I about spit my coffee and fell off my chair, to tell you the truth.
Because I really, really (times ten) admire the Cybils folks — for their smarts, witticisms, read and to-be-read lists, and seemingly bottomless stores of can-do.
So. I am just super honored and humbled… and double-triple thrilled that my friend Chris Barton’s book The Day-Glo Brothers took home the picture book (nonfiction) honor.
Also on the All the World front is this moving and amazing video of my friend and friendly illustrator Marla Frazee talking about children and picture books and how much she loves and respects them both. I’ve watched it a bunch of times and it’s still really, really good…
I save up all my TV watching for two years so that when the Olympics happen I go all in.
Seriously. I do.
I love the Olympics.
I loved the Opening Ceremony last night (especially since I was surrounded by 9-year-olds hopped up on birthday cake).
My highlights included:
The 3D whales.
The golden prairie/Peter Pan/Both Sides Now segment.
KD Lang singing Hallelujah.
I loved the short track semifinals tonight, including the discussion with my girls about whether Apolo Ohno should shave his soul patch.
Not that he asked us.
And I love that it is snowing big fat flakes in Whistler.
Oh, I’m also really kind of glad that they mellowed out the luge track because, jeez, this is supposed to be fun.
Not deadly.
That’s all for now.
Happy Valentines Day, friends.
Happy CYBILS day.
Happy Chinese New Year.
Namaste…
Which isn’t possible, of course, because no time at all has passed and I can still fold her into my lap and kiss her eyelids, as soft today as they were then.
But there you go. Parenthood (and childhood too, for that matter) is filled with impossibilities. How quick and deep the love, how high the late-night fevers, how hilarious the first lurching steps, how like and unlike us…. Since becoming a mother, I nay say a lot less than I used to.
Happy Birthday, my sweet and most vigorous child for whom everything is possible. Thank goodness for you. Thank goodness…
One of the most exciting things about the ALA Awards this year was how many of my friends and writing buddies were recognized and will be getting pretty stickers on their books.
And it just so happens that I was actually reading two of these award winners when they were announced. (I’m psychic that way.) Mare’s War, by my poetry sister Tanita Davis, is a Coretta Scott King honor book. And The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate, by fellow Austinite Jackie Kelly, is a Newbery honor book. Woot and double woot!
Now, disclaimer. I really, really like both of these women and I really, really like reading books my friends wrote. I do. But I promise you, people — you need not know the authors to be blown all the way away by these books. I promise you.
What Tanita does in Mare’s War is a most difficult and risky thing: Telling a story in alternating voices and having them live up to each other.
My fear, when I start a book like that, is that I’m going to love one viewpoint so much more than the other that I’ll want to skim half the chapters in order to get back to the good stuff. But in Mare’s War, it’s all good stuff!
On one hand, we’ve got sisters Tali and Octavia, road-tripping-by-force with their kookie grandmother and struggling with moods, speed limits, and family roles and expectations along the way. On the other, we’ve got that kookie grandmother as a young woman, joining the African American Women’s Army Corps during WWII — to escape her own small town and family traumas. In both realms, the story unrolls like a movie — real, vivid, beautiful and funny. Somehow, we walk away from the book thoroughly moved and entertained, and righteously educated! We’re in the hands of a master here, folks, and dang, if that medal isn’t right where it belongs…
Now, the thing about Calpurnia is that it is timeless. The last book I read that made me feel this way was The Penderwicks, by Jeanne Birdsall. In both books, there is the sense that you’re spending time with real children — charming, funny, sometimes rascally, honestly flawed but totally loveable children.
We read Calpurnia aloud as a family and we were all in agreement — we’d want her as a friend. Both of my daughters started carrying around naturalists’ notebooks — in part to record the fallen pecans and passing cardinals, yes, but mostly just to be Calpurnia for a little bit.
She doesn’t have it easy. It’s 1899, afterall, and options for girls are rather proscribed. But she steps into herself in spite of the societal and familial limitations and that is the kind of story that’ll just knock my socks off. (Read: that’ll make me gulp and cry while my family waits patiently for me to get through the chapter.) The Newbery Honor could not have happened to a nicer book.
You all can carry on with the books you’re currently reading if you want. Or, you can quick up and order Mare’s War and The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate from your local indie or the library. Which is what I recommend. I’m just sayin…
This past weekend, at the Austin SCBWI conference, I had a conversation I’ve had before. Numerous times. It was about rhyme.
The writer really wanted to write in rhyme. Her story had come out that way. She couldn’t stop herself. "But I know I shouldn’t," she said, "because editors don’t like rhyme." Whereupon I gave my standard response. "Editors don’t like bad rhyme. That’s a whole ‘nother beast. Good rhyme is good."
I’m reading Mary Karr’s Lit right now, for pleasure. If reading about somebody walking through the depths of psychic hell can be pleasurable. But y’know, it’s Mary Karr. She’s so … smart. And funny. And man, can she turn a phrase.
It occurs to me that I feel about memoir the way editors feel about rhyme. A little skeptical. A bad memoir can peel the paint off even a very well-made day, and there are so many bad memoirs. But a good one? I can’t put down…
Have you ever turned the page on your calendar and seen, in your own handwriting, an event that completely perplexes you?
i.e., you don’t know what it is, where it is or how you’re involved?
Seriously, you guys, I have TWO such events in the next week.
Plus, yesterday, I came home from the grocery store with two bigs tubs of hummus instead of one hummus and one tabouli.
I need sleep and a mother. I mean, I have a mother but she’s no longer in charge of such things. I am! Oi.
I also need to write.
I’ve been so focused on kicking off my semester, critiquing manuscripts, and prepping for this past weekend’s conference that I’m not in the usual swing of things and it’s making me the taddest bit grumpy.
So, I think my blogging might be rather spare for a couple of weeks here as I gather my wits about me, figure out the secret code words on my calendar and get some tabouli in the fridge.
But, before I go, let me just say that the Austin chapter of The Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators put on one heck of a shindig this past weekend. I didn’t take a camera (mine is still not operational as a result of a rather damp kayaking excursion — yet another loose end in my life ) and I didn’t get to hear all the talks since I was doing critique sessions a good portion of the time. But what I did hear was dynamite, my 12 one-on-ones were really fruitful, and I loved catching up with so many writerly friends and acquaintances. (HUGE highlights for me were spending the weekend with my dear pal and beloved illustrator of All the World, Marla Frazee, and getting to know my poetry chum, the brilliant and fabulous Sara Lewis Holmes!)
Here are the blow-by-blows by a few of the other faculty members and attendees. Enjoy!
Last Monday at 3:30 in the morning, the phone rang in my friend Marla Frazee’s kitchen.
Usually you don’t want a phone call at 3:30 in the morning because:
1. You’re trying to sleep and 2. Phone calls at 3:30 in the morning tend to bear bad news.
But this particular Monday was my Dad’s Birthday aka Caldecott Day (more formally known as the American Library Association’s Youth Media Awards). In which case phone calls at 3:30 in the morning are most welcome.
While Marla was congratulated on her 2nd-year-in-a-row Caldecott Honor for our book All the World, I lay sound asleep in a Murphy bed in Montana. It was a couple of hours later, in fact, that I sat up all bleary eyed and limped to my laptop (with slightly sore shins because I’d just skied for the first time in about 15 years).
I wanted to watch the live webcast of the awards but I was having trouble with the advanced math required to figure out what time it was in Boston. As I sat there counting, my email inbox downloaded a few messages, including one from my editor, Allyn Johnston, with the subject line, “Caldecott.” When I clicked it open, it said, “Honor!!!”
And then my phone started to ring. My agent, first. My Austin friends gathered at Vermont College, next. My husband who’d been trying to get through, third. Then came the emails. And the facebook posts.
My nerves started getting a little jangley right about then, and they stayed that way through most of the day. I was with my sister, which helped. And there was the big hot pool at the condominium, which helped, too. The latté. The long talk with Marla. The herd of bighorn sheep we passed as we drove back into town.
But it was really my visit to my niece’s classroom that afternoon that made me feel firmly planted for the first time all day. Granted, they gave me a standing ovation (something that’s never happened at any of my other events) but after that it was a straight-up, regulation school visit (i.e., very cute and very funny).
There was the little girl who asked me if I knew her uncle (he lives in Texas) and the little boy who asked me if I’d sign his Spongebob Squarepants books. And, just to ensure that my ego was truly and goodly in check, the student who wondered, “When they deny your books, do you bring them home, add a little and change a little and then send them back, hoping they won’t notice they’re the same books they denied?”
Um. You mean, like, revision? Yes. Sort of.
But at the very end of the visit, looking over the very last page of the book (which says “All the world is all of us”), a couple of kids observed that that’s kinda what Martin Luther King had been trying to say. Which was a pretty sweet point, especially on that Monday, which was my Dad’s Birthday aka Caldecott Day aka Martin Luther King Day, 2010.
And there I was – a far cry from Boston and the shiny silver stickers they’d be putting on our book – feeling like I was really in the right place. At the right time. It was one fine day.
(Congratulations flowers from my editor at Beach Lane Books and the folks at Simon & Schuster)
(Congratulations flowers from my mom and dad)
(Congratulations banner from our friends Nathaniel and Lucia)
Oh, and everything I said last week? About being humbled, blessed, swoony, weak-kneed and grateful? That all still applies. Thank you, all, for your amazing love and support. It’s really something. Namaste…
This was partly inspired, I’m sure, by a good friend who recently had a baby named Rainer. But also, I wanted to see what it felt like to read a little bit of somebody, everyday, all year long. And what if that someone was Rilke?
I’m a person who really needs a practice — yoga, writing — to keep from spinning myself into the air like a top or into the ground like an ice auger. And sure enough, this book seems to be a steadying force — anticentrifugal, if you will — before bed each night.
Poetry Friday is like that, I think, on a weekly basis. Each Friday we meet at someone’s house, saying very little but exchanging poems to read while we drink our morning coffee or our afternoon tea. By the end of the exchange I, for one, am breathing differently. More deeply and with greater ease. I’ve never hosted Poetry Friday before and I’m so happy to today. Pull up a chair or a cushion. There are hot drinks on the counter and half-and-half in the fridge. Read all you’d like and let yourself out when you’re finished. Brighten. Wallow. Enjoy.
(Those of you who know me know that something as newfangled as Mr. Linky is waaaaay beyond me, so we’ll be doing this the old-fashioned way today: Leave your link in the comments and I’ll gather them together a few times throughout the day, amending this post as needed. Thanks for coming by…)
And, to kick things off, a line or two from Rilke:
As you unfold as an artist, just keep on, quietly and earnestly, growing through all that happens to you. You cannot disrupt this process more violently than by looking outside yourself for answers that may only be found by attending to your innermost feeling. — Rainer Maria Rilke Paris, February 17, 1903 Letters to a Young Poet
Then my own sister-of-sorts, the dear and lovely Sara Lewis Holmes, pops in with a breakfast surprise. No, not pumpkin bread with chocolate chips, but almost! She has done a serious blush-worthy post about (seriously, you guys, I’m kind of embarrassed) Me! And she includes a poem I posted quite awhile back. She will be hugged and severely chastised when I see her next week at a conference here in Austin. Squee!!
Poet Kristy Dempsey adds a pot of soup to our lunch buffet — her own wonderful and simple soup. Have some — I did, and I feel better already.
Elaine Magliaro is a constant on Fridays — lucky for all of us! Today she brings us poems about eating (how appropriate, at lunchtime!) and more books to look forward to, at Wild Rose Reader, and a poem about writing (how appropriate, on Poetry Friday!) at Blue Rose Girls.
You guys didn’t think we’d have a whole day of poetry and not invite William Shakespeare, did you? Pour yourself another glass of lemonade and welcome Becky who has come with The Bard himself — Manga Style! (Seriously!) (Another one in the "who knew?!?!" category!)
And Jennie at Biblio File, welcome to you, too! Jennie gets us back in bookclub mode with some dust bowl reviews — including Karen Hesse’s Out of the Dust. And she mulls over whether its award-winning status transcends time. I gotta say, I think it does. But then I’m a huge fan of the verse novel.
I think I may go read one (Love that Dog, maybe?) until this afternoon’s tea time update. Must tidy up the lunch dishes, now. Ta-ta!
I get to go away this weekend, but don’t let the palm trees fool you.
I’m going to Montana.
I don’t even know if I own enough clothes to go to Montana in the winter.
But I’m going… to spend the weekend with my sister without spouses or children. This is pretty much unprecedented and is such a treat as to seem almost preposterous.
So, I’m signing off for a few days. I go with the Haitians in my heart… with Martin Luther King on my mind… and with immense gratitude for all that is good and fine. Happy weekend, friends, and namaste…
THIS IS A MORNING THAT IS GOOD By Bill Snyder, For Lynda
On the Green Concourse, around the corner from the news-clerk who said "just around the corner" as if I lived there– a Starbucks, and the African woman behind the counter who asks if I like ice in my water and smiles and smiles again when I say yes, a smile for no reason but to smile–she’s happy– or because I am and she can tell…
