Bee Season
by Myla Goldberg

List Price: $13.00
Pages: 288
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 0385498802
Publisher: Vintage

Shortly after reading about spelling bees in an essay in Granta, a friend of mine told me of a fairly traumatic spelling bee experience. I became obsessed with spelling bees and how they can take on such great significance to the children and the parents involved in them. My feelings were confirmed when I traveled to Washington, D.C., for the 1997 National Spelling Bee. In the two days I spent there watching the bee, interviewing some of the contestants and eavesdropping, I felt I had entered an alternate universe of anxiety and expectation ruled by one of the most arbitrary of systems: the English language. While some of the kids were actually having fun, it became quickly apparent that the spelling bee was pathologically important to a tangible percentage of contestants and parents. Though I was never an active spelling bee participant myself, I recognized in these kids my own childhood imperative to fulfill expectations and live up to my potential. I realized that part of my own fascination with the spelling bee--and part of the reason I think it makes the national news and is televised on ESPN every year--lies in the fact that it is so easy to recognize ourselves in these kids and in this ridiculous contest. We have all felt the desire to please or to succeed against irrational odds. We have all felt what it is like to fail. The universals, underlying what at first sight seemed like such an odd niche of humanity, were a large part of what powered the 18 months it took to write Bee Season.

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