First off, I’m so excited to be sitting on this year’s Cybils Poetry Panel! I’ve done this duty one other time and it was a delight. I mean, really, how could it not be? Reading this year’s best books of poems for children and then talking about them with smart, wise, thoughtful, funny, passionate poem readers?Win win win all over the place.
And speaking of the Cybils Poetry Panel, our fearless leader — Kelly R. Fineman — has a poem featured in a new anthology called Breaking Waves. It’s downloadable and all proceeds go toward oil spill relief in the Gulf Coast. Thank goodness for that. Kelly’s poem closes out the collection (of poems, stories, essays and the like) and is particularly potent (no wonder) because she does not shy away from vigorous language or strong form or big ideas. Go get the anthology and you’ll see what I mean.
And speaking of big ideas, book banning isn’t one. It’s a small, small, fearful idea. Banned Books Week is coming up soon, making it a darned good time to buy those books, talk to your children about them, and just generally kick up a bit of a fuss.
And speaking of kicking up a fuss, I recently finished reading Mark Salzman’s True Notebooks: A Writer’s Year at Juvenile Hall. I loved it almost as much (but not quite) as Sam Swope’s I Am a Pencil, and if you haven’t read either of them, do. Together they illustrate and validate the powerful one-two punch that is self expression and being heard, read and received.
And speaking of being heard, read and received, I’m working my way happily back into blogsville these past few weeks — both as a reader and a writer and I sure do like it. Glad to have you all…
We got so much rain this week — I’ve never seen so much rain. It rained until the creeks spilled their banks and the roads washed out and the water mains broke and the trees lost limbs and the rocky cliffs crumbled. And then it rained a little more.
When weather is that epic in proportion, it’s hard not to assign it greater meaning, not to read it like tea leaves. Maybe there’s a message or a lesson or a story. Or maybe it’s just rain…
Black Rook in Rainy Weather
BY SYLVIA PLATH
On the stiff twig up there Hunches a wet black rook Arranging and rearranging its feathers in the rain. I do not expect a miracle Or an accident
To set the sight on fire In my eye, nor seek Any more in the desultory weather some design, But let spotted leaves fall as they fall, Without ceremony, or portent.
I just had the loveliest morning with a friend, talking about teaching. Well, O.K. Full disclosure. It was mostly lovely because I got to hold her six-week-old baby while talking about teaching. Hold her and kiss the top of her head and straighten her socks and kiss the top of her head again.
But. There really was talk about teaching, I assure you. And about how to make more efficient the process of critiquing student work, which takes (those of you who do it, know this) forever. I’m sure I’m not alone in obsessing, reading multiple times, commenting on every little line break and word choice.
But today we stumbled upon something really important, I think.
It is the broadest, most universal lessons and messages that resonate most deeply with our students, that are transferable to multiple students, numerous manuscripts, and various circumstances. It is the broadest, most universal lessons that help writers grow their craft overall. It is not the icky-picky nitty-gritty edits to any particular piece that really matter. (Those are best used in critique groups and in the pre-publication stage.)
So, what this says to me is that my energy should be spent on hugely focused, engaging, exploratory class sessions. Helping students see patterns (the good, bad and ugly) and encouraging them to act on those.
Each individual piece? That’s practice. That’s personal. That’s yoga. Not that there aren’t ways I could comment on those pieces in order to allow my students to see the challenges and opportunities more clearly, but that’s secondary to what I should offer in a larger sense.
Most of their stories and poems (most of my stories and poems, too, if I’m honest) aren’t ever fully realized. We run through their hoops in order to learn something. So as teachers, we shouldn’t devote all our energy trying to help any one student make any one piece perfect. Instead, our efforts should go into helping all of our students become more conscious of their own work so that, moving forward, there will be something truly fine there to critique.
(Now we’ll see if this actually changes the way I read my students’ work.)
(And maybe you guys already realized this 5 years back, you critique with speed and ease, and play croquet in your spare time.)
(In my spare time I’m going to hold more babies and kiss the tops of their heads and straighten their socks and kiss the tops of their heads again. So there…)
Twelve years ago today (on Labor Day!), my Tall One arrived and I became a mom.
Scroll through the cliched-but-only-because-they’re-so-truisms here:
The love was deep and instant.
My life was changed forever.
It’s all gone too fast.
And then, add to that, this:
She combines old soul with innocence better than anyone I know.
She has a wildly curious mind and a deeply compassionate heart.
She has a sure sense of herself and, somehow, an easy nonchalance.
She fills our lives with ideas, thoughtfulness, beauty, music, humor, pathos, depth and love.
She inspires me every single day and I am a better person because of how deeply good she is.
That’s pretty much the sum of it.
It’d break my heart if it didn’t make me so dang happy.
Y’know?
Lucky me.
Lucky us.
Last week I shared a Neruda poem here, and ever since then I’ve been tripping over poems that feel similar to me, that arrive bearing the same reminder.
To take time. To be still. To feel the pulse of the moon. To open all the windows and listen to birdsong.
Here is the one I found this morning and have read a number of times now, aloud. I’m going to post it here and then go walk the dog in the rain…
How To Be a Poet
BY WENDELL BERRY (to remind myself)
i
Make a place to sit down. Sit down. Be quiet. You must depend upon affection, reading, knowledge, skill—more of each than you have—inspiration, work, growing older, patience, for patience joins time to eternity.
In prepping for class tonight, I’ve re-read one of my favorite books about reading and kids, Daniel Pennac’s The Rights of the Reader.
Here is why I love it so:
(I dare you not to choke up, at least a little.)
"… that ritual of reading every evening at the end of the bed when they were little — set time, set gestures — was like a prayer. A sudden truce after the battle of the day, a reunion lifted out of the ordinary. We savored the brief moment of silence before the storytelling began, then our voice, sounding like itself again, the liturgy of chapters…. Yes, reading a story every evening fulfilled the most beautiful, leas selfish, and least speculative function of prayer: that of having our sins forgiven. We didn’t confess, we weren’t looking for a piece of eternity, but it was a moment of communion between us, of textual absolution, a return to the only paradise that matters: intimacy."
" ‘Again, again…’ really means ‘We must love each other, you and I, if this one story, told and retold, is all we need.’ Reading again isn’t about repeating yourself; it’s about offering fresh proof of a love that never tires."
"In French slang we talk about being ‘tied to’ a book. Figuratively speaking, a big book is a ‘brick.’ Untie yourself, and the brick becomes a cloud."
"As a teacher, you will only patch up your student’s relationship with reading on one condition: that you ask for nothing in return. Nothing. Don’t bombard them with information. Don’t ask any questions. Don’t add a single word to what you’ve read. No value judgements, no glossing the meaning of difficult words, no textual analysis, no biographical information… Reading as a gift. Read and wait. Curiosity is awakened, no forced."
Ages ago, Cynthia Leitich Smith invited me to do a guest post about my experience at ALA in June. I said yes – who wouldn’t? – but then I didn’t do it. I kept putting it off. (While she remained exceedingly kind and patient…)
Finally I started it, but it felt incomplete. Like it needed context. Like posting about the events of that weekend would be akin to reading just the 2nd book in a trilogy, without a lot of sense or connection.
So, here’s my attempt at the context, calendar-style. And the actual details on that gala weekend in June? They’re at Cynsations today – as promised.
September, 2009: My second book, All the World, went out into the world in a way that felt both brighter and scarier than anything I was used to. By the time it was released, it had been given starred reviews in Kirkus, Horn Book and School Library Journal, and I was feeling dizzy. Despite my desire to hide underneath my bed ‘til things blew over, I celebrated the launch at BookPeople in Austin, Texas, with zillions of generous and reassuring folk. I signed a lot of books and did not faint.
October, 2009: I shared All the World at the Texas Book Festival. A class of 2nd graders sang an original song about the book by way of introduction. I had a stool there, so if I had fainted, nobody’d be the wiser.
November, 2009: I had so many gratitudes piling up that it would’ve taken the better part of Thanksgiving dinner to list them all. All the World was a New York Times, Kirkus and Publisher’s Weekly Best Book of 2009, a Scholastic Book Club pick, and it appeared to be headed for Cheerios boxes. Plus, my friends who get pedicures had seen a blurb in People magazine. It was almost too much. My family and I went backpacking in Big Bend National Park and skipped the feast.
December, 2009: People started whispering predictions about the American Library Association Awards. Y’know, Newbery, Caldecott and the like. I put my fingers in my ears and sang, “La, la, la…”
January, 2010: I was in Big Sky, Montana, with my sister, wallowing in our first weekend away together since we’d had our babies a decade earlier. We skied hard, giggled and generally slept well, but on Monday the 18th, crazy-early Mountain Time, I woke to the news that All the World had been awarded a Caldecott Honor. I received so many emails in such a flurry that I thought my computer had a virus. I hugged my sister, took a hot tub, drank a bunch of coffee, called Marla, and cried.
February, 2010: And then All the World landed on the NYT’s Bestseller List. Sheesh.
March, 2010: In a most stunning counterbalance to what was turning into one of the best years of my life, my husband was diagnosed with cancer three days after we arrived home from Spring Break. I was suddenly dizzy again, but in a hard, new way.
April, 2010: My husband spent the month recovering from surgery, and shoring himself up for chemotherapy and radiation. I read and signed All the World at the Texas Library Association Conference, the Corpus Christi Book Festival, and a bunch of elementary schools. Together we went to some 27-trillion doctor’s appointments.
May, 2010: At my husband’s insistence, I followed through on plans for a retreat with my agent and agent-mates in Chicago. It was kind of all about books, and kind of just about life. It was perfect. The day I got home, Kirk had his first of 39 radiation treatments. The morning after, he started chemo.
June, 2010: After eight endless weeks of medicine designed to heal-him-if-it-didn’t-kill-him, we marked Kirk’s final treatment with kiss. I left an hour later for the American Library Association Conference in Washington, D.C. As I sat on the plane I wondered if I was dreaming a very long and very vivid dream, but when I got to D.C., everything felt really real. (See my post at Cynthia’s!)
July, 2010: I finished up the very last itty bitty edits on my next book, and illustrations were begun for the book after that.
August, 2010: It is a new year. Our girls have gone back to school and Kirk is getting well. All the World has a shiny silver sticker on its cover now. And I no longer want to hide underneath my bed, because if I did I’d miss way too much.
Which I guess is why I felt compelled to add this context. A weekend like the kind of weekend I got to have at ALA could be understandably mistaken for a fairy tale. But really, all of our lives are bigger than one dreamy weekend. And our books aren’t created in bubbles – they’re created inside of those lives. In the end, we take the lumps with the luck, making them both all the better.
We may be land-locked in the middle of Texas, but we are not without our watery blessings. If it weren’t for the cold, constant springs here, I’m not sure I would’ve made it 18 months, much less 18 years.
So I started today with a swim. I don’t know why I don’t do that more often — it makes me feel so awake and relieved. So different from a run — hot and pounding, or even yoga, indoors.
While I swam I thought about Neruda — water often makes me think of Neruda — and of this poem especially:
Poet’s Obligation
To whoever is not listening to the sea this Friday morning, to whoever is cooped up in house or office, factory or woman or street or mine or harsh prison cell; to him I come…
So this morning I was on my way out for a run when I realized I needed something to distract me.
Because it was, even in the dark early dawn, 83 DEGREES.
I was not the only one unhappy with that fact, really.
The dog, the cats, the potted plants all wilted.
But I was the only one going for a run.
So.
Distraction was my goal.
But.
My iPod was dead. Go figure.
So I grabbed my daughter’s off the kitchen counter and scooted out the door.
Before long I was grooving around the trail to Buddy Holly, Fountains of Wayne, Taylor Swift, Free to Be You and Me.
And honestly, it was more than distracting.
It was funny and revealing and sweet, and I felt a little like I was running with my Small One.
I ran with a friend’s iPod once and had a similar experience, listening to her New Orleans’ blues, Jewish liturgical music, and even a cut of my friend in her days fronting a rock band.
She was in my head as I ran, and I was in her head.
It was really a most amazing thing.
This morning, running with my daughter that way, it was a comfort.
But I’m thinking now that it’s also a lesson, a reminder, that as a writer and as a person I should get outside of myself sometimes.
There’s so much to know about so many people.
