I had coffee this morning with my newish department head at ACC. She’s the bomb. Smart and calm and assured and idea-centered.
The kind of person with whom you can talk about real stuff and not get rattled
So we were talking about teaching. And, in particular, about teaching creative work within the confines of an academic environment.
We touched on deadlines and grades. We touched on craft. We touched on clever assignments.
And then we settled into how we might help students come to something deeper than just a class — a practice that will extend way beyond December and will allow their writing to become not individual "assignments" but rather bigger works in progress, full of possibility.
The only way to do this, as far as either of us could see, is to encourage openness to revision.
If students aren’t receptive to the concept of revision, willing to listen to critiques and suggestions, and ready to take on the actual practice, then everything they write is sort of a one-shot deal — potentially kind of vivid but quick to fizzle.
And of course the same is true for all of us. Getting stuck in our own stuff and being unwilling to listen, tweak, undo or mess with means that it will never evolve like it might’ve. And, likewise, getting paralyzed by workshops, critiques or requests for revisions stops us from fully realizing the possibility of a piece.
So what Charlotte recommends to her students is that they come to the process with a balance of humility and audacity.
Humility = willingness to listen, openness to change, acceptance of critique Audacity = fearlessness, relentlessness, self-confidence
Most of us tend to fall a little too far on one side of the teeter-totter, but I think she’s right. We need both to grow our work as big as it can be.
I’m telling my students that and I’m telling myself…
It’s November? You have got to be kidding me. I seriously wouldn’t believe it if I didn’t have a few wrinkled jack-o-lanterns on my front porch.
I’m having a wild and juggley fall and there are many days when blogging takes a back seat to other business. So, in an attempt to catch up, here’s a scatter-shot of news I’ve been meaning to share:
1. The General Mills Spoonful of Stories poll is now closed. I owe you all a humungous stupendous debt of gratitude for voting with vigor! The official la-de-da announcement won’t come ’til January, but by all accounts ALL THE WORLD is going to be one of five books in select Cheerios boxes in 2010. And that is all thanks to you good people. I’m just tickled, and the kids getting books with their breakfast will be, too.
2. Got word this week that ALL THE WORLD is a Publisher’s Weekly Best Children’s Book of 2009. Yipes! Just reading the other names and titles on this list is enough to bring me to my knees. (And also squee with glee for fellow Austin authors Chris Barton and Jacqueline Kelly…)
4. Huge whoppin’ thank yous to Clay Smith and all the good folks at the Texas Book Festival. I don’t know if they arranged for the weather, but boy-oh-man was it perfection. My reading was launched by the most delightful 1st grade class from Casis Elementary who made up a song for me! I’m not kidding! I about fell over and it would’ve been a soft landing if I had because I was on Cloud Nine. Oh, yes I was.
5. This Saturday I’m speaking at the monthly SCBWI meeting in Austin. I’ll be at BookPeople at 11 am, talking about Going with your Gut. (If I can make friends with my PowerPoint program that is.) This event is open to the public and ya’ll are welcome to come on by.
6. Here the books that have recently blown the top off my brain. I will post about them separately and with more attention soon, but in the meantime, scurry to the library and get in line to read:
When I was a kid in Colorado, it was often so cold we had to wear parkas over our Halloween costumes. Kind of took the buzz off of being a ballerina if you know what I mean.
And still, it was one of my favorite holidays.
Roasted pumpkin seeds, carameled apples and the neighbors with the extra-spooky foyer.
These days I love it all over again.
My kids went truckin’ off to school with their costumes this morning (Betsy Ross and Harry Otter) and they’ll cap off the day with an all-school Monster Mash.
In Small One’s classroom there’s an altar to their loved ones who have passed, with photos and pan dulce and the vivid sugar skulls they decorated yesterday.
And this weekend the clock falls back and — hallelujah — it is chilly in Texas.
In honor of this brisk and soulful season, a poem by Louise Gluck. Happy Dia de los Muertos, mi amigos…
Ya’ll know by now that ALL THE WORLD is one of 13 books being considered for inclusion in next year’s Cheerios.
Lots of you have been voting faithfully, every day, at the Spoonful of Stories site.
Lots of you are getting a little sick of voting faithfully, every day, at the Spoonful of Stories site, and I don’t blame you!
You’ve got other things to do, like brushing your teeth, making your bed and feeding your children. I promise, you can get back to all that on Friday when this contest ends.
See, here’s the thing. I’m not too keen on competition. I failed miserably at team sports in school — partly because I have no hand-eye coordination and partly ’cause my heart was never in it. My current athletic efforts are running (which I do far too slowly to ever feel competitive about) and yoga. Enough said.
But sometimes life throws you in the middle of the pit to see what you’re made of. Fortunately, for this particular contest, I need not know how to pitch, swing, shoot, throw or kick. I just need to do a little shout-out now and again about my new book.
This is relatively easy except for the fact that I have anxiety dreams about driving ya’ll crazy. (In the olden days, I would’ve written you each a letter, in longhand, included a recipe and a cross-stitch, and been done with it.)
Big ol’ sigh in the age of Twitter.
So why do I bother?
Two reasons:
1. I’m fond of this book and I would really like kids to read it as they eat their cereal in the morning. It’s about connections — between and among us — and I think that’s not a bad little message to lodge in a kid’s heart at the beginning of a busy day. Plus, Marla Frazee’s artwork is lush and expansive and profound and comforting. Even kids who can’t read yet can fall into the pictures and be happy there. Truly, and I can say that because I didn’t have the first thing to do with it.
2. It’s all for a really, really good cause. Seriously. It is. General Mills has, in eight years, given 40 million books to children through their Spoonful of Stories initiative. 40 million! And how do I know that? Because an anonymous researcher-do-gooder-all-around-big-heart uncovered all sorts of important Spoonful of Stories stats and shared them via Laurie Halse Anderson’s blog.
(Laurie also has a horse in this horse race and if ya’ll are twins, could one of you vote for ALL THE WORLD and the other vote for Laurie’s ZOE?)
Anyway, Laurie’s guest blogger is over there giving the scoop on the Spoonful today. (You can read about Zoe first and then, under the heading "NOW, FOR THE GREAT NEWS", you’ll learn about this totally worthy endeavour.) I’d really like for you to read it. It is about literacy and about getting books into the hands of kids who don’t have any. Which is really the whole point.
So, please, go read and then cast a few more votes (one vote a day ’til Friday) for ALL THE WORLD, or ZOE, or any of the books you’d like a kid to wake up to.
And while you’re at it, check out First Book and consider them as a recipient of your generous annual giving.
I usually start making my first school visits of the year in October.
Everyone’s settled into their routines and, ironically, that’s about when it’s time to shake ’em up a bit.
So, what a delight, this year, to be bearing a new book.
Don’t get me wrong; I love my Pocket Book visits. I do. It’s just that I have done a lot of them. Truly. You don’t want to know. And I’m fond of my pocketed fishing vest — my key prop these last few years — but I’m ready to leave it at home for a bit.
Last week I visited a preschool with All the World. Terra Luz is an especially lovely and intentional place, and I was honored to have been invited. Although it was gray and rainy outdoors, we met on the covered patio. I sat in a rocking chair that looked as if it’d been decorated by Demeter. I sat surrounded by parents and plants and a curious spider.
And then there were three-year-olds. Quite a lot of them. Even brighter and more promising than that perfect rocking chair.
(My kids are older now and I forget this age. It is like they live with one less layer of skin, so alert and open and tender and expressive are they.)
Usually after school visits I share a few of the funny things kids say, but this time I’d like to show you what it looked and felt like. The passionate and creative head of school, Andrea Gaudin Tiche, is (among many things) a soulful photographer. These images are hers:
(All images property of Andrea Gaudin Tiche, Terra Luz Preschool)
Aren’t those just delicious? Sometimes I cannot believe my luck…
I grew up eating fresh fish and game — lots of it — and the only growth hormones in my body were my own. I’ve been a pesco-vegetarian for more than twenty years now, but when I quit eating meat, it wasn’t a radical decision. It was more that I was grossed out by McDonalds, I’d never ordered a steak in my life and I still loved sushi. Clear as glass. Over time, I’ve become much more attuned to the subtleties of this decision and the others regarding food. I carry a little card instructing me on which fish purchases are healthiest and most sustainable. I subscribe to a C.S.A. farm basket service. I try hard feed my family of omnivores fresh food full of the good stuff and free of the bad.
Still, gardens and grocery stores are evolving, the planet’s food sources are in flux, and I’m a long way from really learning to cook. It’s an ongoing education. And this morning’s lesson comes from poet Donald Hall. I think I ought to caution you that this is truly graphic but also strangely beautiful — exquisite, even — in its detail. And, it makes me think…
Eating the Pig
by Donald Hall
Twelve people, most of us strangers, stand in a room
in Ann Arbor, drinking Cribari from jars.
Then two young men, who cooked him,
carry him to the table
on a large square of plywood: his body
striped, like a tiger cat’s, from the basting,
his legs long, much longer than a cat’s,
and the striped hide as shiny as vinyl.
Now I see his head, as he takes his place
at the center of the table,
his wide pig’s head; and he looks like the javelina
that ran in front of the car, in the desert outside Tucson,
and I am drawn to him, my brother the pig,
with his large ears cocked forward,
with his tight snout, with his small ferocious teeth
in a jaw propped open
by an apple. How bizarre, this raw apple clenched
in a cooked face! Then I see his eyes,
his eyes cramped shut, his no-eyes, his eyes like X’s
in a comic strip, when the character gets knocked out.
Lucky us, we’ve had Tamara Ellis Smith visiting these past two days, talking about her theory on picture book magic — The Vibrant Triangle.
Tam is smart and studied and instructive, so I’ll admit to not knowing exactly HOW to follow up on her posts.
So much of what I do happens at an intuitive level, I guess, so although I know what I feel and value in terms of books and literacy and connection, it’s not always on the tip of my tongue.
Which is why, voila, I’m jumping straight from Tam-talk to the tip of someone else’s tongue — the overwhelmingly wise and passionate Mem Fox.
No. She is not here. I wish she were, but I presume she is in Australia, writing her next perfect picture book. Or sleeping, since I think it might be nighttime there.
My editor, Allyn Johnston (who just so happens to be Mem’s editor, too), tells me she re-reads it regularly (and not because she wants to read about herself or her son-at-age-three, even though they are both featured lovingly). Nope, she reads it because she says it helps her "stay clear about what we as editors, writers, and illustrators of picture books must keep at the forefront whenever we sit down to work — that love connection between child and adult while books are being shared in a dynamic and cozy and attentive and playful way."
Doesn’t that sound mighty worthwhile?
In Reading Magic, Mem Fox talks about how and why kids learn to read, she talks about phonics and sounding out words and T.V., and she talks about Tam’s Vibrant Triangle, even though she doesn’t say so in quite the same way.
What she says is this: "As we share the words and pictures, the ideas and viewpoints, the rhythms and rhymes, the pain and comfort, the hopes and fears and big issues of life that we encounter together in the pages of a book, we connect through minds and hearts with our children and bond closely in a secret society associated with the books that we have shared. The fire of literacy is created by the emotional sparks between a child, a book, and the person reading."
Oh, that secret society…
When I was a little girl with a littler sister, we lay on either side of my mom in her pretty blue bed and she cried while reading us Little House in the Big Woods. It is one of the things I’m most grateful for.
It is one of our most intimate and present times together, in the midst of our busy, active, scattered lives. I think Mem would probably be okay with me claiming that it’s as good as magic, and none of us would give it up for anything.
If you tuned in yesterday, you enjoyed the first half of my chat with the very insightful Tam Smith (aka Tamara Ellis Smith) in which she introduced The Vibrant Triangle – her framework for assessing how, when and with whom picture books work best.
We left Tam at a pivotal point in her lesson, just as she was saying this:Well theoretically, all picture books have the capacity to belong inside of The Vibrant Triangle. But not all do.
Kind of nerve-wracking, no? I mean, if there’s a readerly place called The Vibrant Triangle, I want in, don’t you?
So, let’s find out what she means.
(These are some of the books Tam thinks fall inside the Triangle)
Liz: If all picture books have this capacity, theoretically, why do only some make the cut?
Tam: After reading a lot of picture books (a fun job, indeed!) and doing more research, I came up with four characteristics that I think truly do make a picture book stand out. Those are:
—Spare and Purposeful Language helping to create Plot
—Limited Words on the Page helping to create an Emotional Experience
—Using Narrative Structure to Extend the Story Beyond itself (a life off of the page)
—Narrative as Intuitive Stepping Stone for Learning about the World
I won’t go into any more detail here about those four characteristics, because I think they are pretty self-explanatory, but I will say that at least two and usually more are woven together in a Vibrant Triangle picture book, and when they are together they can create the most sensorial kind of story. The most organic. The truest.
Liz: I love those characteristics and I think I’ll share them with my students. You seem to have done a really good job describing something that’s really hard to describe. But it was research, right? So you probably just ‘discovered’ these things, as fact, as you worked. Did you stumble upon any surprises or come to any conclusions you hadn’t expected?
Tam: Yes! The neuroscience just blew me away! I didn’t know any of it before I began to research, but then I was like “oh yeah, that makes sense, even to someone without a scientific bone in her body!” Basically, neuroscientists have proven what psychologists have forever intuited: that reading aloud to children actually influences the way their brains develop. Children are born with most of the brain cells, or neurons, that they will have for their lifetime. But these neurons aren’t initially connected with the complex networks—or synapses—that are needed for mature thought processes to happen.
Are you with me so far? It’s worth it!
In the early years of children’s lives, brain cells form these synapses very quickly.
Some of this synapse-forming relies on external experience. Specifically, reading aloud to a child is a powerful way to foster synapse growth. But when children reach around ten years old, they begin to lose some of those connections. Check this out though: this isn’t a random process. The connections that have been used repeatedly are strengthened, and are more likely to remain. Therefore, consistent reading aloud profoundly affects the child listener. It leaves the child more equipped to learn when the brain’s pruning process begins.
Isn’t that utterly amazing?
Liz: Yes. Utterly. Those little tiny brains behind those still-shifting skull plates – so much going on! I think I even join you in understanding the science! But did studying this concept take away from your joy as a reader at all? Or did your awareness of The Vibrant Triangle heighten your sense of pleasure?
Tam: It absolutely heightened it. And made me appreciate all the more what a writer must do to write such a book. But the amazing thing is when I am reading, or being read to, all of the research melts away. I am just IN the book. This speaks to the power of it all, I think.
Liz: So how does your understanding of The Vibrant Triangle play out for you as a writer?
For me it is hard, sometimes, to imagine that relationship between the book, the adult reader and the child listener. Sometimes it’s hard to even remember that at the other end of the experience of writing a manuscript and revising (and revising and revising!) there is an actual book!
Writing is such a solitary endeavor, you know? (I know you know, Liz!)
Somehow the process of diving head first and fully submerging myself in this Vibrant Triangle work has made me more focused on my responsibilities as a writer now. And that focus keeps me much more connected.
I try toremember now that my words on the page, my manuscripts, even (one day!) my published books are not the finished product. The experience of a child listening to my story completes the process. I just love that idea. It connects me to something bigger than my own self in my own room, writing away. Words and rhythms, characters and their struggles and successes. These are palpable links between child and writer. With this intrinsic connection, maybe we can hope to change the world, a child and a word at a time.
I take a deep breath here and say: I believe so, yes. I think Kathi Appelt—amazing writer, mentor and friend—first offered that hope to me. I love it.
We just need to remember that children are our collaborators in this process of change. It is crucial to know them.
Liz: Ooo. I’ve got shivers. Don’t you guys have shivers?? I can’t imagine where you’d go from there, Tam, but is there anything else you think we might want to know?
Tam: I have to mention your new book, All the World, Liz. I just have to! Your rhythms and word choices coupled with your message of connections, big and small, blew me away. (Not to mention the illustrations, which add yet another organic, deep level to the experience…see I really need to write that Rectangle book!) More to the point, though, your book didn’t blow me away as much as it blew the world to me. I felt—yes, I will say it—connected.
All The World is a perfect example, in my mind, of the kind of book that exemplifies The Vibrant Triangle. As an adult reading All The World, you made me feel safe and cozy and hopeful. And reading your book out loud to a child does the same thing for that child. Unreal. I mean you can’t do something more important than that, can you? Such a picture book has the capacity to slip through the child’s skin and into her body. It nestles deep, sprouts its own wings and grows.
Liz: Tam, I’m really touched. Thank you. That is a really powerful way to describe a book – any book – so the very idea that you’re referring to mine is really overwhelming…
Tam: And here is my final thought, Liz. We all carry the books from our own childhoods with us. We remember them, we draw on them, we quote them. But there is more to it than that. The experiences of having those books read aloud are a flock of winged things. They are the sense of self a child develops, and her sense of the world. They are a child’s sense of his place in that world. They are a child’s senses of humanity and tolerance and choice.
The specifics are different for each of us. But at our own pace, in our own time, and with our own purpose, our wings are born.
Thank you, Liz, for giving me the opportunity to speak about The Vibrant Triangle here.
Liz: Oh, Tam, thank YOU! And now I’ve got shivers again. “The experiences of having those books read aloud are a flock of winged things.” Whoa. Shivers. Right?
Let’s just leave it at that for today because I’m thinking we’ve got some important writing to do…
The thing about being a writer is that you tend to be at home, in silence and solitude, a lot of the time. And really, you like it that way. The dress code, the birdsong, the space.
But every so often it’s nice to get out and mingle a bit.
So today? I’m mingling. My visitor is Tamara Ellis Smith. We’ve never met in person, but she’s one of my agent-mates and I’ve grown to love her perspective on things. (We chat sometimes on our agent’s listserve and, more recently, have struck up an email exchange.)
Tam is a writer, a mother of two daughters and a son, and a trained birth doula. She lives in a small town in Vermont where she spends time with her kids… runs on the trail by the river near her house… and writes and eats at "an amazing bakery/community center/music and arts venue." Dreamy, right??
(Here’s Tam with one of her daughters — reading, of course!!)
Tam has written over half a dozen picture books and two middle grade novels—all yet to be published. Her novel MARBLE BOYS won an Honorable Mention in the 2008 PEN New England Discovery Awards and was runner up for the 2008 SCBWI Works-In-Progress grant. She is (like me) represented by the incredible Erin Murphy of Erin Murphy Literary Agency who will, no doubt, be selling MARBLE BOYS to some lucky editor soon!
In the meantime, Tam just ran off and got her MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults from Vermont College. (Some people get SO.MUCH.DONE.) And as part of her work at Vermont, she put a lot of thought into something she calls The Vibrant Triangle. She told me a thing or two about it and I was fascinated. That’s actually what I asked her to come talk about today.
Liz: You’ve told me that you did your Vermont College thesis on something called The Vibrant Triangle. Did you coin the phrase? And can you explain it to us?
Tam: I spent my first two semesters writing essay after essay about picture books and what makes them tick — literally tick, you know? With a rhythm and a beat? I wanted to know which books ticked the best and why. Which books children asked for again and again. So I looked at form, I looked at content, I looked at child psychology and film techniques and oral storytelling traditions and and and..
I was utterly fascinated, so when it came time to write my critical thesis, I combined all of this research and more. Specifically I wanted to find out: What kind of picture books—when read aloud—actually hold the potential for changing a child’s life? A big question, I know, and I hoped I would find some answers! With the enormous help of Kathi Appelt and Uma Krishnaswami—both my advisors at Vermont College—I did…
Liz: Picture books that "actually hold the potential for changing a child’s life"???? See. This is why I invited you over. That idea just bowls me over. So I take it The Vibrant Triangle is related to that concept?
Tam: Yes, The Vibrant Triangle (I did coin the phrase) is the dynamic between the picture book, the adult reader and the child listener. (It is important to mention, I think, that I didn’t even begin to delve into the fourth big thing—illustrations. I recognize their vital role in the read-aloud process, but they were worth extended study beyond the scope of my work. Maybe I will research and write a paper about The Vibrant…uh…Rectangle next??)
Liz:OK, so the Triangle (or Rectangle, if you will) is about the how these players interact with each other?
Tam: Well, without going into extensive detail—because, watch out! I could write pages and pages about this!—The Vibrant Triangle describes the relationship between the book, the adult reader and the child listener. It illuminates a collaboration between these three.
Liz: Can you give us some examples?
Tam: Three concepts that I found to be true (and oh so cool!):
—There is a kind of text called a speakerly text which incorporates oral storytelling traditions. You know how there are these purposeful pauses in a storyteller’s story? So that the lisener can interject ideas and questions? Well, there are similar intentional gaps in the words and illustrations of a speakerly text. This structure leaves room for the reader—or listener—to be a part of the creative process.
—Sheree Fitch (Canadian children’s book writer and poet and amazing person all around) coined the phrase utterature which she defines as “all literature that is dependent on the human voice and a community of listeners to have its life.” I just adore that word: utterature! Her idea is that the language used in utterature is expressive of a child’s rite of discovery of his or her body.” Basically, reading a picture book aloud is a multi-sensory experience, and it can awaken a child’s body in its totality, thus awakening the child to his own self.
—Finally, the Reader Response Theory, which educator, reading researcher and author Louise Rosenblatt created, says that it is not until the reader enters the scene and makes sense of the letters and words and punctuation in a given book, that the meaning of the book is fully realized. In essence, the book is not a piece of literature until it is read.
These 3 concepts: speakerly texts, utterature and the Reader Response Theory are the building blocks of The Vibrant Triangle. There is something dynamic, developmental and, yes, even magical when a picture book is read aloud to a child.
Liz: Yes!! I really believe this — that reading is a dynamic activity and that audiences brings an essential something to it. And I really love the idea of a child’s whole body awakening through books. What a powerful thought…. So tell me how you think these concepts play out in picture books?
Tam: Well theoretically, all picture books have the capacity to belong inside of The Vibrant Triangle. But not all do.
Liz: Yikes!!! And that, dear readers, is where we’ll end today. Because isn’t that a titallating, cliff-hangy place to be??? Tune in on Tuesday for more cool stuff about readers, writers, kids and The Vibrant Triangle! Thanks, Tam!
