All I do when I walk through NYC is look at the windows in shops — not just during the holidays, but year-round. Which is why seeing this window at Books of Wonder (thanks, Heather Ross!) just makes me super giddy.
It’s Picture Book Month, and that means writers and readers are celebrating picture books with exhibits, class and skype visits. But mostly, people are celebrating by reading, which is the best way to celebrate anything. Over at the Picture Book Month International, authors and illustrators like Jerry Pinkney, Aaron Becker and Deborah Heiligman are talking about why picture books are important.
And because it’s Poetry Friday, I’m dusting off that part of my brain and adding my two cents (or sense?) in verse…
Pages
Picture books are Look! Look!
They are Again.
They are the stories you tell yourself
when your alphabet is still
a jumble of shapes
and P comes after U.
They are hours on a shag rug.
They are Where the Wild Things Are.
Picture books are castles and mermaids and underpants.
They are hungry pigeons and purple crayons.
They are the start of a new day
and the end of an old one.
They are almost ready for bed.
They are Just one more?
They are Yes.
Poetry Friday this week is hosted by Random Noodling. Be sure to check out the round up!
I’m also throwing out the Kinks’ song Picture Book, just because I love it so. (They’re really talking photo albums, of course, but I’m co-opting it anyway.)
Can you remember the first time you saw yourself in a book?
For me, it was when I read All-of-a-Kind Family by Sydney Taylor. The book was about five sisters living during the Depression. I had a little brother and was living in the 1970s. They wore starched petticoats and I wore flowery bell bottoms that got caught in the spokes of my bicycle. But I read that book and thought they’re just like me. Because the girls were Jewish and they loved to read. I’d read about girls who liked to read before, of course, but I hadn’t read about Jewish girls. They were quite religious, while my family was not. It didn’t matter. I felt like I was looking in a mirror. I had a place in the world, and that purple-covered book became the most dog-earred one in my collection.
All of this is why I want to make sure everyone knows about the We Need Diverse Books campaign, currently on indiegogo. They are currently three-fourths of the way to their goal of $100,000. Money will be used to diversify classrooms, support diverse authors and programming, and more. In other words, it will be used to help make sure kids see themselves in the literature that’s out there. Check out the videos, including one from John Green: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/we-need-diverse-books
While I’m here, I wanted to mention All-of-a-Kind Family was a series, but save the original, the rest have been out of print these past few years. I found this out when I decided my daughter needed a better copy of All-of-a-Kind Family Downtown since mine had lost the cover. The only one I could find was on eBay for $45. But they’re back! Lizzie Skurnick Books reissued the books this summer. I ordered them right away. But I still have my dog-earred copies, too. Even the one without the cover.
When did you first see yourself in a book?
I’d mentioned research in a recent post. Sometimes, I can’t stop, even after the book is already written. In honor of How to Behave at a Tea Party, for instance, I forced my family to accompany me to this beautiful spot to see how tea was made.
The Charleston Tea Plantation (formerly a potato farm) uses plants that have been cultivated in this country for generations, though the plantation itself didn’t come into being until the 1960s.
Our big takeaway: I always thought there were different types of tea bushes to make green tea and black tea. It turns out, it’s all a matter of how long you let the tea “rest.” Green tea leaves barely have time to sit. Black tea spends more time on the withering table. I’m including some photos here.
Bonus: free tea in the lobby, hot or cold! Julia would have been quite happy there.
Entrance to plantation
Withering Bed
When people think of writers researching stories, they often think of nonfiction. But writers research fiction, too. Details —like the way it feels to cast a fishing rod or do a loop on a roller coaster — need to be right for a fictional story to seem real. For Canary in the Coal Mine, I did research by visiting exhibition mines, walking the streets of Charleston, exploring an old company store, and listening in the dark.
For Nanny X, which is out today from Holiday House Books, I ate.
My main task was to figure out which smelled and tasted worse: a peanut-butter and sardine sandwich or peanut-butter and anchovies.
Which smells worse?
I should begin by saying I have a history with sardines. In my post-college years, one of my housemates liked to make himself a snack of sardines and feta cheese, which he claimed tasted delicious. But my other housemate and I could tell what he’d been eating, long after the evidence was gone. The smell lingered. In the end, we either banned it from the house or made him eat it outside on the porch. So my bet, in the anchovy-sardine competition was definitely on the sardines.
But while the sardine smell did turn out to be stronger, my crew and I decided there was something more disturbing about the anchovies. In a taste test, we all thought the sardines tasted better. The anchovies made us gag. Which means the anchovies won the place of honor on Nanny X’s sandwich. We lined them up on the peanut butter, just so.
And then we closed the sandwich and took a bite. I will spare my test subjects the humiliation of displaying their spitting photographs here. But below is my tentative taste test.
Verdict: BLECH.
When we try out new food items, we have a list of things we consider when we give those food items a proper review.
Appeal: Doesn’t look as awful as you might think.
Texture: Not so bad. We eat peanut sauce with Asian food so there is half a chance peanut butter might be okay with fish.
Taste: (Insert barfing noises here.)
Would you eat this again? No thanks.
Just one bite
“GUH.”
