Ooooops!

Did anyone else happen to read the September 30, New York Times Weekend Arts article about the new exhibition at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C.? The exhibit is titled Manifold Greatness and its subtitle makes clear what it's about: "The Creation and Afterlife of the King James Bible."
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It sounds like a wonderful exhibit, especially for those who love words and real books -- manuscripts from the year 1000, the King James Bibles used by Queen Elizabeth I, King James' son, Henry, and Frederick Douglas, among others. And there's the history of how the King James version came to be, and especially the contribultions made by William Tyndale (who was condemned by the church and state for his English translation of the Bible and subsequently strangled to death by the crown, then burned. Talk about a bad review!) But what caught my attention and gave me a chuckle was the work of printerRobert Barker and his associate, Martin Lucas.
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Seems that Barker/Lucas printed a version of the King James Bible in 1613 where in one book he set "Jesus" as "Judas." Oooops, my bad, he probably explained to the authorities. He fixed the error by pasting Jesus' name over that of his betrayer. But the Barker/Lucas masterpiece of mangled setting was their "Wicked Bible" from 1631. In this version they managed to leave out a single word, "not," so that one commandment reads "Thou shalt commit adultery." I thought this sounded very 60s, but clearly it didn't please the authorites back then, since both men were fined for the error. Barker probably wished he'd hired a real proofreader when he was later put into debtors' prison where he subsequently died.
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Reading about Barker/Lucas made me think of errors that have appeared in my books. Usually a new book arrives and I leaf through it quickly, just to get an idea of what readers will experience. Later (a week, two weeks, sometimes longer) I'll go over the book start to finish with a red pen in hand. I read every word, marking sentences/paragraphs I wish I could have done better or that need to be changed in a subsequent printing. I remember being very embarrassed when I discovered that three sentences in a book began with "It was..." Two on the same page! How could I have possibly missed that, I wondered. Actually, I was really furious with myself and set about figuring out how to avoid the same thing ever happening again. Not that I really figured out how to do this. But at least I give myself a lecture about watching for repetitions whenever I'm readying a manuscript to be sent off to one of my editors.
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Then there was the endpaper map for Across America on an Emigrant Train. Oh, my, this one hurt. The map was a last minute addition (the book was actually at the printer when the decision was made to have it drawn), so I didn't get to see it before the book was finsihed. Not that that would have made a difference. When the book arrived I looked at the map, wanting to be sure the artist had gotten Rober Louis Stevenson's 1879 train trip across America correct. Satisfied, I glanced through the book, then put it aside. Several months later, a letter arrived from an alert twelve-year-old reader. "Dear Mr. Murphy. I really liked your book. I liked that Robert Louis Stevenson almost died while trying to get to his girlfriend in California. The only thing I didn't like about the book was that you put the state where I live -- Vermont -- in the wrong place. Thanks for...." But I didn't read his letter all the way through; I was already fumbling for a copy of the book and right away (and way too late) saw that we'd switched both VT and NH.
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Why hadn't I noticed this when I first looked at the book? I was too focused on checking RLT's route and had assumed that the map was correct. At a glance it looked correct (the state's all looked as I remembered them to be). It was a case of familiarity breeding a form of arrogance, or at least a form of laziness. No one could possibly mix up the states or fail to see them mixed up, so there was no need to check each and every one. But obviously, it happened.
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Once my publisher knew about the problem they started the process to correct the error. But it would take months before another printing would be scheduled, and there were already a lot of books out there already. As embarrassed as I was, I decided to fess up immediately whenever I spoke at a school. I would tell kids that there was a mistake in the map, that two states had their positions swapped and challenged them to find them. Which they usually did pretty quickly. Then I would tell them that we all make mistakes and how important it is to check whatever we're working on, be it written or drawn or whatever, very, very carefully. Even if we think we know the material inside-out. So at least I turned a public mistake into a bit of a learning lesson.
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Was the error ever changed. Yes. The only solution was to cut the VT/NH out of the map and stick them in the right state. This left all subsequent versions with those two states' initals gleaming white and very obvious, a little like the Barker/Lucas patch job over Judas.

To Market, To Market

Twelve reactions to my latest nonfiction work:
• “[This] made me quite teary. [I]t’s a beautiful [story], and very nicely told”
• “A great conversation piece, and I think boys would particularly like it”
• “I have to say, I think the story is fantastic”
• “Not only is [the] story an interesting, little-known slice of history, but the writing is quite lovely as well”
• “We all had very positive reactions to it overall. What we all really loved, and what I am sure appeals to you, is that it is a war story but it’s one about reconciliation. That’s really both a lovely and unusual notion”
• “I have read the story several times, and it is an unusual one with lots of good themes and excitement”
• “[A] lovely paean to peace coming out of war”
• “I was very moved”
• “Compelling and well told”
• “I was fascinated by this story of forgiveness and redemption. It’s so touching!”
• “Haunting”
• “There’s no question this has some compelling marketing hooks—and it’s a pretty unbelievable story in the first place”

I would be proud to say that these twelve comments were reactions to MY latest nonfiction work. But this is actually the way that Marc Tyler Nobleman started off a very thought-provoking post at his own blog.

A little later in the piece, he revealed that each reaction came from a children’s book editor—who was rejecting his manuscript. It wasn’t that they were afraid to take a chance on a newcomer; Nobleman has written many, many books including the highly lauded Boys of Steel: The Creators of Superman. So, why? Doubtless many reasons, but he was often told that nonfiction—especially nonfiction about someone who is not a household name—doesn’t sell.

Okay, it’s no news that the economy is in trouble and if that weren’t affecting publishing, the changes in technology still would be. No news at all. But Nobleman's post isn’t whining about it. Instead he created his own news—and hopefully a bit of buzz to pitch and call attention to the story he loves and wants to tell in print.

He turned to illustrators—some kids, some old pros with hundreds of books among them. He asked them to create covers for his book. There are twelve on his blog (interestingly, the same number as listed rejections). You can go to the link below to see them all. Since I’m just picking one to share here, I'm loyally going for the cover by Tim Bush, who illustrated my own All in Just One Cookie.

I'll let Marc tell the rest of his own story at the link below. But at the end, he closes with two questions:

Librarians: Is this a book you can see adding to your collection?

Editors: Is this a book you can see?

For me, Marc’s post, http://noblemania.blogspot.com/2011/09/picture-book-for-sale.html, also raises many more:

What about the stories that need to be told precisely because they are about people, who aren't household names but perhaps should be because they came out of mist to be heroes or do the decent thing? People like, say, you or me or the kid that is reading the book?

What is the author’s changing role in these crazy transitional times? First it was just creator; now our roles are equal parts promoters and “publisizers.” The Internet also gives Marc and all of us a platform for another additional role. But what is that role and what will it entail?

And, what will happen when the iPad (RIP Steve Jobs) and its equivalents make illustrated books a realistic digital commodity; how will that shift the roles of publishers and authors even more? What are some of the best case scenarios?

Come on guys, do we have a shot at a discussion here?

Insanely Great*

Credit: Darren Rovell on WhoSay

I am writing this post on an iMac. It’s a beautiful machine, sleek and imposing, with a magnificent 27-inch screen that is a work of art even when the power is off. But when the power is on, well, that’s when the magic happens. I can make movies and book trailers, take and edit photos, listen to and even create music, make video phone calls, and hopefully write a decent blog post, all without leaving my desk.

Yes, I am a Macophile, one of the legions of fans of Apple Inc. and all of its products who seem to be taking the death of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs on Wednesday even more personally than the rest of the world. I wasn’t always such a devotee. For a long time, I straddled the PC and Mac camps, but I finally jumped in with both feet a few years ago, chucking my PC desktop and my lame MP3 player that for some reason displayed words only in Danish and embracing the iMac, iPod, and iPad. (I’m eagerly anticipating my first iPhone, too, as soon as my Verizon Android contract is up next summer.) I love this streamlining of my digital life almost as much as I love my streamlined iStuff.

Apple is that rare company whose products deserve the highest marks for both form and function. And Steve Jobs was the rare CEO whose vision always took the needs of his end users into consideration. He built a network of Apple stores that offer training and face-to-face technical support to anyone who can get to them, essentially providing a kick-ass IT department for those of us who are self-employed. Of course, it’s a bit maddening for the budget-conscious that a visit to the Genius Bar requires a stroll past all the new and improved products that Apple has to offer, but who can fault Jobs for being a brilliant marketer?

It’s also noteworthy that Jobs was always known for his groundbreaking ideas, rather than his net worth. Although his success certainly would have earned him the title of business magnate—the Wikipedia entry for the term has a photograph of Bill Gates—his public image was as more of an iconoclast than a tycoon. It’s fitting, then, that yesterday while thousands of people in the Occupy Wall Street protests leveled criticism at corporate greed, hundreds of others laid tributes to Jobs in front of the Apple Store on Fifth Avenue some six miles away. We’ve all learned so much from Steve Jobs. Perhaps the other “captains of industry” should do the same.

*"Insanely Great": Steve Jobs' description for the Macintosh computer

My First Book, Actually

When I speak at conferences and schools, I sometimes hold up my first published book from 1972 to show how much children's books have changed over time. But that really wasn't my first book. My entire eighth grade class of 24 authored a book way back in 1954 called "Shark Point and High Point." The title referred to our home towns, Tiburon, which means 'shark' in Spanish, and Belvedere, loosely translated into Italian/French as a 'high point' commanding a beautiful view. Our teacher, Miss Wilson, felt that this group of 24 students, could accomplish the goal of researching, writing, and illustrating a an accurate and valuable local history, and that's what we did.

In the process, we learned so many skills--how to research newspaper archives, carry out informative interviews, evaluate historic documents, write collaboratively, and so much more. Our history has become a landmark document, and creating it enriched and changed our lives.


When I look at one of my precious copies of our classic, I think about how different such a document would look today, with Google maps, color photos, actual book binding, professional type. We had to hand type, then mimeograph our pages; hand draw the maps, and hand assemble the pages into binders by collating as we each circled around a big table, picking up the pages one by one to create a single volume. I don't know our final "print run," but I imagine it must have been more than 100 copies. Each copy was created for a specific member of a family. I now own three or four of them, my own plus those of my late grandfather (shown here) and sister, and perhaps another that's in a storage box somewhere.

Creating this book taught us all so much we never would have learned otherwise, and I wonder how many young people today could be blessed with such an opportunity. I doubt many public school teachers could pull it off--modern concerns about tight budgets, law suits, teaching to the test, and so forth, keep such precious, creative, and priceless experiences out of the reach of most American children these days. Our book was revised by other Reed School eighth graders in 1958 and 1970, but to my knowledge not more recently. I just hope that any students today who are able to participate in special projects like this realize how fortunate they are. I am still grateful.

A Leap of Faith

Years ago, when publishing was in its heyday, established authors could sell from concept. Here’s how it worked. An author and an editor did lunch. (The publisher picked up the tab.) They discussed possibilities for future projects. When the editor liked an idea s/he said, “Write me a proposal.” That was it. There was trust that the author would deliver a book that they would be happy to publish. The author walked out of the lunch confident of an assignment with money to follow. That was then. Now even established writers have to do proposals complete with a marketing analysis, detailed outlines, maybe a few well-written chapters, and loads of background material. Then they wait for the proposal to be reviewed before a full committee, which seems to be more dedicated to why they shouldn’t do a book than why they should. In these hard times, the beleaguered publishers must constantly consider their bottom line when investing in a project.

The best editors, however, still know how to imagine along with authors. We all know that every book starts with a vision—a fleshed-out idea of how to create a work. Other parts of society are not quite so visionary. As much as we would like to think otherwise, most people don’t “get” innovative ideas. The popular show, Mad Men, about the advertising industry back in the sixties understood this. Fully articulated and illustrated presentations were required to in order to leave nothing up to the imagination of their clients. They knew that even when a concept has merit and is worth a try, every innovative venture, every work of creativity, requires a leap of faith in order to turn a concept into a reality.

What, then, is innovation? I have defined it as: Creating something new from disparate existing elements used in novel ways to solve a contemporary problem while forecasting its own future growth and development. In my outside-the-box proposal published last month in this blog I proposed using nonfiction literature in the classroom (nothing new here), combined with professional development from the authors themselves (nothing new here) to help teachers use their books effectively, and ending up with an author visit with the students after they’ve studied the books (this doesn’t happen often but there’s nothing new here, either.) What makes this program innovative? Its scale (school-wide, many authors and many books) and the timing of the professional development—just before the books are to be used by the teachers, so they can immediately apply what they’ve learned and the timing of the author-visits with kids (just when they’ve completed studying a book). The technologies that makes such an ambitious program possible and even more importantly, affordable, are interactive videoconferencing—face-to-face conversations between the authors and the school participants and a wiki, a collective online document that chronicles contributions from all the participants and serves as a written record of the project. The authors don’t need to travel and schools don’t need to pick up the travel expenses and the in-person personal appearance fees. All of us authors know the excitement of a school visit. It is often the highpoint of a school year. I’ve always wondered how the teachers took advantage, back in their classrooms, of the energy and enthusiasm generated by these visits. I believe that my program for Authors on Call does just that. What we’re really offering, beyond expertise and excellent writing is inspiration and excitement. My problem: I needed to find a school willing to test this idea.

Dave Kaplan, principal of the Edith A. Bogert Elementary School in Upper Saddle River, NJ is willing to take that leap of faith. I met him last spring when I did the traditional author’s visit at his school. Right away, I noticed something unusual about Dave: He was truly interested in me. He attended all my presentations, including my lunch with some of the children. (You should know that this is very rare. Most principals say, “Hello,” and disappear.) I mentioned that I had this idea of a huge collaboration between authors and teachers. Was he interested? He said, “Yes.” But he didn’t get back to me until July when we could make an appointment for him to hear me out.

After our conversation, Dave emailed me: “I just typed up my notes from this morning and as I was typing, I felt my excitement really mushrooming! I'm so thrilled about this venture.... Again, I'm so pumped about this innovative journey on which we're about to embark, and look forward to working with you!” When he introduced the concept to his faculty, he asked for nine volunteers (one to work with each author). He got 28! The entire school! So far, so good. We are currently in the book selection process, where the teachers are doing the choosing. This has only fueled the excitement. The teachers had no problem “getting” the idea and realize that they are part of an experiment; that no one has done what we’re doing. Ultimately, the measures of our success will be from the students and the books themselves.

We are mid-air in our leap of faith.

WRITING RIGHT, RIGHT?

Whoops—sorry. Look what I have gone and done. The title of this blog is grammatically incorrect!!! But even though I don’t like rules about writing, or rules about anything else for that matter, I think I can give our readers a few helpful tips by inviting eight famous guest authors to lend me a hand.

Let’s start with a tongue-in-cheek excerpt from Great Rules for Writers by Pulitzer Prize winning columnist William Safire:

Do not put statements in the negative form. Don’t use no double negatives. Never use a big word when a diminutive one would suffice. Don’t overuse exclamation marks!!! Last but not least, avoid clichés like the plague.

Whoops—I’ve slipped up again. I already used too many exclamation marks in my first paragraph, and I’ve added two clichés to boot. Now I’ve done it again!!! No worries, though. I've invited another author to join in:

There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are. (W. Somerset Maugham)

That did not help. Besides, this is a nonfiction blog. I should probably go back to the beginning and start with tips about writing good titles. My own valiant attempt may not have been grammatically correct, but did it at least attract some attention? To find out, I looked up a rule about writing blog titles from Top 100 blogger Daniel Scocco:

It must be search engine friendly. Like it or not most people find information through search engines.

Hmmm…check it out. Google says there are about 1,040,000,000 results for the word “writing.” That’s pretty stiff competition. OK, so how about this writing rule from the great Mark Twain?

The personages in a tale shall be alive, except in the case of corpses, and that always the reader shall be able to tell the corpses from the others.

I like this rule. But I think Mr. Twain is referring to fiction again, and this is still a nonfiction blog. Maybe these will do:

If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out. (George Orwell)

So far so good (another cliché on my part, though). Will any of these writing rules help?

Prayer might work. Or reading ­something else. Or a constant visualization of the holy grail that is the finished, published version of your resplendent book. (Margaret Atwood)

Never open a book with weather… The reader is apt to leaf ahead look­ing for people. (Elmore Leonard)

Do it every day. Make a habit of putting your observations into words and gradually this will become instinct. This is the most important rule of all and, naturally, I don't follow it. (Geoff Dyer)

Oh. Maybe none of these rules will do the trick. (I know, I know—another cliché.) So here’s the one final rule of the day. It’s from a dead journalist who wrote about war, boxing, and food. I try to follow his rule religiously:

The only way to write is well, and how you do it is your own damn business. (A. J. Liebling)

THE END

(Not) Confronting Controversy

What do you do when you set out to write about a topic that continually heats up the news with its controversial nature? I had to ask myself that very question when beginning my book Global Warming—A Personal Guide to Causes and Solutions.

Most global warming books I had read spent a huge deal of time proving that global warming is happening. After following the topic for decades, however, I felt that scientific evidence had passed far beyond the point of needing me to repeat that data for the gazillionth time. So, I made a bold decision. Right up front, I stated, “This book spends very little time trying to convince you that global warming is happening. The scientific evidence for that is overwhelming. Instead, I focus on what we need to do to solve this growing crisis.”

Simply stepping around the controversy was a liberating decision, and for a couple of reasons. First, I was able to explain to readers why so many people—and corporations—challenge global warming. (Simply put, coal companies, car manufacturers, and others make huge profits by continuing to generate and waste energy as they—and we—have always done.) The second reason this decision was liberating is that it freed me up to focus on what really matters—what we are doing and need to do to solve this overwhelming problem.

Of course, global warming will continue to be challenged, because there are still many people with a vested interest in ignoring it. As writers, however, we shoulder an especially important responsibility in making sure that young readers have access to good information, even if other people don’t like it. It may be no accident that a small publishing company, Lifelong Learning, published Global Warming. I’m not sure that a larger company would have allowed me the freedom to tell it like it is. Larger companies, after all, are owned by stockholders and are terrified of reactionary elements in educational systems across the country. This is reflected in extensive censorship of state tests, textbooks, trade books, and even magazines.

Anyone interested in our future has to fight this censorship wherever they see it. Letters, blogs, and petitions are all well and good, but it’s raw purchasing power that will make the difference. By making honest books a success, educators and consumers will determine just what information young people are and are not going to receive. That, in turn, will determine just how bad global warming and earth’s other problems are going to get. Meanwhile, I urge other writers to adopt a similar approach with “controversial” subjects. If that controversy is driven mainly by money or desires for power, simply state the obvious and step around it. Then focus on what’s really important.

Global Warming is not available through many of the usual channels. To order it, please call Lifelong Learning at 877-502-7477 or go to the following website: http://www.projectcriss.com/41-global-warming

THE SHAPE OF THINGS

Dresses! Evening gowns! Shoes! Accessories! What does fashion have to do with YA nonfiction? Read on, my lovelies. For, like Stephen Colbert’s segment, The Word, it all comes together in the end. Hint: think the shape of things.

Toward the end of summer I was deep into a new book project. My interviews were transcribed and the chapters pretty close to a final draft. Follow-up questions were written in red. The photographs were cued to match the text. I could see what was missing and knew how to get it. That’s what I would call a fine month’s work.

This all came together in a lovely rented home in Columbia County, New York, where I had nothing more to do but write, eat delicious food, write, drink chilled wine, write, and watch magnificent sunsets. No TV. Infrequent Internet. We were miles away from newspapers, bills, and arguments over the debt ceiling. Writing does have its perks.

But, and there’s always an anxious “but” with writers. My “but” was I couldn’t find a shape to my book. It was a burlap bag of information. Where’s the beginning, how does it end, and when does that ubiquitous arc we know and love show its beautiful arabesque? My editor, agent, and writer-friends told me not to worry, “It will come, just keep working.” I agreed that it would happen, but when? I wanted to see it now. No, not now, yesterday. And so I returned home to the city, home to all-of-the-above mentioned annoyances that keep creativity from a fevered pitch.

Meanwhile, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Alexander McQueen show, Savage Beauty, was winding down. It had been on view for months, and to tell the truth, I had little interest in visiting a crowded fashion show. As the lines at the museum grew longer and longer, the hype louder and louder, I panicked. Am I missing one of the biggest shows in the history of the Met? Then again, do I really want to schlep all the way uptown and stand in line for hours to see clothes? I can do that just as well at Bergdorf’s. Friends whose taste I respect insisted, “It’s not fashion, it’s art!”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“Really.” Finally, societal pressure got the better of me, and two days before the show closed I gave up my BEST writing hours to see fashion – I mean art.

By 9:30 the lines stretched from the second floor, around the halls, down the staircase, out the door, down the grand steps, around the block and into Central Park. But members could go right in. Although I’m a curmudgeon when it comes to viewing art en masse, I took advantage of my membership and went in. Savage Beauty was fascinating – stunning. I learned that Alexander McQueen began a new collection with a concept, and that he laid his work out on a storyboard. Hmmm. Writers do that. The concepts were based on nature, history, cultures, poetry, Darwin, primitivism, and “the dark side of life.” Writers work with these ideas, too. Instead of expressing these themes in writing or painting, he used ostensibly incompatible materials and the female shape. There was a McQueen quote that particularly resonated with me: “People find my things sometimes aggressive. But I don’t see it as aggressive. I see it as romantic, dealing with a dark side of personality.”

If you missed the show, as I almost did, here’s a link: http://blog.metmuseum.org/alexandermcqueen/about/

All in all this was a most pleasant morning. Now the time had come to return home and face my own kind of shape, one that did not include feathers, aluminum, velvets, and tulle. Deep into the bowels of the subway, onto the C train, I sat staring into nothingness the way New Yorkers do when riding in a crowded, drab tunnel.

All of a sudden, and for no reason, I stood up and said, “I’ve got it! I know the shape of my book.” [No one even looked up, which is a good thing about New York subway riders.] Everything came together: the opening paragraph, the ending, chapter order, and even that pesky little arc. It was all there, oozing from my brain, filling my eyes with images, tingling my soon-to-be typing fingertips. How did this happen?

Visiting Alexander McQueen’s exquisite dark side somehow sparked my own creative juices in a fresh way. Intangible, enchanted flashes of recognition, often by way of osmosis, somehow inspire other artists, writers, and poets. How? Perhaps my science-writing colleagues have a theory? That’s why Alvin Ailey would arrive at rehearsals with piles of art books instructing his dancers to find a shape that best portrays the reasons behind their steps in a ballet. That’s why Uta Hagen would send budding actors to the zoo to watch an animal that best reflects their roles in a play. Art seems to be one big blob, connected, disconnected, transformed into individual ideas. [Note to the Department of Education: this is one reason why you cannot eliminate music, art, and creative writing classes. The loss is greater than the cost.]

I arrived at my stop, raced up the stairs, my head still bursting with new ideas. A quick stop at the corner stand for strawberries and bananas – head in clouds – uneven sidewalk – trip – fall – crack a rib. Writing can be painful but that’s the subject for another blog. My body was in bad shape – but not my book. And that’s the shape of things.

Happy New Year, 5772,

Susan

Layers in Nonfiction Illustration: Bryan Collier

Last weekend I had the privilege of speaking at the Elizabeth York Children’s Literature Festival at the Nicholson Library at Anderson University in Anderson, Indiana. This conference, in its 3rd year, helps celebrate an impressive collection of about 11,000 children’s books and poetry books—specializing in rare first editions and signed volumes. It would be a great spot for author and illustrator research.

Also speaking was Bryan Collier, an illustrator who has twice been the recipient of Coretta Scott King Awards, and three-times a recipient of Caldecott honors. As always, his process captured me. His in-depth research on Rosa Parks—visiting Alabama, soaking up the atmosphere, researching the community, the buses, the circumstances—is a tale you have to hear directly from him. It has every element of research one would expect from someone writing such a book. Yet to see it through an illustrator’s eyes brings an extra dimension.

Many nonfiction writers speak of their research journeys. Yet, so often, the task of creating a nonfiction image is overlooked. You have to know a thing to write about it. But to draw it—sometimes, you must know more. (When I interned at National Geographic, years ago, I created huge research packets of historical material for each and every object in a single illustration for a children’s book!)

Bryan, though, is looking for more than precision in his work. From what I gathered, he is not limited by the idea that a nonfiction illustration must be like a snapshot, all objects order and historically what they were. He’s creating a moment, truer to those feelings in the air than you can create with a crisp photograph. Although he works very hard to be true to life about climate/people/objects, he also goes for soul—not just the emotion of individuals, but the soul of a community and moment. He adds hidden symbols, words, essence of experience to his illustrations.

As a fine artist, collage artist, and speaker, Bryan added layer by layer to our understanding of his subjects. One of his newer books is connected to South Carolina, where I grew up. He spoke of the soil, the many colors of clay. Immediately, as a tactile person, I was hooked. This book is Dave the Potter. Dave created 40,000 pots in his lifetime and along the way wrote poetry on them and signed his name. He did all this as a slave, somehow learning to read and write in a time when it was illegal for slaves to be taught these skills. Extraordinary. I could imagine a dozen ways teachers could fit the book into their work.

Bryan stressed the book’s connection to word and literacy. Yes! Yet as I heard him reading the book and talking about the illustrations, I kept thinking about another home for this book: not in social studies, but in science. It’s all there. The dirt. The chemistry. The soil. The shaping. The changing. It would be a rich and evocative introduction to material objects, physical science. Of course, an art teacher would have a field day with it, as well. Once again, Bryan Collier has partnered to create a book with as many layers in content as layers of paper, pen, and paint.

He spoke of how an “ordinary day” can become a historical moment. I wonder what publishers, authors, and illustrators will take on the challenge of recent events of the Arab Spring, and how those stories will be told.

Taking the Plunge - to Mexico and Jupiter in a Submarine!?

Carolyn Marsden, award-winning author of fourteen middle grade and young adult novels -- twelve out, two on the way -- has opened a new chapter in her career. She has turned from creating stories about children of other cultures, often in countries outside the U.S., to write about and illustrate her own bizarre multi-cultural past, and how it led to her literary present. Here’s how she describes her latest book.

MEXICO, JUPITER, SUBMARINE: How I Became a Writer

Exploding volcanoes! Harrowing escapes! Ouija Boards and Gong Gong on Jupiter. UFOs, auras, and fairies. Jules Verne’s submarine, under the sea and on Mars. The Beatles as a Communist plot. And the way all of this led to my resplendent writing career.

As I began MEXICO, JUPITER, SUBMARINE, I tumbled into the unknown. With big pieces of paper, scraps of this and that, found objects, cheap paint, and glue, I set out to write and illustrate my odyssey. I loved the trial-and-error, the feeling of free fall. What I created made me laugh.

What made you want to write a memoir?

As a writer I always wanted to somehow make use of my wild and crazy childhood. But whenever I tried straight-out writing about that early life, the writing came off as self conscious.

Then I saw a trailer for David Small’s graphic memoir, Stitches, and thought AHA! that’s the way to go. Right away the idea of doing an illustrated memoir clicked for me. For years I’ve loved playing around with collage and it was natural to combine my art and my writing.

How was this experience – writing and illustrating -- different from writing a novel?

Writing a novel is a very serious and often tedious undertaking. There’s angst involved. Creating MJS was pure fun—lots of lightness, lots of humor. I worked quickly, constantly improvising and using my intuition.

Why did you decide to publish it as an e-book?

MJS is an odd and quirky project. There’s nothing like it out there. Basically, I’m not famous enough for a publisher to take on the expense of something so risky. Plus I wanted to adventure into the world of online self-publishing.

What's the format?

It’s a fairly simple book—90+ collage panels that, with few words, tell the story of events in my childhood that directly and indirectly led me to become a writer. The collage is funky and made up of a wide variety of materials.

How will you market it?

I’m going the social networking route with Facebook, Twitter, Google +, while hoping to get some word of mouth support. I’ll attend an author event next month and will make a nice big poster with info about the book.

Any plans for more memoirs?

Yes, in fact, I’m working on another, called Every Mile a Miracle. This second collage memoir tells the tale of a wacky trip to Belize where I picked up an exotic Land Rover that my husband shipped from Holland. My 86-year-old mother, brother, and I traveled in this dysfunctional vehicle through Belize, Mexico, and the summertime desert of Arizona. We passed through the lands of the Mexican drug lords with a Category 5 hurricane at our backs. Making the collages is quite a journey in itself!

Where can one buy Mexico, Jupiter, Submarine?

MJS is available only in digital format. It can be purchased through i-Books for your Apple device.

Real World, Unreal School

When I walked into Masha Albrecht’s geometry class at Berkeley High School last week, her students were holding hands. It wasn’t budding romance. It was math. Before I explain, I have to tell you about Masha.

I met her when I was a senior at Cornell in the 1970s. I decided to do an independent study that involved working with students in an elementary school classroom and she was the most eager, bright-eyed fourth grader in the class. Masha’s brother Bobby was in an adjacent room and the two classes were team-taught. I hit it off with both siblings, and before the end of the semester I had been to their house several times, met their parents, and spent some enjoyable after-school hours together — doing math. The three of us had delved into Harold Jacobs’s masterful Mathematics: A Human Endeavor, then in its first edition, and we tackled the mind-stretching, often funny, problem sets with gusto. “This is how math should be taught in school,” exclaimed Mrs. Albrecht.

I re-met Masha Albrecht at a conference for math educators in northern California last December. We were both speakers. Good thing her name is an unusual one because I recognized it immediately on the program, and I sought her out. And just to close the triangle of delightful coincidence: Harold Jacobs was also a speaker at the conference.

So now Masha teaches math in school the way it should be taught. Her mother would be proud. In groups of three, four, five and six, her students were creating polygons on the day I visited. Their bodies were the vertices and their arms were the sides. In this kinesthetic approach, they were learning the vocabulary and some mathematical principles of polygons. “Now shake hands with a non-consecutive vertex,” their teacher requested. Later she told me, “They don’t get ‘non-consecutive vertex’ unless we do it this way. Now they’ll get it and remember it.”

What a teacher! Actually, I had gone to the class to see an entirely different class project she had told me about. She had decided to use hubcaps to illustrate reflexive and rotational symmetry. Here is a quick a primer on symmetry so you don’t have to wait for Loreen’s new book (see her post of Sept. 21^st). It is my hope is that once you learn about this, walking past parked cars will never be the same.

If one half of an object mirrors its other half across an imaginary line, we say it has reflexive symmetry. Think of a human face, at least an idealized one. The imaginary line is the “line of symmetry.” Whether or not an object has reflexive symmetry, it might (or might not) have rotational symmetry. Imagine rotating the object partway through a full 360-degree rotation. If you can get it to a place where it looks identical to how it looked before, in the same exact orientation, it has rotational symmetry. If you can rotate it into three positions that look identical, it has three-fold rotational symmetry. Four positions gives it four-fold rotational symmetry and so on. Clearly, human faces do not have rotational symmetry.

But start looking at hubcaps. Do you see reflexive symmetry? Sometimes, always or never? Do you see rotational symmetry? Sometimes, always or never? Do you ever see both in the same hubcap? Are there hubcaps with neither? (Disregard scratches or imperfections.) The answers may surprise you. They sure surprised me. In fact, I now think hubcaps are way cool, way beautiful and full of subtle surprises. (I don’t know why it took so long for me to realize this, but — as with so many epiphanies — a teacher was the catalyst.) And here’s just one of the many discoveries that I, and Masha’s students, made: there are hubcaps with what I’ll call “dual foldedness.” This could mean a pattern that is neatly subdivided (imagine five rays emanating from a central disk, with each ray subdivided into three branches). That’s interesting enough in an orderly sort of way. But imagine a cap whose central disk has fivefold rotational symmetry and whose periphery has six-fold. Now that’s cool! Think about it, draw it, or go out and look for a hubcap bearing it (try a Toyota Prius -- some years) and decide whether that cap as a whole has any symmetry at all.

Devoted to finding real world applications to help Berkeley High students understand mathematics, Masha had a great idea. Two, actually. One was to connect “dual-foldedness” (like the 5 vs. 6 example) to polyrhythms in music. She didn’t actually end up exploring this with her students, but she did ask them to start taking photos of hubcaps and putting them into a grid she'd created at the back of the room. They would identify the photo’s symmetrical properties by pasting it into the appropriate cell of the grid. Across the top, columns were labeled for foldedness — 2-fold, 3-fold, 4-fold, etc., up to 8-fold. The rows were labeled “Reflexive,” “Reflexive and Rotational” and “Rotational But Not Reflexive.”

After a week, the grid boasted merely one hubcap picture and Masha was ready to take it down. “The project didn’t light a fire under them,” she told me on the phone. Later, in an email, she wrote, “I think once they are walking down the street all thoughts of academics are far away. I myself continue to be amazed by the variety of symmetries in hubcaps.”

She did invite me to see some lovely posters the same students had made to illustrate geometry in the real world — seashore organisms, springtime flowers, quilts and so forth. And indeed they were lovely posters, caringly created. But to me, the hubcap project was a little different because it required discovery in the real three-dimensional world using the students’ own eyes and minds, rather than research from second-hand resources like books or the internet.

Masha didn’t seem surprised at the disappointing level of participation of the hubcap project. “I will defend my students,” she wrote in another email. “I think the school environment doesn't connect to their world, so by high school they have stopped bothering to believe in any connections.”

Wow. What an indictment! It’s not hard to see how the drill-and-kill/teach-to-the test/scripted-lesson regimen that so many schools now call education would drive out any hope of connecting math to the real world. Did Masha hit the hubcap on the head with that conjecture?

Let me propose an experiment. Teachers of intermediate grade students may be able to test Masha’s statement if they can break away from the stranglehold of teaching-to-the test long enough to try this:

I believe the symmetrical properties of hubcaps are accessible to 4^th or 5^th graders, who have had 4-6 years less schooling than Masha’s high schoolers. So how about teaching them about symmetry and trying a similar project? (You can find a short exposition on the subject in my book G Is for Googol on the page “S is for Symmetry.” Masha likes the superbly untextbooky textbook Discovering Geometry by Michael Serra.) Your students could draw the hubcaps in the grid if they don’t have cameras. Would a project like this light a brighter fire under 4^th graders than it did under 9^th and 10^th graders? I’d love to know. If your students can shed any light, please let it shine in the comment section here.

In the meantime, I’m going out to photograph more hubcaps.

Interesting Nonfiction for Kids - Banned Book Week

Tomorrow starts Banned Book Week!
From the American Library Association's page: 
September 24−October 1, 2011
Banned Books Week (BBW) is an annual event celebrating the freedom to read and the importance of the First Amendment.  Held during the last week of September, Banned Books Week highlights the benefits of free and open access to information while drawing attention to the harms of censorship by spotlighting actual or attempted bannings of books across the United States.
Intellectual freedom—the freedom to access information and express ideas, even if the information and ideas might be considered unorthodox or unpopular—provides the foundation for Banned Books Week.  BBW stresses the importance of ensuring the availability of unorthodox or unpopular viewpoints for all who wish to read and access them.
The books featured during Banned Books Week have been targets of attempted bannings.  Fortunately, while some books were banned or restricted, in a majority of cases the books were not banned, all thanks to the efforts of librarians, teachers, booksellers, and members of the community to retain the books in the library collections.  Imagine how many more books might be challenged—and possibly banned or restricted—if librarians, teachers, and booksellers across the country did not use Banned Books Week each year to teach the importance of our First Amendment rights and the power of literature, and to draw attention to the danger that exists when restraints are imposed on the availability of information in a free society.
Banned Books Week is sponsored by the American Booksellers Association; American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression; the American Library Association; American Society of Journalists and Authors; Association of American Publishers; and the National Association of College Stores.  It is endorsed by the Center for the Book in the Library of Congress. In 2011, the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund; National Coalition Against Censorship; National Council of Teachers of English; and PEN American Center also signed on as sponsors.
For more information on getting involved with Banned Books Week: Celebrating the Freedom to Read, please see Calendar of Events, Ideas and Resources, and the new Banned Books Week site. You can also contact the ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom at 1-800-545-2433, ext. 4220, or bbw@ala.org.

Check out:
The new Banned Books Website
The new Banned Books Week Facebook Page  (And "Like")
And, follow the discussions on Twitter at the hashtag #bannedbooksweek

Love to hear your favorite Banned Children's Nonfiction Books in the comments.