Faculty Focus: Dr. Sara Hays

By Cristian Dunn

Both of your parents are educators, did you become an educator yourself because of that?

We tease that it's the family business, because my grandma was a teacher as well. She was a teacher in a one-room schoolhouse, and so we joked that I went into the family business. I initially, intentionally, did not choose to get an English degree or to be a teacher, because my mom was a professor at the school where I went to undergrad. (She was in) the English Department, and I didn't want to be in the same department, so I intentionally chose film studies as a different degree, so that I wouldn't be in my mom's classes. But then when I ended up going to grad school, that's when I went down the path of getting English degrees and becoming a college professor. So, yeah, initially I didn't get an English degree, but I'm glad I did because now I incorporate film into my teaching. 

You are a second-degree black belt in Krav Maga. Can you explain what that form is about, and its values?

So, Krav Maga is the fighting defense system used by the Israeli fighting force, and Krav Maga is Hebrew, I think, for contact combat, that's what it means, and it was developed during World War Two as a way for civilian citizens to be able to defend themselves. So the idea of Krav Maga is that any body type, any age, any physical ability, should be able to be successful in a pretty short amount of time. With some other martial arts, it takes years of practice and training to get any sort of sense of accomplishment, but with Krav Maga, within a year or two, you could be proficient in a self defense situation if you needed to. But it has become really popular in the United States with law enforcement agencies, both local and national, FBI, CIA. They train Krav Maga, and because it's really effective and efficient and it incorporates weapon disarming as well as open hand combat, as well as some grappling on the ground… originally in Israel, they have compulsory military service, (and) every citizen has to do two years. And so the techniques of Krav Maga were able to quickly and efficiently train their citizenship to be effective in a short amount of time. 

What led you to choose to learn Krav Maga?

My daughter has a black belt in karate. They have classes for adults, but they don't do karate for adults. They only do Krav Maga for the adults. And so, if I wanted to train in the same place with my daughter, Krav Maga was the choice. I did train Taekwondo in college for a couple years, but I like Krav Maga better. One of the reasons why I chose Krav was because I did like how practical it is. At the time,  my daughter and I lived alone, and so (it was good for) safety and confidence and things like that. That's why I wanted to do Krav. It wasn't for some sort of a competition or trophies or anything like that. It was a practical choice to keep me and my daughter safe and for fitness. And I just loved it so much that I stuck with it a lot longer than most people do. 

When you see martial arts portrayed in film, does the choreography need to be realistic to be a good fight scene for you, or can you enjoy fight scenes that follow the “rule of cool?”

Oh, yeah. I mean, I do love the rule of cool. There's nothing wrong with that. We don't think anything of it when our superheroes can jump off of things and fly over things and take hits and they don't bleed or get hurt. I kind of feel the same way when there's an elaborate fight scene that wouldn't really happen in the real world. But I do appreciate whenever there's a film, and the choreographer has been intentional about incorporating practical moves, moves that real people who train, use and learn. And that's honestly been the trend lately. 

It really started with the Bourne movies in the early 2000s. (It was) 2002 I think, is when the first Bourne came out. And so when the Bourne movie started becoming popular. A lot of other fight choreographed scenes started copying the Bourne style, which was kind of raw, gritty. They get hurt, they're stumbling around. And so it's easier to watch movies now as a martial artist, because the style, the fashion, I guess, is to have realistic fight scenes. The best example is the movie Enough with Jennifer Lopez. She's a victim of, I think, domestic violence or an assault of some kind. And so to take back her power, she trains Krav Maga like it's part of the plot. And there's a part where she's attacked again, and she's shoved up against the wall being choked, and she does this maneuver. And I'm like, we train that! That's Krav Maga by the book. 

Do you sometimes use film to help people learn certain moves?

They don't show clips, but a lot of times, our sensei will mention, “XYZ movie,” and this is, like that move they do in there. John Wick is a big one. There's a lot of the gun and knife disarming techniques that we train in those. So we mention scenes in movies. But if we're going to talk about movies or show clips and movies to each other, it's usually stuff they've done poorly. 

A big part of Krav Maga is also throws, like throwing an opponent, flipping an opponent onto the ground, or over your shoulder or something like that. And so there's a lot of fight scenes in movies that do that, where they're throwing opponents off to the side. And something that training Krav has helped me with, helped me as a viewer of films, is, I always used to be so skeptical when if somebody was fighting, like a group of people, and a bad guy would rush at him and he would just kind of flip him and throw him, and then be ready for the next guy, and the other guy would just lay on the ground—like he didn't do anything. He just kind of flipped him onto the ground. He could fight. And then I got flipped onto the ground, and I learned how to flip people over and throw people over my shoulder and throw people over my hip and then I had to be the attacker so they could practice. And so I had to be thrown onto the ground. We train on on a padded, matted floor. But if I were on the concrete or a marble floor in a mall or something like that, I might have to lay there for a minute. I might have a cracked rib. You could, you could fracture your wrist going down like that. You have to know how to fall. And so we learn how to fall as part of our training. 

You have demonstrated Krav Maga a couple of times on campus at Colloquium. It's fighting in a different area; does that feel different than fighting in a dojo? 

Oh, yeah, I felt weird and out of place here. That's probably because I'm a faculty member here, and so there's a certain hat I wear, as you know, Dr Hays, Professor of English. And so being in this environment with my belt and getting sweaty and defending guns and defending knives, and in that environment, it did feel like a weird out of place experience. But that's good, I think, because if I'm going to be attacked, I'm probably not going to be in my dojo. I'm probably going to be here, or I might be at a grocery store, or I might be at a gas station or somewhere like that. Sometimes at the Dojo we have street clothes week, where we train in stuff we would be wearing to work, or stuff we would wear out, normally, because we train in comfortable workout clothes, leggings, or the boys wear shorts, and stuff like that. But on street clothes a week, we'll wear jeans and like a sweater and jewelry and something like that. 

Your doctorate was in studying children's literature, which is a relatively new field. When it comes to promoting it, what would you say to encourage others to study Children's Lit?

As you mentioned, children's literature as an academic discipline is really new; it really got started in the 1960s and 70s. In the 1960s is when you could start taking courses on a college campus that were about studying children's literature, not from a teacher’s perspective, but as literature. In the 1970s is when you could get a degree in it. And there were departments, studying children's literature. So it is relatively new. And because of that, it is dismissed often like, well, “it's just kiddy lit, it's what kids read. It's children's literature. So it seems deceptively simple. There's this misunderstanding that it is simple stories, simple characters, simple themes. And I think anybody who's read children's books knows that that's not the case. It's not all simple. And so the reason why studying children's literature is so important, and why it deserves our scholarly attention, is because it is universal. It is the one genre of literature that everyone has read. It influences more people than any other genre of literature. It's the first time we learn of death and loss, the first time we learn about grief, the first time we learn of compassion and friendship, the first time we learn about taking care of something weaker than us, like an animal or a friend. All of these life lessons that we learned the first time we ever learned them is in a children's book. 

What’s a standalone text you would have someone read to understand what Children’s lit is about?

My instinct is to say Alice in Wonderland, because scholars who study children's literature, recognize Alice as a pivotal text. In Alice in Wonderland we had entertainment first, no lesson. If you take a lesson away, it was an accident. Now, Alice has social commentary. There's commentary on the education system, commentary on the system of government and the monarchy. There's all kinds of social commentary in the book, but as far as making sure the kid who reads it learns something from it, was not even a consideration. It was, Are the children who are reading this book? Do they get the jokes? Are they entertained? Did they have a fun time reading it? That was his goal. It was (Lewis) Carroll's goal. And so from then on, it's like he gave us permission that they would just find fun, right? That they would be entertained by what they would read: cute characters, or funny situations, or something really beautiful. Little pictures, whatever it is. And so Alice in Wonderland is by no means my favorite book or my favorite children's book, but it is the benchmark for what modern children's books are. 

It is often said that “a good children’s story is something adults can enjoy too.” What do you think are necessary elements for a good children’s story? 

So, yeah, C.S. Lewis said that. C.S. Lewis said, “any children's book that is enjoyed only by children is a bad children's book.” And so by that definition, if a story is one-dimensional in theme and tone and character, on a simplified one-dimensional level that a small child would be entertained by it, at least temporarily. Yes, that's technically a children's book, but is if an adult cannot also glean some sort of wisdom from it, or some sort of amused, nostalgic entertainment from it, or really, if an adult can't establish a deep connection to any of the characters, then it's not a good children's book. That's kind of what he was getting at. And so I think the the the elements that go into it, we've kind of fallen away from it now, because we are prioritizing goofy, silly characters who are doing shenanigans and, potty humor, things like that. But you have children's books, I would even say, like Diary of a Wimpy Kid, or the Magic School Bus. It's still fun, characters doing shenanigans, but the stakes are a little bit higher. The nostalgia for the adult reader is intact. There it comes from a place that's real. So I don't know that I would say a good children's book has the fill-in-the-blank bullet list of this kind of character, this kind of setting, this kind of plot, this kind of picture, it's more of an—I think you kids would say it's a vibe. It's a vibe, right of setting out to delight a child reader, while also amusing and making a nostalgic connection with an adult reader, and a good children's book can do both simultaneously. 

Fairy tales are a part of Children’s Literature and are often adapted and reimagined multiple times. What about these stories do you think makes people feel drawn to recreate them?

That's been happening as long as we've been as humans telling stories to each other. Where there's a kernel of a story that we connect to for whatever reason, and we want to hear it over and over, and that something about that does come from childhood, we want to hear our favorite book over and over. We want to watch our favorite movie over and over. And so that seems to be something that's human nature. There's an element of the story that we want to hear again. I think what we as readers want is a combination, a sweet spot, combination of familiar and novel like new, right? We want familiar, recognizable story patterns. We want familiar, recognizable characters. We want the comfort, a little bit of the predictability of it. But we also want to be surprised by new ideas.

Do you think there’s a point where a story has been reimagined too many times?

I don't think that there's such a thing as too many, because it really just depends on how well it's done. Is what you're adding to the character, adding to the story? Is it edifying to the whole? I think that readers and fans of these kinds of stories and characters are pretty quick to suss out when there's schlock, or when there's someone trying to ride the coattails of another artist, I think fans squash that pretty quickly. So I think usually what ends up making it to the top, rising to the top, is the cream. And so I think, I think the more the merrier, in my opinion, because a certain retelling of a story might not really have any sort of resonance with one viewer, but it really does with another.

Is there a text you would like to see reimagined more?

I would like to see a movie of the original tale Donkey Skin. Robin McKinley wrote a novel, a novel version, a reimagining, called Deer Skin. And I don't know that there's ever been a movie of it. It's in the same type of story family as Cinderella, but instead of the mother being the evil one, it’s the father who's the evil parent. And so that's a whole offshoot of Cinderella-type tales. And so I don't know that I've seen many like intentionally a film that's saying we're intentionally doing a Donkey Skin tale, or a Deer Skin adaptation, or tale. 

Who or what is your favorite children’s lit author or series?

 If I had to pick one, I should say John Green, because I wrote my dissertation about John Green, and so officially, I know the most about him and his books, and him as an author, but that's a really hard question. I have so many. My old, old loves are, well, my old, my oldest love of all time is Anne of Green Gables. When I was young, Anne of Green Gables and Little House on the Prairie. As a girl, I read them over and over and over. Then, when I got a little bit older, my absolute favorite author was C.S. Lewis. And so anything C.S. Lewis wrote, I was devouring it. I took a class on C.S. Lewis. In college, I taught a class about C.S. Lewis. So those are some of the nostalgic favorites that mean a lot to me. More recently, it would be in my scholarship era, is John Green. He's the author that I think has the best handle on the adolescent voice in literature, the most realistic depiction of it. It's a heightened depiction, but it's still realistic at the same time, which is really hard to do, a stylized realism of the modern American adolescent, and I think he's got it down better than anybody else.