Jeannine Atkins

Last week I went to UMass-Amherst to hear Sherman Alexie http://www.fallsapart.com/ talk about his books and life. He’s touring for his latest story collection, War Dances, so I’d heard about people leaving his talks dazed and full. I admired the two story collections I read, particularly The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, which my daughter’s smart friend Liz told me is one of the best books ever. I liked his award-winning YA novel, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian.

Sherman Alexie is not just a storyteller – speaking entirely without notes – but an actor – taking poses of his characters, mainly drawn from himself. He speaks and writes a lot about depression and alcoholism, usually with a dark humor. When asked about whether people should try to depict people outside their own race, color, and gender, Alexie said he used to insist that authors stick to what they know. “I’ve become less rigid about that,” he said. “But I still see truth there,” explaining that writing is like a house. You don’t want to stay on the first floor. You need to explore the basement and the attic, and it’s harder to get to those places when you’re writing much beyond your personal experience. “The trouble with writing outside your culture is that it mostly stays on one floor.”

He also said that the key to him becoming a successful person – a writer, and sober for about twenty years – was that his father read books. He noted that they weren’t literary books, but that having books in the house showed him a way beyond what he saw on the reservation. And he related this to why he tirades against Kindles and other e-readers. Books should be where children can see them, smell them, hold them. Screens are fine, Sherman Alexie said, for things like classes or sports journalism, but the book is a sacred object. Mixing everything together on one screen sets all writing as if equal and it’s not. People sometimes need to hold books as if totems that may change their lives.

I’m personally not so much against e-books. For one thing, aren’t trees sacred, too, and won’t e-books save some from being cut? And look what blogs do for books. Still I thought of his words while I walked in the woods the other day, and saw birch bark peel from trees. I grew up when it was common to play cowboys and Indians, mixing tribes at uneducated whim, bending green branches strung with string into bows, and pretending sticks were arrows. And I found bits of fallen birch bark to etch with what I called writing that no one could read. I remembered looking at those scratches as being sort of sacred, or too profound for me to ever understand.

What stories might be told on that bark? What stories are already there?

The book’s cover suggests the musical language and energy within, and of course the WWII period look and language. One of my favorite authors working with one of my favorite illustrators: I was excited and not disappointed. Marilyn Nelson chose to tell each poem from the point of view of an instrument that had been stored and given a new chance to speak. We hear a trumpet first feeling it’s a step down to be played by a woman instead of a man become jubilant to expand his range from marching tunes. The verse seems less grounded in imagery than Nelson’s other work, but more in sound. There’s a lot of repletion as there is in a song, and that helps capture the thumping beat of many. Sometimes the poems are about music, while others turn philosophical, addressing the role of music in wartime and whether something done for “fun” can be an instrument of social change. We get lines such as: “It was Chattanooga Choo-Choo, but it was a prayer for peace,” and “Must beauty apologize for simple elegance?”

Poems are titled after songs, something Carole Boston Weatherford did in Becoming Billie Holiday, a life told through verse intended for older readers.

In notes at the back, Nelson and Pinkney tell how they made a pact to do something new in this book. For Nelson, it was the point of view and using triple meters to evoke the swing band, while Pinkney added collage to his usual gorgeous paintings. I love the way torn sheet music or maps and scraps of color add a lively and jazzy feeling to the red, yellow, sepia, and blue images of women playing music and dancing. There’s buzz about Jerry Pinkney getting the Caldecott for his nearly wordless Lion and the Mouse also out this year. It’s charming, but If I were awarding prizes from my kitchen, it would go to Sweethearts, which I think is livelier, and bigger in scope, drawing in and through history, and I love the way he depicts humans.

The book includes a chronology as well as the mentioned author and illustrator notes. I was happy to hear that Marilyn Nelson danced around the house as part of her process!

Even if you need more poetry today (and I know I do: I heard Sherman Alexie talk about poetry last night at UMass, but he didn’t read any) please visit poetry roundup at Wild Rose Reader http://wildrosereader.blogspot.com

I am loving this book by Sue Monk Kidd and Ann Kidd Taylor about mothers and daughters, bees and pomegranates, Greece and South Carolina, myth and ordinary life, with its strand of how Sue Monk Kidd came to write her first novel after having raised two children and built a career writing nonfiction. The Secret Lives of Bees is one of my favorite novels, the kind of book whose title you can mention in a group of women and hear contented sighs, as if someone was passing around a sleepy baby: the book goes right to your heart.

But for the first half of this memoir, I was more captivated by the chapters written by her daughter Ann, visiting Greece with her mother after graduating from college, and coping with depression as she wondered what in the world she’d do now. She is so candid about her uncertainty and questioning, the tightrope of being in a beautiful place while feeling some hollowness inside. And not all her moments are bleak. She can still enjoy a good meal, and make jokes, while facing a future that seems to have way too many gaps.

As the two writers alternate chapters, you see the distance between them, despite their love, as both struggle with a sense of being incomplete. Only the edges of revelation enter their conversation in the first half of the book. Must sadness be a private struggle? There’s the tension. Sue writes about being a young mother first left alone with her baby, and sobbing as she thought of all that might go wrong. Now, wondering what to say to her daughter, she’s aware of all that can go wrong in such a conversation. She waits.

They travel to Turkey and visit Ephesus where Sue remembers surprising herself five years earlier sending up a prayer to write a novel. After some time she took a class and wrote a story set in her childhood bedroom, where bees sometimes nested: honey dripped, and the walls hummed. Her instructor called the story interesting, with that tone that suggests: not at all. He called the story small. Sue put it away, but the memory came back as she stood in a garden, having just prayed before a statue of Mary, then stands still when a bee lands on her arm. She let it be. She knew her prayer had been answered. It was time to start her novel.

Blue Plate Special is a novel for mature teens told in the voices of three girls dealing with the beauty and difficulty of what they inherit. I began sinking into each girl’s separate story, and felt there was just enough discovery and action to keep me there, without feeling too torn as I began the next section about the life of a girl in another decade. I marveled at how Michelle enticed me to become absorbed in each distinctive and urgent voice, while deftly leading me to another. Gradually, gracefully, connecting themes and images came together.

Madeline’s life is shaped by first love, then huge disappointments, Desiree’s by careless parenting, and Ariel by family secrets. In various ways, these girls face the too realities of sexual and emotional coercion, violence, unplanned pregnancies, and rough mothering. We see ways these shape and scar, though there’s always hope for tenderness, fragile connections, hard-won wisdom, and courage, especially in the form of speaking up for oneself. Beautiful language also redeems, particularly for Desiree, whose sections are written in free verse.

I met Michelle Kwasney http://www.michelledkwasney.com years ago in the basement of the Hatfield MA library where I also first heard Jo Knowles jbknowles read her work. It’s been great to share cups of tea and an occasional celebratory glass of champagne – the miracle of manuscripts to books -- over the years. Blue Plate Special is generous, brilliant (okay so I like her) Michelle’s third novel, after BABY BLUE and ITCH (both Holt) and the first YA novel from Chronicle who did an amazing job in giving us a book we want to hold in our hands. The slightly wide pages offer a welcoming space for the three sections, and the paper seems particularly soft. The end papers are brilliant blue, and the cover evokes the theme – of broken pieces perhaps coming together, though never completely.

It’s not a read for those who seek escape, but I can imagine girls who desperately need reflections of themselves or friends reading this novel as if could save their lives. It might.For more information, to hear an excerpt of BLUE PLATE SPECIAL, or download reading group questions, go to:
http://www.chroniclebooks.com/index/main,book-info/store,kids/products_id,8242/path,2-13-116/title,Blue-Plate-Special/

Last Tuesday night was warm enough to enjoy sitting on steps waiting for my friend Margaret, watching people in actual droves head to John Green Hall to hear poetry. Back bents from the climb up Elm Street, intentness seared the autumn air. Mary Oliver did not disappoint her 2000 plus admirers. She read from several of her twenty-six books, along with some yet-to-be-published poems. There were a lot of ponds, otters, wild geese, pines, ferns, and, from her newest poems, an adored little dog. Afterward, my friend and I wondered if this was her first dog: the poems had that first romance air about them.



Mary Oliver talked some about the ethic that’s formed her life’s work: to pay attention, to be amazed, and to tell about it. She said that in her Provincetown home, people tease about what makes a good walk for Mary: she starts out in a small blaze, gradually slows down, then ends up standing perfectly still. And she introduced a poem telling of how an editor offered to publish it if she took out the word, “beautiful.” She said no. Many cheered this short story, but I kept my hands in my lap. Mary Oliver reveres the world and seems like a happy poet, words that don’t always go together. Fine, but I’m not always excited to find the word “beauty” in a poem any more than I’d think the poet would love a tree with such a sign hanging from a branch. I want to see what she sees, and make an assessment myself.

Well, one quibble, and why not join her in seeing a poet as a performing artist: one who performs admiration? What a pleasure to leave with many people looking radiant, and speaking of red birds and purple iris. Our local women’s colleges, Smith and Mount Holyoke, have a lovely tradition of pairing older alums with students, and, when I walked the packed sidewalks to my car, I expect it was this kind of match I witnessed between two young women by a white-haired women with a cane keeping out of the crowd. The three women stood on a lawn bending their heads for a good view of the moon.


It's Poetry Friday! To read more blog posts about poetry or poems, visit Crossover http://crossoverbooks.blogspot.com/2009/10/poetry-friday.html

Jumping off Swings by Jo Knowles (Candlewick, Sept 2009) shows the drama of an unplanned pregnancy and how it affects a variety of friends. The novel feels true to teen life, with its sometimes awkwardness, brutal inattention, sloppy mistakes, kindness, tenderness, and longing.
I admired how deftly and deeply the four points of view were handled. The characters do things that are wise and not so much, but they’re all rounded; no one slides into extremes of good or evil.

Reading, I both wanted to keep turning pages and to take time to ponder, and this is the kind of book which offers readers both the need to find out what happens and to reflect. It made me think about lucky friends and family who will read this together and talk.

There’s nothing much better than loving a book written by someone you love. Years ago, Jo jbknowles read eight manuscript pages from this in the basement of the Hatfield, Mass. Library where two long tables were pushed together, and we sat on folding chairs around. The rattly humidifier was turned off, but still I leaned in to catch the soft voice. Which wavered, but just a bit. Jo kept on. We all were pretty sure she would keep on. And of course she did. Continuing to knock people out – in the best, gentlest ways.

This collection of mother-daughter poems (Christy Ottaviano Books/Henry Holt) is the newest work from Hope Anita Smith, whose other books,The Way a Door Closes and Keeping the Night Watch, also tell family stories through poems. The first third or so of Mother Poems seem to emphasize rhythm more than the later ones, using it to lull us into the ease of love between a small girl and her mother. They ring as confidently as the voice of a young girl who is certain she is treasured. They describe episodes that are ordinary, but they take away your breath because you know what’s coming. A girl tries on her mother’s shoes, echoes her hand-on-hips stance: and we know that soon she’ll have to figure out what a woman can be without a mother to guide her.

Then the safety breaks, and the narrator wakes to a changed world. We’re kept snug within her point of view, not getting many answers, just as the girl didn’t, but tried to read expressions on the faces of adults. Perhaps this was the beginning of a poet.

The rest of the poems are about the unnamed girl putting together pieces of old stories and her broken self, trying to make a complicated world whole. There are encounters with other mothers and daughters that include envy, desire, and a sense of danger. Couldn’t she be the good and grateful daughter? No. Getting through Mother’s Day alone. Replaying the last words. The deals made, like trying to be perfect. The hazards of and necessity of memory. Wondering it it’s disloyal to enjoy another woman’s cooking. And finally a new mother whose words she examines with suspicion, but the woman brushes past, opening her arms, looking with eyes that “say it all --/Stop searching for evidence to convict me./I did it./I love you.”

Hope Anita Smith created the torn-paper collages that illustrate the poems. The ripped edges echo the often-torn, rough-at-the-edges feeling of the narrator, but the way the pictures of mother and daughter often overlap, not letting you tell one arm or torso from another, beautifully shows their bond in brave, true, and bold strokes. The book ends with “Constructing Trees,” as the girl remembers how she and her mother put together a Christmas Tree. This poem sends us back to the first poems, just as the narrator returns to memories, savoring, examining, and using them to make something brilliant and new.




To read about other poems, please visit Sylvia Vardell's blog http://poetryforchildren.blogspot.com/

In Mary Pearson’s latest novel, due in stores soon, four teenagers take a trip that’s about finding home. They talk their way through rough-edged memories into closer friendship. Secrets peek in and out of sight, adding to the drama of where will they stop next? There’s the thrill of wondering if there can ever truly be one fair day, a little romance, wishes, loneliness, and a touch of magic. In other words, THE MILES BETWEEN is a wonderful read.

This ARC (advanced reader’s copy; the cover has since been changed to the one above) has already whipped back and forth across the country a few times. Melodye newport2newport just showed it a good time at a county fair in Orange County. We’re quieter here in western Massachusetts.

Not much more than a thousand people live in our town. We’ve got a great school, library, and post office, but that’s about it. No coffee shop, no movie theater, not even a general store. But we have an enormous milk bottle, which visitors beg to see. Or at least we drag them there for photo ops. The book doesn’t show up too well, but I guess that points out how huge this milk bottle is! (in the caring hands of a walking buddy, Jeanne, who as a retired librarian knows how to hold a book with care.) Quonquont Farm is still around, but selling berries and apples; the cows have all gone. Back in the 1930’s, I think, you could buy ice cream from a little door that opens in the back. Now you can get the ice cream only at our Fall Festival.



I introduced this ARC to the one that thrillingly just showed up at my house (though Borrowed Names won’t morph into a book until spring 2010; Mary’s The Miles Between will be out this fall).



Okay, it’s no county fair with corn dogs and cotton candy, but I took the ARC out for a drink and discussion of children’s literature with friends who oohed and ahhed. Here it is enjoying an evening on the Deck with (from the left) teacher Tiphareth Ananda, writers Ellen Wittlinger, me, and Peg Davol (seated on the right), and librarians Nancy Brady and Mia Cabana. I don’t think it minded that we talked about her sisters, Mary’s widely acclaimed novel, The Adoration of Jenna Fox, and my favorite, A Room on Lorelei Street.



You too can win a chance to have The Miles Between visit your home by commenting below. If you win this chance to be one of the book's first readers, you’ll need to post some pictures of the ARC in your hometown on your blog, or, if you don’t blog, send a picture or two to Mary to post on hers marypearson where you’ll find the simple rules. If you’re not registered on Live Journal, you can post anonymously and write in your name and how to reach you by email (please write “AT” instead of the fancy a thing and I’ll figure it out). Contest is open until Wednesday, July 29, midnight PST. Please enter! This ARC wants to see a bit more of the country before it’s sent back to Mary’s editor in NYC at the beginning of September!

A wide swing over the blue Pacific, then we flew over craggy brown mountains, then arid red-brown plains, some broken by crooked rivers. Usually I like an aisle seat, where I can stand and stretch at will, but I was glad that hadn’t worked out as I watched puffy clouds and their puffy shadows over land where I can’t imagine a soul. The father who sat beside me and behind his wife and two small children dozed or read the paper. By the time the view changed to straight highways breaking up the green, now and then a tiny pale brown hand poked from between the seats in front of us. Sometimes the small fingers just wiggled hello. “Papa!” Sometimes they contained offerings of a packet of applesauce or Oreos passed between son and father.

I had a hefty carryon with not only a laptop, but also the thick paperback of New Moon that my daughter said I could probably finish between the coasts, and, “Really Mom, you teach children’s literature. Don’t you want to read what most of your students read?” She has a point. When I took a break from teen vampires, I pulled out the even thicker novel that my husband recommended. Drood by Dan Simmons is based on the life of Charles Dickens in his later years and evokes a seamier side of nineteenth century London. It’s narrated by rival-friend novelist Wilkie Collins, whose habit of drinking laudanum by the glassful, (an opiate usually prescribed as a drop or two) makes him a unreliable narrator, thought he’s fascinating, too. I learned that Dickens might be credited for popularizing turkey over goose for Christmas dinner. I made my way through a few hundred pages before I wanted a break from the London underworld. I didn’t need a glittering vampire, but could I have a garden or something pleasant, or even a female voice? Dickens’s wife, exiled for a few complaints after bearing ten children who survived, too many who didn’t, and spending about twenty years pregnant or lactating is treated sympathetically – but is never on stage. Nor, at least yet, is Ellen Ternan, the young actress who took her place. It reminded me of how every character needs a presence, at least some dialog from time to time, or their shadowiness will grate. This is something I’ve got to work on in my own revision.

I read a short piece in last Sunday’s New York Times about Mary Oliver, well known for her poems depicting that natural wonders of Provincetown on Cape Cod. She speaks of haunting the woods and ponds, where there is always inspiration. After once getting stuck without a pencil, she has since hidden pencils in the trees.

I made it home safely, where I plan to spend the rest of the summer admiring orange day lilies and daisies blooming in my yard, swimming in the local pond, and finishing up my book. Happy travels to friends going to ALA or elsewhere!

I’m happy NASA is reaching out to get more kids interested in space. All are invited to vote to name the new rover that will be sent to explore the red planet. Just click here by March 29.
http://www.popgadget.net/2009/03/more_on_the_mar.php
NASA teamed with Disney for the contest, and, while the wonderful WALL-E is prominent on the site, I’m sorry to say the results came in as less than creative. As a name for the rover, Amelia is not up against other pilots such as, for instance, Jackie Cochran, the most prize-winning woman pilot, or Shannon Lucid, who’s spent more time in space than any other American, or Anne Lindbergh, maybe the most talented prose-writing pilot, or any male pilots. It’s Amelia versus ho-hum abstract nouns.

I think things were more exciting in the 1990s, when a contest was held to name the first Mars rover, built by a team managed by Donna Shirley at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Twelve-year-old Valerie Ambroise won the contest with her essay on Sojourner Truth, with Marie Curie, Judith Resnick, and Sacajewea as runner-up names. http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/MPF/rover/name.html



I wish there were other names, like some of those you’ll find in my book, Wings and Rockets: The Story of Women in Air and Space.



Or Tanya Lee Stone’s new book, Almost Astronauts, which I look forward to reading.



I especially want to get Tanya’s update on Jerrie Cobb, who trained as an astronaut in the early 1960’s before NASA leaders had second thoughts about putting a woman in space. Jerrie made the best of it, spending around thirty years piloting food and medical necessities into villages in South America, but certainly part of her heart was broken. She still dreams of a chance to see the world from outer space. I really wish at least her name was heading toward the stars.

On Sunday afternoon I met my friend Burleigh Muten at the Jones Library to hear Barbara Dana http://www.barbaradana.com/ read her new novel for teens: A Voice of Her Own: Becoming Emily Dickinson. It was fascinating to learn about Barbara Dana’s process for the book which took about ten years to research and write, and to hear her read passages that sent us back in time and seem true to the young poet. That’s a lot of years to spend on a book, but Barbara seemed to hold no regrets. She said Emily would now be with her for the rest of her life, as was Joan of Arc, the subject of an earlier book. That’s good company.



Her research, she said, included talking with Dickinson scholars, a few of whom were in the audience. As a researcher, she first tries to find out everything she can, then, as a novelist, uses her imagination to fill in places where no record was left. She worked to get the voice right partly by playing tapes of Julie Harris reading Dickinson’s poems and letters over and over, while driving, doing dishes, or walking the dog, sometimes listening closely, other times letting the words be background to something else. Barbara acts as well as writes, and spoke of how she brings her acting into her writing process. Drawing from an exercise taught by drama teacher Uta Hagen, Barbara researches and considers aspects of clothing, habits, morals, language, buildings special to an era, then equally considers all the elements of a life that don’t change because of time and place. As an actor and writer, she tries to bring that experience-in-common to the specifics of another person.

She spent long times in archives, as well as walking through her bedroom and garden. In the special collections at Amherst College she saw Emily’s old Latin book and a lock of hair.
She spoke of being introduced to Emily Dickinson and her work by seeing Julie Harris in The Belle of Amherst on Broadway. This summer, Barbara will perform that one-woman play for that Emily Dickinson International Society conference in Regina, Canada.

I look forward to reading the novel, which covers the time when Emily was nine to twenty-four. It is beautifully produced with a sepia toned cover, and reddish tones in both Emily’s hair and the fur of her beloved Newfoundland, Carlo.

April, Poetry Month, is going to be filled with other great Emily Dickinson events as Amherst celebrates its 250th anniversary and participates in The Big Read. For more information, check outhttp://www.emilydickinsonmuseum.org/events.html

The talk was also co-sponsored by http://www.EmilyDickinsonMuseum.org as well as the Jones Library in Amherst, Mass. one of my favorite spots on earth. But I’d never been in the beautiful Trustees Room on the third floor. Here’s a shot I took of one corner, with a mummy case that enchanted me but is apparently not so universally beloved. A librarian told me that it had been made to stash cassettes and was one of those gifts no one quite knew what to do with. Anyone need a mummy case?

On this sunny, cold Sunday, my husband suggested taking a ride to New Hampshire. We hiked around Madame Sherri’s castle http://www.chesterfieldoutdoors.com/plands/sherri.html relics left from the home of a costume designer for the Zigfield Follies back in the roaring twenties. Or something like that. There’s a lot of myth and gossip around her. http://americanhistory.suite101.com/article.cfm/vermonts_madame_sherri We saw a smooth frozen pond:



and this:





Especially for my pals in California, here’s what’s so very cool, or not, in footwear in New England. At least I could navigate hard snow and ice wearing L.L. Bean with pull-on ice cleats.





Then, on to civilization, at its peak: The Toadstool Bookshop in Keene, N.H. http://www.toadbooks.com/NASApp/store/IndexJsp. Here’s what I left with:



A nature-loving student, Anne, first brought this picture book by M. T. Anderson and illustrated by Kevin Hawkes to my attention, and I’ve recommended it to others since. Me, All Alone, at the End of the World pairs perfectly with an essay M.T. Anderson published in the Horn Book a few years ago about his childhood spent in nature and imagination. I snatched it off the bargain table. Megan Schliesman of CCBC gave a riveting synopsis of the Printz Award winning Jellicoe Road (a novel within a novel always intrigues me) at the Wisconsin Reading Association last week. Kelly kellyrfineman wrote that I must read Toys Go Out and its sequel, so I will. At last. And The Worcester Review features articles about Robert Cormier, which I’ll read before passing it on to Jo jbknowles who I know adores him. I already learned that in the Leominster, Mass. Library where he was trustee for fifteen years, there’s now a diner-like booth, where teens can hang out, in the Robert Cormier Center for Young Adults, more commonly called “The Bob.”

As if all this wasn’t enough fun, driving back, I started musing about the never-ideal title of the novel I’ve been revising. Swapping words with my husband, I hit on a title that made him not go, um, no, or make some wisecrack. In fact he almost shouted, “Write that down!” (as my daughter knows, this is rare). Sorry I can’t write this cool title because I want to live with the sweetness before someone maybe bursts my bubble. Right now, slapping on a good new title is giving me the energy to finish the thing, or this round of it.

I remember the first time after my daughter was reading on her own, and had left behind most picture books, that I went to the children’s department in the Jones Library and chose a small armful of books. I felt sneaky as I approached the desk. Could I really check these out without a small child at my side, or one waiting at home? It seemed I could. And today this remains one of favorite places. Right up there with lattes for a pick-me-up. The kind librarians ask about my daughter in college as they check out my wide slim books. No explanations, no apologies. Often they’ve read some themselves, and not to their grandchildren.

You might not have the pleasure of a child’s company, but that shouldn’t keep you from the pleasures of picture books. A biographical one often gives me just enough information about someone: I’m not keen on thick biographies that spend the first chapters on ancestors. I recently read The Road to Oz: Twists, Turns, Bumps, and Triumphs in the Life of L. Frank Baum, Kathleen Krull’s http://www.kathleenkrull.com/ picture book biography, and learned something, though I’d read other short biographies of him. I admired the way she structured this book about a man who took some decades to find his calling. Illustrator Kevin Hawkes made the book very very emerald, and put echoes from the author’s childhood rose garden into Oz.



Since I love this genre, (and adding to Becky’s beckylevine lists), another picture book I just read was Before John was a Jazz Giant by Carole Boston Weatherford http://www.caroleweatherford.com/ illustrated by Sean Quails, and which just received a Corretta Scott King Honor from ALA. While Krull, who specializes in amazing biographies (my daughter was raised a bit on The Lives of the Artists, Writers, etc.) works by accumulating fascinating details, this book is short and swingy, a riff, while the afterword I expect has a bigger word count than the text. If you love rhythm you’ll love this book. Here’s page one: “Before John was a jazz giant, he heard steam engines whistling past, Cousin Mary giggling at jitterbuggers, and Bojangles tap-dancing in the picture show.” There’s some music on every page, with words and Sean Quail’s http://altpick.com/spot/alko/index.php whimsical, lively paintings, with bubbles and dashes and zigzags indicating sound.



Aside from learning about people, I like the way picture books offer the pleasure of narrative, the sweep and elegance of a clear beginning, middle and end, and often give the attention to language of poetry. When I taught children’s literature last fall, some of my college students were delighted to discover their library had shelves of books with pictures. Books about mischievous monkeys, well dressed penguins, George,Madeline, Madlenka, Tango, and Angelina Ballerina. One student began to use that section of the library as a place to escape stresses, a fantastic idea. Brevity, brilliance, often humor. What's not to like?

This picture book won a New Voices Award Honor from Lee and Low, for Zetta Elliott’s first picture book. The illustrator, Shadra Strickland, just won the John Steptoe Award for new talent. It’s a beautiful book about a boy using art to try to make sense of the deaths of his guiding-light grandfather and an older brother who escaped into drugs. A lot happens; we get a complicated family between these slim covers, and despite the bleakness, the boy’s love of the world shines through. The boy nicknamed Bird loves birds for their colors and flight. Strickland conveys the huge role of art in his life by using line drawings to show him drawing, and pulling out another world from what on the surface is happening around him, depicted in watercolors and gouache.


Zetta Ellitot’s just-out novel A Wish After Midnight, a time travel novel in which a fifteen girl goes from the present day to Civil War era Brooklyn, can be ordered from her website. http://www.zettaelliott.com/

Thanks, lovely Jama jamarattigan for passing on the kreativ blogger award!



Since Jama is such a lover of picture books – I, too, think they’re the heart of children’s literature, though other genres are wonderful, too – and because Becky beckylevine recently asked for recommendations of good books about picture books, I’m writing about seven favorites. American Picturebooks from Noah’s Ark to The Beast Within by Barbara Bader is a hefty tome with brilliant studies of and pictures from books that have stood the test of time. You may have read Bader’s articles in the Horn Book.

For views of people working in the field more currently, I couldn’t choose between two slender colorful books by Leonard S. Marcus, who is our go-to person for following the industry, and perhaps best known for his biography of Margaret Wise Brown and the collected letters of Ursula Nordstrom, which every children’s writer should read for its humor and insight. But I digress – there are so many books! Marcus’s Side by Side: Five Favorite Picture-Book Teams Go to Work emphasizes wonderful collaborators, and shows more picture books for older readers, perhaps because getting information right was part of the collaboration. A Caldecott Celebration: Six Artists and Their Paths to the Caldecott Medal is also filled with great nuggets from interviews and gorgeous illustrations. I always bring in this book when I teach to show Maurice Sendak’s dummy for Where the Wild Things Are, which was originally Where the Wild Horses Are, until Sendak conceded he wasn’t so great at drawing horses.



I blogged about Show and Tell by Dilys Evans (Chronicle) a while ago, and while it emphasizes art, you get a feel for ways great picture books combine words and pictures.



Writing with Pictures by Uri Shulevitz, who won a Caldecott honor yesterday, puts forth more plainly the work behind a book. Bringing authors and illustrators together is Writing and Illustrating Children’s Books for Publication: Two Perspectives by Berthe Amoss and Eric Suben (Writer’s Digest Book) is one I’ve had around for a long time and may be dated in some ways, but not in the essentials. It’s easy to read and practical, including exercises and checklists, but also inspiring anecdotes.

Finally, Inside Picture Books by Ellen Handler Spitz, published by Yale University, offers an overview and analysis of classics. I love this book, which is the only one listed that’s entirely writing. The voice is lovely and honest and pulls you right in. I didn’t always agree with Spitz’s conclusions, but I loved following her there, and it’s particularly good on what makes a book compelling to some of the youngest picture book readers, those who perch on laps.

If you dare to call a novel Everything Beautiful in the World (Farrar,Straus and Giroux), the prose had better be good. Fortunately, the voice, imagery, and structure of this debut novel by Lisa Levchuk are elegant, and point a way for seventeen-year-old Edna to get beyond the fear she lives with since her mother was diagnosed with late-stage cancer. The voice is punchy, cool, and vulnerable all at once. Edna is both distant and all there as she steps into shaky territory with her good-looking and married art teacher. The mother stays mostly out of view, but I felt the perpetual force of her illness. I liked the very short chapters with titles like “Western Civilization,” “The Cold Chair,” “Heaven,” and “The Living Room.” Even while Edna could look to herself and to others like someone in control, I felt uncertain about where she was going. And the last line of the novel is one of the best I’ve ever read.

I've been waiting for this book since it was written by my daughter's beloved high school English teacher. Both my daughter and her former teacher are so cool they haven't been screaming about it or anything. But I'm not so cool and am thrilled to pieces.

Saturday I went with Peg Davol to the Keene State College Children’s Literature Festival.
http://www.keene.edu/clf/festival.cfm I enjoyed listening to Carolyn Coman talk, especially about her earlier darker work, though I respect the need she expressed to explore and live with a lighter part of herself these days. I got to say hello to Jerry Pinkney and tell him how much I loved the illustration he did for the story I wrote about Woodrow Wilson in Our White House: Looking In, Looking Out. I got to shake his strong hand. Fangirl moment.

And before a talk that didn’t interest me as much, I slipped out to walk to the wonderful Toadstool Bookshop. There I found a book called Standing in the Light: My Life as a Pantheist by Sharman Apt Russell, who appears to be an environmentalist and scientist, too, which intrigued me. I’m not thinking of switching religions, but this is the tradition of the person I’m writing about who lived 3000 years ago. I’d been aware I’d been treating her world view too much on the surface, and I have to attempt to believe with her. If the moon and river is talking to her, for instance, I have to listen.

I brought this book and another to the counter, where the clerk said she’d bought it, and put it on her pile, and we had a brief talk about those piles.

“Oh, what is the book?” asked a woman beside me, winning my heart, as I, too, always want to know what books people are reading, talking about, or even putting in piles.



I showed her and said, “Who can resist reading about someone who believes she’s a bird?”

Apparently this woman could. Her smile turned stiff as she turned away, but not before I noticed she was holding “Badger’s Parting Gift.” It’s interesting how we let, even encourage, children to read about animals with active inner lives, then draw lines that suggest: time to grow up.

I vaguely remember being a child reading some already faded books by Thornton W. Burgess. His stories were filled with characters like Mother West Wind, Mrs. Grouse, Mr. Snake, Jack Squirrel, Hooty the Owl, and Grandfather Frog. Recently a friend brought up this author, and said she thought his work had gone out of fashion because of their use of talking animals who wear human clothes. I said that anthropomorphism is not out of fashion, except maybe with “your people,” meaning conservationists, which wasn’t a very nice phrase and took no account of all the trees, frogs, vernal pools etc. my dear friend has saved in her day (not to mention all the treats she gives my dogs and advice she gives me).

I just meant that everyone, even naturalists, have got to check our vigilante leanings. You could wipe out a whole lot of literature if you nixed animals who talk. I wouldn’t want to do without best friends Frog and Toad, or Toot and Puddle, or Jane Dyer’s sweet works, the hungry, hungry caterpillar, Winnie-the-Pooh, Thoreau as a bear and a pigeon who wants to drive a school bus. Beatrix Potter’s work seems timeless. I’m fond of Kevin Henke’s little mouse Lily, and Angelina Ballerina, not so much of Ian Falconer’s Olivia. As the saying goes, whether or not we want talking animals in a book depends on what they say.

Anthropomorphism has its benefits: you don’t have to necessarily distinguish the gender, though many artists do; race isn’t an issue, so children of all colors can identify with the characters; age isn’t important, so pigs, hippos, etc. get to do both childlike and adult things without raising eyebrows. In his autobiography, Burgess adds another reason. “The animal story, because of the psychological factor involve, the intuitive feeling of superiority on the part of the child, is the most effective form of story.” (Now I Remember, p. 337) So is it that children feel a bit above some of the foolishness they find in humanized animal?

What matters is that anthropomorphism be done well, and I went back to Burgess to see. The adventures seemed generally ho hum, the lessons stagy. It’s not the talking animals that let Burgess’s books go out of print, after a long life most of us would envy, but that their dialogue isn’t quite distinctive enough, and perhaps even their animal nature not animal-y enough. I’m afraid I found the stories about as goofy or run-of-the-mill as the names of the characters (except for Mother West Wind, I’m holding her dear).

The flat prose is not altogether surprising considering that Burgess wrote over 70 books and 15,000 stories. Just in case anyone out there was feeling prolific. He wrote six stories a week for a newspaper at one point in his life. He said he often knocked out a story in half an hour, dictating to a secretary, and that he never rewrote. He gives us a formula: “One fact, a liberal amount of imagination with truth, a moral lesson, plenty of good action, adventure or lively dialogue, humor or pathos as desired, sometimes both, and a reasonable amount of simple English.” (p.218)

He doesn’t claim they were grand art, though he is pretty proud and hastens to list admirers including Teddy Roosevelt. I’d say the stories have had their day, but it’s kind of nice that many are still available on the shelves of my local library, with pages bent and yellowed. I think what I like best is their setting – not remarkable, but speaking of an era, or to children who still, plain old play in the woods. Most of us who write about nature in any kind of way for children hope to inspire wonder before endangered planet themes. What I like in Burgess is that he takes a step back even more. Nature is there, but also silliness and magic. I think his stories appealed to children like me who made little porches on stones and thrones on moss, where the woods were part of a kingdom where real squirrels play with elves and fairy queens.

My friend Pat’s cold kept her from having chemo this week, but the good news is she feels well enough to have lunch with me and see The Secret Life of Bees today. The movie is based on a novel she lent me, and that we both love, about the power of sisters, mothers, and friends, in all their various shapes. It’s a dream come true for me to see the movie with a friend who’s been like a sister to me with another good friend, Mary Beth.

The novel’s author, Sue Monk Kidd, http://www.suemonkkidd.com/Reflections.aspx inspires me. The Secret Life of Bees in set in 1964, back when I was in fourth grade and wore white gloves to church, at least on Easter, or at least when I could find them. Other memories from that year include being shot down at the spelling bee while Mrs. Shaw had the class chant r-E-c-E- IVE. I must have missed the day she taught that chant, but now I can’t spell that word without it in my mind. Then there were the multiplication tables, after which life got better.

My friend Pat grew up outside of Detroit, and an African American woman named Anna helped her mom care for her and her slew of Irish Catholic sisters. When an older sister got married, Pat remembers someone telling her father that Anna was not welcome in their church. Pat’s father said… something… and Anna sat in the front row with the family. Slowly, things do change.

The leaves are falling, but I’ll see some great colors as I drive. Yesterday I took both dogs, the good and the not-so-good, but cute, for a walk. Here they are, kindly, and uncharacteristically, posing.

I've spent the past few days mostly in my writing cave, wrestling with blank pages that I made a little prettier or at least un-blank. Maybe the quiet days made me feel especially primed to be social, or maybe it was just the wonderful people that Michele Barker got together as part of a mini tour for some of the debut novelists of the Class of 2K8 classof2k8. While they were in western Massachusetts to talk about some of the many people it takes to put out one book, Michele arranged a lunch where some other readers and writers, including me, Melissa Stewart http://www.melissa-stewart.com, D. Dina Freedman d_dina_friedman and Nancy Castaldo naturespeak joined them to talk about writing and marketing. I took a picture of the Class of 2k8 members present, and their books. I hope to write a bit about these shiny new books, all aimed for teens, in the upcoming weeks; we’ll see how organized and un-backlogged my reading can get. And how much my white paper wants to talk back to me. Meanwhile, I’m happy to have made a few new LJ friends! (we were all saying how great this place is).

Here is, from left: M.P. Barker mpbarker, Marissa Doyle marissa_doyle, Ellen Boordem, Courtney Sheinmel courtneywrites, and N.A. Nelson lucky_life.



And -- yay! -- their first novels! (which I so cleverly lined up in order to match the faces)