Thank you to Two Writing Teachers for creating an amazing community of writers and a safe, welcoming space to write and share.
I surprised myself yesterday. There was no way I could write to the prompt of “slumber party games” by going through memory’s front door. The “slumber party memories” door is kept shut with a chair lodged under the knob.
So I had to find another way in. I looked for the farthest thing from my own reality, and came up with a mouse living in a (mostly) fictional woodpile.
Or at least I thought my character was far from my own reality. Instead, I found an very familiar introverted mouse living in my imagination. One who wishes for the things it seems like everyone else has, but who, in the end, is very happy with her own little life.
The Poetry Sisters’ challenge for February was to write a Valentine or love poem. A plethora of people, places, things, and ideas are objects of my affection. Why, then, was it so hard to pick one and write a poem?!? Thank you, Irish Breakfast Tea, for helping me crank out an eleventh hour haiku.
Here’s how the other Poetry Sisters met this month’s challenge:
I’m reading a poem or two a day from Jane Hirshfield’s new (2023) collection. I was initially thrilled, but then stumped by yesterday’s poem, so I thought I’d dig into it and see if I could make it make more sense.
I found a faint and blurry but printable copy on Google Books and went at it with colored pencils. Red is for questions, green is for words and phrases that seemed to resonate or repeat, and black is research notes.
If we’re going to do this the way Pádraig Ó Tuama does on Poetry Unbound, you should go to Google Books and read the poem for yourself before I start nattering on about what I think it might mean. I’ll wait.
Okay. Ready? You’ll see all my notes all at once, but I’ll try to recreate my thinking as I combed through the poem over and over again, doing more and more research about what happened in February 1991.
Even though I wasn’t sure about Tel Aviv, Baghdad, California or 1991, I was drawn into this poem because it is February right now and the narcissus (daffodils) are pushing up with great determination. So I started with the delight of spring happening and flowers opening all over the world “in their own time.” But fairly quickly, the poem opened up to include “nameless explosions,” “oil fires,” “missiles,” and “smoke.” These images were clearly referring to Tel Aviv and Baghdad, but they could just as well be from Gaza in 2023-24. Ouch. I read on, and the flowers were compared to children born “in that time and place” who would become “…what they would without choice, or with only / a little choice, perhaps…” (A stab in my heart with the connection to Palestinian children.) Then I was back to the flowers opening peacefully, but now Hirshfield added the earth opening “…because it was asked.” This line: “Again and again it was asked and earth opened” made me think of all the ways we’ve taken from the earth — mining, damming, paving, plowing, deforesting. And the earth cannot refuse. Hirshfield compares this to seabirds diving into the ocean, not refused, but rather welcomed so they can eat, and there was another stab in my heart: we take and take and take from the earth and she keeps giving and giving for our survival. And then Hirshfield lost me with that last line. So many questions!
After this first read-through, I did some research (notes in pencil at the top right, except for the starred note…that came later). Clearly, this poem is speaking to the Gulf War (specifically, Operation Desert Storm). So that explained Tel Aviv and Baghdad in the title. I wasn’t so sure about California in February 1991. There was the LA runway disaster but the Oakland fire I noted turned out to be in October. Maybe California was included for the local blooming of the narcissus.
I kept reading through and noting the contrast between spring / flowering / the inevitable rising of life versus violence / destruction / falling. I kept getting stuck on that last line. What did “As soon refuse” refer to? What was “battered and soaking?” Where did that rain come from? I went back to Google one more time, and…bingo. The headline from the LA Times on February 19, 1991 was the key that unlocked the ending: “Iraq Oil Fires Causing Showers of Black Rain.”
Now I understand that “As soon refuse” refers to the earth. The earth, with its own precise timing and its gifts of life, with its mirroring of human evils in the very flowers that bloom in spring, can as soon refuse our destruction of it, can as soon refuse to soak the “dark mahogany rain” of oil fires into its battered surface, as the ocean can refuse to allow seabirds to dive in.
What do you think? Would Jane Hirshfield agree with my thinking? Do you?
YOU BROKE IT! by Liana Finck Rise x Penguin Workshop, 2024 review copy from the public library
This is a very funny book and it made for an interesting research question, but you don’t need to buy it for your classroom or school library.
It was written/drawn by a cartoonist, so it should come as no surprise that the whole story consists of a series of sight gags — adult animals scolding their young for doing what they naturally do: a turtle moving slowly, a tornado making a mess, an earthwork squirming. Finally, the young octopus stands up for itself, the adult has an AH-HA moment, and all is made well with a multi-armed hug.
My research question was, “Who would think this is a funny book?” I took it to the after-school program where I work and tested four different audiences.
The director, a mom with grown children, thought it was funny. One of the classroom aids, a college-aged lad, didn’t think it was funny at all.
When the kids arrived after school, I tested it on a group consisting of two kindergarteners and a first grader. They were quick to use the cover and endpapers to infer that the adult bird was mad at someone who broke the egg. The adult bird didn’t break the egg, and the baby bird didn’t break the egg. Someone else broke the egg and this was going to be a book about Who Broke The Egg. So when the second spread featured an earthworm, they were thrown for a loop. However, some very good inferring ensued: “I’m not sure what squirming means,” said the first grader, “but I think it might mean wiggling.”
Besides the inferring, some surprising background knowledge was revealed. Eventually they realized that the adult animals were probably parents, and because the tornado was wearing a bowtie, it was a dad. When we turned the page to the frog, the first grader refused to choose between mom and dad. “I think the frog is non-binary.” Then, concerned, she asked me, “Do you know what non-binary means?”
“Yes, I know what that means.”
“Good,” she said, turning to the kindergarteners. “Do you want me to explain what non-binary means?”
I quickly intervened, “Let’s save that conversation for later.”
Final verdict from the K/1 crew: not a funny book. It didn’t even answer the question of Who Broke It?
My next group consisted of two third graders and a first grader, all in gifted/enrichment programs at school. On the first page turn after the bird and chick (worm and wormlet), one of the third graders exclaimed, “Oh, I get it! This is going to be a book about grownups yelling at kids for doing what they naturally do!” Every page turn after that was met with a chorus of “…because that’s what we’re SUPPOSED to do!” At the pony page (“Get the hair out of your eyes!”) I stopped and asked if adults had ever said any of these things to them. And indeed, they had been told (“a million times”) to get the hair out of their eyes, or hurry up, or settle down.
Final verdict from the 1/3 crew: a very funny book.
Everything we know about the development of children’s ability to move beyond the literal and understand humor was confirmed. There also seems to be a component of experience that determines whether this book is funny. The 1/3 crew is still in the phase of life where adults are correcting their behavior on a regular basis. The college lad is well-removed from that, but hasn’t had the experience of being on the parental end of those corrections. The mom with grownup kids has the lived experience of this book.
So, who should buy this book, since lots of kids are either not going to get it, or not going to pick up a book that consists of a series of corrections they hear from the adults in their lives, with very little agency given to the young animals in each situation (except for the octopus fry)? Seems like a $20.00 baby shower card, given to remind new parents that kids will be kids, even though the “big idea blurb” on the back of the book has it the other way around: “Parents will be parents…”
Thank you to Two Writing Teachers for creating an amazing community of writers and a safe, welcoming space to write and share.
Thank you to Two Writing Teachers for creating an amazing community of writers and a safe, welcoming space to write and share.
I went downstairs to my studio intending to play around with some applique. My eyes fell on Great Grandmother’s quilt, folded on the back of the couch, waiting. I’ve been working intermittently (for a year!) on repairing one ring of hexagons in one flower of the “Grandmother’s Flower Garden” pattern. The fabric in that one ring had completely disintegrated.
“You’re not allowed to play until you finish repairing that quilt,” I told myself. “After all, the work of the repair is a kind of applique, or at least uses some of the same skills.” So I picked up my needle, ready to get to it.
The pieces I had previously replaced provide a snapshot of my learning. In other words, my stitching was progressing from embarrassingly awkward to somewhat tidy. Little did I know that when I picked up my needle I would find that my skills had taken a quantum leap forward.
Since the last time I worked on the quilt repair, I had taken Jo Avery’s online class in fabric book making. If you follow her on IG, you know she has a very distinctive style of applique, primarily stitching impressionistic birds and flowers. So I learned needle-turn applique from a master. Not only did I learn and practice the technique, but I began using the proper tools — a thin milliners needle and tiny smooth-headed applique pins.
When I picked up the needle to get started again, the first thing I realized was that I had been using an all-purpose embroidery needle, which was downright clunky compared to a milliners needle. And my long, flat-headed sewing pins were pulling puckers in the tiny hexagons that made it impossible to sew one to the next.
Fitting new hexagons into an already-completed and decades-old quilt is still tricky, fiddly work. But armed with better skills and the right tools, I feel ready to take this repair to the finish line. And I feel sure that the last hexagons in the circle will make the spirit of Great Grandmother proud of her descendant’s learning journey.
Shh…the Inklings are getting ready to whisper secrets to you. Our challenge this month came from Catherine, who borrowed a prompt from a list Molly shared with us. Unlike the Go-Gos, our lips are NOT sealed — we’ve written poems about secrets.
To help us write about secrets, we had this poem, “Family Secret” by Nancy Kuhl to use as a mentor text.
“When in Doubt” by Sandra Cisneros showed up mid-month in the Poetry Unbound podcast, and it seemed to be in conversation with my poem, which was written to answer the stem which became the title.
Here’s how the rest of the Inklings met Catherine’s challenge:
Thank you to Two Writing Teachers for creating an amazing community of writers and a safe, welcoming space to write and share.
I just finished Lisa Congdon’s 30-day challenge “Developing Your Visual Vocabulary: A Daily Practice in Mark Making” on CreativeBug.
She dropped a lot of big wisdom throughout the course.
This wisdom can inform mark making with colored pencils, watercolor, thread, or words on a page: the importance of practice, the acceptance (or even cultivation) of wonkiness (she used the word “wonky” a LOT and it made me love her even more every time), and the development of your own particular VOICE.
Throughout the course, I’ve often copied her lesson and then “riffed” on it by trying it with watercolor instead of colored pencil, or by combining lessons when I didn’t have the energy for a whole-page design.
Last night, I pulled out my watercolors and doodled. It was blobs of color with a stack of brush marks down the center. It was a journal entry of random “thoughts” made with marks rather than words. I knew I could do more with it, but I set it aside, as I often do with the entries in my writer’s notebook.
This morning, in Lisa’s final lesson, she invited us to “go big” on the biggest piece of paper we had using all the marks she had taught us. She modeled how she would set up her paper for an arial-view landscape, and then in time lapse, we watched her fill the whole page, first with watercolor in each section, and then with marks.
I opened my sketchbook to my blobs of watercolor from last night, and suddenly I could see a village in a valley across the road from mountains with wheat fields and high pastures tucked in between. Without looking back at any of the previous lessons, I chose my colors and made my marks.
There are such beautiful echoes between what happens in my writer’s notebook, my sketchbook, and the scraps of cloth where I test different threads and stitches — my “scrappy stitch book.” I’m glad I’ve taken the opportunity to slow down and listen to my own voice.
The photo above is a black swallowtail that was born in the fennel in our garden last summer, raised in the safety of our house, and released back into the garden when she (yes, that’s a female) emerged from her cocoon. Compare a real black swallowtail to the piñata version by Roberto Benavidez. Remarkable, isn’t it? Using “paper as the equivalent of paint” in a “fringe that flows,” Benavidez is able to capture the reality of a butterfly, the fantasy of mythical creatures, and nearly photographic landscapes.
If you want to know more about piñatas as well as about Roberto Benavidez and his art, you can watch this Craft In America episode on play. Piñatas are found at 12:16, and Roberto Benavidez is at 18:27.
Here’s how the other Poetry Sisters met this month’s challenge:
Thank you to Two Writing Teachers for creating an amazing community of writers and a safe, welcoming space to write and share.
Yesterday was one of the happiest days of the year: ALA Youth Media Award Day!
Back in 2006 when Franki and I started the original A Year of Reading blog, our main purpose was to have a public chat about books all year and then see who could pick the Newbery and Caldecott in January.
We have rarely been right, but along the way, we found ways to give each other grace. The winner was in your Amazon cart? That counts. On the stack beside your bed? Counts. On reserve from the library but hasn’t arrived yet? Definitely counts. And my new one this year — read halfway through but didn’t love it and abandoned it? Still counts.
For a retired person, I’m pretty proud of how many winners in different award categories I read: American Indian Youth Literature Awards (CONTENDERS and MASCOT), Coretta Scott King (BIG, THERE WAS A PARTY FOR LANGSTON, AN AMERICAN STORY), YALSA Award for Excellence in Nonfiction for Young Adults (NEARER MY FREEDOM), Pura Belpré (REMEMBERING, 1/2 of MEXIKID), Robert F. Sibert Informational Book Award (THE BOOK OF TURTLES, JUMPER [on hold at the library]), Caldecott (IN EVERY LIFE, THERE WAS A PARTY FOR LANGSTON, BIG), Newbery (1/2 of MEXIKID).
I’ve got the Newbery winner, THE EYES & THE IMPOSSIBLE by Dave Eggers on reserve at the library but rather than going back to fill in any other holes, I’m going to concentrate on reading all the best that 2024 has to offer.
Did you read some winners in 2023? What 2024s are already on your TBR stack?
A(nother) Year of Reading 