Every speaker addressed the topic of opening pages in provocative, engaging, and always thought-provoking ways.

Arthur A. Levine talked about essential knowledge, taking us through his gaining of it via certain opening pages of his life. He talked of being asked what he wanted most. And what Arthur realized he wanted most was to be understood. I’m still thinking about what I want most.

Fellow Newbery Committee members Kathy Isaacs and Martha Parravano and I did a session on the award, focusing on the process and fielding interesting questions.

That evening Pam Munoz Ryan spoke, beginning with a very amusing look at the cultish aspects of CLNE. She then went on to discuss what was most important to her as a writer, quoting from Ray Bradbury about those items that we care most about —enough to whisper and shout about. We went out to a bonfire (evidently a tradition at the Inn at Essex) and did poetry with the wonderful Ashley Bryan and then sang many a CLNE favorite (keeping the spirit of John Langstaff alive and well).

On Saturday Susan Cooper started us with twenty seconds of silence — this, she told us, is what happens at the start of a play —and, at the end. That twenty seconds of silence stayed with us for the rest of the conference. Silence — so important and so scarce these days, especially for children, I think. Susan’s talk was both profound and heart-filled — a wonder.

Next we heard from the energetic and brilliant Janice Harrington. She gave us wisdom and read her own poems and The Chicken-Chasing Queen of Lamar Country, with a presence and style that I will long remember.

The afternoon was incredible. We took a ferry to the New York side of Lake Champlain to visit Steven Kellogg’s studio. That word “studio” barely does justice to that extraordinary space, filled with his collection of folk art, his art, friends’ art, and more. The Rackhams and Sendaks and more on the walls, the rare books and original art for us to see — it was a remarkable time.

This fall Candlewick is publishing Our White House: Looking In Looking Out created by the National Children’s Book and Literacy Alliance and we were treated to a presentation and reception for the book. Contributors who presented included Katherine Paterson, Susan Cooper, Brian Selznick, Tobin Anderson, Jeannine Atkins, Virginia Euwer Wolff, Steven Kellogg, Gregory Maguire, and Marguerite W. Davol. Probably everyone’s favorite was CLNE regular Lynda Johnson Robb who read her piece “My Room.” (Brian Selznick talked about the difficulty of following her as a speaker! She was that good.)

Here are Deirdre Baker (children’s literature expert and author of Becca at Sea) and Martha Parravano (Horn Book editor and my Newbery bud) enjoying the idyllic location.

That evening we had a brilliant presentation from the one and only Brian Selznick. This was followed by a storytelling session organized by Rita Auerbach that began with Brian narrating Georges Méliès’ A Trip to the Moon complete with soundtrack and sound effects and included many other wonderful storytellers.

The next morning we heard from the one and only Sarah Ellis considering the opening pages of a number of books. She spoke of the “apparatus” in books — in particular she consider the much maligned prologue. Sarah asked us to, “… question the limits of narrative even as we experience it.” A terrific final talk that kept me thinking all the way home.

The event wound to a close with a colloquy. Here are a few random notes of mine from that:

Pam Munoz Ryan reminded us of the Raybury quote, “What [or maybe it was when] are the best things in your life and when you are you going to whisper and shout them?” Ray Bradbury (from Pam Munoz Ryan)

Susan Cooper gave us Priestly’s, “…the icy challenge of the paper.”

Janice Harrington gave a great metaphor of writing openings being like a plane — taking off. That poems and shorter runways may create greater risks of crashing and burning. Susan Cooper then noted that “sometimes a poem just takes off and flies.”

Ginny Wolff gave us poet William Stafford’s, “Writing a poem is like starting a car on ice.”

We were reminded of Brian’s use of the first line from Joyce’s Ulysses. One huge S.

Katherine Paterson noted that, being a Depression era baby, she wastes as little space as possible.

Of course, cult that we are, the conference ended with us joining hands and singing “Wild Mountain Time.”

A very wonderful few days.

]]> http://medinger.wordpress.com/2008/05/12/more-opening-pages/feed/ medinger http://medinger.wordpress.com/2008/05/11/the-experimental/ http://medinger.wordpress.com/2008/05/11/the-experimental/#comments Sun, 11 May 2008 11:16:36 +0000 medinger http://medinger.wordpress.com/?p=1066

“All art is about trying to see the world anew.”

It is the final morning of CLNE. Hopefully, I’ll find time this coming week to write up the varied and marvelous experiences of this conference, but for now here is the post I began directly after listening to Tobin (M.T.) Anderson’s extraordinary speech.

Tobin focused on what he termed “experimental” techniques. He noted that they are called that although they have been around hundreds of years so are not exactly truly experimental anymore. He further noted that these methods (or whatever you want to called them) are natural and often unremarked upon when used in children’s books whereas they are fussed over when used in adult books. Most important of all, he raised the idea of the book teaching the reader to read itself.

Tobin quickly blew us out of the water by reading and then analyzing Kurt Schwitters‘ “Poem 25.” It was incredible. All numbers and all poetry, performed by Tobin with remarkable brio. (Later some of us toyed with what the poem would sound like read in different languages. It is “Gedicht 25″ in German, for example.) Tobin used it to demonstrate how the work itself taught the reader to read it. He noted that linguists consider that all language is a network of internal and external structures. In the case of the Schwitters’ poem, 25 means nothing until it is used in the poem. And it is all the easier for children since they don’t know that it has to mean something.

Next Tobin took us through Dr. Seuss’s One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish and contrasted its rambling structure to that of William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch. After that he got me looking at another familiar book anew, Shaun Tan’s The Arrival. In particular, he showed how it, like the other works he’d presented to us, was a book that teaches its readers to read it.

Tobin followed these close looks at individual books with a review of the different techniques that are used in these experimental books including meta-fiction, magical realism, typographical intrusion and play, linguistic play, and hypertext.

Tobin also spoke about his own Octavian Nothing, not an experimental book as such, but one that also teaches its readers to read it. He spoke of his careful placing of such fantasy tropes as a dragon, princess, and castle in early on in order to disrupt the readers’ thinking that this was possibly a fantasy. I loved learning this as I had gone into my reading of the book thinking that was a possible. Even the cover image had me wondering. Today, no doubt,  this would be harder for anyone as the book is now so well-known as a work of historical fiction, not fantasy.

Of all the fascinating things he talked about, it was the idea of the book teaching the reader to read that most enthralled me. To take the idea further, I imagine the reader in effect creating his or her personal glossary of words, themes, phrases, and ideas to use as he or she reads the books. One that is developed in partnership with the book. It is this idea, this idea of the book (not the author) as teacher that was the most amazing thing I took away from Tobin’s talk.

Over the following days I’ve been fortunate enough to be in several conversations about this talk with Tobin and others. Last night (more in a separate post) Brian Selznick did his talk, a tour of a virtual museum, including a M.T. Anderson Memorial Wing where he riffed off Tobin’s remarkable idea. As always happens at CLNE, there has been a surfeit of intellectual and aesthetic wonder that we all will need to go home and process.

I’m sitting in my suite (almost as big as my NYC apartment) at the Inn at Essex enjoying a little quiet time before heading over for breakfast, visiting, and then off to listen to the sure-to-be-profound words of wisdom from the brilliant M. T. Anderson.

The Opening Page is a new yet familiar Children’s Literature New England institute. For twenty years, ending in 2006, these summer institutes were like no other. At the urging of some child_lit friends I began attending in 1999, was a speaker in 2005, a discussion leader 2006, and a fan for life. This one is new because it is at a different time of year, shorter, in a very different venue (previously these were always in educational institutes), less intensive (no huge reading list or formal discussion groups), and smaller. It is familiar in structure (packed with wonderful speakers), singing, and most of all — faces.

I accompanied Rita Auerbach on the drive from NYC to Essex. While her car’s GPS was very unhappy with our route and kept trying to make us do a U-turn and take her way we stuck to Rita’s husband’s route and arrived as the wine and cheese reception began. Before long directors Barbara Harrison and Gregory Maguire welcomed us with prose and song and so we began.

After dinner we heard the one and only Katherine Paterson. I stupidly did not take notes, but it was (as always) a magnificent and profound talk. I was sitting next to Brian Selznick who did sensibly pull out a notebook and jot down a few notes for himself. I do remember that she began by reading the first few pages of Alan Bennett’s charming The Uncommon Reader, a book she had recommended for the reading list.

More anon.

Huh? Why Newbery, you asked? After all, I’m done. We made our decision and now it is the 2009 Committee’s turn. Well, because I’m now thinking about possible books for this year’s award and my current favorite is absolutely neck-deep in atmosphere.

Now I may be using completely the wrong word, but by atmosphere I’m thinking about books in which the setting is alive and a vibrant part of the story, books in which you just smell, feel, and taste the heat or the wind or something else. Books like Richard Mosher’s Zazoo. It has been years since I read it, but I remember being drawn in by the atmosphere of that life, that home where Zazoo and her grandfather lived. Books like Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast series where the place is so weird, so unique, so part of the story.

What brought the term to mind is Kathi Appelt’s The Underneath, a book that I like more and more as I think about it. And the more I think about it and read other reviews, it strikes me that it is the atmospheric writing that elevates it to award contender for me. The story is engrossing, but it is the sense of place the author gives to us, that bayou, ancient and current, that is absolutely central to the book. Swirling, twisting, moving in and out and about, Appelt’s mastery in creating atmosphere is what makes this book to my mind a serious contender.

Are there others you’ve read, old and new, that are similarly vividly atmospheric?

MIDTOWN, OCTOBER 1996 Wallace and Gromit, the British clay puppets who are stars of the silver screen, spent a day locked in a taxi trunk when a porter at the Rihga Royal hotel, at 54th Street between Avenue of the Americas and Seventh Avenue, overlooked the black box they live in as he unloaded luggage belonging to their creator, Nick Park. Mr. Park gave chase but could not catch the cab or its license plate number. The driver returned the box, with puppets, to the hotel the next day.

Lost and Found in New York Taxicabs - New York Times

…While Amazon.com and other online booksellers boast lists of best sellers and a local librarian can advise on which books are in frequent circulation,
neither can tell you if any of these books were ever opened, much less
if they were read cover to cover. Renaissance Learning has unique
insight into the books kids are reading, and we are pleased to share this
information with you for the first time….

The above is from Renaissance Learning’s self-proclaimed “Groundbreaking Report” [sic]: What Books Are Students Reading in Grades 1–12?

Please. All this reports tells us is what books kids are reading for their school’s Accelerated Reader program. Cover to cover? Well, some kids may really be losing themselves in the books, but I suspect (based on my own years as a teacher and earlier ones as a kid doing SRA which was also quiz-based) that they are far more concerned with collecting book credits than in properly reading them. To my mind this report has way less crede than the above disparaged stats from booksellers and librarians. For those unfamiliar with AR, this is how it works (according to their own website):

It’s as Easy as 1-2-3

1. Student Reads a Book. Students choose books at their appropriate reading levels and read them at their own pace. Visit AR BookFinder to search for available titles.
2. Student Takes a Quiz. Accelerated Reader Enterprise offers more than 120,000 quizzes to help you motivate and monitor students’ reading and vocabulary growth.
3. You Get Information. You get immediate feedback on the reading and vocabulary progress of each student.

Seems benign, right? Well, not exactly. Well, hold on. See that “Visit AR BookFinder to search for available titles.”? Means, just that — not all books are part of this program. Besides, since when did a simplistic “quiz” indicated that a kid really read a book thoroughly? Hate to tell you, guys. It doesn’t.

About as groundbreaking as …. I don’t know…sliced bread?

The Golden Compass tops Entertainment Weekly’s “Read the Book! 23 Disappointing Movie Adaptations.” It is a very eclectic list, but of those on it I think The Cat in the Hat (#10) was a whole lot worse.

And of course there have been MANY absolutely horrid film adaptations of wonderful children’s books. One of the worst of late was The Seeker, supposedly based on Susan Cooper’s wonderful book, The Dark is Rising.

“Once you get the snippets you need,” Wozniak says, “your books disappear. They gradually evaporate. They have been translated into knowledge.”

Want to Remember Everything You’ll Ever Learn? Surrender to This Algorithm

It had to happen sometime — and, lo, an era has ended. After a 10-year run, and less than a year after the seventh and final book in J. K. Rowling’s series was published, the Harry Potter books have fallen — as of the May 11 issue of the Book Review, which went to press last night — off The Times’s best-seller list.

Ten Years Later, Harry Potter Vanishes From the Best-Seller List - Paper Cuts - Books - New York Times Blog

Chris Riddell is doing illustrations for the British children’s edition of Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book while Dave McKean is doing an adult version. And now Neil has posted a few of Riddell’s illustration on his blog here and I must say, they creep me out. But then I also find Dave McKean’s illustrations for Coraline too scary for my students and don’t show them when I read the book aloud.

For that matter, the forthcoming graphic novel of Coraline with illustrations by P. Craig Russell is also problematic for me because Coraline looks way too old in it for me. I guess I had always imagined Coraline to be around the same age as Alice — eight or nine, close to the age of my students. But the graphic novel makes her look several years older. Closer to the girl in Mirrormask than my imagined image of Coraline.

What strikes me about this is that kids eight to ten are getting a bit squeezed out here. I mean, there are the more sophisticated picture books that they love such as Gaiman and Grimley’s Dangerous Alphabet, but then there is a BIG leap upward to Coraline and The Graveyard Book in terms of illustration. Sure, some of my students will go for both, but many will not. And I think that is too bad because I think Coraline is very much for them. I’ve read it aloud many times with great success. But those illustrations are scary, scary, scary!