Outside with a Good Book

Tulip Festival Time in the Pacific Northwest’s Skagit Valley

I’ll keep things short and (hopefully) sweet this time around: Here’s a link I saved about two years ago but never shared. Seems like the right time to share it now – April! The tulips are blooming! In a few weeks, the lilacs drift in.

Most everybody knows a book can go anywhere, any time, any place, and in (almost) any weather. There’s very little I find as soothing as a reading a book out in the sunshine – and if you agree, you might not need any nudges. But if you think reading a good book is only about cuddling up on the sofa to read while you drink cocoa and warm yourself by the woodstove (I admit, that’s nice, too) here’s another way to approach it.

You don’t need hot beach weather – you can do it by bundling up – hat! coat! warm scarf! – and finding a picnic table in a nearby park. You sit down, you breathe a deep breath, and you dive in to the printed page. You can even wear your mittens (gloves, better, for turning pages!) while the world your book conjures up appears.

Well…brrrrrrrrrrrr. Maybe not when there’s snow?

Spring is unpredictable in the Pacific Northwest, On Monday, the day of the awe-inspiring total eclipse, it was cloudy and messy, windy as heck, no chance at catching even a partial bit of the magic of moon-over-sun. But now it’s Thursday. Today, I see a blue sky. The sun, uneclipsed, is shining. Outside I go.

Just finished Roz Chast’s I Must Be Dreaming. On top of the “Next Book” pile is James McBride’s Heaven and Earth Grocery Store. But I’ll turn back this afternoon to continue with the book I’m reading for the next Book Club discussion with friends, The Discovery of Slowness by Sten Nadolny – reading it slowly, of course. Savoring it. So far, wonderful. And brrrrrrrrrr again. A cold cover photo!

Where do you go to read outside? And what are you reading as the world begins to leaf out? Would love to hear from you in the comments below.

Keeping a Commonplace Book

Just before Christmas, I read a book review written by Dwight Garner (click here for an interview of him at Poets and Writers magazine) for the New York Times, and rather than go to the library and look for the book he reviewed, I got online and looked Garner up, He struck me somehow as a kindred soul; his priorities about what makes a book good seemed to echo my own. In addition, I liked the way he wrote – both clear and clever – and I liked his sentences at the level of word choices, I liked his wit. What I found as I looked into his writing was that he has a book out titled Garner’s Quotations: A Modern Miscellany. This book, in previous centuries, would most likely have been called a “commonplace book,” and my New Year’s resolution has been to create one of my own. As with Garner, I’m not looking for Deep Thoughts. Not cascading advice for writers about other writers’ thoughts about writing. Definitely not Bartlett’s. Just sentences I love.

Wikipedia’s definition of a commonplace book is this: “Commonplace books (or commonplaces) are a way to compile knowledge, usually by writing information into books. They have been kept from antiquity, and were kept particularly during the Renaissance and in the nineteenth century. Such books are similar to scrapbooks filled with items of many kinds: notes, proverbs, adages, aphorisms, maxims, quotes, letters, poems, tables of weights and measures, prayers, legal formulas, and recipes. Entries are most often organized under systematic subject headings and differ functionally from journals or diaries , which are chronological and introspective.“

I’ve never been interested in keeping a diary – my grandmother gave me one when I was about eleven, and I only managed to keep a record of what I ate for breakfast for several weeks before I gave up. There is only so much that can be said about oatmeal or eggs. Though I could play a mean game of tether-balI, I lacked the skill of introspection at that age.

This book is a collection, a miscellany culled from many, many more, of sentences Garner has loved. They’re not “passages” from books. None are very long. And they’re not organized by category. Instead, he says he put them together by “feel” – “I’ve tried to let the comments speak to one another and perhaps throw off unexpected sparks.” Often the sentences he chooses have a certain quirkiness or energy, a distinct sound to the words strung together, thoughts that might never have occurred to him but which delight or surprise him. He quotes Walt Whitman who said as his own preferences became clear to him that he liked words of “unhemmed latitude, coarseness, directness, live epithets, expletives, words of opprobrium, resistance.” (Fair warning, Garner’s book gets salty often enough to make even Whitman blush.)

Describing his commonplace book, Garner puts it this way: “It’s where I write down favorite sentences from novels, stories, poems, and songs, from plays and movies, from overheard conversations. Lines that made me sit up in my seat, lines that jolted my awake….Into it I’ve poured verbal delicacies, ‘the blast of a trumpet,’ as Emerson put it, and bits of scavenged wisdom from my life as a reader. Yea, for I am an underliner, a destroyer of books, and maybe you are, too.”

Garner has been collecting his lines for nearly forty years. His miscellany is over 200 pages long, with a nicely organized index. I’m late beginning. But I’m going to give it a try. I’ve added some photos of old commonplace books into this post to inspire you, simply because – well – they’re beautiful.

Here are just a few gems from Garner’s miscellany:

“You have to laugh trouble down to a size where you can talk about it.” (Dan Jenkins)

“It’s only words, unless they’re true.” (David Mamet in Speed the Plow)

“You will do foolish things, but do them with enthusiasm.” (Colette, attributed)

“You are mine, I say to the twice-dunked cruller, before I eat it.” (Rita Dove, Describe Yourself in Three Words or Less)

“Every woman should have a blowtorch.” (Julia Child, attributed)

Here’s wishing you all a very Happy New Year!

Quick postscript: Next on my list of good books to read is Garner’s latest, The Upstairs Delicatessen: On Eating, Reading, Reading about Eating, and Eating While Reading. Love the title. Love the cover.

Telling Stories Without Words

Poetry, I’ve come to believe, is a conjuring (yes, magic) of the senses. It’s vision, but with words. And it’s music without an instrument. It’s the scent of low tide with no seaweed and no sand. It’s texture with no physical object to touch. You conjure an image, a smell, a sound, a touch, a taste, using only words. It’s a kind of synesthesia – a jumble of one sense on top of (or underneath) another. So why does it surprise me, over and over again, when this confusion of senses happens in art, that is, when something purely visual speaks?

Yesterday I read an article in the New Yorker (“Quilts That Keep You Up at Night” by Nina Mesfin, 10/23/23) about a Black quilter named Michael A. Cummings. He’s a storyteller who uses fabric patches instead of words. He creates characters, populates a setting, and challenges us to stay with him as he opens a window on a scene. We use our imaginations to follow his narrative arc, and we fill in the gaps with what we’ve learned about the world ourselves and what we’ve lived in our own lives.

For this blog post, I don’t want to use too many words. I’d like you just to look at some of the work Cummings has created and to ask yourselves to “read” the stories they tell. Think of them as writing prompts. Choose one and think of it as a short story, or even as flash fiction. What’s the story in this quilt? Who is this person, who are these people? Where are they? Have hearts been broken? Has a stranger come? Has someone set out on a journey? What’s happening? What’s about to happen? What is the mystery at the core of the story (because what is a story without a deep mystery to it?) Look for details. A mermaid, a monster, a cross, a snake, bags for cotton, repeated fish, and water, water, people in water, people on ships, ships in water.

Here are photos of a few of Cummings’ quilts.

“I’ll Fly Away” by Michael A.Cummings

The last image is just part of a quilt – here is what the actual quilt looks like on a wall.

Maybe that quilt is not flash fiction, not a short story. Maybe it’s the Great American Novel.

For “Fusilli Times,” An Old Favorite

Little makes me happier during these “fusilli times” (** see note below) than hearing about librarians who do a fantastic job of presenting good books to kids. Recently, that includes librarians who stand up to the pressure to ban books, a movement more widespread than I once thought possible. But it also includes librarians who re-introduce well-loved picture books from the past to a constantly fresh pool of wiggly new readers.

The article which appeared in my email Inbox and delighted me this morning was one from the New York Times describing a gathering of 225 (!) people at the Curtis Memorial Library in Brunswick, Maine (see photo of the gathering, above.) And can you guess who was reading to the kids? It was Sal McCloskey of Blueberries for Sal fame. Decades ago, that book, by Robert McCloskey, along with Make Way for Ducklings, was one of my kids’ favorite books. It’s the perfect book to read every summer before you go out to pick your annual supply of blueberries. Click here for a link to that article.

Kaplink! Kapink! Kaplink!

Sal is now 78 years old, still living in Maine, still experiencing her Mornings in Maine. The caption on that photo says, “As Sal McCloskey read ‘One Morning in Maine,’ young audience members crept closer and closer. Some followed along in their own copies of the book.” The kids creeping closer and closer as she reads – .isn’t that the way it is with a great picture book?

So hooray for kids and hooray for well-loved favorite books and hooray for stalwart librarians!

**Footnote: I refer to “fusili times” (wacko weather disasters, climate change, Ukraine, politics, indictments, ad infinitum) because of the following cartoon from the New Yorker:

Further explanation, in case “fusilli” is unfamiliar: That little piece of straight-edged macaroni is talking to these guys:

“Fusilli times” – a few kinks, and a perfect alternative to “cockamamy.”

thanks to cartoonist Charles Barsotti.

Hope you all have a great September. And remember to support your public and school district librarians.

For “Space Fans and Poetry Lovers”

Jupiter – Twice as massive as all other planets put together.

How exciting is this?!! A poem inscribed on the spaceship Europa Clipper, is being sent by NASA this October 2024 to Europa, the second moon of Jupiter. Ada Limon, currently the Poet Laureate of the United States, is the author of the poem, titled “In Praise of Mystery: A Poem to Europa.” Admittedly, it’s not the kind of poem I would normally file among my favorites, because it names large abstractions – beauty, grief, pleasure. love – and abstractions seldom evoke the senses, a requirement which defines poetry. But reading the poem over several times in the last few weeks, I’ve warmed to it. I’ve come to the conclusion that if a poem ever deserves to be big – I mean Big – it is one that’s going to represent human beings across 500 miles of space, and one that is going to look out on the largest planet in our solar system in order to make a connection. That connection is made most effectively, I think, by the way Limon shares a small moment or two of life here on Earth – moments like a songbird “singing / its call in the bough of a wind-shaken tree.” Here is the poem:

In Praise of Mystery: A Poem for Europa

Arching under the night sky inky
with black expansiveness, we point
to the planets we know, we

pin quick wishes on stars. From earth,
we read the sky as if it is an unerring book
of the universe, expert and evident.

Still, there are mysteries below our sky:
the whale song, the songbird singing
its call in the bough of a wind-shaken tree.

We are creatures of constant awe,
curious at beauty, at leaf and blossom,
at grief and pleasure, sun and shadow.

And it is not darkness that unites us,
not the cold distance of space, but
the offering of water, each drop of rain,

each rivulet, each pulse, each vein.
O second moon, we, too, are made
of water, of vast and beckoning seas.

We, too, are made of wonders, of great
and ordinary loves, of small invisible worlds,
of a need to call out through the dark.

Europa, Jupiter’s 2nd Moon

If you’re a teacher or a writer hoping to encourage a love of poetry, you can hear Limon read it aloud at this link. And take time to notice on the same web page a link to a project called “Join the Message in a Bottle Campaign.” Consider having students sign their name to the poem before it’s sent “to call out through the dark.” I imagine that would thrill many students, to know their name would be carried into space. If you’re working with older children, a bit of time spent trying to understand the poem – its belief in wonder, its belief in mystery – would set those children up for what I think is the most intriguing and wonderful thing about poetry: the fact that it doesn’t necessarily answer questions, it indirectly asks them. Even a science unit, linking poetry to science, would help students understand how closely aligned science and poetry are – both of them ask questions and try to understand our world. The mission to Europa aims to answer questions about its inhabitability, and about the ocean that scientists strongly believe lies below it’s icy crust. This wonderful link allows you to see scientists working on the spacecraft and to hear their explanation for why they want to know more about Europa. It’s all about “the offering of water.”

Another link to introduce yourself to Ada Limon’s work in general can be found at this site, sponsored by the Library of Congress. Ron Charles, book critic for the Washington Post, interviews her, and she reads several of her poems. I often think her work sounds like lovely prose rather than poetry, but the words are open and honest and from the heart, and they’re sprinkled with evocative small moments, just like the poem she created for the spacecraft.

Hope you enjoy my little Rave for poetry this week. And for mysteries, moons, planets, scientists, the dark, etc. One last thought: Just look how tiny we are.

Julie Larios

Relative Size and Distance from the Sun

Eleven Years, 100 Books

[The images in this post reflect my eleven favorite Book Group books over eleven years.]

I discovered the other day that the book I’m reading this month with my book group (Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver – fascinating story based on David Copperfield by Charles Dickens!) is the 100th book we have read together. 100 books! Of course, we’ve been choosing and reading and discussing books since 2012, and we’ve been friends for longer than that (some of us have been friends reading books together since our kids, now in their 40’s, were in pre-school!)

It’s just fascinating to look over the list – some of the stories remain vivid in my mind, others require something that jogs my memory. Some I began but put down – just couldn’t go on, not for me. Some I chose that the group loved, others I chose fell flat. Some I expected to like and was disappointed by, some I had no initial interest in and ended up loving enough to look for other books by the same author or other books about the same subject.

No matter what the book, I’ve loved sharing our responses, and being part of a group has taught me to read more carefully, asking myself to be able to articulate what I loved, what I didn’t (sometimes both in the same book.) As a writer, I often have stronger responses to style than to story – I’m less interested in plot or forward movement. I respond to the way something is being said and fill my books with marginalia or post-it notes. And I’m a slow reader – reading text as if it’s being spoken slows me down. You learn a lot about books and a lot about yourself by being part of a book group.

To that end, and because choosing the book is often the hardest part of the whole process, I recommend an article titled “How to Be a Better Reader,” published in 2022 in the New York Times. Of course, “better” is a matter of opinion, shaped by your answer to the question, “Why do I read?” But the article talks about choosing books, about reading more deeply and more critically, and it has the best list of links to literary reviews I’ve ever seen. The link is below: read through the article and see what you think.

http://www.nytimes.com/explain/2022/how-to-be-a-better-reader

I especially liked this part:

“To read more deeply, to do the kind of reading that stimulates your imagination, the single most important thing to do is take your time. You can’t read deeply if you’re skimming. As the writer Zadie Smith has said, “When you practice reading, and you work at a text, it can only give you what you put into it….In ‘Slow Reading in a Hurried Age,’ David Mikics writes that “slow reading changes your mind the way exercise changes your body: A whole new world will open up, you will feel and act differently, because books will be more open and alive to you.”

Wonderful Oaxaca

I’ve been in Oaxaca, Mexico, for the last month, enjoying the blue skies, the temperate weather, the delicious food, and the unseasonal (for anyone used to gray winters in the Pacific Northwest) bursts of color. When I’m writing poetry for adults, I get a bit cerebral; writing for children, I allow a little more room for the senses. But Oaxaca reminds me that writing almost always broadens and deepens its effect when it evokes one or more of the five senses. Here are photos from my trip – not over yet! – that involve sight, sound, taste, smell, and touch. In Oaxaca, I wake up and tell myself each morning to use my eyes, my nose, my fingers, my ears, my tongue!

A Plate of Christmas Cookies, Kind Of…

My sweet neighbor sent over a plate of Christmas cookies the other day, via her 8-year old son, Henry (who is maybe a foot taller than the last time I talked with him in September as school opened) and her 5-year old daughter, Thea (ditto.) The kids, of course, are even more of a treat than the cookies.

I’m going to offer up my own little plate of “cookies” on Books Around the Table today – links to delicious articles I’ve read in the past month that I want to share. Think of them as gingerbread men, peppermint bark, Mexican wedding cookies, shortbread, chocolate chips, little reindeer and Santas and mittens – sugar cookies with red and green frosting and white piping. Enjoy!

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Have you seen the New York Times announcement of “Best Illustrated Children’s Books of 2022”? I like a lot of them this year — they seem kid-oriented, lots of fun. I went immediately to my library to check them out – and a couple of them are so popular right now that I’m on a waiting list to get them. That’s a good sign, isn’t it? My favorites of the books I found on the shelf and brought home were Yellow Dog Blues, written by Alice Faye Duncan and illustrated by Chris Raschka, and Telling Stories Wrong by Gianni Rodari, illustrated by Beatrice Alemagna. The latter will make kids hoot with laughter. I’d love to be at a read-aloud of that with kids in stitches. Here’s the link: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/10/books/review/the-2022-new-york-times-new-york-public-library-best-illustrated-childrens-books.html

from Telling Stories Wrong

Cover of Yellow Dog Blues

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“An Awe Walk Might Do Wonders for Your Well-Being” – nothing better than fresh air to get you out of the doldrums, clear your head, remind you there’s a lovely world out there, make you feel creative. Here’s the link: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/30/well/move/an-awe-walk-might-do-wonders-for-your-well-being.html

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Do you know the work of the South Korean author-illustrator Baek Heena? She won the 2020 Astrid Lingdgren Award but her prize ceremony was postponed due to the pandemic. The citation about her work says, “With exquisite feeling for materials, looks and gestures, Baek Heena’s filmic picture books stage stories about solitude and solidarity. In her evocative miniature worlds, cloud bread and sorbet moons, animals, bath fairies and people converge. Her work is a doorway to the marvelous: sensuous, dizzying, and sharp.” If your local library doesn’t have any of her books, urge them to purchase a few. Here’s the link to the announcement about her prize: https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/childrens/childrens-industry-news/article/82868-baek-heena-wins-2020-astrid-lindgren-award.html

And here is the general Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award page, with the 2021 and 2022 winners – Jean-Claude Mourlevat and Eva Lindstrom: https://alma.se/en/

Baek Heena with some of the figures she uses to illustrate her picture books.

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“A Fast-Growing Network of Conservative Groups Is Fueling a Surge in Book Bans” – disturbing news. Here’s the link: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/12/books/book-bans-libraries.html

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Tsundoku: That’s the Japanese word for a stack(s) of books you’ve purchased but haven’t read. It comes from the words  tsunde-oku (letting things pile up) and dukosho (reading books). I have a few stacks, to say the least. And here is a wonderful article from Big Think about how important these stacks are when it comes to reminding us that we don’t know everything! https://bigthink.com/neuropsych/do-i-own-too-many-books/

Here is what Maria Popova at Brain Pickings has to say about Umberto Eco’s definition of the “anti-library”: (actually, it’s a review of the book Black Swan by Nassim Taleb, about Eco’s idea.) https://www.themarginalian.org/2015/03/24/umberto-eco-antilibrary/

If you want to read about more “untranslatable words” like “tsundoku,” take a look at Lost in Translation: An Iluustrated Compendium of Untranslatable Words from Around the World by Ella Frances Sanders.

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That’s it for my little plate of holiday “cookies.” Hope you’ve found them delicious, too. Wishing you all the joys of the season!

Contemplation vs. Stimulation

All writers know what a tug-of-war the writing life is – you’re never quite sure whether to prioritize stimulation or contemplation. With the former, you experience the world; with the latter, you make sense of it. During the down time it gets real: cook meals, clean dishes.

I’ve been both off-the-grid (on an island near Martha’s Vineyard) and deep into the grid (NYC) for the last two weeks. The  island has rowboats, it has sheep in the meadow, it has dirt paths leading to beaches with bleached-white whale bones. It has no commercial enterprises. None. Meanwhile, on nearby Martha’s Vineyard, several dozen Venezuelan immigrants were being declared victims of a crime (perpetrated by Florida’s Gov. Ron DeSantis), so I guess “off-the-grid” is only true up to a point. But in general, the vibe on this particular island is non-vibe. Days spent in contemplation.

New York City, indisputably on-grid, has a 3-story (!!!) M&M souvenir shop, outside of which the question bubbles up: How many M&M souvenirs does any one person need? Key chains, magnets, t-shirts, hats, coffee mugs, wind-up dancing M&M’s, M&M flashlights, M&M phone covers, M&M sheets and pillow cases, M&M pajamas, M&M stadium blankets, M&M onesies. At this level, NYC is a 180-degree turn from the world of the island — it’s ALL commercial enterprise, 24/7.

On the other hand, NYC also has Broadway (both On- and Off- I saw Tom Stoddard’s new play Leopoldstadt and the musical Book of Mormon) and a public library guarded by Patience and Fortitude, two lions sculpted from pink Tennessee marble.  In the streets of the city, you hear many languages spoken by people from many countries. Though the island I was on near Martha’s Vineyard is calm and green, the chaos and energy and diversity of NYC appeal to me just as much. City days aren’t days of contemplation but days of stimulation. Is there anything quite like the thrill of a curtain rising in a majestic Broadway theater?

As I write this, I’m just north of Boston in Lynn, Massachusetts. It’s a smallish blue-collar town. Lots of ponds around, lots of autumn trees currently flaming yellow, flaming orange, and flaming red. Lobster roll restaurants, with “lobster” pronounced “lahbstuh.” The big booming Atlantic Ocean rolling in nearby. Also nearby is Salem, famous for its witch hunts (the real hunts, not the political ones.) Both Lynn and Salem are getting ready for Halloween, putting skeletons on their porches, hanging spider webs rather than hanging “witches,” buying pumpkins to carve. There are no sheep in the meadow, no pink marble lions, no dancing M&M’s. But there are cardinals at the bird feeder and someone paddle-boarding across the pond. This is life at the normal level, the day-to-day level, the cook-and-clean level. And though Lynn is neither off-grid idyllic nor on-grid frenetic, that is, not the stuff of a writerly life, it’s where my daughter and her family live, so it’s perfect for now. I’ve contemplated, I’ve been stimulated. Time now to be with people I love.

Here are half-a-dozen links I think you, as readers and writers, will like:

1. A video game based on Emily Dickinson’s poetry. What??? https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/you-can-now-play-emilyblaster-a-video-game-inspired-by-emily-dickinsons-poetry-180980305/
2. “Voices thought lost to history…” An imaginative Irish storytelling site: https://www.virtualtreasury.ie/hidden-stories
3. Bestselling authors describe how they organize their bookshelves. https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2022/07/28/book-organizing-authors/
4. Ever find anything tucked into the pages of a library book? https://www.npr.org/2022/08/02/1114851706/library-notes-books-collection
5. Are you in a reading slump? Here’s a solution: https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2022/07/11/reading-slump-help/
6. Have you ever bought a book based on the blurbs endorsing it? If yes, this might explain why: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/aug/13/killer-crabs-and-bad-leprechauns-how-the-best-book-blurbs-excite-our-brains

Country Fairs

Caldecott Honor recipient Elisha Cooper’s first book, Country Fair.

This last Wednesday my husband and I went to the Northwest Washington Fair. It’s not the fancy State Fair, but to my mind it’s the perfect size. It’s small enough to see everything without getting worn out, but big enough to have all the magic ingredients: amusement rides, 4-H kids and their animals (horses, cows, goats, pigs, chickens, rabbits), vintage cars on display, hand-sewn quilts, knitted mittens and hats, art work, instructional displays about bee hives, perfectly canned peaches and string beans, flowers and berries from local gardens, kids’s Lego collections, kettlecorn, BBQ everything, cotton candy, gyros, corn on the cob. The Whatcom County Dairy Women sell ice cream. At various small stages there are local clog dancers and magicians and musicians. In the grandstand area, rodeo events. Perfection.

I took some photos and will share them below. Five are of kids’ displays – from vegetable “critters,” to instructions about how to play marbles. And two are of the quilts my husband and I voted for to win the “Viewers’ Choice” ribbon.

During the pandemic, the Fair was cancelled. This is the first time the gates have been open since the summer of 2019, and I wouldn’t have missed it for the world. It’s one of the highlights of my year (and I’ve written about it before here at BATT.) I feel like the county fair is my local Italian piazza or Mexican market – full of life, full of tastes, textures, smells, sounds, and sights that anchor me to a certain world. In this case it’s not a distant, exotic world but a sweet, familiar one.

If you’re a children’s writer or illustrator and you’re reading this post, consider going to you local country fair to see what kids are passionate about. You’ll find that they’re interested in everything under the sun. And if you’re interested in one of those things, too (soap, honey, Ferris Wheels, Hot Wheels, photographs of dog snouts, the hidden talents and/or fears of chickens) – well, there you go: you’ll have come up with your next book

I sent this photo to my brother, who was school Marble King when we were young. And kids still love marbles! Hooray!

I did not know this! Chickens recognize faces. You learn something every day.

Who can resist an orange octopus?

Important information about the predators of “innocent chickens.”
Who knows? Maybe the adjacent vegetable critter is one?

The traditional quilt we voted for…

…and the wildly modern quilt.

Hope the rest of your summer brings many delights!

Julie Larios