Painting and Writing Interesting Nonfiction for Kids

I love “By the Book”, a semi-new section of the Sunday New York Times Book Review. Each week, a different author shares his or her favorite books, the books on their nightstand, who they’d like to eat a meal with, and various questions on writing ~ and each week, I manage to glean a few useful gems from each author.
The author profiled last weekend was Orhan Pamuk; author of “The Innocence of Objects” and “Silent House”. What caught my attention was the interview question: “How has your training as a painter informed the way you write and read your books?” When I read that, I knew I struck gold!
Orhan’s response: “As I wrote in my autobiographical book, “Istanbul”, and now in “The Innocence of Objects”, I was raised to be a painter. But when I was 23-years-old, one mysterious screw got loose in my head and I switched to writing novels. I still enjoy the pleasures of painting. I am a happier person when I paint, but I feel that I am engaged more deeply with the world when I write. Yes, painting and literature are “sister arts” and I taught a class about it at Columbia.”

Orhan points out the five things that the painter in him taught the writer in him:

1. Don’t start to write before you have a strong sense of the whole composition, unless you are writing a lyrical text or a poem. 
2. Don’t search for perfection and symmetry --- it will kill the life of the work. 
3. Obey the rules of point of view and perspective and see the world through your characters’ eyes --- but it is permissible to break this rule with inventiveness. 
4. Like Van Gogh or the neo-Expressionist painters, show your brushstrokes! The reader will enjoy observing the making of the novel if it is made a minor part of the story. 
5. Try to identify the accidental beauty where neither the mind conceived of nor the hand intended any. The writer in me and the painter in me are getting to be friendlier every day. That’s why I am now planning novels with pictures and picture books with texts and stories. 

Read more of the interview here.

Now, tell me that you didn’t grab an inspirational gem from that.
While writing my manuscript the past year, I’ve been aching to paint. I even have a board on my Pinterest page titled “Things that make me want to paint”. If I look it from Orhan’s perspective, I shouldn’t be berating myself for not painting… on canvas --- guess I was painting on Word.

Later in the day last Sunday, I watched part two of the David McCullough interview with Morley Safer on 60-Minutes. Truth be told, I have a little author crush on David. The Great Bridge helped me immensely while writing my Emily Roebling chapter. Turns out David originally started studying painting in college. He even drew a picture of Another gem!
The book "The Writer's Brush: Paintings, Drawings, and Sculpture by Writers", written by Donald Friedman, is filled with many paintings by our favorite writers, but I had never made that writing/painting connection that Orhan pointed out. So, now that my manuscript has been sent in and another looms in the future, I think I will try to switch to some canvas work. Question is: acrylic or oil?

Telling Truths

I was on a short writing retreat last week--a time and place away from news and social networking and daily obligations. Yes, heaven. But two news items snuck into the idyll: the death of Maurice Sendak and President Obama's announcement coming out in favor of gay marriage. I cried and sighed and smiled;  both of these events revolve around children and telling truths.


Maurice Sendak, though he wrote fiction, was a master truth-teller. I would like to take out that "though" because of course we tell truth when we write fiction as well as non-fiction, but sometimes the "outside" world forgets that. But when I say he was a master Truth-Teller, I mean Truth with a capital T. And Teller with a capital T.  He was not afraid to hit the tough subjects when he was writing and drawing for kids--death, AIDS, fear, anger, homosexuality, the Holocaust, love. Because he knew that kids want and crave and need the truth. About everything.


On this little retreat one night as we cooked dinner, the talk turned to sex (education), as it often does when five mothers are together, especially mothers whose kids span the ages--twenties to teens to twos. When did you tell, how did you tell, what should I say? And the overwhelming answer was: tell the truth. And also, get Robie Harris to help you.


People who write for children are devotees of telling the truth, and we learned from people like Robie and Maurice Sendak. I was so sad that Sendak died, but so happy that he lived. And wrote and drew. And told the truth. His books made a huge impression on our sons and lines from all of them are part of our family lexicon. "I don't care."  "Let the wild rumpus begin!" And for some reason, especially, "Milk for the morning cake." (Why don't we have cake for breakfast, though?!)  If you haven't read the obituary in the New York Times, treat yourself to it. Margalit Fox wrote one of the most wonderful obituaries I've ever read. I think Sendak would be pleased. I understand his NPR interview is great, too.  I haven't listened to it yet. I hear one needs a lot of tissues.


When I read that President Obama finally came out in favor of gay marriage, I sighed, "Oh good." My friend in the room below me said, "I know." (Thin walls.) That was all we said at that moment (we were writing) but she knew what I was talking about and I knew what her reaction was.   


President Obama finally came out in favor of gay marriage, it is said, not because of his Veep's declaration or because of the North Carolina embarrassment, but because of his daughters. Apparently they told him that love between two people is love between two people. They should be able to get married. Who knows? Maybe they had been telling him that for a long time. Maybe he had been telling them that. (We can only hope.) But it's the truth and it seems they told him it was time to Tell the Truth. It so often takes children to lead the way to the truth. Because they just seem to be unafraid of it.  Up to a certain age they don't have the defenses and the filters and the biases that adults have. We who write for and teach children know this.


In 1969, E.B. White told George Plimpton and Frank H. Crowther in a  Paris Review interview, "Anyone who writes down to children is simply wasting his time. You have to write up, not down. Children are demanding. They are the most attentive, curious, eager, observant, sensitive, quick, and generally congenial readers on earth. They accept, almost without question, anything you present them with, as long as it is presented honestly, fearlessly, and clearly."


He goes on to say that "Some writers for children deliberately avoid using words they think a child doesn't know. This emasculates the prose and, I suspect, bores the reader. Children are game for anything. I throw them hard words, and they backhand them over the net. They love words that give them a hard time, provided they are in a context that absorbs their attention."


Master Truth Tellers deserve all the respect, adulation and thanks we can give them. Most of the great ones, like White and Sendak, were actually humble. Maurice Sendak knew that children often ate his work. He loved that. They read it, they loved it, they ate it. Fine with him. But those who write for children are also proud of it. Sendak did not love when people disrespected him or the genre. And yet he didn't think he was changing the world (I disagree). He told Vanity Fair in an interview last August,  “A woman came up to me the other day and said, ‘You’re the kiddie-book man!’ I wanted to kill her.”


E.B. White said in that same Paris Review interview,  back in 1969, "A writer must reflect and interpret his society, his world. He must also provide inspiration and guidance and challenge." 


I would say that goes double and triple for those of us who write for kids. Because kids demand and deserve the truth. Give it to them and they will lead the way. 

Evolution, Shmevolution?

I had all kinds of ideas about what I was going to write about for today. Science and art. A term called The Beholder's Share. I was going to tell you about a great trip I had in Maine, where I spoke to librarians about writing non-fiction. I was going to show you a cool NPR story about the wind at sea looking like a Van Gogh sky. But then I opened up the New York Times Monday morning and saw this:

Pseudoscience and Tennessee’s Classrooms

Please read it. I'll wait. I can't say it any better than that because all I want to do is scream. Loudly.

But I will say this, once again, as I've said many times and I think as I showed in CHARLES AND EMMA: Science and faith can co-exist. It does not have to be either or. But science is science and religion is religion. Evolution really happens. Smart theologians, religious people, clerics, rabbis, priests, ministers have NO PROBLEM WITH EVOLUTION. (I guess I am screaming.)

Our children deserve to be taught the truth in school. Period, the end.

Global warming really is happening. Smart politicians know that. Teaching our children the truth about global warming leaves open the possibility of saving our earth. Not teaching them the truth closes that possibility.

I hate conflict and controversy. I got very little of it, thank goodness, when  Charles And Emma came out. I think because their relationship shows how science and religion can co-exist in peace and harmony with understanding. That's beautiful.

What's happening in Tennessee and elsewhere is not beautiful. It's UGLY. And stupid. I'm going to let Spencer Tracy say it for me: Inherit The Wind

Writing a True Story About Something That Never Happened

The sinking of the Titanic was a heart-breaking disaster that the public couldn't -- still can't -- get enough of. This week, The New York Times has published a number of stories about Titanic coverage one hundred years ago. In 1912, The Times printed special sections of news articles and first-person stories, fueled by competition with The Evening World, and managing editor Carr Van Anda is credited with inventing disaster coverage because of the special section of articles and features the Times put out.

This past Tuesday's Times told of the competition between the Times and The Evening World to get the story of a reporter aboard the rescue ship, Carpathia. The leading papers hired tugboats that raced out to meet Carpathia as she steamed into New York; as the World's tugboat edged alongside, the reporter tossed a bundle into editor Charles E. Chapin's arms. SCOOP!

I learned a bit about the nature of the journalism surrounding the Titanic a few months ago when I began working on a new Humanimal Doodle for the Titanic-themed issue of Odyssey. I began by searching for a Titanic story with an animal in it. There were some pets aboard -- pampered pedigree dogs and cats, of course -- and rats, no doubt. And then there was Rigel.

Rigel (who shared a name with the dog star, which shone that fated night) went overboard along with the lifeboats, and stayed close to one, doing his doggy-paddle. People in the boat called encouragement to him, until, hours after the Titanic went down, they grew too cold to call out to anyone -- including Carpathia sailors searching the dark waters. But Rigel lifted his sodden furry head and barked back, and was credited for saving a boatload of people.

It's a wonderful story that is found among Titanic histories, on the American Kennel Club's Newfoundland breed site, and among collected stories about heroic dogs. But it isn't true. Entirely fictional, according to the experts. So, rather than digging up more of the Rigel story, I was left with the choice of ditching it completely. Instead, I decided to research how Rigel's story had endured for 100 years.

Titanic historian Tim Maltin filled me in on the public hunger for Titanic stories, and the do-or-die attitude of many so-called journalists of the day. Tim started with the scene in the Titanic film that shows the ship's kennel being broken open. "This is based on the fact that there was a cage for passengers' pet dogs on the deck," -- a cage that must have been broken open during the sinking. "A week later, First Class Passenger Johanna Stunke , traveling on the Bremen from New York to Europe, looked over the rail as they were passing through Titanic's wreck site and saw the body of a woman in a nightgown, dead and frozen, with her arms clasped around a shaggy dog." He adds, "And that is not a shaggy dog story!"

But Rigel's definitely was. "In 1912 the press was more sentimental (and less cynical) than it is today. Many myths abounded in the newspapers at the time, again inaccurate but based on fact." One animal that was definitely on board was a toy musical pig whose owner, Miss Edith Russell, grabbed it from her cabin last-minute so she could entertain children in her lifeboat. Later, it was reported that a pig had been rescued, although so many people had died.

What fact was Rigel's story based on? He was a Newfoundland dog, a swimming rescue breed often kept aboard ships in the late 19th century. Newfies have webbed feet, thick, oily coats, the ability to stay thawed in freezing water, and a reputation for courage. What's more, Newfoundland was the nearest land. But maybe most of all the story touched the hearts of those yearning for stories of bravery and sacrifice.

New York Times article about competition for stories.