The Holiday Season Rolls On

Posted

At our house we’re equal-opportunity revelers. We throw ourselves into not just Halloween, Christmas and the 4th of July, but Hanukah, Mardi Gras, Chinese New Year and the Hindi ritual for brothers and sisters. Nevermind that we’re not Jewish, Catholic, Chinese or Hindi; we’re not even Louisianan, and the closest thing to brothers around here are our two male cats.
 
Still, anytime our girls hear a hint of observed merriment out there in the world, they’re compelled to bring it home and embrace it. They wouldn’t dare let so much as a solstice pass without hauling home a stack of appropriate library books, hanging banners on the front door, making cards and gifts for neighbors, and helping us turn dinner into a thematic commemoration of the day at hand.
 
Some of the appeal, no doubt, lies in the holiday bootie. I mean, who wouldn’t want a big old hunk of King Cake, or a dish of candied almonds, or a thin, red envelope with a crisp dollar bill inside?
 
And then there’s the equally attractive notion of ritual. There is something so satisfying in gestures, words, food and music that are more symbolic than literal in nature. There’s no logical necessity for ritual, and that’s the beauty of it. It answers to our deeper, more mysterious needs for reverence and recognition of all that we find most exquisite and important in the world. Ritual is poetry off the page.
 
Kids aren’t immune to this pull. The opposite, in fact. Toddlers often want an almost liturgical refrain running through their days – cuddle, eat, rough-house, read books, cuddle, eat, rough-house, read books, cuddle, eat.
 
Life itself is so stunning, popping, fresh and new; ritual grounds a kid. Even an ordinary family dinner can accomplish that, so when you add candles, place cards, and a Sanskrit chant or an Indian dessert, you’ve got everyone at the table truly present and connected.
 
But here’s where it gets interesting at our house. While these ceremonies help settle us into ourselves, they also serve to transport us completely. It’s partly through this holiday smorgasbord buffet that our kids are becoming world travelers. Nothing – outside of real air-miles and books – takes us so completely into other countries, cultures and communities.
 
This morning, putting away a stack of CDs we’d been using to celebrate African American history month, I couldn’t help but wonder what it would be like if more folks (world leaders, say) truly understood each other’s customs and values and traditions – embodied them, even. Can’t you just see the guys at the G8 summit, singing, snacking and making brotherly bracelets for each other?
 
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m gonna go get a good look at March, and her holidays, on the kitchen calendar.

Tid Bits

Posted

Children’s author Cynthia Leitich Smith is back up and running on Blogger — phew!! — and her new baby Tantalize has hit the shelves! 

Visit her and take a peek at the fun interview we did together a couple of weeks ago, too.

The 11th Carnival of Children’s Literature is up at Mother Reader. My January piece on Empty Baskets is included, as is a lot of other rich reading.

Mary Lee, over at A Year in Reading took my utensil post from a few weeks ago and ran with it! She’s got egg slicers, chopsticks and whisks, oh my! 

There are also strong posts by both Mary Lee and Franki on the whole Newbery issue. (I especially love, “Teaching is not for sissies!”)

What took my little family so long to plunge into the world of BabyMouse?
Elder daughter read this graphic-novel-for-girls three times within the first week, each time with more vivid expression and hilarity! 

I’ve never totally understood the format, which probably qualifies me as a square, but my husband is a major TinTin fan and I think I may become a convert now that we’re all up in arms about Felicia Furrypaws over here. 

All for now…

Poetry Friday — Mary Oliver

Posted

And speaking of “noticers”, a belated Valentine goes out to Mary Oliver – 
beloved poet, queen of noticing.
 

Oliver sees “great hands of light…” and “clear pebbles of rain…” and “the broken cupboard of the clam…”
 
She asks, “How does any of us live in this world?”
She asks, “What is the name of the deep breath I would take over and over for all of us?”
She asks the fire to “put on its red hat and sing …”
 
Her poems pay attention to mushrooms and geese and the tongues of toads, to music and to stars. 

They behold, she beholds:

 
How blue is the sea, how blue is the sky,
how blue and tiny and redeemable everything is, even you…

The Noticers

Posted

Yesterday, the mail brought a packet of appreciations from 50-some kindergartners I visited with recently. We’d spent a morning reading A Sock is a Pocket and exploring my Writer’s Vest, (a.k.a. khaki fishing vest stuffed with pens, shells, tea bags and other little trappings of the trade).
 
Each time I share this book, there’s a moment when kids get it, the whole pocket-metaphor thing. And when they do, they practically have to sit on their hands to keep from levitating with ideas.
 
I love when that happens, partly because that’s how the writing of this manuscript was for me. Once the concept stuck in my craw, I could not look at socks or bowls or caves or breaths in the same old way. Everything became a vessel for something else. I swear to you, it’s an addictive little game, kind of like UNO only you don’t need a deck of cards.
 
One of the teachers, whose note accompanied the childrens’ yesterday, wrote, “They could not stop thinking about pockets all day!” She added a half-smiley face and a “thank you” tinged with tiredness and the teensiest bit of irony, like I’d introduced them to pure-sugar pixie sticks or something.
 
But really, there is nothing more gratifying than when kids are at their most uninhibited – both energized and attentive – so completely connected to their experience that you can almost see new synapses being clicked on.
 
I think it is this wakefulness that we’re most afraid of losing to standardization – and rightly so. Kids need to be players, co-creators, in their own learning. And when they are, they come up with gems like these:
 
Your body is a pocket for your bones.
 
A tree is a pocket for a scared cat.
 
The past is a pocket for a dragon.
 
Fresh, vivid metaphor. From kindergartners, mind you.
 
There’s been an awful lot of discussion in this country lately about who are the “deciders.” But it seems to me there is something more fundamental than decision-making. First, there is awareness, perception, taking note. Before any dotted lines are signed or buttons pushed, there is (there should be) a time for absorption, for paying very close attention

I’m making it a habit to ask kids like these kindergartners to be good “noticers,” because I think if they are – if we all are – the decision-making will become a little more organic, a little more intuitive, a little more right.

 
 

Cynsations Displaced

Posted

In a dark cyber-twist on things, KidLit champion Cynthia Leitich Smith has been blocked out of blogger right before the debut of her new novel Tantalize hits the shelves. Is that a bum rap, or what? 

For those of you who like to keep up on all her news, views and interviews, she’s currently “guest blogging” at Greg Leitich Smith’s site  http://www.greglsblog.blogspot.com/

which is syndicated for Live Journal at

http://greglsblog.livejournal.com/

Today, there’s a good interview up with Marian Hale, author of the new Dark Water Rising (Henry Holt, 2006). 
I like what she says about the importance of loving what you do, even the revision parts:

“Look at each revision as another chance to bring more clarity, to make some part of your story touch your reader more deeply and hopefully linger long after your book is back on the shelf.”

Makes it all seem like less of a slog when you put it that way, doesn’t it?

Poetry Friday: Skipping Rope

Posted

 
This morning I picked up a new jump-rope for my youngest, as a birthday surprise.
 
She turns six in just a few days, which makes her old enough to skip, hop and jump; count past 100 ; and rhyme in time. All of which makes me trip over the lump in my throat.
 
There’s just something about six that is so… kid-like. Y’know?
 
She moves around these days in a mighty body. She plunks her feet on her handlebars and steers her bike downhill. She performs acrobats on her bunkbed ladder. At school, her only disappointment is when a swing isn’t available at recess.
 
Meanwhile, clever witticisms burst forth like little exhales. Her dad and sister and I are her happy, captive audience and granted, we’re biased, but she’s funny!
 
Thus, the jump-rope – the perfect synthesis of physical vigor and brainy vim.
 
Here are a few skipping rope rhymes to get her started. She can make up the rest herself. Sigh.
 
 
Red hot pepper 
in the pot –
gotta get over 
what the leader’s got.
10… 20… 30… 40 …..
 
 
Two little dickie birds sittin’ on the wall
One named Peter, one named Paul
Fly away, Peter, fly away, Paul
Don’t you come back ’till your birthday’s called 
January…February…March…
Fly away, fly away, fly away all.
 
 
Raspberry, strawberry, apple jam tart.
Tell me the name of your sweet heart.
A… B… C…
Ice-cream soda, lemonade punch.
What is the name of your honeybunch?
A… B… C…
 
 
I might just have to give that rope a whirl myself. 
See if I can get all the way to W, in honor of the birthday girl. 
Happy Birthday, Honeybunch.

Author’s Interview

Posted

I’m honored to have been interviewed by the lovely and talented Cynthia Leitich Smith (author of many good reads, including the upcoming Tantalize http://www.amazon.com/Tantalize-Cynthia-Leitich-Smith/dp/0763627917/sr=8-1/qid=1170959828/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/102-8343462-8780968?ie=UTF8&s=books)

So walk, don’t run to the newstand at the corner (whoops, that’s another era I’ve been immersed in lately)… 

These days, you can stay seated and catch me rambling on about writing and reading at:
http://cynthialeitichsmith.blogspot.com/

Thanks, Cynthia, for including me in your illustrious list of interviewees. Grateful and flattered…

Unsinkable Molly

Posted

 
Vivid columnist Molly Ivins died last week, too young, after battling breast cancer three long times. I’ve been meaning to write about her for days, but the thing about Molly Ivins dying is that it can render you speechless.
 
I mean, really, what’s to say about a voice that was so dang good at speaking up for herself, and for all the rest of us? And when I say us, I mean everyone who needed a little hoist up onto the old soapbox. The women and children, the artistic and illiterate, the black and brown, the broke and beaten, the neighbors and nations a long ways away. Us.
 
Molly Ivins was wicked funny and deeply thoughtful at the same time – a capacity I admire more than any other, I think.
 
Where plenty of funny folk use humour as an escape ‘chute (and who can blame ‘em), Molly used it to plot a direct path in deeper to whatever pesky, troublesome business was at hand.
 
And where plenty of deep intellectuals and well-intended political thinkers are solemn (and self-important) enough to shut our receptors down, Molly cracked jokes to keep us on our toes. Hers was a single-handed call-to-action; a plan you wanted in on.
 
And that’s the thing. Molly Ivins glowed and crackled, not unlike her sister-Texan Ann Richards (whom we also lost to cancer this year). These women politicized other women, they chastised apathetic youth, they shook up the steady center, they triggered movement – and movements. These were voices capable of lighting fires under just about anyone.
 
I had a grandmother like that – all full of intention and charisma. My husband once said of her, “Mame is the only person I know who makes you feel lucky when she asks you to do her a favor.” If you get a whole family or a whole readership or a whole constituency feeling that way, stuff is gonna get done.  
 
Molly Ivins moved on with that charge in her wake. In her last column, in which she pushes a populist crusade to end the war in Iraq, she says, “Think of something to make the ridiculous look ridiculous.” It’s a call to Shakespeare’s fools, to the emperor’s tailors, to us. Hone your rapier wit. Git ‘er done.

Poetry Friday — Basho

Posted

I love haiku, and not for the same reason some of my students do (i.e. they’re super short and you can pull one out in a pinch just before class).

I love them because of how pure they are, how evocative and complete, in so spare a frame. 

I love the implicit connection they make between the natural world and, well, everything. 

I love that they remind us, as poets, to be attentive to each and every word, every sound, every connotation.

Basho and the Fox, by Tim Myers and illustrated by Oki S. Han is a lovely little picture book about the great haiku artist and his relationship with a rascally fox, but also his relationship to his work. 
(http://www.amazon.com/Basho-Fox-Tim-Myers/dp/0761451900/sr=8-1/qid=1170420520/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/102-8343462-8780968?ie=UTF8&s=books)

The very idea that the dramatic conflict is the constant striving to write a better poem! Isn’t that delicious? 

Myers grapples with all sorts of abstractions — the muse, revision, patronage, and writing a poem for its own sake — with humour and, dare I say, suspense. 

My girls love the trickster and the struggle to Get It Right. 

I love the reminder that our best work “flows into (us) and out of (us)” and that all the effort in the world won’t impress a fox (or an editor or the madding crowds) unless the act of creation is that natural, that inevitable, even. 

Like the moon blooming
or a deep breath, in and out
words take their places. 

Books and Spoons

Posted

Recently around our dinner table, we discussed the relative merits of forks, spoons and knives. 

Which are most useful? Most dangerous? Most breakable? Which would you want if you were lost in the wilderness? Which are most portable or smoothest on the teeth?

 
(I know, I know. But we’d been iced in for days. Cabin fever does damaging things to the rational mind.)
 
Our conclusions:
 
The side of a fork cuts… tines stab… flat slats scoop. Very versatile.
 
A knife cuts and stabs and pokes and slices. Especially good in the wilderness.
 
A spoon? A spoon shines like a mirror or a moon.
A spoon – little egg-shaped puddle-keeper – scoops and dips and pours and drips.
Versatility and disaster preparedness aside, none is prettier than a spoon.
 
(When just one person at the table orders a ramekin of warm crème brulèe, the rest of us ask for extra spoons. Right?)
 
 
Naturally, this got me thinking about books. About what we want to read, about why, when and where we want to read them. (Remember the cabin fever? It spared none of us…)
 
So, drum roll please, here are my own literary utensils:
 
My Forks (versatile enough for airplanes or waiting rooms, beaches or bedtime):
  • Short story anthologies (preferably with some Alice Munro, Annie Proulx and Jim Harrison)
  • The summer fiction issue of the New Yorker
  • An episodic novel or two, to be read in fits and starts if necessary (maybe Willa Cather’s Death Comes to the Archbishop and the new Black Swan Green by David Mitchell)
My Knives (books I wouldn’t want to get caught in the wild without):
  • A few meaty classics (The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy, Fagles’ translation of The Odyssey, and something by both Dickens and Austen)
  • Some humour (Essays by David Sedaris, poetry by Billy Collins and maybe a Tom Robbins novel or two)
  • Some wilderness reading (Thoreau, Annie Dillard, Edward Abbey)  
My Spoons (pure pleasure)
  • Beautiful poetry (by Mary Oliver, William Stafford, Louise Gluck, Marie Howe, Jane Kenyon, Dickinson, Whitman, Basho. How many am I allowed to pick?)
  • Beautiful picture books (by Cynthia Rylant, Patricia Polacco, Maurice Sendek, Peter H. Reynolds, Jane Yolen. I can’t stop!!!)
Really, wouldn’t it be torture to have to work with one single utensil for the rest of your days? (And I haven’t even gone into my chopsticks here, or egg slicers!)
 
Choose shmoose. I like the versatile, the capable and the pretty, myself. A well-laid table. What about you?