Jeannine Atkins

In my usual step behind fashion, I’m getting around to a fun challenge posted by Becky Levine beckylevine a while back. She took a picture of a stack of books she’d compiled for research on her historical novel, inspired by two even taller stacks of books that Susan Taylor Brown susanwrites had posted. If you want to play, please join us (and no one’s in a rush here.)



I’m writing about ancient Iraq, or what the Greeks called Mesopotamia c. 2400 B.C. and am starting to get pretty comfortable there. (In my mind: no time or space trips planned.) I’ve always loved the Time-Life books for research; I think it was the Web that made these wide photo-packed books stop being produced, which is a shame. The longer essays include more than most web clips and the bigger pictures are more haunting. After checking out a few from the library many times, I decided to buy the three favorites at the bottom from used bookstores, and the musty smell of one only adds to my pleasure. Yes, call me research geek. The pictures of round-eyed statues, votives, and clay tablets printed with cuneiform script are inspirational.

I’ve also read some of the texts of the time – poetry and stories in their first written form. Much of it is not too my taste – I like the moon and everything, but how many ways to praise it? What I like is the thought of characters who do. So here are chants and tales to be reread. And on top of my stack I put a few of my favorite volumes of biographical verse, because I’m working with that as well as prose. I love Marilyn Nelson’s Carver: A Life in Poems, Natasha Tretheway’s Native Guard, and Annie Boutelle's Becoming Bone: Poems on the Life of Celia Thaxter, though, of course, these poems take place in entirely different periods.

My husband liked the photo, but said I should have stacked them in the shape of a temple. A ziggurat, I corrected: the five or seven storied buildings with a temple at the top where priests and priestesses worshipped the sun and moon.

That’s where – sort of – I’m heading now. But if you have a minute, for one of the coolest things ever, you can write your name and see it transcribed to cuneiform. http://www.upennmuseum.com/cuneiform.cgi Please, don’t think I was complaining about the internet when I was raving about Time-Life books! We want it all!

There I was a week or so ago blogging about being on the last stretch of a revision. I finished –yay! – but due to some family drama, my drop off at the post office felt quiet and unceremonious. Still, I’ll take any belated wish-my-little-manuscript-well pleas anyone cares to offer up.

So what next? I’ve resurrected notes on one of my beloved women from history, known, then pretty much forgotten. That pattern. I tried to present her life first as a picture book, but editors found it a bit too foreign and too much information crammed in. They weren’t convinced a picture book could be made featuring someone whose name gets jumbled in your mouth. They were mostly right (I’m not sure about that name thing..). A year ago I wrote out the story as a chapter book, then left it to tend to other projects. Now I’m seeing the book as a combination of poetry and prose, for while I want to keep the pace moving, the words spare, the subject matter is more appropriate for older readers. Why not blend some genres?

Last night my husband asked what I was working on.
“A book about Enheduanna.”
“Remind me who she was,” he said.
“Another obscure woman.”
“But not for long,” he said. (bless this man) “I can’t wait to wear my Enheduanna T-shirt.”

This morning it’s snowing like mad. Chickadees flutter near as I come around to knock snow off the feeder. I love how they let me feel like a Disney princess, even if they don’t quite land on my wrist. It’s sad around here after taking my daughter to the airport last night, back for spring semester. She could be slipping on flip flops for her first class while I brushed off my boots. I drank coffee and ate oatmeal while reading gossip from magazines E. left behind, then made notes for the classes I’ll soon start teaching, and waited to hear what books the ALA committees named as prize winners.

Like most of my reading and writing friends, my tables are covered with beloved books that deserved to win a big award, but didn’t, along with some that did -- like The Poet Slave of Cuba: A Biography of Juan Francisco Manzano. Margarita Engle just won the Pura Belpré Author Award for this book.Yay! I put the book down last night after a second reading that caught me more in its spell than the first, as the best poetry often does, opening up its pleasures and insights.

I love the way the verse cuts the shape of a life, moving forward the sometimes wrenching, sometimes beautiful, story of a slave who fights for freedom, finds and creates hope. Some biographies bog down in detail. I know I’ve been put off from reading about a life after slogging through first chapters of great-grandfathers and great-great-aunts. Why do biographers do that? And even if you skip ahead, there’s sometimes too much extraneous this-and-that; just because a biographer found out something, must she put it in?

There’s no room for that in a verse biography, and here, not a word is wasted as Engle blends fact with her imagination. From her notes at the back, it seems she read Juan Francisco Manzano’s poems and accounts of his life as boy, man, slave, tailor, painter, pastry chef , and poet – whose work inspired people to fight for freedom. She mused until she felt haunted, and wrote these poems.

Like Marilyn Nelson’s wonderful biographical verse, Carver, or Stephanie Hemphill’s Your Own, Sylvia: A Verse Portrait of Sylvia Plath, which just won a Printz honor (another yay!), the poems are told from different points of view, and the speaker’s name gives the title of each poem. Juan’s goodness stands out against some of the rough, the occasionally sweet, nuanced voices of those who meet, use, betray, or admire him. The details are wonderful. His mother crushed eggshells to make powder for a slave-owner who aspired to look pale. A slave-owner showed off the boy, Juan, who memorized what he could barely understand, while keeping his true thoughts apart, trying to scratch them in leaves. Settings are vivid: the garden with its mangos, orchids, jasmine, and lime, and the cellar, with its chains. Sean Quails’s black and white illustrations are also moving in their starkness, fitting the mood and place.

Congratulations, Margarita Engle! Hurray for so elegantly blending biography and verse, hardship and hope.