Walter Dean Myers, whom Jon Scieszka called a cross between “Darth Vader and Pat the Bunny,” was inducted yesterday as the new ambassador of children’s literature. The event was held in the Library of Congress’ Thomas Jefferson Building. (That’s the building you’ll see pictured in the dictionary next to “hallowed halls.”)
Here’s a quick snapshot of Myers with previous ambassadors Scieszka and Katherine Paterson, all looking at someone else’s camera, taken from far away and without a flash. And yet I still managed to give them red-eye!
Okay, so I’m not a photographer. That’s still a lot of awesome in one place, no?
Myers’ platform for his two-year term is “Reading isn’t optional.”
And saving the world. And world peace. Which would both require an element of reading, I think — of children’s books in particular.
You want to know what else could encourage readers, aside from the writings of our ambassadors, past and present?
That’s right: Cookies!
My friend Rachael took this picture of me as fangirl. I wasn’t planning to go the fangirl route, actually, opting instead to catch up with friends and try the food at the Museum of the American Indian’s cafe. But I’m not above wanting to impress my kids.
In our family, we give each of the eight nights of Hanukkah a different theme.
There’s Giving Night and Sock Night (a remnant from my childhood and still not the kids’ favorite, even though I found socks with clone troopers on them.) There’s Book Night (big score for me this year — we took a family trip to Politics and Prose and each picked out a book, including the parents. I got the Annotated Phantom Tollbooth.) But my favorite night is always Make-It Night (not as risque as it sounds) where what you give is what you make. I’ve sewn skirts and Darth Maul cloaks and Harry Potter yarmulkes. This year, I relied upon The Star Wars Craft Book for inspiration. I admit these guys look a little more like Ewoks than Chewie, but I was happy with them anyway.
Well, hopefully more than 1,000. I’m in the final stages of revisions on my middle-grade novel, so I took a trip to Charleston, W.Va., over Thanksgiving to walk around my setting a bit more as I enter what I’m hoping is the home stretch.
One of my favorite blog challenges last year was the one on Tara Lazar’s site for Picture Book Idea Month. Thirty days, thirty ideas. I just looked at my list from last year and two that had seemed ridiculous at the time have aged surprisingly well.
There are many different types of bravery, and one type is imbued in the pages of Laurel Snyder’s Bigger than a Breadbox, set to be released on Sept. 27th. It’s a story about magic, primarily, but interwoven in that magic is the event that causes the need for the magic in the first place: her parents’ divorce. I say HER parents, though of course the story isn’t about Laurel, it’s about Rebecca. Only the divorce part is based on Laurel’s childhood, which is where the bravery comes in. To write this story she had to relive those my-parents-are-splitting-up days – the days where you feel like you’re living in an after-school special. And to write the story knowing that her parents were going to read it – and read into it? That was brave, people. And perhaps, for Laurel, necessary.
To help promote the book, Laurel asked for divorce stories from those of us whose parents divorced when we were at a vulnerable age, which is to say when we were anywhere between the ages of 1 and 70. I was in high school when my parents split up and I didn’t own a breadbox, magic or otherwise. I have stories, but I’m not brave enough to tell most of them, in part because I don’t want to go back there myself and in part because I don’t want my parents to have to go back there, either. So instead of opening the door, as Laurel did, I’m cracking a window.
Divorce has a color, in case you didn’t know that. For me that color was beige, the same color as my father’s new condo: the walls, the paintings, the chair, the couch, the linens. When my father remarried, he offered me his Divorce Furniture. It didn’t seem like the best omen, but I took it anyway. I covered the couch with the loudest slipcover I could find. I painted the dresser bright blue and added stars and moons, my own brand of exorcism.
The taste of my parents’ divorce: That would have to be Chinese food that caught fire in the oven because my father didn’t know you couldn’t put cardboard containers in there when you turned it up to broil.
A casualty of my parents’ divorce: My grades. RIP trigonometry, which was during the period when my usually together mother locked her keys in the car and needed me to bring her mine. Obviously, this happened more than once.
A benefit of my parents’ divorce: My friends started hanging out at my house again.
The sound of my parents’ divorce: The Police’s Synchronicity album, which, thank G-d, I was able to separate from the rest of their catalog. It was in huge rotation in the early 1980s, on every rock station. Only my father never let my brother and I listen to rock stations when he was driving, preferring, instead, the generic classical of WPVR. But in those early weeks after he and my mom separated, he decided that being a cool parent meant buying us Billy Idol cassettes and letting us listen to Rock 105.
“There’s a little black spot on the sun today.”
Things were going fine until Sting sang that it was his destiny to be the king of pain.
“That’s me,” my father said. “King of pain.” He stared straight ahead and gripped the steering wheel. He wept. I haven’t been able to listen to that album since. Even when Sting had moved on from pain to sing about lemmings and breathing, I was done.
Another sound of my parents divorce: Cards. When my parents told us, my brother and I sat on the floor of his bedroom and began playing War, even though we knew hearts, spades, poker and three kinds of rummy. But we needed something mindless, something that could go on forever, so I remember the flicking sounds the cards made as we pulled them from the deck and placed them on top of each other. Flick. Flick. Flick. It seemed sort of appropriate, war, because wasn’t that what our parents were having? Except they weren’t. They were “growing apart.” That was their line. They stuck to it and I knew it was true, long before they even mentioned the word “divorce.”
That’s it for me. You can get plenty more from Laurel on her blog, in Breadbox, and here and now, as she stops by in her frantic week before publication to answer a few questions.
Me: You’ve talked a lot about wanting this book to be able to help kids grapple with their parents’ divorce. Which books helped you? Laurel: I don’t remember a specific book that addressed divorce in a way I could believe. But the books that helped me most with that time were books about loner kids. Harriet the Spy and The Egypt Game, Wrinkle in Time and Dicey’s Song (which I seem to keep bringing up lately). Books that showed me I could be okay on my own made me feel like I could be okay with my family in a new formation.
My friend Wendy Shang wrote once (in her blog? on Facebook?) about how psyched she was when she got her first ISBN number. I totally understood what she was saying this week when I got my own. It came with a note from the Library of Congress, asking whether I’d also written a book called The Shadow of Descent under the name of Maddy Rosenberg.
“Nope,” I said, wondering if Maddy had a grandmother like mine. “Not me.”
I thought Shadow of Descent sounded like it might be either a bodice ripper or a spy novel, neither of which is my thing, but I looked it up right away because I’ve been curious about other Madelyn Rosenbergs (although she could be a Madison) ever since I corresponded with an incredibly cool one from Seattle on myspace.
Anyway, it turned out that this Maddy Rosenberg’s work was not a bodice ripper, but this intricate art book. Her website contains more like it, along with some of her paintings. I especially liked her series on Brooklyn Brownstones.
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First week of school, I loathe thee.
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Wisdom of the ages: When you’re supposed to be working on a novel revision the best thing to do, clearly, is to become your daughter’s soccer coach.
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I had to change a line in a picture book this week to allow the artist to use a different color paint. The line had been one that I’ve always liked, but I think I like the new line I came up with even better. Still, tomatoes and floral chintz, I will miss you.
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Rain, rain, go AWAY.
You know, for kids:
Today is the book birthday for Darth Paper Strikes Back, an Origami Yoda Book by Tom Angleberger. In our house, this has been the most highly anticipated book of the summer. We got a hold of a British release (thank you Generous Benefactor) in July and my children took a solemn oath not to reveal anything about it. On his reading sheet for the library, under “what did you think of the book?” my son wrote: TOP SECRET. (I’ve been trying to teach him not to give away endings so in a way, this helped.) One secret that Tom revealed today on his blog: There will be another OY book after this one. The saga continues!
You know, for grown-ups (though not inappropriate for smaller ears):
I’m always blown away by what my poet-friends can do in so few words. In Jane Varley’s recent Sketches at the Naesti Bar, we get 19 poems that convey an expedition to Iceland — its landscape and geography, sure, but most of all, its people. Sketches, perhaps, but Jane’s evocative images remain fully fleshed out in my brain. Personal favorites: “Bjork and Bobby Fischer in Heaven,” “The Bells of Akureyri,” and “Thinking Practice.”
The Savages lived two houses down from us on our dead-end street in Blacksburg, Va. I never knew Lon Savage well because when you’re a kid, adults only seem to enter your life when they yell at you (the Savages didn’t), when they’re your teachers (the Savages weren’t), or when they give you Halloween candy (the Savages did; I don’t remember what they handed out, but I know it must have been decent because we never skipped their house).
The Savages’ kids were older than we were, so they were our babysitters rather than our friends. Ellen taught me how to draw pictures of girls with dark bangs and long dresses before she graduated from high school. Then she handed us down to her sister, who graduated and handed us down to her brother. Then we didn’t need babysitting anymore and eventually my parents moved away from our dead-end street. I ran into Lon Savage years later, after I had graduated from college and started working for The Roanoke Times. He had been a journalist, too, he told me, and I was finally old enough to wonder how the heck that could have possibly escaped me. He was also a historian, working with the Salem Museum in his retirement. But I didn’t know how good of a historian or journalist he was until this month.
I’d been doing some research for my middle-grade novel when I came across a book that had been cited in bibliography after bibliography: Thunder in the Mountains, the West Virginia Mine War, 1920-1921. The author? Lon Savage. The book was first written in the 1970s, when the Savages were in that green house just up the street, but it came out again in the early 1990s, with a forward by director/author John Sayles, who’d used it as a reference when he was filming Matewan.
I don’t know what I would have asked Lon Savage when I was 6 or 8 or 12. There are plenty of questions I’d have for him now, though, if he were still alive. But that’s the thing about a good book: Even when you’re gone, you can still grip people and surprise them and educate them; you can still answer questions, from a young girl or an old girl, because you wrote it all down. The bibliography for Thunder in the Mountains goes on for miles, so there’s plenty more reading I can do – suggestions and guidance from an old neighbor, who seems to have become one of my teachers after all.
I’ve decided that when I say “today on the couch” I sound too much like a therapist. Besides, Kelly Barnhill, another member of The Lindsay Situation*, doesn’t seem like the sort of person who sits still for very long. If we were running, she’d be too far ahead and my questions would come out in huffing, puffing spurts. So let’s pretend we JUST went running, and now we’re walking, and one of us is probably limping, and we’re talking to Kelly about her new, almost-out book, The Mostly True Story of Jack. (Though in truth you can talk to Kelly about more than her book; you can talk to her about just about anything and she’ll tell you exactly what she thinks in her passionate, poetic way. Follow her on Twitter at @kellybarnhill or check out her blog and you’ll see what I mean.)
You may have already heard about Jack (Little, Brown and Co), which has already received starred reviews from Booklist, Kirkus and Publishers Weekly. The book’s officially coming out next week, although people who have preordered it seem to be getting it this week. It’s the story of a boy who seems to be mostly invisible, until he goes to a small town in Iowa and finds that he isn’t. He finds other things in Iowa, too: a strange house, eccentric relatives, best friends. People in Hazeltown, Iowa are interested in Jack. Some are a little too interested. And the reasons? You’ll have to find out those for yourself. The story is part mystery, part fairy tale, all good.
Me:Growing up, what were some of your favorite books?
Kelly: The books I loved as a child were not the books I read. They were the books I listened to. I was a bit of a delayed reader, but I absolutely adored anything read out loud. I had a Fisher Price record player that was all my own – a big deal in a family with five children. I had purchased it with my own money at a garage sale and wouldn’t let any of my siblings touch it. I had Treasure Island and Kidnapped and Oliver Twist and Call it Courage on old records, and I listened to them over and over and over. Also, my dad read to us every night – Grimm’s Fairy Tales and The Lord of the Rings and Great Expectations and The Chronicles of Narnia. As far as the books that made me into a reader, I was never the same after I read The Borrowers, and later The Five Children and It. And I’ve been a reader ever since. Me:You mention in the acknowledgements (I have a thing for acknowledgements and yours made me all teary and bleary) that your dad had you given you Tolkein’s essay “On Faerie-Stories.” Talk a little about how that shaped your writing.
Kelly: One of the things that I love about about that essay is the assertion that the experience of the fairy-story is, at its heart, an earthy experience. Their aesthetic is rooted in the sensory information of the natural world. Fairy-stories require a consistence with the natural and a certain rationality, while still insisting on a vigorousness of vision and an insistence towards the beyond. But what kills me most of all is the language of fairy tales. In his essay, Tolkien says, “It was in fairy-stories that I first divined the potency of the words, and the wonder of things, such as stone, and wood, and iron; tree and grass; house and fire; bread and wine.” And it’s like that for me too – the ordinary achieves a sense of wonder and magic, not in spite of its ordinariness, but because of it.
Me:Where did Jack come from, and when did he come from?
Kelly: Jack came to me while I was running. This happens a lot, actually. I go running most mornings at six o’clock when the kids don’t have school, and shortly after I get them out the door when school is in session. And I spend a lot of time spinning sentences in my head or investigating images as I run. One day, I got a picture of a boy sitting in the back seat of a rental car as he and his mother drove across Iowa. The landscape intrigued me, of course, because Iowa is terribly intriguing. The swell and ripple of green. The air thick with growing. But the boy. I couldn’t look away from him. He was a terribly singular fellow, out of place and lonely. And I had to know what his story was.
From Kathy, whose Mockingbird won the National Book Award last year, we have The Absolute Value of Mike, where a 14-year-old boy with a math learning disability learns that he has other abilities that more than make up for it. The story is played out in a Pennsylvania town where Scrapple is king and the townspeople — Mike’s relatives among them — are about as quirky as they come.
To welcome Kathy’s new book, which was released on June 9, I thought I’d play you:
Erica’s book, When Life Gives You OJ, is out TODAY, TODAY, TODAY. The book, features Zelly Fried, 11 years old and trying to fit in a strange new world in Vermont. A dog, she thinks, could make everything right. And then she meets OJ, the practice dog her grandfather gives her, which, yep, is really an orange juice container.
To welcome this new book from the creator of Chicken Butt (I’ve always wanted to say that) I thought I’d play you the Monkees’ I’m Gonna Buy Me a Dog.
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Erica’s trailer for this book is wonderful, so I thought I’d link to that as well.
