Shadows and Reflections

Margaret’s post last week made me the think of shadows and reflections. The shadow of the creative leap is the terrifying fall. The reflection of being stubborn is persevering. We struggle to keep the light and dark in balance.
This week I will shadow her post, adding a few light reflections, digressions and pictures.

Saul Steinberg

 

 

 

In her book The Language of the Night Ursula LeGuin wrote an essay about The Shadow, by Hans Christian Andersen. Andersen’s story is about a man who becomes separated from his shadow and then overtaken by it.

Honor Appleton’s 1932 illustration for Andersen’s The Shadow

LeGuin reads the story as an allegory about creativity: creativity comes from acceptance of and cooperation with the dark side of the soul. The shadow is dangerous without the soul, and the soul is weightless and empty without the shadow. The shadow is the guide to the journey of self knowledge and to the collective unconscious.

Edward Gorey is an artist who accessed his dark (and light) side with wit and style. He drew this shadow, and this non-reflecting bicycle.

In this photograph is the shadow a prison or a release from prison?

I-phone ad

Suzy Lee made a wonderful wordless picture book called Shadow where the shadows take on a life of their own.

Words as well as pictures can have shadows. The author and critic Gerald Vizenor said that shadows are the silence that inhabit heard stories. Talking about haiku, he said that the dissolved word is replaced with a shadow of the evoked sensation.  I end with this haiku by Ichihara Masanao from the Muki Sajiki.

 

 

Persevere

Sorry. No pictures this time. Just a little story:

There was once this girl.

She had many strengths and quite a few weaknesses.
She was shy, emotional, stubborn. She could draw and she liked to make things.
It turned out her weaknesses were also her strengths and vice versa,
but she wouldn’t learn that until she was much, much older.

Not the end.

I recently had to put together a curriculum vitae, or CV, of my work. As a freelance illustrator I don’t have the need to do this very often. Thank heavens.

I have a problem. When I have to list everything I have done that someone might want to know about professionally, my head freezes up. It’s like when someone asks you what your favorite song is, and all you can think of is the tune you liked best in 7^th grade.

If you are confident in yourself, with never any doubts about your abilities or self-worth, then you can stop reading at this point and go do something else today. I don’t want to bore you.

But if you have difficulty putting yourself forward because of what you haven’t done, then I counsel you to stop, and look instead at what you have accomplished.

If you think all of us who have published books, received awards and recognition, and generally produced some very cool work, don’t shake in our boots when we look at the next level of expectations we have set for ourselves, you are wrong. Every potential success is also a potential failure. And rejection hurts. Yes it does.

Take me, for example: I tend to focus on my failures; my inadequacies; the thing I want to do before I die, but haven’t managed yet. I don’t also see my accomplishments and what I am capable of. Sometimes I have to be reminded by someone who is not myself.

A number of years ago I went to a book-signing event for David Small and his wife and collaborator Sarah Stewart. I had published two children’s books of my own at that point, and was trying to figure out how to write my next book. I spoke with David and Sarah about the insecurity I felt about writing. Before she left, Sarah gave me a card on which she had written “persevere,” along with a sprig of rosemary from her garden.

I have kept that card with its now brittle, little sprig. It reminds me that stubbornness can be a good thing. When you grow up it can become determination. And being emotional can provide you with the empathy necessary to tell good stories and work well with others. Being shy, well, being shy won’t stop you from writing a blog or even giving a speech, and maybe it will keep you from boring others by going on and on about yourself. Maybe.

Unless you are in preschool and have yet to learn to tie your shoes, then you must have done something that took determination and effort. Think about it. What are you proud of having done, and why? Now remember those achievements. Put them into your CV notes before you forget again. When it is time to move forward to the next opportunity, hold your head up, even if you are nervous. Rejection hurts but you move on. You have faced down challenges before and done some impressive things. I am here to remind you.

And this too: Persevere.

Shaw, pshaw

Thems that can do. Thems that can’st teach.

George Bernard Shaw

 

 

 

That’s the folksy version I learned of that sentiment. (Apparently first penned by George Bernard Shaw.) There was a time when I thought it was true, especially observing those who taught creative writing. In my youthful certainty, I figured if they were good enough writers, they’d be out doing that, not stuck at the front of a classroom full of people eager to compete with them in the writing world.

But an old man once told me, “Life will humble you.” And while I’ve been not totally humbled, I have learned that most maxims have a grain of truth, not the whole saltshaker.

Many outstanding writers also teach and, in fact, enjoy passing on their hard-earned skills. Two of them will be teaching this summer at the Northwest Institute of Literary Arts where I teach writing for children (which brings up another Shaw quote: The moment we want to believe something, we suddenly see all the arguments for it, and become blind to the arguments against it. But we’ll leave that for another day.

Gary Schmidt and Matt De la Peña will be guest faculty at NILA’s annual summer Residency. Up to six children’s writers will be allowed to attend the Residency without being students in the program itself. I want to let as many writers as possible know about this special chance to learn from these writers, up close and personal.

As many of you know, Schmidt is the author of two Newbery Honor books–Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy and The Wednesday Wars and was a National Book Award finalist for Okay for Now.  He teaches the writing of fiction, children’s literature, and medieval literature at Calvin College, and is a member of the MFA in Children’s Literature at Hamline University.

Peña is the New York Times Bestselling author of six critically-acclaimed young adult novels (including Mexican WhiteBoy, The Living and The Hunted) and two award-winning picture books (A Nations Hope and Last Stop on Market Street). He likes to say he entered college as a basketball player and left as a writer.

The NILA program is small. In total it’s limited to 50 students in four different genres: fiction, poetry, non-fiction and children’s/young adult. It’s in a unique, intimate setting–the Captain Whidbey Inn on Whidbey Island, which is a few hours north of Seattle.

 

Captain Whidbey Inn

 

Students meeting for morning class.

 

 

 

We’ve had all kinds of guest faculty come in over the years ranging from the poet Tess Gallagher (widow of Raymond Carver) to Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times journalist and author Timothy Egan to children’s authors like Linda Urban and Newbery-honor winner Kirby Larson (in fact, Kirby helped found the NILA program.)

It’s a low-residency program. We meet once each semester in person on Whidbey Island for 10 days. And the rest of the semester is handled on-line. The summer session this year will be from August 2 to August 11.

One of the interesting things about the NILA program is although you specialize in one of the four genre tracks students take classes in other genre and during the Residencies hear from speakers in all the different genres. There’s a nice cross-fertilization that goes on with a system like that. (Nothing like learning a bit about poetry for a picture-book writer.)

Schmidt and Peña will be speaking on a range of subjects from getting out of the way of your readers and letting them experience the novel more directly to getting more out of your minor characters.

Along with Schmidt and Peña, there will be other visiting faculty in children’s/young adult and the other genres, as well as daily classes with full-time faculty (myself and poet, picture book writer and novel writer Carmen Bernier-Grand.)

You can learn more about them and the NILA Residency program at:

http://www.nila.edu/www_mfa/residency/

I hope I see some of you there this summer! And I’ll be blogging about what Matt and Gary have to say in August.

Which brings to me to one of my favorite Shaw quotes:

Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.

 

 

 

Lilacs! Roller Coasters! Mothers!

This coming Sunday is Mothers’ Day, and the white lilacs by my front porch are more than ready.  So am I.  I’ve always loved Mother’s Day, especially coming on the heels of Easter and May Day, when my sister and I passed out homemade baskets of flowers to all the neighbors. A triptych of floral holidays – what could be more perfect? Daffodils! Lilies-of-the-Valley! Forget-me-nots! Apple blossoms! Bluebells! Lilacs! Cards with crayoned hearts and tulips all over them, surrounding a stick-figure mom.

Despite how much I loved being a daughter with an easy-to love mom, when I found out I was pregnant with my first child, I burst out crying. Should I admit that publicly? I loved my husband, I wanted a family…shouldn’t I have been thrilled?

I guess I was thrilled – kind of. But for me, it was the type of thrill you feel on a roller coaster, with that little voice in your head saying, “What are you doing?????” You get into that little car, the attendant brings the bar down so you don’t fall out, you know it’s going to be a scary ride, you know there’s going to be a long climb up and a terrifying dip down and screaming and laughing and several jerky rounding of corners. And you know that if you are unlucky or unblessed you could fly off the rails at any point – I don’t think it’s possible just to be thrilled by news like that, is it?  Besides, I was a wise-cracking, cynical, semi-hippie, barely past my hitchhiking days. Barefoot. Torn jeans. What kind of role model would I be? Oh, there were a million things to worry about, and I worried about them all.

Of course, I came to love being a mom, and I had fun and did pretty well….the proof is in the pudding, as they say. I have three great grown-up kids.

And my daughter is now a mother herself. Amazing.

Mother’s Day — such an undeniably justified holiday, no? It’s so basically the right thing to do, celebrating and honoring our mothers. What culture on the face of the planet doesn’t do that? For the Italians, it’s practically operatic.

This year my mother will turn 89; she’s been a mother since my older brother was born in 1945. That’s seventy years ago. A mother for seventy years…that’s a sobering thought, because motherhood isn’t easy. And my mother became a mom while my dad was still serving his tour of duty in WWII. When he came home she proceeded to give him two more kids, both girls, within four years, so she had three kids under five years old when she herself was not quite 23.

My mother is a creative, complicated, generous, hard-working woman with a bright mind and high standards. She was a classroom teacher and a school librarian/reading specialist for all the years we were growing up, and she read aloud to us until we were teenagers. And I read to my kids. And my daughter reads to my grandson.

Last week here at Books Around the Table, Laura Kvasnosky shared thoughts about her new grandson, Emmett. Over the last few weeks, Laura’s daughter has begun experiencing what it feels like to be a mom – the sleep deprivation combined with the giddy joy. Laura talked about the books Emmett will grow up with. Reading aloud together at bedtime is a wonderful way to build memories – the quiet time at night when the busy day sloughs off and stories float out into the dark.

I vividly remember my mom reading The Wind in the Willows to us. This Sunday, May 10th, is not only Mother’s Day, it’s the 108th anniversary of Kenneth Grahame sending his son Alistair a birthday letter in which the characters of Rat, Mole and Toad are first imagined. Thanks, Mr. Grahame for that – you’ve been part of the pleasure of bedtime stories between mothers and kids now for more than a century.

This Mother’s Day, I’m taking my mom a bouquet of lilacs. Then we’re going out to lunch in Bow, Washington, and we’ll head down to Mount Vernon to see Julie Paschkis’s show at the Bitters Co. barn.

A sunny day in the tulip fields of the Skagit Flats. Fun! It’s one way to say thanks to my mom for being a good mother. And for reading to us.  And for going on that roller coaster ride of motherhood, hanging on and having fun, even while terrified.

Happy Mother’s Day to everyone this Sunday! If you don’t live close to your mom, give her a call.

Happy Mother’s Day, Mom!

ALL ON BOARD

Recently our daughter gave birth to our first grandchild, Emmett. I would include his photo here but our daughter hopes to keep his internet exposure to a minimum. Suffice it to say he is the most adorable baby ever.

For the past three weeks John and I have been in San Francisco to help out. It has been a special time and we know it. Everyday Emmett wakes up a little more to the world; his beautiful blue eyes look so intently at us. Already he smiles and responds to music.

One of our jobs was to set up new shelves in the nursery. That gave me a chance to look at the small library of board books that friends and relatives have sent to the baby. Seemed like a good excuse to check in with the board book world. I realize this sample is very non-scientific, but it does provide a nice introduction.

CLASSICS and REPURPOSED

I was glad to see Emmett has Pat the Bunny on his new shelf, first published in 1940 and recognized as one of the first books in this genre. He also has the classic Good Night Moon, repurposed from its initial issue as a picture book.

New to me are board books with roots in adult fiction. Emmett’s library includes babylit: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and Sherlock Holmes, by Jennifer Adams with art by Alison Oliver.

Huck is subtitled “A Camping Primer.”  The text plucks single words from its forebear, followed by a phrase from the original. For example “RIVER,” followed by “I’d go down the river about fifty mile and camp.”

 Sherlock is billed as “A Sounds Primer.” The illustrations are dark and a little scary. The text may raise goosling bumps on the baby: “Hounds howl, Thunder rumbles, Gates screech…Doorbells ring.”

Many of Emmett’s books were first published as children’s picture books. Some seem even better in this format, like Eric Carle’s Hungry Caterpillar, whose die-cut holes of the caterpillar munching through the pages will hold up much better in cardboard than they do paper.

Others, like P.D. Eastman’s classic early reader, Are You My Mother? make me think, what’s the hurry? It is such a perfect book for learning to read. Though maybe reading it as an infant will make it more accessible later?

The Little Blue Truck, with rhyming text by Alice Schertle, illustrated by Jill McElmurry, is a board book that first appeared as a picture book. With 15 spreads, it has the most pages of the books on Emmett’s shelf but when his attention span expands, it will be a great introduction to the basic shape of a story. The LBT says hello to lots of animals, (fun animal sounds followed by “Beep, Beep”), then meets a big challenge which is resolved with help of the animals, especially the littlest frog.

CONCEPT BOOKS

Board books do a good job introducing concepts to our tiniest readers. As Emmett devours his little library, he will learn about colors, animals and numbers, in Pink, Red, Blue, What are You? and One, Two, Three, Play with Me. These were my very first published books and I can’t wait to share them with my own little grandson.

He also was given The Sleepy Little Alphabet, written by Judy Sierra and illustrated by Melissa Sweet, in which a reluctant group of 26 lower case letters are finally tucked into bed by their capital letter parents. Last spread: “Who’s that snoring Z z z’s?”

And Keith Baker’s wonderful 1 – 2 – 3 peas, which is animated by a cast of 100 peas in the most amusing ways.

HELLO WORLD

Then there is the bunch of books that will introduce Emmett to his world. This includes the board book that was my daughter’s favorite when she was a baby, All Together, as well as the inimitable Lucy Cousins’ Garden Animals, Country Animals and Farm Animals. I am intrigued by one that is illustrated with photos of babies, Global Babies, put out by the Global Fund for Children.

INTERACTIVE BOARD BOOKS

I’m especially looking forward to sharing Goodnight, Goodnight, Construction Site, by Sherri Duskey Rinker and Tom Lichtenheld. While I read Emmett the simple text, he will be prompted by icons to push one of five buttons that provide the sounds of the big machines settling down to sleep. No wonder it’s been on the New York Times best selling list for over 80 weeks.

And I know we’ll have a great time peeking our way through Nina Laden’s Peek-a Zoo, and lifting the flaps in Rod Campbell’s Dear Zoo.

The low tech of Hervé Tullet’s Press Here has lots of simple appeal. As the title suggests, each spread invites the reader to “press here,” the result being a turn of the page to find what the pressing caused. This, too, has sat for months on the New York Times best selling list. Seems we like that return to the wonder of the page turn.

STAND OUT SERIESES

These books from Helen Oxenbury are especially suited for reading to babies. They each have four spreads, their format is larger, (8 x 8”), and the illustrations of babies are big and bold. Emmett’s two-year old friend Darwin noted: “Dear Emmett, My favorite part is the ‘All Fall Down’.” And (on Tickle, Tickle) “Dear Emmett, This one is funny.” Nice to have recommendations from the toddler set.

Leslie Patricelli made her name as author/illustrator with her first board books in 2003. Emmett’s going to love BIG Little, Quiet LOUD, and Yummy YUCKY and the funny big-headed baby who stars in each book.

Last but not least are titles by the amazing Sandra Boynton, queen of the humorous, rhyming board book: Snuggle Puppy and Belly Button Book! I will be sure to read him my favorite of hers, Moo, Baa, La la la, as well. Each Boynton book is full of love and good funny rhymes.

••••

I was forty when I turned toward becoming a children’s book creator. My kids were about grown, the oldest heading off to college.

Partly what attracted me was a desire to have my work be part of that circle of reading to a child again: to sit in the big chair in the lamplight, the kids fresh from their baths, their heads damp against my chest; the quiet of the neighborhood settling around us, the warmth of their small selves as we open the cover of a book and enter a story together.

This little shelf is where the newly-expanded family will begin reading together. They’ll share board books that offer snippets of story, or the simple naming of things in our world, or concepts like colors and numbers, and – always – warm humor.

We overheard Emmett’s parents reading to him in the nursery as we left last night. I love that our wee grandson already knows the circle of love with his parents and a book.