Blythe Woolston

Morris Awards 2012: Interview Series

2012-01-20T08:00:00.000-08:00

The William C. Morris YA Debut Award celebrates the achievement of a previously unpublished author, or authors, who have made a strong literary debut in writing for young adult readers. The work cited will illuminate the teen experience and enrich the lives of its readers through its excellence, demonstrated by:

Compelling, high quality writing and/or illustration

The integrity of the work as a whole

Its proven or potential appeal to a wide range of teen readers

I am delighted to join Elizabeth Bunce, the inaugural winner of the Morris Award, in welcoming this year's shortlist authors. Please join us in celebrating what these authors have accomplished.

We begin by remembering an author know for her generosity of spirit. L. K. Madigan. Please visit Elizabeth's blog, "Mirth & Matter" to read the interview with Lisa.

Here's the schedule for upcoming posts in the series...

Jan 6 L. K. Madigan (Flash Burnout)
Jan 9 John Corey Whaley (Where Things Come Back)
Jan 11 Ruta Sepetys (Between Shades of Grey)

Jan 13 Jenny Hubbard (Paper Covers Rock)

Jan 16 Guadalupe Garcia McCall (Under the Mesquite)

Jan 18 Rae Carson (Girl of Fire & Thorns)

And we wrap up Jan 20 with an interview with Elizabeth Bunce

While were at it, let's celebrate the YALSA librarians, who take joy in connecting books with readers.

UPDATE: Where Things Come Back earned both the Morris and the Printz. Under the Mesquite earned the Pura Belpré.
(Everyone earned an octopus tiara.)

Morris Award Interview: Elizabeth C. Bunce

2012-01-19T20:52:00.000-08:00

This year's Morris interview series will end at the beginning—with the award of 2009. This is a a sweet moment; the future's on the horizon. Elizabeth and I extend all the congratulations our hearts can hold to this year's Morris winners.

Arthur A. Levine\Scholastic
ISBN 9780439895767

I'm delighted to offer today's interview with Elizabeth C. Bunce. Three years ago, her debut A Curse Dark as Gold earned the first Morris gold. It has been quite an adventure since then. Here is part of her story...

This supernatural novel retells the story of Rumpelstiltskin, setting it at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution and centering it around the life of Charlotte Miller. When the bank wants to repossess her mortgaged mill, Charlotte strikes a bargain with the mysterious Jack Spinner, (a creature who knows the art of turning straw into gold), but then discovers she must free her loved ones from a generations-old curse.
At the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, Charlotte Miller strikes a bargain with the malevolent Jack Spinner, who can transform straw into gold, to save her family’s mill. With masterly writing and vivid characterization and setting, Bunce weaves a powerfully seductive tale of triumph over evil. (Description from YALSA Morris Award Winner List)

- - -

The Morris Award, itself, debuted in 2009, when A Curse Dark as Gold was selected for the gold. Did you have any notion what was happening to you and your book when it was nominated? What has the award meant in the years since?

Did I have any notion? Oh, good heavens, no. I hadn't heard of the award, and consequently had no reference for it. My editor called me one December evening with the news, to which I listened politely and dutifully made notes. She then asked if I wanted to call my agent, or if I would like her to do it. I ought to have Understood at that point, but I said, "Uh, no, you, I guess." I then hung up and went about what I'd been doing (taking the garbage out), but my phone rang again less than a minute later. I picked up to hear my agent say, "Oh, my god, you amazing woman." It was at that moment that I began to have some inkling of what this meant. (To put it into perspective, I also had a hard time explaining to my family what it meant. I finally hit on saying, "It's like the New Artist Grammy.")

In the months that followed—particularly between Curse being selected in January, and going to ALA in July to receive the award—it was very strange. (At the same time, Curse also received several other very intimidating honors, including recognition from the Smithsonian!) At first, I found writing in the shadow of the nomination and the win to be pretty daunting. I kept thinking that I had to do it again, only better, that Everyone was expecting me to write another award-winning novel... and I hadn't the faintest idea how to do that!

I finally realized that when I wrote Curse, I had never sat down to write An Award-Winning Novel. I sat down to tell my characters' story with truth and authenticity and heart. And that is my job. And I know how to do that, and the awards and the reviews (good or ill) and sales are completely outside the scope of my work and the parts that I am responsible for.

Well, of course, it turned out that nobody was actually expecting me to do anything... except me. And those expectations were harder to let go of. In many ways, I was picturing the Morris Award--not just for me, but for all of us who've been honored--as a sort of springboard to ongoing success. You think a debut novel recognition would put you in front of booksellers, librarians, and readers as One to Watch, and that your future work would get a little boost because of it. It doesn't always happen that way! There are no coattails.

... You also don't think the next person who receives the award will die shortly after her second book comes out. My perspective about the award has definitely changed in the last few years. It truly is a recognition of a debut novel, and nothing else—but that is a difficult and wonderful achievement all on its own, and I don't believe I gave myself enough time to really take in that experience for its own worth.

You are a fabric artist as well as storyteller. What can you share about relationship between the creation of text and textiles?

16th Century
Purple Damask Kirtle

18th Century
Caraco Jacket & Petticoat

I've been a needlewoman all my life, but I've only really been sewing about as long as I've been writing professionally (I met my agent the same summer I tiptoed my way through my first period gown). It's fascinating to me how the two crafts mirror each other, the one becoming almost a metaphor for the other in my mind. There is the same initial rush of Glorious Idea; then the delicious plunge into research, seeking knowledge and inspiration; followed by the careful outlining of the project and first tentative test-fittings, to see if the Idea is actually workable... then the settling down to the actual work, the step-by-step route of one small detail after another, during which the twin demons of self doubt and lack of skill threaten at every turn... accompanied by PLENTY of ripping-apart and re-working along the way to get everything just perfect... and finally, the nearly surprising moment when it all comes together at the end, and you realize it looks almost just like you'd hoped it would--only better.

A Curse Dark as Gold is a story complete in a single volume. You followed with the Thief Errant series, with two of Digger's adventures published so far. What are the rewards and challenges of writing a series?

For me, writing Liar's Moon, the sequel to StarCrossed, was far easier than either of my standalone novels... but the writing is only part of the whole book experience. Watching one book's fate tied so closely to another is probably the most challenging aspect for me. What has really been surprising, in terms of my own catalogue, is how much Curse literally stands alone--in the sense that there are so many people who've read Curse and enjoyed it and still write to me about it and ask me to do events to talk about it... and have no idea I've published two more books! The book really does become its own entity, apart from its author. And there's both wonder and frustration in that, to be sure.

World building is essential to the success of fiction, especially fantasy. In your own process of world creation, how much is imagination and how much is scholarship?

Wow, what a great question! Because the research is such a big part of my process, and I'm so dedicated to getting it right, I want to say that it's the lion's share of the process. But that rather shortchanges my own contribution to the creation, which is my whole job. I mean, that is what I do—I make story. So I'm going back to the analogy of costuming again, and say that the research is the underpinnings, the structural support--the corsetry and hoop skirts and all the hidden but-oh-so critical foundations without which the artistry of the gown would collapse. It's important, and beautiful to the creator, but the viewer doesn't need to (and perhaps should not) see it. It permits the artist—the seamstress, the writer—to experiment confidently with the fabric of the creation, shaping the illusions and story and experience that you want the reader to take in and knowing it will all hold together.

What advice would you give to this year's crop of debut writers?

My advice actually hasn't changed since I gave my acceptance speech, where I said, "Write as though they'll never let you write another book." Because the fact is, "they" might not. It doesn't matter how many awards you've won, or how good your last book was. If there's anything the experience of the Morris Award has taught me, it's that we have no idea how many books we'll get to write, so make this one The One. Give it everything you have.

Lightning round:

Tattoos?

No; are you kidding? I have trouble committing to shoes for fear I won't like them once I get them home!

Do you write every day?

I work on story every day. I may not commit something to paper/keyboard, but there is never a day when my story people are not moving about in my consciousness or talking to each other. Isn't that the peculiar gift of being a writer? I can't imagine life without my imaginary friends.

The best thing you've eaten recently is...

Over the holiday season, I tried real egg nog for the first time. I think history will bear this one out.

Last song you added to your music library...

Blackmore's Night "God Save the Keg."

When it comes to comfort, how do contemporary under garments stack up?

Ha! Well, I just have one word for the people who turn their noses up at corsetry: underwire (shudder).

BONUS: Meet Digger...

Guadalupe Garcia McCall: Morris Award Interview

2012-01-15T14:06:00.000-08:00

Lee and Low Books. ISBN 978-1-60060-429-4.

Today's Morris nominee interview is with Guadalupe Garcia McCall; she's on Twitter @ggmccall And how about some some cover love? The roots of the tree: the map of the region. That's genius.

Under the Mesquite by Guadalupe Garcia McCall

This novel in verse tells the story of Lupita, the oldest of eight children. When Lupita’s mother is diagnosed with cancer, it is up to Lupita to step into a role she never considered taking in her drama class: surrogate parent. McCall’s chapters are exquisite poems with language that sings and stings. Finding hope amidst despair, finding the chance to laugh, and finding the incredible power of family make this a memorable reading experience. (Description from the YALSA WIlliam C. Morris YA Debut shortlist announcement.)

- - -

Under the Mesquite is your debut novel. Had you experimented with linking poems or poem cycles before you wrote this story? Did you begin with the narrative, Lupita's story, and write poems to fit a plot or did poems come before the plot?

I have been writing narrative poems all my life. However, MESQUITE came about because of a set of very special poems. The poems were special because they were all coming out of teaching. I often model the use of poetic devices in my classroom to show students how easy writing poetry is, how effortless it can be if they open their minds and just let themselves "be." One year, my students challenged me to write a poetry book, just like they had to do, in the same time frame, so I did. It was fun and exciting and at the end I had this little collection of poems about my childhood on the border, in Eagle Pass, Texas that sort of resonated with magazine editors because they were getting picked up by literary magazines across the country. So I sent it out as a collection and Emily Hazel at Lee & Low liked them so much she asked if I would be willing to work with her on creating a novel in verse based on those poems. Of course, I accepted. It took us a year, but we created characters, a plot, a journey based on the strength of the original poems. It was a fantastic experience. I still can't believe those little poems took flight and traveled all this way. Being from a small border town, like Eagle Pass, it's hard to keep up with the journey of these poems without feeling totally overwhelmed by it all.

Poetry is built on the power of individual words. As a reader of poetry, a phrase like "high-heeled hyenas" works for me on every level: the music of alliteration and assonance wed to a brain-jolting image. How did you come to be a poet? Are there poems or poets you think everyone should read?

I love words; they are little jewels that sparkle and shine. One thing about words that surprises me the most is how when you string them together, move them around, play with them, you can make them mean totally different things. Its mind boggling how the interplay of letters and sounds can be so pleasantly musical and yet scrape a raw nerve or squeeze someone's heart all at the same time. I love listening to words. My sons say I shouldn't talk to myself, I tell them I'm not talking—I'm listening to the sounds of poetry in the room inside my heart, speaking them out loud, so that I can hear their song.

A rose for Lupita's Mami.

I came to poetry through reading. As a young girl I was chubby and awkward and not built for sports, but I loved to read and write. I often sat outside to absorb nature and read my school literature book while everyone else ran around chasing each other. Poetry surprised me, though. In middle school, it grabbed me, pulled me in, and told me stories in ways I'd never heard before. I read every poem written by Edgar Allan Poe. I loved his dark imagery, his tragic voice, his foreboding rhyme. In high school, however, it was Khalil Gibran who enlightened me. I was dealing with my mother's illness when my drama teacher, Mr. Cruz, handed me his book, The Prophet. He thought I might like to channel my emotions into a performance of those poems for competition. I can honestly say that after reading that book, I've never been the same. Gibran's poetry touched me so deeply, so honestly, I felt like I'd died and was being resurrected. Gibran's words led me to a better understanding of the poetry I was already familiar with--the beauty of life and the power of nature. Because of his poems, I was able to find my place in the universe. I think everyone should read poetry that speaks to them, poetry that inspires them, poetry that feeds their hungry hearts.

Being bilingual is a part of Lupita's story so the inclusion of both languages was essential. As a poet, how did you decide which words needed to be in Spanish? As an author for young readers who might not know any Spanish, how did you make certain that the Spanish wouldn't be a barrier to understanding?

I don't ever really make conscious decisions about which words need to be in Spanish. Being bilingual (with Spanish being my first language) means that part comes naturally–organically. The words that are in Spanish are often words that have special connotations, special meanings, that I cannot fully express in English when I write poetry. They are words close to my childhood, words that live and breathe en mi corazón. To write them in any other language would feel unnatural. I think because of their special meanings, and their special place, it is easy for the reader to understand them. However, that being said, good words play well together, they find friends contextually, and that is always a blessing.

The Morris Award is for a "first time author writing for teens." Did you know that Under the Mesquite was a YA novel? How did you imagine your audience while you wrote?

Yes, I did know our target audience was teens. My editor informed me that Lee & Low only publishes children's books, so that was understood early on. MESQUITE is actually one of the few YA titles Lee & Low carries, but I think they are working on getting more. It was very easy to imagine my audience as I wrote the book because I've been teaching 20 years (23 altogether) in a middle school in San Antonio. 98% of my students come from the same socioeconomic/cultural background as I do. That experience helped me a lot. I imagined my students sitting at their desks listening to me telling them this story. I wrote the book in language that I hoped would speak to their minds, their dreams, their hopes.

What happens next? Do you have another YA novel in the works?

Well, now that it has been officially announced, I can say it. I am thrilled to have my second book, Five Little Sisters, coming out from TU Books, an imprint of Lee & Low Books, in the fall of 2012. Sisters is a YA novel which is actually a retelling of The Odyssey set in Eagle Pass / Coahuila, Mexico. In the story, Odilia and her sisters, the Garza girls, find a drowned man and embark on a journey to return the man's body to his family in El Sacrificio, Coahuila, Mexico. However, they encounter and must defeat monsters/creatures from Mexican lore before they get back home. At the heart of Five Little Sisters is a story about family, sisterly bonds, and maternal love. Sisters is not written in poetry, it would have been much too long, so I wrote it in prose. I can't wait to see what Stacy Whitman, my editor, conjures up for a cover. I have actual dreams about its cover art. I just know it's going to be mystical and magical and beautiful to behold.

Speed round:

Writing advice in five words or less...

FIVE?!? Oh, the pressure, the pressure… Ok. Here it goes…

--- Write-eat, Write-sleep, Write-pray, Write-laugh, Write-live

That's five, write?

What are you reading?

I am reading all the other Morris Award Finalists in no specific order because I am just honored to be listed among them. Right now I am in the middle of The Girl of Fire and Thorns and Between Shades of Gray is sitting, patiently waiting on my nightstand.

Three movies you think are worth watching, maybe more than once...

PRIDE AND PREJUDICE, the 2005 version, because it reminds me of my cinco hermanitas and Macfayden is so dreamy. MY BIG FAT GREEK WEDDING and JANE EYRE. They are both fantastic.

Last song you added to your music library...

Music Library? What's a music library? Seriously, I'm not a music person. It interferes with the rhythm of the poetry around me. I'm a nerd. I like quiet time. It lets me think.

Is there a poem you know by heart?

Oh! Oh! YES! YES! I can recite "The Highwayman" by Alfred Noyes. Every heart-wrenching word, every heart-pounding image, every breathless rhyme—all 17 stanzas live inside my heart. My students are surprised when I recite it without looking at a handout. It's a skill left over from my high school poetry interpretation days. I went to State with that poem. I didn't win, but I went, and that's what's important—the journey.

BONUS: Podcasty goodness... Hear the poet read her poem

Jenny Hubbard: Morris Award Interview

2012-01-12T18:40:00.000-08:00

Delacorte Press,
an imprint of Random House Children’s Books.
ISBN 978-0-385-74055-5.

Today's Morris nominee interview is with Jenny Hubbard. She tweets, but is concentrating on revision at the moment; check out @HubbardWrites . I must also mention this: Her dog Oliver is just plain adorable.

Paper Covers Rock by Jenny Hubbard

Alex, a junior at an exclusive boarding school, uses his journal (neatly hidden inside a copy of Moby Dick) to relate the disturbing events that led to the drowning of a classmate. Hubbard’s literary references, her creation of Alex’s poems and journal entries, and her storytelling skills combine in a story about the code of silence that often compromises the code of honor. (Description from the YALSA William C. Morris YA Debut shortlist announcement.)

---

The Morris Award is for a “first time author writing for teens.” Paper Covers Rock was initially conceived as a book for adults, with an adult POV. What were your considerations as you revised with a young adult audience in mind?

My fabulous teacher at the Vermont College of Fine Arts summer workshop, Kathi Appelt, explained to me how to get it done.

1. Put a teenaged narrator "in the moment."

2. Put adult characters on the periphery. (Obviously, I didn't follow this one to the letter.)

3. Keep the plot moving quickly.

She gave me more insider advice, of course, but these were my three primary revisionary mantras.

When did you know you had captured an authentic young male voice?

After teaching and living with boys for 10 years, that voice was inside of me, and it took writing the book to get it out of me again.

Can you share some recent YA reads that you feel achieve the perfection of diction, structure, characterization, and setting that would make them good candidates for learning "how to read"?

I don't read a lot of other YA fiction--a shortcoming of mine, to be sure. But I highly recommend the "OA" book Monkeys, by Susan Minot, as "how-to" manual (both for reading and writing); in fact, I used to use it when I taught eleventh-grade English for just this purpose. Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried is another model of perfection, and one that my (all-male) students enjoyed probably more than any other work of fiction I can recall.

Although Alex hides his journal-cum-novel behind Moby Dick and admits he is stealing Melville's words, he never actually reads the book. What does that say about the character? About the canon as it is taught? About reading?

First of all, thank you for noticing that Alex never gets past the first chapter! What that says, to me, is that he is too self-absorbed for the time being to process any story other than the one he is writing/telling. It also says that while Alex is a very good reader, he still has a lot to learn. He still needs a good teacher to guide him. What it also says is that the novel is too long to fit into a college-prep high-school curriculum. As a former teacher, I bemoan the fact that so many schools these days require "teaching to the test" rather than teaching close reading or elegance of sentence structure/grammar or allowing room for instructors to share his or her particular favorites with their students.

What happens next? Do you have other novels in the works?

Yes, I am overdue to present Novel #2 to my editor, Michelle Poploff, at Random House.

Working title: Exit, Little Sister. A story told in three different POVs by three teenaged girls.

"I have here to speak of the magical, sometimes

horrible whale-line.

The line originally used in the fishery was of the best

hemp, slightly vapored with tar, not impregnated with

it, as in the case of ordinary ropes..." --H. Melville
BONUS: True fact, I spent the day after I got my Morris
prowling around the masted ships in the San DIego
Maritime Museum. I saw an abundance of good rope.

Lightning round:

Revision advice in five words...

Rewrite book in different POV.

Three movies you think are worth watching, maybe more than once...

The Sweet Hereafter, Sideways, Amelie

Where did you first fall in love with Vermeer?

1996. Washington, DC: the National Gallery of Art.

Last song you added to your music library...

"June Hymn," by The Decemberists

Moby Dick abridged to excise the whaling minutia: for or against?

FOR!!!

John Corey Whaley: Morris Award Interview

2012-01-09T01:00:00.000-08:00

Atheneum Books for Young Readers, an
imprint of Simon & Schuster Children's
Publishing. ISBN 978-0-4424-1333-7.

If you don't already follow Corey on Twitter, I'll just wait here while you tap into that...because, really, he's an author who is fun to follow.
Ahem. So that's managed? Okey Dokey. Let's get started then...

Where Things Come Back by John Corey Whaley

Lily, Arkansas, seems like a sleepy town where it would be unlikely for anything of note to the outside world to happen. But Cullen’s seventeenth summer is marked by the overdose death of a relative, his brother’s disappearance, and the discovery of a woodpecker thought to be extinct. These seemingly disconnected events collide in this novel which demonstrates that nothing is random. Whaley’s story will absorb readers as they follow Cullen on his journey through an unforgettable summer. (Description from the YALSA
William C. Morris YA Debut shortlist announcement.)

Corey is this year's Morris winner—and he earned the Printz as well... How cool is that? Very. Extra very.

- - -

Where Things Come Back is your debut novel, but is it the first novel you wrote? How would you describe the experience of writing it?

Actually, WTCB is the first novel I ever finished. For years, I started and stopped working on novel after novel, the closest I ever got to finishing one was a few years before WTCB…it was this horrendous story that I’ve completely repressed. Haha.

Writing WTCB was interesting and surprisingly fast for me. I sat with the main idea for the story for a little over a year, while I was struggling through my first year as a public school English teacher. As soon as I got out for my first summer break as a teacher, I sat down to finish (I had 14 pages or so after a year) WTCB and was done with it in about a month and a half. I wrote most of it in a camper, on a camping trip with my parents, in the Arkansas woods. I always forget to tell people that.

This book, though, was supposed to happen. Maybe that’s cheesy or what not, but it was in there somewhere, you know? And it was ready to come out onto the page, so to speak, when I sat down and let it. It felt so crazy to actually do the one thing I always wanted to do.

If a story emerges from a struggle, what was the struggle that created Where Things Come Back?

I grew up in a small town in the very, very north of Louisiana called Springhill. It literally sits on top of the Arkansas state line. Growing up in Springhill was always a struggle to me…I just never felt quite right in the town, I felt as if I belonged in a big city somewhere. I spent a lot of weekends alone because friends would be out partying, etc., and that just never was my sort of thing. And I was a teen guy who didn’t like to hunt or drink beer or play or watch sports, so that pretty much limited me in a lot of ways on the social front. I thought college would change that…give me a new city, open me up to a lot more people and more varying types, but it really didn’t. I went to school about an hour from home and pretty much just let myself continue to be in my cynical little self-loathing shell. I think WTCB is, in a way, about finding the hope in the littlest things and about how environment can and will change the way we look at how the world works. I learned a lot about my views of people and the world while writing this book, and I’ll be forever grateful for that experience.

The Morris Award is for a “first time author writing for teens.” Did you intend WTCB to be a YA novel from the beginning? How did you imagine your audience while you wrote?

When I wrote WTCB, I didn’t really have audience in mind at all. I wanted, so badly, and had for years, to write a novel that I thought would be meaningful to anyone who read it. I wanted to tell the story of someone growing up in an impossible world, and that is what fueled the story and the characters and their interactions. In retrospect, it wasn’t surprising that I was subconsciously compelled to write a YA novel, given that I have always been so obsessed with books such as The Catcher in the Rye, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, King Dork, etc. These books helped shape who I am as a writer, I think…and, more so than that, what I intend for my readers to take away from my stories.

As a reader, I enjoyed the Rube Goldberg-esque enchainment of events. How did that plot happen? Was there an outline? (If so, did it look like a three-dimensional chessboard from Star Trek?)

Rube Goldberg! That may be my favorite description ever. The plot was accidental, I’m not afraid to admit. The original story was intended to be Cullen’s unbroken, first-person narrative of his summer and little else was to happen. Boy oh boy am I glad I decided to change that. At a certain point, about nine or ten chapters into Cullen’s story, I asked a friend how I should try to explain Gabriel’s disappearance…and that I was considering the use of some sort of religious cult. She, in turn, suggested I look into the Book of Enoch, something she had read in an article or seen on television, etc. So, I read the Book of Enoch and BAM! I knew I had my other story….the one I didn’t even know I needed in the first place. I immediately started a second narrative, one intended to be emotion-less as a opposed to Cullen’s emotion-filled narrative, and it all just went from there.

In the editing stage, I rearranged the chapters to be every-other-one, etc. As thrown off as readers are when, in Ch. 2, they are suddenly in Ethiopia….I was just as thrown off when I started writing about it and had no idea where I would take the story from there.

Kismet, though, fate…it sort of helped me out and I figured out what needed to be done as far as tying in the religious symbols and the overlapping themes. It all fit together in this eerie, magical way while I was writing it…many times I was struck with disbelief that some of the weird ideas I had actually worked. It was so awesome.

As far as an outline goes….I had one, several even...and they looked like the scribblings of a madman. I had to edit them constantly…add things, draw lines, scratch things out. I wish I’d saved them for an accompanying photograph. Haha.

What happens next? Do you have another novel in the works?

You should go to
That Cover Girl's blog
to read about evolution of the two
magnificent covers for WTCB.

I do! I’m very excited about my second novel, which I’m currently revising and basically overhauling. I can’t provide a release date, but I can say that the book concerns a mysterious death via defenestration, a creepy religious school in the middle of nowhere Louisiana, and a narrator who may or may not be telling us the entire truth. It’s a bit darker and heavier than WTCB and I’m excited to see how readers will react to that.

SPEED ROUND:

Writing advice in five words or less...

Honest writers make good stories.

What are you reading?

How to Live in a Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yu.

Three movies you think are worth watching, maybe more than once...

Super 8 (breath-taking), To Kill a Mockingbird (classic), and The Hours (best acting I’ve ever seen)

Last song you added to your music library...

"We Are Young" by fun.

Gospel or apocrypha?

Ah. Both…very cautiously, critically, and open-mindedly.

Bonus: Here's a trailer for Where Things Come Back...

WHERE THINGS COME BACK by JOHN COREY WHALEY Official Book Trailer from Corey Whaley on Vimeo.

Everybody Sees the Ants: Not-a-review

2011-12-07T13:59:00.000-08:00

Lucky Linderman didn't ask for his life. He didn't ask his grandfather not to come home from the Vietnam War. He didn't ask for a father who never got over it. He didn't ask for a mother who keeps pretending their dysfunctional family is fine. And he didn't ask to be the target of Nader McMillan's relentless bullying, which has finally gone too far.

But Lucky has a secret--one that helps him wade through the daily mundane torture of his life. In his dreams, Lucky escapes to the war-ridden jungles of Laos--the prison his grandfather couldn't escape--where Lucky can be a real man, an adventurer, and a hero. It's dangerous and wild, and it's a place where his life just might be worth living. But how long can Lucky keep hiding in his dreams before reality forces its way inside?

New skin is a miracle—proof we can heal.

I've sat down to write about A.S. King's book, Everybody Sees the Ants, more times than you can imagine. The first time was when I read it this summer while I was in Paradise Valley. All I had to do for a few days was read, write, and stare out the window.

My workspace, McGyvered out of
a couple of pantry shelves and
a bookcase.

The view.

But that was way before the book was released. It seemed like I was going to have all the time in the world to write something that might come close to doing it justice.

But then the future happened a little more quickly and much more bumpily than I hoped.

I did find myself thinking about Everybody See the Ants frequently, like when I watched my son-in-law patiently teach my grandson how to protect himself in a fist fight. My grandson is in first grade. He's already been bullied so unmercifully that he's had to change schools. The school administration at his previous school took the view that "boy will be boys" and children need to sort things out for themselves. In other words, the institutional culture said that everything was normal and operating smoothly.

I found myself thinking about Everybody Sees the Ants again when my youngest child became so depressed that he started talking about ways to hurt himself—to get away from the world. He's ten.

Honestly, as far as anyone can tell, he isn't the target of specific bullying. His school has a genuine commitment and an anti-bullying project in place. Unfortunately, none of that could protect him from realizing that he is different than the majority of the kids in his class. He isn't "normal" and there is considerable pressure to be "normal" even if it doesn't manifest in the body of a particular bully. So he thought he might be able to step in front of a car or fall from some high place. He thought that might help.

What's my point? Well, part of it is that Everybody Sees the Ants is a very true book. Although Lucky is bullied and that drives the plot, it offers a much wider perspective of the phenomenon. It knows that feminism is a fight against bullying, for one thing. It faces the dismal truth that society brutalizes individuals. And most cringe-inducing, it shows how fear makes accomplices of us—especially those of us who ought to be the protectors.

I remember looking at this sky and thinking about all the kids with all their scars, scabs, and bruises.

"I wonder then, how many other kids could join in.

Where are the Montanas and the Colorados?

Where is Vermont?"

And I want to tell them, "You deserve to be treated with respect."

That's all.

You don't have to be normal to earn it.

You just deserve it.

Poetry Friday: Let your babies grow to be poets

2011-10-27T12:00:00.000-07:00

Elsewhere I might have mentioned this poem by my daughter, but she had the original and definitive fair copy pictured here. When she was three, she thought writing poetry was just a thing people did, like drawing or typing or jumping in dumpsters. Thinking this didn't do her any harm.

It may have been an advantage when she got to University. The drawings below are from papers she did while in Texts and Critics when she was seventeen.*

Roger owned six sacred objects on which he enjoyed sucking.
(Six, from an illustrated book of numbers.**)

Meg was disturbed to find 12 fractals in her medicine cabinet.
(Twelve, from an illustrated book of numbers.)

Desmond dreamt his house burned down.

When he woke, love was not his own.

(D from an Abecedary***)

Hermione, the small white dog, with an affinity for cherry cordials,
knew the importance of home.(H from an Abecedary)

Oedipus feared he would never read again.
(O from an Abecedary.)

Unfortunately not everyone had an umbrella.
(U from an abecedary.)

* Hey kids, you want a cheap, good education? Check out the nearest Cow College.
** She allows that she was influenced by Gorey. It is a really good thing to be influenced by Gorey, I think.
*** Despite an aptitude for alphabetical sorting, I cannot get her to be an indexer. Right now she says she should have business cards that read:

"Poopy pants manager and household appliance savant"

So, I'm in a plane, maybe, over the South Pacific, but I really wanted to be part of Poetry Friday this week, because being with my daughter and her children reminds me that poetry is just a part of life--like poopy diapers and rainy days and love.

Today, Poetry Friday is hosted by Diane Mayr at Random Noodling

Poetry Friday: A Poem for a Place

2011-10-13T22:50:00.000-07:00

Today, I talked to a lot of six-year olds about brains and punctuation and fairytales. I was reasonably well-prepared. Part of that preparation involved visiting a used and rare book store. My intent was to find either primers or fairytale books. I had luck with that, and the visit was a success.
But I'm not a paragon of restraint. I also acquired several other books including The Fifth Book of the Swan School Readers, compiled and edited for the Education Department of Western Australia by J. Reford Corr, M.A., LL.B., printed here in Perth in 1920.

First off, this caught my eye on the front end paper

"My Country" by Dorothea Mackellar

Western Australian Wilflowers,
colour plate facing Mackeller's poem

Core of my heart, my country!
Her pitiless blue sky,
When sick at heart, around us,
We see the cattle die—
But then the grey clouds gather,
And we can bless again
The drumming of an army,
The steady, soaking rain.

Core of my heart, my country!
Land of the Rainbow Gold,
For flood and fire and famine,
She pays us back threefold;
Over the thirsty paddocks,
Watch, after many days
The filmy veil of greenness
That thickens as we gaze.

An opal hearted country,
A willful lavish land—
All you you have not loved her
You will not understand—
Though earth holds many splendours,
Whenever I may die,
I know to what brown country
My loving thoughts will fly.

Dorothea Mackellar earned her place in this reader alongside Dickens, Bunyan, and Tennyson. There is something tough and true in her poem that fully deserves the ornery pride in the inscription.

Poetry Friday

Today is Poetry Friday.
Delzey is hosting at Fomagrams, and
considering Halloween and
why robots might want candy,
among deeper issues.

Clean Up in Aisle Five!

2011-10-11T05:52:00.000-07:00

She's a week old.
IMO baby = book analogies are failures.

It's still 0-Dark thirty here in Australia. I've been up for a while thinking middle-of-the-night night thoughts, because that's what I do. It isn't jet lag. I've been here for weeks. It's just what I do. It's normal. There is a week-old baby in the house. She does it too. It's normal. I don't know what she thinks about, but ...

It occurs to me that a book store is a lot like a grocery store. There are a lot of products in there. The grocer wants to sell those products. The shopper wants to find something to eat. There have been all sorts of studies that have come to all sorts of conclusions about the best way to get a shopper to move a product from the shelf to their cart.

One of those theories is the "thrill of the hunt" theory. The stacks should be high, not only to pack in variety of products, but to make *searching* part of the experience. It should feel slightly claustrophobic. Maybe there is something out there, prowling the aisles that is after you every bit as much as you are after it.

You may notice that this scheme doesn't tend to apply in the vegetable section. There you can often see over the bins. Maybe this is because giant carnivorous yams aren't the stuff of nightmare--maybe it is to help us remember when we tippy-toed out onto the grass land out of the forest. I don't know. This is a half-baked, half-remembered theory and a tangent.

Stop thinking about yams. Start thinking about the cereal aisle.

While you are at it, make sure you are thinking of a conventional first-world supermarket.

Now look up and down the cereal aisle. There are many boxes, vaguely uniform in size.

Now stock those shelves with books, not boxes of cereal. There they are, rank after rank. How do you pick among them? Well, there are clues on the box. Some promise marshmallows; some promise to clean you out like steel wool. It's all there, on the box.

It's the middle of the night. One of the fluorescent fixtures over the cereal aisle is flickering. Background music is playing because there was a study that said it would encourage you to take a box of cereal off the shelf and put it in your cart. The music catches like a memory in the back of your brain, but then another cart comes careening around the corner and hits the end-of-the-aisle display and a whole pyramid of Frosted Mummy Flakes teeters, wobbles, crashes. A girl comes up behind the guy pushing the cart and slaps him in the back of the head. You reach out blindly and grab a box off the shelf and back your cart out of the aisle.

Later, when you are putting the groceries in the cupboard, you wonder why you bought cat food or Mackerel Helper...but it's cereal after all. You just bought a box of something called Catch and Release.

Questing Beast

2011-10-10T15:46:00.000-07:00

"Been questin' today?"

"Oh. Yes, thank you. Always am questing, you know. After the Questing Beast."

"Interesting job, that, very."

"Yes, it is interesting. would you like to see some fewmets?"

--T. H. White The Once and Future King

I haven't seen a Splendid Fairy Wren.

I haven't seen a Konik, either,
but I got hours of cold, damp satisfaction looking
for one in the marshes while I was in Holland.
I did find fewmets.

While watching for Fairy Wrens, I've seen kookaburras

and Kangaroo Paw flowers.

I could make some blather here about writing being like pursuit of the Questing Beast, but the salient points are these:

1) A lot of people may laugh when you go after the Questing Beast;

2) One must do one's best despite that;

3) You are imagining things.

Ultraviolet by R.J. Anderson

2011-09-02T10:56:00.000-07:00

Available from Carolrhoda Lab

"...there they were: Three stars, bright as a promise. But instead of giving of the crystal wind-chime noise that had soothed me since childhood, they sang an eerie, piercing harmony unlike anything I'd heard before. And their colors were strange too. The first star burned blue neon, the second electric green, and the third...
I ransacked my vocabulary, trying to put a name to that elusive hue, and failed. It wasn't red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, or violet or any of the million variation in between. It was something entirely new, a color beyond ordinary perception."

Ultraviolet makes the familiar strange and the strange familiar.

Synesthesia is a condition where the senses we ordinarily understand to be discrete are mingled. A stimulus, the sound of clinking glasses, might be an auditory experience with an overlay of color or a clear "taste." Alison is a synesthete, she hears stars and sees the sound of a zipper. Ultraviolet is her story, and it is a very strange one. Her experience of the world is radically different than that of those around her. She is aware she is not "normal." She fears she is crazy.

While telling Alison's story, R. J. Anderson probes issues of difference and acceptance. She also blows the lid off the universe and our comfortable confidence in what we "know." If you see the ending coming, you have more developed literary spidey senses than I do, that's for sure.

Brooklyn, Burning by Steve Brezenoff

2011-09-01T08:39:00.000-07:00

Available now from Carolrhoda Lab.

"I don't remember what he sang about; I'm not sure I ever knew. It was his voice, gritty but gentle, like my father's hands when I was too small to see past them, and the slow way his melody moved along its path, not in any hurry but enjoying every note for itself, rather than look forward to the next note, and the next, until the song's end. This song would have no end; it couldn't possibly. This song was forever."

Steve Brezenoff's new book Brookyn, Burning—how do I tell you how it works? It works like music. It has that compound, layered existence music makes of the ordinary moment.

When I first read this book last fall I said, "It is grit and ashes under a layer of honey." That is fair enough—as far as it goes. This is a gritty book, written in hurt and abandoned places. It's raw and stinging. And there is sweetness, too. This is a love song, after all.

Grit and ashes under a layer of honey.

Read it. You will be astonished.

Cat's Cradle: A random triptych

2011-08-23T12:48:00.000-07:00

Here are three cats and three cradles.

They all tell the same story*,

but they tell it very differently.

An illustration from

Dutch Fairy Tales for Young Folks

by William Elliot Griffs.

The cat in this story is Dubbelje, because she is twice as loving.

A Flood (1870) J.E. Millais

The kitten in this painting was part of Millais' household: Eel-eye was "an evil minded little miscreant, but its moral defects were forgotten in the halo of Art with which it was held to be invested." —John Guille Millais, The Life and Letters of Sir John Everett Millais

The Inundation of The Biesbosch in 1421 (1856)

L. Alma-Tadema.

I have no idea what this cat's name was, but it looks authentically worried.

You should never abandon your story because it has been told—every story has been told.

My own little boy at Kinderdijk in winter.

*Actually, there is more than one story about babies in cradles swept away by floods and the noble cats who accompanied them—sailing the storm deep and keeping the cradle upright through the night. Here the story occurs in Sheffield in 1864; there it happened in the lowlands during the middle ages and the cradle comes ashore at Kinderdijk.

Book News

2011-08-17T07:57:00.000-07:00

I'm still pretty stunned so please excuse this blithering* post.

This deal means I have the opportunity to make two more books. One of them is Black Helicopters. It also means I will have the opportunity to work with another editor, Liz Bicknell. I'm still happily working with Andrew Karre on Catch and Release. So...three books to join The Freak Observer on library shelves in 2012, 2013, and ? I'll put more details on my blog in a few days. Thank you all for your support.

Sparkling new deal for Morris Award winner Blythe Woolston!

August 16, 2011 Children's: Young Adult Author of Morris Award winner THE FREAK OBSERVER, Blythe Woolston's BLACK HELICOPTERS, about a girl raised to be a weapon who straps on a vest of explosives and sets out to kill and be killed until her plan goes wrong, to Elizabeth Bicknell at Candlewick, in a good deal, in a...

By: The Greenhouse Literary Agency

*One of my very best friends used to call me blithering Blythe. He had good reason.

Love Poetry: The Angelic Wombat

2011-07-15T08:15:00.000-07:00

A drawing by Dante Gabriel Rosetti
featuring his beloved wombat, Top.

Who can resist the Rossettis? Not me, for darn sure.

Beautiful, creative, scandalous.

Wombat lovers.

The Wombat

OH how the family affections combat
Within this heart, and each hour flings a bomb at
My burning soul! Neither from owl nor from bat
Can peace be gained until I clasp my wombat.
I don't have that much poetry by heart, but this is going to be added to the store.

Hosted today by
A Year of Reading

True Love and a Cow: Music of Daniel Johnston

2011-07-12T10:38:00.000-07:00

Crumple Horn Cow
A flea market photo picked up in California.

I'm taking a little bit of a break from blogging—it started a bit ago, but I'm slow on the uptake.

While I'm gone, I'm going to be wallowing in ambivalence. You don't want to see that. Ambivalence about what? Well, writing for one thing. I am deeply envious of the many who knew from the cradle that they wanted to write. My destiny has always been less manifest.

So I'll let someone who seems like a kindred spirit sing the world to you... Daniel Johnston.

"Lucky stars in your eyes...
I really don't know what I have to fear.
I really don't know why I have to care."

And in my murky moments, I think of this Beck cover of one of Daniel's songs: True Love Will Find You in the End ...

"This is a promise with a catch
Only if you're looking will it find you,
'Cause true love is searching too,
But how can it recognize you
Unless you step out into the Light?

Don't be sad,
I know you will...."

I'll be back soon as I can. I want to tell you about some books I'm reading—and I'm going to Australia come September—and...I have no idea what else is going to come up. Prognostication isn't one of my gifts.

Lorine Niedecker for #PoetryFriday

2011-07-01T06:56:00.000-07:00

Swallows on Pryor Creek. Photo by Will Woolston. (201)

Today I'm working on the index for Lorine Niedecker: A Poet's Life by Margot Peters. Lorine was supremely devoted to her poetry, despite a life that seemed to conspire against it. She was an Objectivist—like Charles Oppen and Charles Reznikoff. As an Objectivist, she strove for precision and concision—for an expression of the thing itself.

This is the Objectivist Creed as it appears in Lorine Niedecker

clarity of image and word-tone
thinking with things as they exist, and directing them along a line of melody
economy of presentation
the poetic rendering of current speech.

She loved birds.
She lived in a swamp, or good as.
She was sharply opposed to capitalism and the accumulation of wealth.
She was interested in mental processes, especially the nature of memory.
Here is a sample of her work in which she considers the work of other poets:

If I were a bird

I’d be a dainty contained cool

Coming October 2011 from
University of Wisconsin Press

Greek figurette

on a morning shore—

H.D.

I’d flitter and feed and delouse myself

close to Williams’ house

and his kind eyes

I’d be a never-museumed tinted glass

breakable from the shelves of Marianne Moore.

On Stevens’ fictive sibilant hibiscus flower

I’d poise myself, a cuckoo, flamingo-pink.

I’d plunge the depths with Zukofsky

and all that means—stirred earth,

cut sky, organ-sounding, resounding

anew, anew.

I’d prick the sand in cunning, lean,

Cummings irony, a little drunk dead sober.

Man, that walk down the beach!

I’d sit on a quiet fence

and sing a quiet thing: sincere, sincere.

And that would be Reznikoff.

Today is Poetry Friday @ A Wrung Sponge Andromeda Jazmon is hosting.

When I was a library clerk

2011-06-27T17:23:00.000-07:00

When my first book, The Freak Observer, was published,
This came in the mail from Ken Bova, who was,
like me, a library clerk Once Upon a Time.
The stuff that circulates in the library?
It's the best stuff in the world.

I haven't processed everything that happened at ALA NOLA. I've used india ink and a dip pen with a metal nib to write accession numbers on my experiences, but I've not cataloged anything. A person must take pains with the cataloging. Otherwise, you might lose several, complete whale skeletons archived in the rotunda because no one will think to look there.

So in lieu of an ALA recap that would be fragmentary vulture barf, here is an artifact from my time as a library clerk. I have said that libraries have been my sanctuary more than Once Upon a Time. One of those times was the shaky transition between getting my BA and entering grad school. Let's just say going to grad school was no sure thing. Returning to my previous station in life—I had been The Duchess of Dumpster—seemed inevitable.

But Bede (the Venerable Bede) gave me employment in the library. He had assembled a staff devoted to reading, fishing, making art, and getting things done. It was one of the sweetest passages of my life. During my time there, one of the other clerks, kept a carefully curated list of things I said. Here it is:

I think autobiographies are always dishonest, but I think this, as a biography, is accurate.

And while I was there, one of the other clerks made this portrait of me. I did wear this tippet and hat to work, if you're asking. It's a good likeness I think, and has gotten better over the years, although he did romanticize my mouth a bit.

Constraint and Play for #PoetryFriday

2011-06-17T05:15:00.000-07:00

A tiny illustration, but very pertinent. This is an initial letter
drawn by William Makepeace Thackeray.
It is Becky angling for a fat fish.
It is P, as in P is for Pegasus.

Because it's early in the morning, and because I'm indexing stuff about Joyce, I'm going to say that making a poem has three moments:

Integritas, consonantia, claritas

Consonantia, harmony, trips me up. That is the moment when rhythm and rhyme, neither of which I can attain, come in to play.

But, since play is my whole motivation for poetry in the first place, I have recourse:

Doggerel.

Some of my best conversations have been in doggerel. Conversing in doggerel encourages observation and appreciation. When one says to another at the trailhead, "Let's only talk in haiku until when come back out," that's a pretty good hike in my experience.

In Catch and Release, Polly resorts to doggerel because talking is hard. Doggerel constrains the conversation. It formalizes and sets boundaries. It demands thinking before speaking. Doggerel is deep play.

In the course of the book, Polly and Odd compose only a few letters of the alphabet book Odd thinks Polly should write. The subject, monsters, because, to quote Odd, "The little boogers would love a book about monsters.” The form is doggerel, because that's what we know about picture books for small children, even if we know it is lie.

Here are a couple letters of the abecediary* that Polly and Odd didn't get around to using in conversation:

P is for Pegasus

A horse in the air

The stain of a murder

Snakes dead as hair

X is for Xeno

Stranger who visits

Marry it, screw with it

Kill it, which is it?

*Another constraint, the poems must proceed from A to Z...and there is the "no humany monster" rule too.

It is Poetry Friday

Check It Out

At Check It Out: Life and Books in a K5 Library School Setting

Teaser Tuesday: Catch and Release

2011-06-14T08:45:00.000-07:00

My son made this flash animation for me during his last month of high school. I couldn't figure out how to download it and make it work without actually, you know, taking the time needed to do that...so I just filmed it playing on my screen.

Summary: Eighteen-year-old Polly and impulsive, seventeen-year-old Odd survive an deadly outbreak of flesh-eating bacteria, but resulting wounds have destroyed their plans for the future and with little but their unlikely friendship and a shared affection for trout fishing, they set out on a road trip through the West.

In this scene they visit the Berkeley Pit in Butte.

The music is DeadMau5 HR8938 Cephi--kind of got picked up on accident, but works brilliant.

Juggling Kittens, Cobras, and Cabbage

2011-06-03T04:30:00.000-07:00

I have nothing to contribute to Poetry Friday this week
because...
I'm juggling kittens.*

But Poetry Friday is at The Writer's Armchair.

Toby Speed is one of my favorite human beings and

she is hosting today despite the fact that she is

juggling kittens of her own:

1) Revising her book

2) Anticipating her daughter's wedding

3) Being a poet

* Yesterday was Yell-fudge!-at-a-cobra Day. I didn't get that done, either. And being done with my book? Not done.

I did plant a cabbage.

If you enjoy today's illustration (what is wrong with you? Did you click on it? You really should click on it.), you should go to the Uncyclopedia entry for juggling kittens. I thought about including a disclaimer, but if you enjoy that illustration you have already been corrupted by the Interwebz.

What happens while "nothing is happening": Style Sheets

2011-05-30T09:57:00.000-07:00

The publishing process is full of invisible steps. The creation of a style sheet, which provides consistency and accuracy in vocabulary across a book, is one of those invisible steps.

Here is an alphabet-bookish selection from the style sheet prepared by Julie Harman for Catch and Release. Julie is the production editor at Lerner, Carolrhoda Lab. (She was an important ally in the creation of The Freak Observer, too.)

Alzheimer's

Blankie
Crisco

Herman the Sturgeon.
I took this picture last time I saw him.
He has a Facebook page...
someone wants him to
o-fish-e-ate at her wedding.

DEET

Evel Knievel
Flashback Pheasant Tail Nymph
gothasol
Herman the Sturgeon
Jefferson, Thomas

kahuna

Lucky Charms

Moby Dick

NICU

Oreos

Princess Peach

refrieds

Smokey Bear

Troutzilla
...? (There is no U! It makes me want to yell "stop the presses" and put a sentence in there about the Unknown pokémon...and no V? I'm ashamed of myself.)

White-Slave Traffic Act

X-ray
Yeats, W. B.
ziplock

The real list is much longer. Here are the rest of the Sssssssss ...

Saltine (brand name)

screwdriver

Here is a rattlesnake shaped
like the letter S.
There is a rattlesnake
in Catch and Release.

seat belt

Seychelles

Sharpie

sloe gin fizz

Smokey Bear

snak-paks

Snow White

snowflake babies

"The Song of Wandering Aengus"

The Sopranos

South Park

speakeasies

Spokane, Washington

Statue of Liberty

St. Regis River (MT)

superbug

systemic

A huge amount of work went into preparing this style sheet. This is just one of the things that happens while "nothing is happening" author-wise during the publishing process. And it's just one of the reasons I am deeply grateful to the people who work together to make my stories into books.

P.S. I had to come back here and correct the spelling on Julie's name. It is Harman, not Harmon. (Maybe Herman the Sturgeon can help me remember this.) Did I notice the error on my own? No I did not. Editor Andrew Karre caught it. The amount of work an editor invests in a book, in an author... imagine.

Baby Lyuba: Lost Worlds for Poetry Friday

2011-05-27T07:21:00.000-07:00

Continuing to think about allusion: Here is another Lost World poem—with the provenance of imagery.

THIS +

THIS =

Lost Worlds: The Extinct

Deep in the Siberian permafrost

temptation is accumulating in little crystals

floating in the air

like breath.

The mammoth is a huge temptation.

It is as if time is stopped.

The cold is too thick to let the minutes pass.

Only the temptation is moving forward

collecting,

whispering,

“Certainly there could be cells in perfect order

only frozen

waiting to wake up to the returning sun

the way snow wakes

sublimating from ice to breath.”

It is a salvation plot

Dostoevsky might not have understood.

The cautionary lamb

struggles to her arthritic knees.

Telomeres ticking.

No cold is thick enough to stop

their bleating.

- - -

I don't especially like this poem, it isn't strong and I don't think it can be made strong. It is, however, very allusive. So allusive, it becomes obscure to everyone but me.

Poetry Friday is at
My Juicy Little Universe

* I had a copy of this Big Little Book in which Lassie discovers a perfectly preserved frozen mammoth, which, was, alas, destroyed in a forest fire. I don't remember if I was obsessed with mammoths before I read it, but I am now.
The second picture is of Dolly the Sheep, the famous clone, whose untimely death proved to be timely after all. There is no fooling telomeres.
Then there is Dostoevsky, who provided the yearning—and I blame him too, for the hovering veil of Christian symbology.

The Rapture at Hardware Depot: A Story

2011-05-23T05:16:00.000-07:00

I wrote this story several years ago. Events of the past week brought it to mind.

The Rapture at Hardware Depot

Nobody was ready. I mean, some people might have been “prepared” but nobody was ready. It’s like having a big plastic tub full of emergency supplies in the basement, being prepared, and then, when disaster strikes, your house caves in and all your preparation is buried under the rubble. Nobody’s ready for that.

Arguably, it was worse for those of us who just plain didn’t believe any of it, like me.

I mean, I’d flipped through a couple of paperbacks while I was waiting for checkout at the grocery store. There are always a few books on racks they have there are to encourage impulse buys, you know? A person with a medieval mindset might see the Seven Deadly sins: Gluttony slathered with chocolate and promises of easy weight loss; Envy posing as celebrity gossip; and plenty of Lust—always popular, Lust. It’s a triumph of 21^st century marketing, the impulse buy.

Anyhow, there, among the well-oiled torsos and must-have fashions for spring, I noticed a couple of items that didn’t fit the pattern. I picked up a chunky paperback and flipped it over. The back cover was less ambiguous than the front. It was fiction about the “end times.” Impulse buy failed. I was not the reader they were looking for, and this book was not my cup of apocalypse. Couldn’t be, since I don’t see the point in brewing apocalypse at all.

As is often the case, my brain was now primed for coincidence—miracles by any other name. Miracle number one: The next day some guy who played in a straight-to-DVD movie adaptation of the books started crawling the circuit of the morning and afternoon talk-shows plugging his movie and the books. Products don’t sell themselves, not even paperbacks that package timeless truth in a page-turner. (The guy actually said “timeless truth in a page-turner” more than once.) Miracle number two: I saw a bumper sticker while I was waiting for the light to change. It said, “When the rapture comes, can I have your car?”

Unlike the actor, who exuded serious sincerity through his smile faster than venom could be milked out of a cobra, the bumper was supposed to be funny.

Or maybe it was a very subtle message written in the ink of angels, because, as it turns out, that bumper sticker was touching on a very important matter. Hardware and material possessions were way more involved in the rapture than any of us, prepared or disinterested could have imagined.

I said that “arguably” the rapture was worse for us nonbelievers, but there really wasn’t much argument at the beginning. It was definitely very bad for the raptured.

Things would have gone smoothly if it hadn’t been for the body. The body, that pile of soggy hardware, was a first big glitch.

The roll-out of the rapture was staggered in time, not immediate, and that proves that some careful planning went into it. And the prototype worked, apparently, all those years ago. “When the rock was rolled away.” At least that’s the story—and they seem to be sticking with it. I guess that’s admirable.

But the problems with the current roll-out, I should tell you about them.

Turns out that the rules of physics apply even in the case of bodily ascension. That makes sense, I mean, the whole universe operates according to those rules. While it might be handy to have an exception in this specific case on this little wet planet, there are a lot of balls in the air and physics is juggler, not a magician.

Anyhow, if a body is lifted up toward heaven and a ceiling is in the way, the body bumps into it. It’s kind of like waving a big old magnet over some iron filings, a sheet of paper makes no difference to that kind of attraction. There were many, many cases where the spirit was willing, apparently, but the flesh was weak. Those poor souls were stuck to the ceiling pretty hard. They could roll, or creep along like a spider, which some of them might have done for minutes or days until they died of heart attacks or thirst. Once that happened, the body would come crashing back down. Dropping a body eight feet or so makes a considerable noise, which sometimes alerted downstairs neighbors to the event. More often though, the only clue was an overflowing mailbox or a bad smell in the building.

So, at first, the rapture was reported as a rash of deaths among the elderly and shut-ins and used to illustrate the generally callous nature of our society, as a rash of deaths among the elderly and shut-ins usually is. There might have been others, not so elderly, less isolated, but those instances went unremarked. They didn’t fit the pattern. Things that don’t fit the pattern are invisible, white noise, non-events. Those isolated events were totted up as heart failure or household accidents, and it would have taken months for anyone poring over the morbidity statistics to notice the least blip in the numbers.

There were no plane crashes because of disappearing pilots or deaths in the operating room because the brain surgeon evaporated leaving nothing but a pile of sweaty scrubs on the tile floor. Like I said, there was evidence of planning.

Eventually, though, there were a couple of successful raptures outdoors, and those were witnessed and reported and even documented on shaky cell phone movies that made it onto the evening news. At that point, the experts stepped in and said it was the rapture.

Well, there you go. You’d think that would have settled it, but no.

It was 24-7 where you couldn’t watch a rerun of Will and Grace without a crawl along the bottom of the screen reminding the rapture-ready audience that they ought to get their butt outside and avoid standing under power lines. How many of the rapture-ready watch Will and Grace? I do not know. But I know I wasn’t among them and that the whole thing was an irritation to me.

So at that point, I’d have to say the whole rapture was just an irritant equal to the shopping channel. I was clearly not the audience, but it was there, taking up bandwidth and making my channel surfing less productive.

Of course, the 24-hour news channels didn’t limit their coverage to a crawling warning along the bottom of the screen. Let’s just say the rapture was dominating the news cycle. Nothing else—not even surfing dogs or squirrels on water skis—could get any traction. It’s impossible to compete with people milling around naked in cornfields and crowded on rooftops of cities.

Seriously, you haven’t seen that much TV news footage of people of roofs since Hurricane Katrina. I don’t know why the people in the great fields of the Midwest came in for less camera action. It’s probably nothing prejudicial—the networks just have quicker access to the metropolitan areas. And nudity on the news, well, a helicopter angle from a certain distance is just plain easier to negotiate than glimpses of grub-like white bodies twinkling between the leaves of corn.

OK, so there’s the nudity. I’m not sure where that idea came from, but before long those hoping to be raptured decided that clothes would get in the way. Here’s how I see it. If you think that the rapture is a big magnet and the raptured are sort of like paper clips, you can see how a barrier, like a ceiling, would gum up the system. It would have been less problematic when we were all sleeping in tents out in the desert or on the roofs of mud huts, but there you go; times change. Anywho, I don’t see how clothes would have ever been much of a barrier between the raptured body and heaven. But the rumors went around and “naked” was the hot tip. So they all got naked.

As a person who never gave modesty much of a thought. I can point out that there are some really good reasons to wear clothes—outside at least. Cold, sun burn, bugs crawling on your wazoo. If you’ve ever used an outhouse full of mosquitoes, you know I speak the truth. Those are good reasons for clothes. None of that made a bit of difference to the hoping-to-be-raptured. On the other hand, being naked on a roof or in a cornfield didn’t seem to be the most persuasive argument in favor of rapture, either. Plenty of people just got cold and rashy.

There was pretty much no knowing who was going to be raptured or when. This was disconcerting to the faithful, who thought they had their tickets punched, but it was way more disconcerting to the likes of me, who hoped we could sit the whole thing out—like an argument about who should get Grammy for Best Country Single. I just do not care, but it looked like that would be no defense.

Still, you can’t go around nervous as a cow pissing on a hot rock all the time. No matter how weird, the situation becomes the new normal. So it wasn’t long before I was able to conduct my life with the thoughtless confidence of somebody visiting the Baghdad pet market on a spring day. Sure, suddenly everything could all blow up, but kittens are cute and life must go on.

It was in this frame of mind that I went to the hardware store to buy a new fluorescent bulb and a pack of picture hooks. Found the light bulb, which isn’t a simple task anymore with the shocking explosion of light bulb species recently. Found the picture hooks. Went to the check-out stand.

While I was there, getting my items rung up, suddenly the checkout chick cries out, “It’s happening!”

My first thought is that her water’s broke. She’s pretty round: might be a baby, might be the obesity epidemic, you can be sure? Or it could be some marketing campaign so next thing is she’s going to offer me a store credit card with a ten percent discount on this purchase. But no, not this time.

“I’m being raptured!” she is all ecstatic. “Help!” Suddenly the ecstasy turns to fear, “Git me outside!”

I look up and see the high ceiling and the fluorescent light tubes and the metal scaffolding of the warehouse hardware store.

“Please don’t let me hit those lights!”

By now her feet are hovering above the check-out counter and she’s trying, hopelesslessly, to swim through the air toward the automatic exit doors.

I grab her foot, and I have to say, I’m impressed at the strong attraction heaven seem to be exerting. I had imagined something sort of like a helium balloon, but hell no, this has weight. It’s like I’m trying to keep her from falling of a cliff or something. It takes some doing.

Before too long, though, a couple of sales associates turn up and they grab her too. Between the three of us, we get her out the door and then let her go, into the wild blue yonder. Her speed is unwavering. Her trajectory true.

Then the three of us who had been left behind on the pavement of the parking lot went back into the store.

One of the employees paused to make sure that I’d paid for my purchase before he bagged up the light bulb and the picture hooks and said, “Thank you for shopping at Hardware Depot. And thank you for helping with Shelli. She’s the third cashier we lost this week.”

Allusion for Poetry Friday

2011-05-20T09:05:00.000-07:00

Caravaggio's "child of Venus"
Cupid as Victor
I have always enjoyed his attitude.

A lovely dryad rang'd the Thracian wild,

Her air enchanting, and her aspect mild:

To chase the bounding hart was all her joy,

Averse from Hymen, and the Cyprian boy;

O'er hills an valleys was her beauty fam'd,

And fair Caissa was the damsel nam'd.

Mars saw the maid; with deep surprize he gaz'd,

Admir'd her shape, and every gesture prais'd:

His golden bow the child of Venus bent,

And through his breast a piecing arrow sent.

This is a bit from a Caissa or a Game at Chess written by Sir William Jones in 1763. My son brought it to me to read because I am working on the problem of chess, describing the pieces and the movements. He thought passages like this one...

Chess piece made from antler, 12c.
Foto: Kantonsarchäologie Zug,
Res Eichenberger

Then four bold knights for courage-fam'd and speed,

Each knight exalted on a prancing steed:

Their arching course no vulgar limit knows,

Tranverse they leap, and aim insidious blows:

Nor friends, nor foes, their rapid force restrain,

By on quick bound two changing squares they gain;

From varing hues renew the fierce attack,

And rush from black to white, from white to black.

...would interest me, which they certainly did.

There were two things that interested me even more.

The first is that he, seventeen in the 21st Century, knew this poem.

The second is the operation of allusion. I wondered at the appearance of Hymen there, for example. Hymen always makes me thing of Cassandra's song in Trojan Women. Everything I have since read about Hymen is lit by the torches of Euripedes.

That is how allusion works. William Jones in 1763 could count on his readers to know the story/ies of Hymen, and that is what makes the figure work.

The ensuing centuries have clotted up the clockwork some. Hymen might not be common knowledge.

Last night, I attended a high school band concert. One of the pieces on offer was the symphonic Godzilla vs. Las Vegas. As Godzilla rampages through the neon meadows, there are musical allusions to Sinatra, Wayne Newton, and Liberace. They band took a multi-media approach to the performance: A drum line of Elvis impersonators, a power-point with photoshopped images of the devastation, and reactions of the terrified citizens—including the dramatic chipmunk...

There are a couple of things to think about here regarding allusion. First, the study of music preserves the music of the past—Wayne Newton crooning "Danke Schoen" in this case. Second, allusion is as much fun as it ever was—and just as useful.

I love allusion.

Poetry Friday is at The Drift Record
this week. Thank you to Julie Larios for hosting.

Go there for poems and thoughts on poetry.

Dear Library of Congress, Thank you...

2011-05-09T10:19:00.000-07:00

Here's a milestone on the road to publication: What editor Andrew Karre refers to as the poem in metadata created to describe Catch and Release

            Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Woolston, Blythe.

Catch and Release / by Blythe Woolston.

       p. cm.

  Summary: Eighteen-year-old Polly and impulsive, seventeen-year-old Odd survive an deadly outbreak of flesh-eating bacteria, but resulting wounds have destroyed their plans for the future and with little but their unlikely friendship and a shared affection for trout fishing, they set out on a road trip through the West.

  ISBN 978-0-7613-7755-9 (trade hard cover : alk. paper)  [1. Disfigured persons--Fiction. 2. Automobile travel--Fiction. 3. Fishing--Fiction. 4. Trout--Fiction. 5. Communicable diseases--Fiction. 6. West (U.S.)--Fiction.]  I. Title.

  PZ7.W88713Tro 2012

  [Fic]--dc22

2011009630

That was composed by a master of clarity and concision. As an indexer, I admire it greatly. As a reader, I trust it will help other readers find the book.

Thanks to CIP data, I've just added Playing with Matches by Brian Katcher to my TBR pile.

Here's the CIP data that sold me on the book:

While trying to find a girl who will date him, Missouri high school junior Leon Sanders befriends a lonely, disfigured female classmate.[1. Dating (Social customs)--Fiction. 2. Friendship--Fiction. 3. Beauty, Personal--Fiction. 4. High Schools--Fiction. 5. Schools--Fiction. 6. Disfigured persons (U.S.)--Fiction. 7. Missouri--Fiction.]

First words: "So I was reading this Vonnegut novel."

Agha Shahid Ali's Dream of Glass Bangles

2011-05-06T05:55:00.000-07:00

One of the most wonderful things about reading is finding new things. Agha Shahid Ali's poetry is new to me. This poem stunned me. It stuns me.

I'm including the whole poem here because I couldn't imagine how to separate it without losing the magic and power. It has to be read whole, like a Prince Rupert tear.

* Dream of Glass Bangles *

A woman wearing shisha and bangles.

Those autumns my parents slept
warm in a quilt studded
with pieces of mirrors
On my mother's arms were bangles
like waves of frozen rivers
and at night
after the prayers
as she went down to her room
I heard the faint sound of ice
breaking on the staircase
breaking years later
into winter
our house surrounded by men
pulling icicles for torches
off the roofs
rubbing them on the walls
till the cement's darkening red
set the tips of water on fire
the air a quicksand of snow
as my father stepped out
and my mother
inside the burning house
a widow smashing the rivers
on her arms

This poem is from the book The Half-Inch Himalayas, published in 1987.

You can read more of the Aga Shahid Ali's poems here... Maybe you will want to read them all. I do. There are 213 copies in libraries according to World Cat. It is still in print, too, happily.

Today's Poetry Friday Host is Scrub-a-Dub-Tub, who reminds us, beautifully,
that it is Mother's Day.

I'm in Yellowstone Park for the next couple of days.

The winner in the drawing for Jacqueline Houtman's
The Reinvention of Edison Thomas will hear soon.

Quirks, Quarks, and Social Media

2011-05-02T09:08:00.000-07:00

Salon featured an interview with Alexandra Robbins, author of The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth. The message of Why It's Good to be a High School Loser appealed to me. I read the interview. It was worth it. (Quirk Theory is almost as much fun to say as quark.*) I think it has a good chance of being a popular book, which is to say, I think many people will consume the book or the ideas in it.

As a person who rarely ate in the cafeteria and can hardly remember sitting with the same person twice, I'm not sure that her findings on the defining and isolating power of cafeteria tables are solid, but I do think the analogy she draws between on-line social networking and her imaginary cafeteria tables is interesting. I wonder if, in the book, she explores SoundCloud or ScrewAttack . I wonder that, because I think Facebook and Twitter are less interesting, by far.

Never believe grafitti.

Facebook is like homeroom. You show up. You touch base. You show a face to the world. You pass secret notes to people who know that isn't your real face. Every once in a while the teacher gets a bug up the butt and rearranges the seating.

Twitter is like having a conversation in the bathroom: Short statements and echoes on the tile. A little graffiti. TMI. Way TMI.

Alexandra Robbins describes three elements of popularity: Visibility, recognizability, and influence.

Those are very applicable to social media. I'd also go a little further and say that's an excellent schema for using social media to promote something—like a book.

Visibility means search engines see you. If they don't see you, you might as well be invisible.

Recognizability means your avatars are quick to read and remember. I really hate the word "branding," but there you go: branding.

Influence means people follow you.

I'm going to confess one of my deepest frustrations with social media: Numerical evaluation. I hate it. My revulsion may be pathological and directly related to the fact I wasn't a popular person in high school. Or it could be because the metrics for influence are almost always numerical, quantitative. I think those metrics are misleading. If you sit down with a quote-a-day calendar you can tweet enough to bump the stats. If you are part of an echo-chamber marketing scheme, you can bump the stats. It's all pretty illusory.

I'm a limited person. I can provide direct, high-voltage attention to one moment at a time. That's it. That's my sphere of influence.

* "I like to say 'quark'! Quark, quark quark!" —Hobbes of Calvin and Hobbes. As far as Quirk Theory goes, I'm pretty sure I got the quirks.

An Enchanted Loom: Ode to the Brain

2011-04-29T07:19:00.000-07:00

Ode to the Brain by Symphony of Science

Information in the form of energy

Streams in simultaneously

Through all of our sensory systems

And then it explodes into this enormous collage

Of what this present moment looks like

What it feels like

And what it sounds like

And then it explodes into this enormous collage

And in this moment we are perfect

We are whole and we are beautiful

--Jill Bolte Taylor

Jill Bolte Taylor might not have imagined this to be a poem, but I do. Consider the alliteration, the consonance, the euphony, the polysendaton. And the repetition. (Well, some of the repetition is engendered by melodysheep's construction of the piece, but however it got there, this is a poetic performance.) This is sciency poetry: Poetry of the brain.
My son sang/recited this as part of his talent show performance. Here is a picture of him wearing his big blue mouse head just as he did during the show.
This is the last post where commenting means an automatic entry into the drawing for Jacqueline Houtman's book The Reinvention of Edison Thomas.
Click here to learn more about the book and Jacqueline's sciency fiction.

This is the last Poetry Friday of National Poetry Month.
Today's host is Tabatha Yeatts at The Opposite of Indifference.

Enjoy the poetry.
May your moments explode in an enormous collage.

The Dreaded Special Interest

2011-04-25T09:03:00.000-07:00

A BBC station ident. You can't tell by looking, but this is a result of his love of hot air balloons.

I could write a whole post about balloons. They are like silent drums.

One of the criteria the school considers when determining if a child needs accommodation or support is this...

"Encompassing preoccupation with one or more stereotyped and restricted patterns of interests that is abnormal in either intensity or focus."

Off hand, this doesn't seem like a negative trait. Overwhelming passion is required to persist and accomplish anything great. But there is no steering a big interest. You can't walk up to a nifty, passionate brain and say, "How about you harness that obsessive thinking? Please figure out how to prevent catastrophic oil spills. Or come up with a cheap, simple fix for brain damage done by malnutrition." The world might need those things, and it is possible that some non-neurotypical brains are on the job right now getting that stuff done, but those brains chose what they desired.

As I mentioned before, my son memorized product introduction speeches given by Steve Jobs. His speech patterns improved dramatically once he had mastered those speeches. He had greater fluency. He was more willing to talk to others. He used nonverbal gestures like pointing and nodding appropriately.

This wasn't our idea. We were out of ideas. The occupational/speech therapist was out of ideas. We had computers in our house, and he had access to them. If we hadn't, he might have done something else--like learned to speak to ravens.

He still has an abiding interest in all things Apple/Macintosh. He can talk for hours about the company history. He can talk for hours. He can talk.

That isn't his only subject, however. There has been a sort of branching and interweaving, he's building an interconnected web of things he loves. The very first thing he loved, when he was pre-verbal, was drumming. And balls, he loved balls. So when he saw this Sony ad...

...we spent hours pouring balls down the stairs and down the slide.

Other things he loved/loves include Blueman Group (drumming! alienation! beauty!), Animusic (drumming! robotization! beauty!), and most recently DeadMau5 (beats! giant mousehead! beauty!)

There's no school today. He is bouncing his ball and chanting. When he does that, our whole little house turns into a drum. He's thinking about something. That's just the way he thinks.

This is another NOS post. Anyone who comments will be entered into the drawing for Jacqueline Houtman's book The Reinvention of Edison Thomas.

Good question: non-sequitor reply #PoetryFriday #spinepoems

2011-04-22T07:58:00.000-07:00

Two spine poems today for Poetry Friday. I've been looking for spine poems since I first saw them in a Poetry Friday post. Today, I realized that I could make spine poems. So I did.

Both of these poems are related, in a way, to the brain that makes us who we are. If you comment on this post, you will be automatically entered into the drawing for Jacqueline Houtman's wonderful book The Reinvention of Edison Thomas. (Click here to read more about the book.)

"What if, day in and day out, independent people need play?"

What If ed. by Robert Crowley
Day in and Day Out by Mabel O'Donnell
Need by Carrie Jones
Play by Stuart Brown

"Maybe, the last exit to normal exposed the diversity of life."

Maybe by Brent BunyonThe Last Exit to Normal by Michael HarmonExposed by Mark ShapiroThe Diversity of Life by E. O. Wilson

Poetry Friday is hosted today by
Book Aunt: click her fantastic motto for more poetry...

"Because OTHER people give you clothes and video games for your birthday!"

Sciency Fiction with Jacqueline Houtman

2011-04-20T08:18:00.000-07:00

Today Jacqueline Houtman, author of The Reinvention of Edison Thomas, answers a few questions about her book and about Aspergians, fictional and in the real world.

Remember, I'm giving away a copy of this book. All you need to do is comment on any of the NOS labled posts. You should also stop by Jacqueline's blog, Sciency Fiction, to check out her Twitter challenge.

About the Book: Science geek Eddy Thomas can invent useful devices to do anything, except solve his bully problem. Eddy Thomas can read a college physics book, but he can't read the emotions on the faces of his classmates at Drayton Middle School. He can spend hours tinkering with an invention, but he can't stand more than a few minutes in a noisy crowd, like the crowd at the science fair, which Eddy fails to win. When the local school crossing guard is laid off, Eddy is haunted by thoughts of the potentially disastrous consequences and invents a traffic-calming device, using parts he has scavenged from discarded machines. Eddy also discovers new friends, who appreciate his abilities and respect his unique view of the world. By trusting his real friends, Eddy uses his talents to help others and rethinks his purely mechanical definition of success.

Eddy's concern for others is very impressive. Is that "out of character" for a person with limited social skills?

Not necessarily. A lot of people think that people on the autism spectrum lack empathy, that they don’t care about others. This could be because autistic people may not express their concern in ways that neurotypical people would expect. They also might not catch the more subtle, nonverbal communications, and so their apparent priorities may seem unusual. In the book, Eddy is not so good at figuring out who his real friends are, but his concern for the safety of the neighborhood kids when the crossing guard is laid off is very real. He has a very strong idea about what is right and what is wrong.

In the book, no one ever "labels" Eddy with a diagnosis. Why not? Wouldn't it be an advantage for the readers, especially young readers to *know* how to talk about people like Eddy? Wouldn't that improve awareness?

There are a lot of kids out there who are “different,” but who don’t have a diagnosis. Are they any less worthy of respect and acceptance than someone with an official diagnosis?

I decided not to label Eddy with a diagnosis because I didn’t want readers to form opinions about EDDY based on their own experiences or expectations of what autism “is supposed to be like.” Everyone on the spectrum is different, an individual with his or her own gifts and challenges. I wanted readers to get to know Eddy as a character. Autism is part of who he is, but it’s not everything.

I agree that a label might have made it easier for people to find my book if they are looking for Aspergian protagonists. I’m hoping word will spread. That’s one reason I’m doing a bit of a marketing push during Autism Awareness Month.

Why "sciency fiction"? How is that different from science fiction?

Eddy has an analytical way of thinking and knows a lot of facts. I used scientific metaphors and descriptions throughout the book. There’s even an embedded lesson in scientific method. But I didn’t just throw the science in; it’s integral to the story and theme. I came up with the term “sciency fiction” to describe books like THE REINVENTION OF EDISON THOMAS when I started my blog. Here’s how I explained it then. Of course, “science fiction” can have a lot of science too, but there’s always some sort of speculative element. The term “science fiction” already had a longstanding fan base and body of literature, so I felt I needed to come up with a new term.

In contrast to science fiction, the science in “sciency fiction” is accurate, and reflects our current understanding of science. Or, in the case of historical sciency fiction, it reflects our understanding of science during that period. (In that way it’s different from fiction science, in which the science is made-up, or inaccurate in service of the story.) Last year, Tom Webb independently came up with “sciency fiction” in response to “Lab Lit,” arguing that not all science happens in the lab.

I’m hoping the term will catch on, especially in kidlit, since there are a lot of kids who seek that stuff out. A couple of my favorite sciency fiction titles are THE GREEN GLASS SEA by Ellen Klages and THE EVOLUTION OF CALPURNIA TATE by Jacqueline Kelly.

And if you’re Googling sciency fiction, make sure Google doesn’t insist you’re looking for science fiction. It thinks it knows better, at least for now.

On the Spectrum: Not Otherwise Specified

2011-04-18T10:31:00.000-07:00

Angus building a stick bomb.

At the recent parent teacher conference, the teacher gave us the paperwork required to get our son some educational accommodations "further down the line." We know he will probably need it. But it isn't that easy to get him what he needs.

Nowhere on the list of diagnostic criteria is "palilalia*" or the even less common "learned to communicate by memorizing the Steve Jobes speeches and then rehearsing them with gestures in front of a mirror." Nowhere does it say "decompresses and processes the day's information while bouncing a ball and chanting for two or three hours each evening."

Thing is, his teachers know there is something up with him.

They gave him a weighted blanket to help him remember to sit at his desk. They agreed that he could take breaks from class to walk up and down the stairs when he needed to reboot. They coped with his intense love of overhead projectors. They let him eat lunch in the closet for the first few months so he could avoid the horrifying smells and sounds of the lunch room, then they gradually helped him acclimate himself to that environment. None of that appears on the form either.

This week I'm going to introduce you to someone who is NOS: Not Otherwise Specified.

Later this week, Jacqueline Houtman, author of The Reinvention of Edison Thomas will visit, I hope, to share something about Eddy. I'm going to give away a copy of her book on April 30th. The rules for the giveaway are simple: anyone who expresses interest by commenting on NOS blog posts will be entered in the drawing.

* palilalia - a pathological condition in which a word is rapidly and involuntarily repeated.

Even more exciting, Jacqueline is conducting a twitter experiment (she's sciency that way) with a classroom set of her books as motivation. Visit her at Sciency Fiction for details.

The Hoo Doo of Motherhood

2011-04-14T20:53:00.000-07:00

My daughter's birthday is approaching; it makes me sentimental. This poem is about the confusion of being a parent. Maybe some mothers aren't confused, but I was—am. Also, I'm a nature poet, I guess.

I Remember When I Made You

I carved the ribs and longbones

of peeled willow;

the flexibility seemed good

the wood

both attractive and available.

I used water weeds for your lungs,

cold and green,

but damp and knowledgeable of air.

Hung inside, no one sees them there

drifting currents of hair.

For the head

a puffball mushroom.

I chose it for the size and shape,

its dense and giving nature

white and round and impressed by my thumb.

I considered flowers for your eyes—

harebells and clematis might have been charming—

but the shiny slime of trout

was more authentic somehow.

That is how you got that little spot

of gold in the left eye.

I made you in that manner,

and I left you propped on an alder fork.

How you got from there to here

standing in your wedding crown

puzzles me, but I remember

how I made you.

Today Poetry Friday is hosted at Random Noodling

I lurve Random Noodling. That is all.

Living Under the Name of Sanders

2011-04-12T09:31:00.000-07:00

This is a good picture made originally by
E. H. Shepard.

Unless it's really rainy this afternoon,

I'll commence living under the name of Sanders by this evening.

This is a result of what we were reading last night: Winnie the Pooh. Actually, I wasn't doing the reading, I was being read to, which is one of the more delightful experiences life offers. The person doing the reading was really enjoying the jokes, which made me enjoy them, even though they are pretty old jokes.

Anyway, we will be painting Mr. Sanders above our door.

(I might paint RNIG ALSO by the bell.)

I'm going to continue to live under the name of WOL—or "woolston" which is good as.

Prior to the reading part of last evening, we had a conversation about names, specifically the names we, in this family live under. Our names are rivers (Angus and Blythe). Our names are streams (Dee and William). And we have one fish to live in the water (Pike). Our names are mythic and heroic (Ajax, Angus, Christopher, Cyrus, Nelson, Travis, William). Our names are the moon (Neoma) and a star (Aldebaran).

But our names are also pretty silly. Mine for example is a town surrounded by lettuce and a doll with eyes. It is a puritan virtue name, which gives me giddy, brainless joy and makes me wonder why giddy, brainless joy is a virtue. Since it is, though, I have to assume that living under the name of Sanders is a virtuous act.

This is Just to Say:Thank You for #poetryfriday

2011-04-08T05:45:00.000-07:00

I wanted to show you plums painted by

Adrian Coorte, but I had no luck finding them.

Here are strawberries instead.

Each of those seeds is a little jewel of varnish.

If you stand before the painting, they catch the light and sparkle.

It's a very lively painting.

This is Just to Say

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

William Carlos Williams

I am going to say thank you to the librarians of Montana this morning.

I'm taking this poem as my model for concision. It has always impressed me as a very grateful poem.

Today's Poetry Friday Host is Madigan McGillicuddy of Madigan Reads.

Madigan has a review of Poetrees a collection of 19 poems about trees. I don't know about you, but I'm inordinately fond of trees..

A Fishing Poet: Greg Keeler

2011-04-04T07:44:00.000-07:00

The Glass Trout

It lies over the rock
Or at least its shadow does.
It turns to feed.
Or at least its refraction does.

Here is a bright window
on a world where
everything is clear
until it moves
and everything moves.

A nose breaks the surface
in a circle small as
a bracelet for a slender wrist
but the shadow beneath
cannot even hide behind a boulder
so it moves up and back
under the hatch.

It is a rock
then a week bed
then a sunstruck wave.

Then it arches out into
this world
where everything stops.

This poem appeals to me not only because it describes trout in a way that is accurate to my experience, but because it also is so deeply interested in vision--in seeing through and seeing past.

It is from the book American Falls. The poet is Greg Keeler. If you know his voice, it is impossible not to hear these words as he would say them. (The book was recently republished by Confluence Press. According to World Cat, the book is held in 22 libraries, so that avenue exists, too.)

One last thing, he is a pretty fine teacher of poetry. (And I might have boogered up some of his line breaks when I put that picture in there. My bad. Line breaks matter.)

April is Poetry Month and today...

2011-04-01T08:01:00.000-07:00

I made this photo of a bride's veil last April.
Unknowable script on a white page.

...is Poetry Friday.

On the page of snow
the wet, black hem of my coat
writes words I can't read.

• • •

In one of my online bios it says that my poetic license was revoked—for good reason. It does not state what that reason was. The first-order reason was that I love the joke; the second, more important, reason is because poetry takes time. And experience.
The little thing above (I won't call it haiku.) was written in a moment while walking. I had occasion to turn back upon my tracks and saw that my footsteps had been swept away by my coat. What remained was a dark and curling script of shadow and wet on the blanket of undisturbed snow.

• • •

A year ago, I noted the advent of Poetry Month with a poem dedicated to libraries and librarians including those who work in museums. Last September I met the poets at KidLit Con and started participating in Poetry Friday. My life is different because of that. I have started to recover my poetic license. Each Friday, I have made time for poetry—and I have been rewarded in experience.

A special happy poet's anniversary to Amy at the Poem Farm, who wrote 365 poems in the past year. She is the host of Poetry Friday this week. I wish you many happy returns, Amy.

And to all the poets, thank you.

What Can(t) Wait by Ashley Hope Pérez: Not a Review

2011-03-27T20:46:00.000-07:00

Today's not-a-review is for Ashley Hope Pérez's debut novel, What Can(t) Wait.

"Another day finished, gracias a Dios."

Seventeen-year-old Marisa's mother has been saying this for as long as Marisa can remember. Her parents came to Houston from Mexico. They work hard, and they expect Marisa to help her familia. An ordinary life--marrying a neighborhood guy, working, having babies--ought to be good enough for her. Marisa hears something else from her calc teacher. She should study harder, ace the AP test, and get into engineering school in Austin. Some days, it all seems possible. On others, she's not even sure what she wants. When her life at home becomes unbearable, Marisa seeks comfort elsewhere--and suddenly neither her best friend nor boyfriend can get through to her. Caught between the expectations of two different worlds, Marisa isn't sure what she wants--other than a life where she doesn't end each day thanking God it's over. But some things just can't wait...

• • •

My parents both earned their G.E.D.s, but neither of them graduated from high school.

I'm a first-generation college graduate.

When I took my first run at university, I buckled and washed out. When I look back at myself, that outcome was inevitable. Financial Aid looked like Welfare to me. A person could take 18 credits for the same price as 12, so that's what I took. My minimum-wage job started at 5:30 am. My Calc class was in a west-facing room in the afternoon. You do the math.

Eventually, I fought my way back to school. I learned to negotiate the system. I learned that there was no stigma attached to financial aid. I still took 18 credits a term, but work-study jobs made my schedule less daunting. I took my three-year old with me to night classes. She helped me study art history. I graduated.

Despite my rocky start, I became a teacher at a university. I ended up teaching people who were the first in their family to go to "school." Some of them were single parents who had to bring their kids to class when the baby sitter didn't show. Others were SOTAs—Students Over Traditional Age—who were juggling families, jobs, aging parents, and dead-end jobs.

What Can(t) Wait is a book those students would have appreciated. They would have loved Marisa. They would have understood the love she lavishes on her little niece, even though childcare eats the time she should spend studying. Those students were always struggling with the everyday math of not enough money and not enough time. They would have understood the hard choices Marisa faces—choices that pit the present against the future.

I'm not a book reviewer, but I felt compelled to share this with you: What Can(t) Wait rings true. It doesn't soften the sharp edges of economic reality, it brings them into focus through the lens of Marisa's life. It is very worthy of the time you will spend reading it.

Visit ashelyperez.com for additional information—including proper reviews.
What Can(t) Wait is a Carolrhoda Lab book. Ashley generously provided me with an ARC.

At the Storm Door

2011-03-25T03:26:00.000-07:00

It's all about sorting buttons. I made this photo at
The Knopenwinkle in Amsterdam.

At the Storm Door

I wanted to live in a fast language,

words as unambiguous as rain.

I have, instead, these foggy hours,

twilights designed

This week
Poetry Friday is at A Year of Reading

to predispose me to eventuality.

Skim light here

and almost gone.

The heat spins away after

into some deep space that physics persuades

to have a longing greater than my own.

And the bells on the cattle

in the meadow over the hill

ring like the apples on a branch.

- - -

There are times when I struggle while indexing. My job is to determine what a passage, a sentence, a page of writing is about. To name it and move on.

Poetry and indexing share some attributes: An interest in concision, a ragged line length, formal structure. But a thing that they share most deeply is the struggle to name it and move on.

- - -

You might visit A Year of Reading today. You will find Mary Lee Hahn's poem

Wild Atrocity

It is pretty fine stuff. From there, you can leap out and visit other poets too.

The Reaping: District 2 (Win The Girl Who Was on Fire)

2011-03-20T20:35:00.000-07:00

"From the trilogy's darker themes of violence and social control to reality television, fashion, and weaponry, the collection's exploration of the Hunger Games by other YA writers reveals exactly how rich, and how perilous, protagonist Katniss’ world really is."

The winners have been contacted. Thank all of you so, so much for participating. The enthusiasm for the books is a wonderful thing to witness.

More chances to enter at The Hunger Games Trilogy Fansite and Adrienne Kress (Check out the excerpt of her essay about decadence.) and sharpest rose (March 30th only, BUT keep in mind her essay: "The Heart is a Weapon the Size of Your Fist"—you want to read that very much.

Update: Wow. We are creeping up on 100 entries. Either way, this
contest ends soon. But there are lots more opportunities, like this one
at The Hob starting today, Thursday, March 24 and ending April 5.

A Smart Pop book.

To celebrate the April 5th release of The Girl Who Was on Fire, I'm authorized to give away two copies of the book.The rules for this giveaway are simple. Just leave a comment at the end of this post saying that you would like to have the book. That's it. I'll keep this open until Friday or until there are a 100 comments (...that'll never happen.) On April 5th, I'll hold simple lottery, no battle to the death afterward.

Hey, you in OZ, Great Britain, Japan... this is for you too!

I think the essays in this book have the power to change how you think about The Hunger Games—to see the story in different lights.

With that in mind, I want to share some photographs that reminded
me of the book. These are all portraits of real people, in their real worlds, but you might see why they reminded me of Sae, Gale, and Prim.

And visit the Smart Pop blog for links to the other Districts--and eleven more chances to enter. The odds are totally in your favor.

This might be Sae.
Woman on a Porch, Doris Ulman, 1930.
Via the American Art Museum Collection.

Gale and this soldier may know the same truth.
Photo of a Vietnam-era soldier via
everyday iShow.

Prim might have had a moment like this while Katniss was at The Games.
Photo by Jack Delano, from the Farm Security Administration photo collection.

Revision Lesson: The Owl and the Pussy-Cat

2011-03-17T20:41:00.000-07:00

I'm addicted to this Owl video from Japan.
Remember that there is still need there.
Doctors Without Borders is there.

I have been revising the last two days.

It's a really niggling process for me.
I pick up individual commas and polish them on my shirt.
I print the pages out and pin them on the clothesline and look at them with binoculars.*
In this way, I make progress at the rate of 56 words per hour.

There are four sentences, 49 words, devoted to a boat. It's supposed to be a very desirable boat. I know that. My job is showing convincing the readers. All I have to do is make them fall in love with the boat—at least for the span of three lines. The first thing that popped into my head was a "beautiful pea green boat." In the end, I didn't use those words, but I considered it. During my consideration. I sought out the poem that stuck that boat in my imagination in the first place: Edward Lear's "The Owl and the Pussy Cat." You probably know it by heart. It's a very easy poem to know by heart.

What I didn't know was how the poem looked before Lear revised it.

Here's an early draft.

Our mother was the Pussy-cat, our father was the Owl,

And so we're partly little beasts and partly little fowl,

The brothers of our family have feathers and they hoot,

While all the sisters dress in fur and have long tails to boot.

We all believe that little mice

For food are singularly nice.

Our mother died long years ago. She was a lovely cat

Her tail was 5 feet long, and grey with stripes, but what of that?

In Sila forest on the East of far Calabria's shore

She tumbled from a lofty tree - none ever saw her more.

Our owly father long was ill from sorrow and surprise,

But with the feathers of his tail he wiped his weeping eyes.

And in the hollow of a tree in Sila's inmost maze

We made a happy home and there we pass our obvious days.

From Reggian Cosenza many owls about us flit

And bring us worldly news for which we do not care a bit.

We watch the sun each morning rise, beyond Tarento's strait;

We go out ........................ before it gets too late;

And when the evening shades begin to lengthen from the trees

........................as sure as bees is bees.

We wander up and down the shore .......................

Or tumble over head and heels, but never, never more

Can see the far Gromboolian plains ......................

Or weep as we could once have wept o'er many a vanished scene;

This is the way our father moans - he is so very green.

Our father still preserves his voice, and when he sees a star

He often sings ....................... to that original guitar

....................................................

...................................................

The pot in which are parents took the honey in their boat,

But all the money has been spent, beside the £5 note.

The owls who come and bring us news are often ..........

Because we take no interest in poltix of the day.)

And here's the final poem.

The Owl and the Pussy-cat went to sea

In a beautiful pea-green boat,

They took some honey, and plenty of money,

Wrapped up in a five-pound note.

The Owl looked up to the stars above,

And sang to a small guitar,

"O lovely Pussy! O Pussy, my love,

What a beautiful Pussy you are,

You are,

You are!

What a beautiful Pussy you are!"

Pussy said to the Owl, "You elegant fowl!

How charmingly sweet you sing!

O let us be married! too long we have tarried:

But what shall we do for a ring?"

They sailed away, for a year and a day,

To the land where the Bong-Tree grows

And there in a wood a Piggy-wig stood

With a ring at the end of his nose,

His nose,

With a ring at the end of his nose.

III

"Dear Pig, are you willing to sell for one shilling

Your ring?" Said the Piggy, "I will."

So they took it away, and were married next day

By the Turkey who lives on the hill.

They dined on mince, and slices of quince,

Which they ate with a runcible spoon;

And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand,

They danced by the light of the moon,

The moon,

They danced by the light of the moon.

All I can say is holy cats. That's revision.

*No, I don't, but I read about someone who did that—and I mean to try it sometime.

It's Poetry Friday
The host this week is
Andromeda Jazmon at A Wrung Sponge
Every week I'm astonished.
That's how it works.

N'oublie pas

2011-03-14T06:51:00.000-07:00

Ojizosami. Keep them safe and warm.

ShelterBox provides disaster relief.
Learn about them http://www.shelterboxusa.org/
The accumulation of small donations
is important.

"N'oublie pas."

It was the first thought I had on waking.

It seems to me to be a terrible thing to think,

because I have no idea what it was that I shouldn't forget.

If it was part of a conversation in a dream, I've forgotten the dream—or all but a crumb of it. Dreams often leave a little scurf of ideas behind, like tidal debris on a beach.

"Our bodies are our own doppelgängers." (July 22, 1994)

A scrap like that has some marrow in the bone. I've chewed that one for more than seventeen years. But "n'oublie pas"? Even thinking it leaves me feeling stranded. Even thinking it makes me wish I could forget.

I Have Sex: 3 Fallings into Love

2011-03-11T04:47:00.000-08:00

Three Fallings into Love

(If they had ended in marriage, they might have been comedies,

but, as it is, they aren’t tragedies, either.)

The first time, it was with a brown-haired boy

who read science fiction.

I was eleven.

He moved away

and I kept reading.

I still pretend I’m setting my coordinates for distant stars

when I punch the buttons on the microwave

to warm up the vegetables.

II.

When I was sixteen, it was my physics teacher.

I loved watching him do math in his head

and on his fingers.

Virginity is pretty small potatoes to pay

for numbers

spilled out like the milky way

and sizzling with possibility.

III.

Then it was with an artist

who smelled like Juicy Fruit Gum,

especially his pockets,

and who made the silver wrappers into jewels.

He left a trail of twinkling ripples in his wake

like a rock skipping

one, two, three, four times

before sinking into me

and coming to rest down deep.

Today is Poetry Friday
Liz Scanlon is hosting
at Liz in Ink