this is my first time doing this specific form of mentorship, but I do have experience in both facilitating teen book clubs and in education. I ran a Monster Book Club for my doctoral dissertation project, and you can watch interviews with two former participants in the video up in the corner (and also linked in the description). I have also taught college courses in writing, composition, and critical reading; childhood studies; monsters (including the monster and the child); and young adult literature. So I’m taking all of that experience and mixing it together in this Youth Monsterology program.

I have a full description of the program on my brand-new website. Thank you to my lovely wife for putting that together. A link is in the description and is also now available on my channel profile. It’s themonsterandthechild.com, all spelled out, no ampersand, so should be pretty easy to remember. So you can read all about the program over there, and I’m also going to give you the overview on this video. Youth Monsterology will be a five-month program for young people aged fourteen to eighteen. Each section will have up to twelve members, and I’m looking to fill up to two sections at this time, to begin meeting on Sunday, June 28, 2026. We will meet with the full group every two weeks on the voice channel of a private Discord server. The first meeting would be an intro meeting, then the first one after that, we will discuss one to two short stories. Two weeks after that, it will be a whole novel, novella, or graphic novel, and then repeat that pattern. So you would get the whole four weeks to read the longer materials, though none of them are even really that long. And the book selections are going to be:

• The Taking of Jake Livingston by Ryan Douglass
• Release by Patrick Ness
• Pet by Akwaeke Emezi
• Nimona by N.D. Stevenson

And then the short story selections from The House Where Death Lives, edited by Alex Brown, as well as The Gathering Dark, edited by Tori Bovalino. Possibly in the last month, we may also read M is for Monster, a graphic novel by Talia Dutton if we have time to do that. So that’s pending how things go in the program.

I will not be able to provide the books, but I highly recommend borrowing them from a library or the Libby app. None of them are obscure titles, so I’m hoping that people will have an easy time accessing them. If requesting it from a local library doesn’t work, teens can actually get a National Teen BPL eCard from the Brooklyn Public Library, which is extremely rad. So link to that in the description, and then I will also send that to anyone who signs up, as well.

The independent projects will begin two months in (so leaving the final three months of the program to work on them). Based on the themes we’ve been discussing in the book club, participants will develop an independent, community-facing academic, creative, and/or activist project. Not only will this look unique and exciting in college applications and résumés, but it will also enable participants to share their valuable insights on topics they most care about.

Potential examples include academic projects presented at a school assembly, public library exhibit, community speaking engagement, or youth academic publication or newspaper; creative projects that could also be staged at any of those venues and/or submitted to contests and art festivals, such as short stories, short films, poetry collection, and even visual art installation with artist’s statements; and then activist projects with written reflections for local publication that could include peaceful protests, donation drives and volunteer coordination, community events like environmental clean-ups, or advocacy meetings with a school board, local rep, or community organization. Or some combination thereof, or something I haven’t even thought of!

As for me, for the book club part, I will facilitate discussions about theme, metaphor, character analysis, and broader sociopolitical implications in monster stories. For the independent projects, I will provide close one-on-one mentorship as participants design, organize, draft, revise, and publicize their projects. Starting at the beginning of that third month of the program, I will meet with participants once a week, and we’d find a time that would work for the participant themselves, and I would to provide guidance and personal feedback on planning, writing, and communication with community partners. So this mentorship will be a combination of academic and practical, as I will aid participants in not only producing polished, high-quality work, but also making connections with professionals in their communities.

So from first meeting until last meeting, Youth Monsterology will run from June 28 to November 29. Full group meetings will be held on Sundays, so if you’re thinking of signing up, make sure that that schedule will work for you. The cost of the program is $50 per month. This low price is facilitated by the generous contributions to the Indiegogo, and I do recognize that really any prices will be prohibitive to some people, unfortunately. But if you compare this price, especially once we get to the mentorship part, to going rates for tutoring or extracurricular education programs, you will see that I am offering this for much lower than comparable programs. If you are 18, you can obviously sign up yourself, though if you are younger, you will need a legal guardian to do so for you. As much as I want to live in a world where teenagers can make all of their own decisions legally, we don’t, so I do need parental consent for legal purposes. But if you are one of those guardians of a teenager, please consider the social benefits of a new peer group with common interests, the intellectual benefits of discussing complex topics outside the classroom, and the potential future benefits of seeing a unique independent project through from conception to completion in a way that many teenagers don’t get the chance to do. I feel very confident that participants will have a really positive experience in this program, and I cannot wait to meet everyone who signs up. Participation will be on a first-come, first-serve basis, but if this session doesn’t work for you, know that there will definitely be more in 2027. If you have any questions about the program before clicking submit, please reach out to me at themonsterandthechild@gmail.com. Again, that’s “the monster and the child” all spelled out, no ampersand.

Meanwhile, if you are a teen or an adult who is interested in just signing up for an ongoing monster book club, I have that for you, too! Also on the website, if you go to the programs tab, you will find sign-up opportunities for you there. For teens ages 14-18, the first four books will be the same first four books as Youth Monsterology, and for adults, the first three books will be Frankenstein, Eden Robinson’s Son of a Trickster, and Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle. From there, we will poll the groups for future book ideas. Note: I don’t have separate books for the separate age groups because I think adults shouldn’t read YA or teens shouldn’t read “adult” fiction, or because of anything having to do with reading level or anything like that. So the books that we start out with in the adult group could wind up as later selections for the youth club, and vice versa. I’m just starting with texts that I think will be particularly thought-and-discussion-provoking for each cohort. Meetings will be held once a month, and if you are signing up, make sure you’re signing up for a day and time that works for you! There are two options for each section as of now. These clubs will also have their own private Discord servers, and I will facilitate discussions with open-ended questions and considerations as a monster and childhood studies professional. Those clubs will hopefully begin in July of this year, again, pending adequate sign-ups and they will be $10 a month. If you can’t start in July but want to join later, that will also be a possibility. If you are already a patron on Patreon, then you will have a discounted rate.

I will still be here on YouTube, sharing scholarship and storytelling, though the time between video essays will more often be three weeks instead of two going forward. I will keep sharing chapters from my YA manuscript Our Sharp Forsaken Teeth in between, and once that wraps up, I will find some other fun (and also sustainable for me) intermediary content, as well. I just want to make sure that the video essays stay high quality and not rushed, and since I’ll be doing all this other stuff, you know, that does mean they’ll be a bit more spread out. But don’t worry, I am very much not going anywhere. I’ve been enjoying my work on this channel immensely, and I’m so grateful to everyone who tunes in.

So please share this video and my website with anyone who may be interested, especially teenagers! I know my main demographics on here are adults, but you are adults who care about youth issues, so I trust you with the circulation of these programs. If you would like to support my work, like I said, that Indiegogo is still ongoing. There are fun rewards for different tiers of contributions over there, including YouTube shorts and personalized writing feedback. If you would like to join my Patreon, we have polls for future monster topics and reaction videos to new-to-me monster stories over there. And any form of engagement with videos on here – liking, subscribing, super thanks, commenting – all of that helps me support my programs and myself as an educator, so I enormously appreciate it. Thank you so much for tuning in, and I will see you soon for more monstrous food for thought.