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a mother-daughter reading journal by Kristen den Hartog
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This will be my final post in a place that has meant a lot to me as a mother, a writer, and a reader, so please forgive my wordiness. Now is my last hurrah, and then it’s time for me to move on to other wordy things.
I haven’t written here in a very long time. Though there has always been plenty to say, there hasn’t always been the time to say it. In the spring, I was a juror for a literary award, and had to make my way through boxes of books. Nellie was curious about this process, and frequently checked my stack of top picks to see how my choices had shifted. Even though she is someone who doesn’t like to pick favourites, she gave good advice. When she saw that a certain book had hovered near the top of the pile for a solid couple of weeks, she asked, “Will that one win?” And I sighed and said that the book really was exceptional, but that the person had won so many awards already. She said (not having read the jurors’ guidelines!) “You can’t go by that, Mom. You just have to pick the best story.”
By Mother’s Day I was still wading through the boxes, and as one of my gifts Nellie made me a tiny modeling clay replica of another book that had stayed near the top of the pile. It seemed a symbolic kind of gift — one that showed she knew what books meant to me. I thought they must mean a lot to her, too, in order to recognize that.
Weeks later Nellie and I talked it over, and agreed the author might like the little replica, so we mailed it off to her, and it was warmly received. I love that Nellie is aware not just of books but of the people who write them — partly, I’m sure, because her mom is an author. (A friend of mine is a midwife, and her daughter recently asked if Labour Day was a day for delivering babies.)
All summer, Nellie has been reading The Sisters Grimm series by Michael Buckley, in which Daphne and Sabrina discover that their ancestors’ famous fairy-tale book was really a history book, and the characters in it (a magical race called the Everafters) are still alive and causing all kinds of trouble. When we visited a friend’s cottage in July, Nellie brought the first in the series for her book-loving friend Frannie to read, and over the course of our stay, the girls read, and jumped on the trampoline, and read, and swam, and read, and cooked pancakes, and read, and read, and read.
There was a time not so long ago when I fretted Nellie wouldn’t read on her own because I had read so much to her, but those worries were misguided. I think her love of stories is so deeply entrenched that it’s part of her now. Though I will still be vigilant. I can see how easy it is nowadays to be drawn away from the written word and seduced by constantly evolving, eye-popping, mind-boggling technology. Nellie got an IPod this summer — to the great reluctance of her very low-tech parents — and I worried she would quickly become one of those many sad zombies we see with gaze glued to minuscule screen, missing the world around. But again my worries were unfounded. Nellie read more this summer than she ever has — and she cartwheeled, and she did underwater somersaults, and she picked wild blueberries, and she spotted skunks and woodpeckers and foxes and blue jays and rabbits and even a deer.
What would Laura Ingalls Wilder make of all that, topped off by Pottermore and Itunes?
While Nellie’s been reading on her own, we’ve also continued reading together. We’re a few books into the Little House series, books I loved as a child, but which are sometimes shocking to me now, in the way that so-called Indians are described as “wild men,” their faces “bold and fierce and terrible.” Ma, in particular, is blatantly racist. These passages are difficult to navigate, but I try to do so with a minimum of editing and a lot of discussion. Why is Ma so fearful of the Indians? How can she be a good person and say such cruel things? How do you think the Indians feel about the Ingalls family? How would you feel if strangers came into your neighbourhood and took over the place as theirs? (Jeremy Adam Smith’s article “How to Really Read Racist Books to Your Kids” at Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Centre offers some interesting insight here. He writes, “We have to ask our children to adopt fairness to all people as a goal, and to call out unfairness when we encounter it in one of their books, movies… or inside ourselves. Research says the more explicit we are with children about that struggle, the better.”)
Of course there are simpler questions that arise in our readings too — what’s a trundle bed? What’s calico? How do horses know how to swim? The Little House books are about a way of life so different from ours that even mealtime and springtime and bedtime make for scintillating reading. This summer we’ve lived in the Big Woods with the Ingalls family, and smoked deer meat in a hollow-log smokehouse. We’ve churned butter with them, and added bright carroty milk to colour the butter yellow. We’ve traveled across the prairie with them in a covered wagon, cried when the dog Jack was lost crossing a river; cried again when he returned, worn out and starving; and we’ve dug a well, and nearly lost a man down inside it, and built a log house from scratch, then laid in bed and listened to the wolves howling all around.
That’s the wonder of good books: they take you places you couldn’t otherwise go. You’re propped up on pillows with your cool sheet pulled over you, but all the while you’re traveling, and your world is expanding, and your mind is filling with answers to questions and new questions that spin out from those answers. Like when Laura lies awake at the end of the first book, trying to find her place in the expanse. She listens to the wind moving through the big woods, and to the sound of Pa’s fiddle, and to his voice singing about auld lang syne — “the days of a long time ago,” Pa told her. And as she drifted off to sleep, she thought, “‘This is now.’ She was glad that the cosy house, and Pa and Ma and the firelight and the music, were now. They could not be forgotten, she thought, because now is now. It can never be a long time ago.”
And “now” seems the right time to close this final post on a blog I began when Nellie first started to recognize clumps of letters as words. These days when I pull her door closed at night, I leave the light on, and a book is propped open before her. As Betty Smith wrote of Francie in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, “From that time on, the world was hers for the reading.”
Thank you for reading along with Nellie and me.
My friend (and the wonderful artist) Sara Angelucci has a question for you lovers of children’s books. Please read about her newest project below and get in touch with your memories of “a book you always carry with you.” I’d love to hear your comments here as well!
♦
Hello,
I am looking for children’s books suggestions (from YOUR CHILDHOOD) for an upcoming project I am preparing for the Koffler Gallery in the fall of 2013 entitled We’re in the Library. As one of the participating artists I have been asked to create a work in response to the idea of the school library.
For my project, I’m interested in knowing which books from childhood (approximately age 6-14) have been IMPORTANT ones and had a long-lasting impact into your adult life. In essence, a book you always carry with you deep inside.
Perhaps by way of example, I will share my story. When I was 14 I entered the school library and the librarian said, “oh my goodness Sara, you look so much like Anne Frank.” As a Catholic girl raised in a small town, I was unfamiliar with Anne Frank’s story. And my response was “who is Anne Frank?” She immediately took Anne Frank’s Diary off the shelf and said, “you should read this.” So I did, and of course, the impact was profound. Not only did I look like Anne Frank, I was her age when she started writing the diary. And, I shared many of Anne’s feelings as a young burgeoning adolescent woman. Of course, her life circumstances were beyond my comprehension, and to discover Anne’s ultimate end was devastating. Her story changed me. Perhaps it was the real shift from childhood to adulthood.
If you should care to, I would love to hear about your most important book. I will not be able to use all of the books suggested to me, I’m searching for a short-list of ten. But if you would like to share your story, please write to me at:
sara@sara-angelucci by MAY 27, 2013.
Many thanks
Sara Angelucci
I’m a guest on Project Bookmark‘s blog today, one of many writers participating in a month-long campaign to support a registered charitable organization that puts poems and stories in the exact location where they were set. Read all about it below.
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Think of the scene from Michael Ondaatje’s In The Skin of A Lion when a nun falls from the Bloor Street Viaduct; or of Vancouver’s Chinatown circa 1940 in The Jade Peony by Wayson Choy. This country is full of such places: real ones that appear in our stories too. Three of my own novels are set in Deep River, Ontario, the town where I grew up – at magical Rabbit Rock, thick with moss and pine needles, along the TransCanada Highway with its roaring transport trucks, or even down inside the cold dark river. I know I’ve got something right when people who know these places say they have recognized them in my stories.
To celebrate the way place inspires literature, actual “Bookmarks” have begun popping up across Canada. There are 12 so far – poster-size ceramic plaques that bring stories and poems right into the landscape where they were set.
I’ve signed on as a Project Bookmark Page Turner because I want to see more, and more, and more of them.
These markers remind me of the spots we stopped at when we were kids: getting out of the car on a road trip and stretching our legs while reading about some historic battle or church or settlement. Looking at the spot we were in and trying to imagine the thing happening there long ago. I love that Project Bookmark gives the same weight to invented stories pressed into actual places.
So I’m here not only to tell you that I’m a Page Turner, but to ask you to be one too. It’s pretty simple. You donate $20 to Project Bookmark, just as I have. If you donate today, you have the chance to win a copy of my novel, And Me Among Them.
But the best part is this: you’ll be one on a growing list of writers and readers who are building a kind of literary TransCanada Highway: “a network of sites and stories, so that we can read our way across the country.”
Join us.
On Twitter, my friend Eric Cator describes himself as “Artist, filmmaker and guy who spends more time drawing than can possibly be healthy.” I’ve been following his posts for some time, and recently noticed a series of alphabet drawings he was making for his baby daughter. In fact, he was building her a city made of letters. I was so touched by these pieces, which popped up randomly rather than in alphabetical order, that I asked him to write for Blog of Green Gables and tell us a little about what prompted him to make Alphacity. Turns out it has something to do with a love for stories, and the imaginary worlds you find there.
I’d love to hear your comments on what Eric’s written below. Did having a child inspire you to make something?
♦
A great deal of my childhood was spent looking for another world to live in. Specifically, I wanted to live in the ‘adult’ world (the one that parents lived in when they weren’t around their kids). I didn’t feel like I fit in with the kid world, and anyways, I was pretty sure the adults were keeping all the really good things for themselves, and I wanted in.
Yes indeed, it was going to be nothing but late-night pancake feasts and afternoons spent speeding around in race cars for me! In order to learn more about the secret adult world I began lingering around adults, hoping to pick up clues from their conversations, but it soon became clear that they knew I was listening, and therefore insisted on only talking of dull and pointless things when I was around, to throw me off.
EW Kemble’s version of Huckleberry Finn, 1884
Now, I’m pretty sure my parents tried to warn me that the truth about adult life was that it was mostly filled with mundane activities like going to work and paying bills; things that couldn’t possibly measure up to my fantastical theories or even fictional novels. I of course dismissed this as another clever ruse designed to dissuade me from digging any further into their secrets.
After some time however, I realized that I wasn’t reading books just to look for clues anymore, and instead I was just enjoying being with the characters and spending time in the worlds the authors had created. The truth was that I had fallen so in love with fictional worlds that I had stopped looking for hidden secrets about the adult world; it seemed more and more likely that my parents were telling the truth, and the real world would never compare to the endless imaginary lands that existed in books and comics. Only then did I realize that these works of fiction were open doors into the minds of their writers, who likely created these worlds because they felt they didn’t ‘fit in’ with the normal world either. It also seemed very likely that the parts of them that didn’t fit were the same parts that allowed them to create their own worlds, and by sharing these worlds they had found a way to connect to other people after all, which is what I was really after all along.
Now that I’m a parent, I find myself wanting to share my love of imaginary worlds with my kids. Luckily my wife is also a writer and lover of stories, and we make a point of reading to our children daily. I also try to put my own imagination on display around them whenever possible, with the side benefit that it often encourages them to put their imagination on display for me; at three my son is a frequent teller of make-believe stories, usually involving dinosaurs and firefighters. My daughter is only a couple of months old, so she hasn’t begun making up her own endings to bedtime stories just yet, but I have been working on an alphabet poster that I will hang on the wall beside her crib; in this poster each letter is an entire building, and together the alphabet forms an entire city.
Hopefully, in the near future she will imagine herself in this city, perhaps living in a two-bedroom condo on the sixth floor of the letter S, or spending her days watching the world from a balcony in the letter D. I also hope that this ‘Alphacity’ will spark her interest in other imaginary places, and in the written language that can bring her to them. And who knows, as she gets even older maybe she will even find some comfort here in this fictional land, on those inevitable days when she feels like she isn’t fitting in with the regular world around her.
♦
Eric Cator has always loved stories, but usually tells them through pictures. He is a Toronto-based visual artist with works in the Colart Collection, City of Toronto collection, as well as private collections throughout Canada and around the world. He is currently working on too many things at once, but enjoying the heck out of it.
“I hope that whenever you look at this picture you will feel that you are in Holland with the tulips. NW”
From a personal perspective, one of the best offshoots of having a blog like this one is that it serves as a scrapbook of sorts, or a journal, and looking back on old posts helps me remember not just the stories we’ve read together but what was happening in our lives when we read them; what N was learning at the time, and what I was learning as her mother.
She asks questions about her homework, and I answer with poems about verbs and parallel lines and fractions. She asks questions about people with mental problems and people who live on the street and people who commit crimes – Why would anyone kill a kid? She asks questions about the news — Will war come to Toronto? and Who’s worse, Stephen Harper or Rob Ford? — and about why I say “Tuck-toyaktuk” when I tuck her in at night. “Where is Tuktoyaktuk anyway, Mom?” Sometimes she offers her own answers to the weightiest questions of all: “It isn’t sad or scary when you die, Mom. People always want to die right when they’re going to.”
I’ve often thought that being a parent gives you a chance to go over what you yourself learned the first time, and really understand it in a deeper way. Plus you pick up more — things you missed altogether — not just about decimal points and adjectives and the Great Lakes and the greatest stories, but things only a child can show you, kabuzz they see the world differently, and you see it in the regliar way. Once N wrote me a note that said “To Momma, so she can know my knolege,” but all the while she has been teaching me too.
The world N has shown me is of superior koality, where the “fairys are verry buissy but they allways remember there tasks and allways get back to them.” The capital of this world is Yoo Nork City, and it is peopled (and aminaled) with people (and aminals) named Buzzzbee and Yoma and Mrs Thumble and Mrs Shabour, also known as Mrs Neighbour. There are pixies in this world, and they are tricksters, “so be careful if you see a tiny creacher that has no wings.” Everyone here is “odd in noticed ways,” as if “something’s buzzing inside us.” And no wonder: sometimes the fairies here do magic in front of your eyes. If you believe, you can see it; if you don’t believe, you can’t see (and you probably won’t buzz either).
In this world there are places to dine called Splashafishchip and Kleenexfishymombofood, and they serve all kinds of delicious dishes but no dry wine, only wet. You can get soothment from eating in such places, and later you can get more soothment when you lie down to sleep, because “in the light light room, there is music.” This must be the room where you can get to Narnia through the floor tile, or to Neverland through the window, even though it is painted shut. There are endless places to go from here.
The bookshelves sag with all they have to offer — worlds inside worlds, in which no one reigns supreme even though there is a little prince and a littlest princess and a girl who can lift a horse over her head. The dresser drawers spill over with clothes that are so quickly outgrown they sometimes barely get to be worn. But no matter. There are large gold dressup shoes and vampire capes and witch hats and strings of one-size-fits-all beads in every colour, and there are loose beads, too, that sometimes escape from their tins and roll around the floor until they slip through a crack to another world.
This room is full of paper butterflies and sequined fish and stuffed aminals with mournful eyes and Zhu Zhu pets that squeak “Let’s go!” when you step on them accidentally. And who would not want to go?
And yet in all my travels, this is among the loveliest places I have ever been.
N is still insisting on reading the juicy novels on her own, so we’ve been making our way through a wonderful new batch of picture books lately. She loves to draw, as some of you may have noticed, so she takes particular interest in how a book is illustrated, and whether or not the author made the images. She still loves a good story, but she’s also curious about the mechanics of the words and pictures coming together, and how the pictures show us unwritten parts of the story.
We were both intrigued by the pictures in Andrew Larsen’s Bye Bye Butterflies, illustrated by Jacqueline Hudon-Verrelli. The colourful people with their overlarge heads and simple curve smiles are charming, as are the wonky brick buildings and crooked window frames in the background. What I love most is seeing the artist’s hand here — the uneven pencil-crayon strokes and the bits of newsprint that give the pictures a collage-like feel. When I see this kind of work that shows hints of its process, it reminds me of sitting up close at a ballet, and hearing the dancers’ shoes squeak across the floor with each powerful move. It’s as if I’ve been invited in.
We both enjoyed the story too, which tells of a little preschool boy named Charlie, out walking with his dad when he sees a stream of waving hands on the school rooftop. “Bye bye, butterflies!” the children holler, and a cloud of butterflies emerges above them — butterflies of all sizes and colours, lifting off into the sky. Charlie says to his father, “Maybe I could do something like that one day.”
The story jumps ahead a few months, and Charlie is in kindergarten, “doing somersaults in gym and learning to sit still during storytime.” He’s forgotten all about that butterfly moment, until one day in spring a package arrives that says “LIVE CONTENTS, OPEN IMMEDIATELY.”
“Inside the package were tiny jars. Inside the jars was some special goop. And inside the goop were teeny tiny caterpillars.”
And so begins Charlie’s experience of watching the caterpillars transform, seeing them eat the goop, grow big and fuzzy, then dangle upside down and wrap themselves inside their cocoons.
“I wish we could keep the butterflies forever,” one of Charlie’s classmates laments. “I know,” he says, remembering the hands on the rooftop. “But just wait and see!”
The children finally release the butterflies, just as Charlie had witnessed the year before. Larsen provides a beautiful circular ending by placing another little preschooler on the sidewalk below, out walking with his dad and looking up at the waving hands and the liberated butterflies.
It’s a lovely story about metamorphosis, about waiting and observing, about beginnings and endings, and then endings and new beginnings. About feeling “a little happy and a little sad all at once.” And in that way it resonates with both parent and child.
I feel a little like this myself these days, as N grows in all ways, slipping her feet into my rubber boots, which are almost her size. I’ve mentioned before the moment we stood in front of her bookshelf and she said “It’s just that I like to read those kinds of books by myself now,” and how it was heartening and heart-wrenching all at once. So maybe reading is another form of metamorphosis.
N is in Grade 4 now, and they have weekly “lit circles,” where a group of kids who are reading the same novel get together and discuss various aspects of the story. Each week, a child plays a different role in the circle: one person tracks the action in the story and where the scenes change; another makes connections between the story and his own life, or the story and other books he’s read; another quotes key passages or looks up difficult words; and another makes visual interpretations of a favourite scene or character.
How I would love to be a fly on the wall hearing her pontificate about Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, or Louis Sachar’s Holes, which she’s reading now. But I can’t be everywhere in her life anymore, nor should I be. Still, I like to think she’s well-prepared for this because of all our years curled up together, reading one story after another.
Last week I featured a guest post by author Sara O’Leary, who graciously included a prize for commenters — a set of six Screech Owl books by Roy MacGregor. We had lots of great comments from readers, and the discussion moved from animals to shoes to the Ology books with their flaps and pockets (we got one yesterday!) to electronic devices to the feminization of reading to breakfast-time reading to bathtime reading to audio books to Marvel Comics and The Water Babies. I’ve drawn a name from the pool of people who chimed in, and the winner of the books is Holly McDaniel. Thanks to Sara for her great post, and to Tundra Books for making the set available.
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on 3/1/2013
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I love having guests! Today, writer Sara O’Leary, author of the gorgeous Henry books, which Quill and Quire calls “almost unbearably charming,” posts about the various techniques she used to encourage her sons to read. “My boys both had dints on the tops of their heads as babies from where I used to rest my book while I was breastfeeding.”
For me it’s a gift to have Sara at Blog of Green Gables as part of When Writers Read Kids’ Books, but there’s a gift for you too! Together with Tundra Books, Sara has generously offered a prize for a draw: a set of six Screech Owl books by Roy McGregor, to a commenter who resides in Canada. So please send in your comments about how you’d get kids reading, and I’ll draw the winner’s name in a week’s time. Meanwhile, a warm welcome to Sara O’Leary:
♦
There seems to be a lot of talk lately about how we can get boys reading. Around my house the talk is sometimes more on the line of how do we get them to stop. I have two sons and while neither could be categorized as what’s known in the trade as a “reluctant reader” they do have very different reading patterns. And in all the discussion of how we get boys reading, I think it’s important to remember just how varied those boys may be.
My first-born is a voracious reader and the problem has always been how to keep him in books. I was lucky enough to work as a columnist for a major daily for most of his childhood, which is the only reason we ever had enough money left over to buy him the occasional pair of shoes.
I wasn’t in the least surprised at his reading habits — his father and I are both readers and writers and our professional lives revolve around books. And really, the fact that he was an early and prolific and what could only be termed a dedicated reader probably made me a bit smug about the whole thing.
His younger brother was much less fanatical about reading. In fact, he’d often start reading a book only to put it down and go draw his own cover illustration, or make a video inspired by it, or write his own book. This wasn’t really a problem but it was odd to me. And it did force me to consider a little the question of how to get boys to read. I don’t have the answer but here are a few strategies that make sense to me.
Model behaviour. Don’t be afraid to let your kids see you reading. My boys both had dints on the tops of their heads as babies from where I used to rest my book while I was breastfeeding. There are books in every room of our house. My husband won’t leave the house without a book in his pocket. I wouldn’t say you have to go to this extreme but really if you can lie down on the sofa with a novel and call it good parenting, why not?
Read to your kids. The funny thing is that when they are small it doesn’t really matter what you read to them (and I say this as someone whose books are marketed to pre-readers). Read them what you are reading. Take them to the library as regularly as you can and let them bring home as many books as you can carry. So few of the best things in life are free but libraries are still one of them. Take them to bookstores and let them browse.
Remember that Mother Goose is the mother of us all.
Okay, I know I just said it doesn’t matter what you read to them but actually language acquisition is hugely aided by being read nursery rhymes or other rhyming verse. And it’s fun. There’s something intrinsically satisfying about a line that scans well and rhymes well and has a certain syntactical rightness. There are some beautiful editions of Mother Goose out there — I’m particularly fond of Barbara Reid’s. My boys and the children of many of my friends grew up listening to Ted Jacobs’ musical rendering of R.L. Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses, which I highly recommend. When my son Euan was small I printed out a number of Mother Goose rhymes and he made his own book with hand-drawn illustrations. This book is now one of my treasured possessions.
Books are good gifts.
I don’t like the idea of a book being tossed to one side as a boring gift but I am not above including a small toy or a box of candy in the packaging for a little instant gratification. There are terrible statistics out there about children who don’t own a single book to call their own. I suspect that these are not the children of anyone taking the time to read this but I think a child with a well-stocked bookcase is a child who has been properly provided for.
Play to their interests.
This is where independent booksellers really come in handy — too bad they’re such an endangered species these days. A good children’s book store (Kidsbooks in Vancouver, Babar in Montreal) can help you when you want a suggestion for a kid who really likes dragons or soccer or pirates. It would be nice if there were an online children’s book doctor who could prescribe books based on interests or past favourites. I don’t believe in pandering to kids — I’m not big on potty-humour even if it is a development stage — but there is a huge range of reading material out there and you’re bound to find something to appeal. Ask around. Ask people who blog about children’s books because they clearly are somewhat obsessive on the subject.
Like what they like.
As parents we do a lot of expecting our kids to like what we like. I don’t really think we’re obliged to like what they like but we owe it to them to at least give it a try. This is why I have sat through as many Godzilla movies as I have. I’m a terrible snob about comic books but I have a boy who collects vintage Marvel (and laughs at me when I pronounce it with the emphasis on the second syllable). I have less than no interest in hockey but was a regular purchaser of Roy MacGregor’s Screech Owl series when my elder boy went through a period of hockey-mania.
It does make me terribly sad to hear of children — any children, not just boys — who don’t read or of parents who don’t read to their children. Partly this is because reading is just such a tremendous pleasure that you naturally want others to share in it. And partly because I think that people who don’t read fiction are limited in a way. If you don’t actively engage in imagining the lives of others in the way that reading fiction produces then you necessarily only view the world through a single point of view — your own.
It seems to be that there is a very direct correlation between reading and the development of empathy. So while as parents we could view reading as akin to learning piano or being able to perform algebraic equations, it is also key to helping our children develop one of the most important attributes. My boys are beautiful, bright, and gifted but I don’t feel I can really claim to be proud of that fact because as I see it they pretty much arrived on this planet that way. But they are also both profoundly empathetic boys — they are kind and thoughtful human beings — and I think this is partly because reading has enabled them to see the world from the perspective of others. And I am inordinately, absurdly, and shamelessly proud about that.
♦
Sara O’Leary and son in their early days of reading together. This lovely shot was taken by fellow author Christy Ann Conlin.
Sara O’Leary is the co-creator with Julie Morstad of the Henry series: When You Were Small, Where You Came From and, most recently, When I Was Small (Simply Read Books). She has worked as a literary columnist and blogs about children’s books at 123oleary. A graduate of the UBC Masters program, she has taught Writing for Children and Screenwriting at Concordia University in Montreal. She is currently working on a novel titled The Ghost in the House.
Last night we stood in front of N’s sagging bookshelves looking for something good to read.
“Black Beauty?” I suggested.
“No. It’ll be too sad.”
“The Railway Children?”
“Mmm. No.”
“I know: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer! Funny! Or here — The Swiss Family Robinson!”
“Mmm. No.”
“It says it’s happy! Listen: ‘The Swiss Family Robinson is a story of the happy discovery of the wonders of natural history by a family shipwrecked on a desert island, who remain united through all the adversities that they encounter.’ Wait — it says it’s joyful too! A joyful classic!”
“No. Something else.”
Finally she pulled an Ivy and Bean from her shelf, which we’ve been reading since the picture book phase I wrote about last week. I like the Ivy and Bean books, but I’ve been craving a bigger story since before Christmas (though yes, I do read from my own library too!).
“Let’s pick something else,” I suggested. “Don’t you want to read a big, juicy novel?”
And then came the blow: “Mom, it’s just that I like to read those kinds of books by myself now.”
I smiled to hide the sting, but privately I was thinking about all our years of reading together, and — at least in retrospect — how quickly they have flown by. It was another of those bicycle moments. You run and you run alongside your child (in our case for years!), and suddenly she is ready to go alone, and before either of you has realized it, she is flying away from you, and it’s you who becomes the speck in her distance when she finally looks back.
But this is wonderful, I thought as I closed her door last night. In this one respect, I know I have done my job well. N is a reader, and I suspect she will remain so. She has moved up through all the phases of reading, recognizing first the pictures, then the letters as pictures, then the letters as words, then the words as sentences, then the sentences as information. And with this skill she can unlock many mysteries. Wherever she wants to go, books will take her there, and in that regard I hope she will become a world traveler.
I’ve read that reading fiction increases empathy too–I suppose because one gets caught up in a character and looks at the story’s situation through that character’s eyes. In a sense you have to become someone else. I used to get N to eat by pretending the morsel on her plate was sad because she’d eaten other morsels but not “him.” As I put on my warbly Tiny Carrot voice — “Please eat me so I can be with my friends. I am so lonely!” — I’d sometimes worry I’d gone too far when I saw her face fill with pity, eyebrows working, mouth opening wide for the poor bit of food that had felt so abandoned.
I also recall walking through Value Village with N and coming upon a bedraggled stuffed dog lying in an aisle, with a $1.99 tag pierced into his neck. We both stopped and looked down at him, and he stared up at us with large blue eyes, felt tongue lolling. We had to take him home, and of course he’s with us still.
Years later, we sometimes sit in her room and go through the stuffed animals with the aim of getting rid of some, but we make the mistake of holding them up one by one and looking at their faces, and for a quiet moment they look back at us, waiting for our decision. Our cull is far from thorough every time.
There are the real creatures too — the baby squirrel who lost his mother and cried for help in our backyard; the kindergarten friend who wouldn’t speak but found a loyal friend in N, who spoke enough for both of them. We used to walk home together at lunchtime, the wordless girl and her wordless mother just ahead, and N and I trailing behind, calling out a cheerful goodbye when we reached our house.
Recently when her grandmother was sick, N hung a reversible sign on her doorknob, and ran a full series of checkups. She made “emergency pain notes” on her own medical stationery with a logo that read “your health matters to us.” She asked careful, thoughtful questions about where the pain was and what the patient would be willing to take for “soothment.” And would the patient like one hairdo per day, or two?
Whether this ability to understand another’s emotions comes because of reading, I’m not sure. I like to think that’s part of it. But I wonder too what makes books so special? Do movies increase empathy? Does television? There are lots of awful television shows for kids, but there’s great stuff too. In fact, the more I think about it, I suspect a show like Nana Lan, which N loved as a little girl, did indeed boost her ability to empathize. There are lots of books that have done zero in that regard. So perhaps it’s not so much the medium, but the value of the story it contains, and the extent to which the viewer can embrace that story.
In any case, I hope this is not the end of our reading together, but it is almost certainly the beginning of the end. Which is as it should be.
Some strange things are happening in our reading world.
In mid-December we went on a trip to Thailand and Malaysia, to see my dad and his wife on board their sailboat. We brought A Wrinkle in Time along, since N was lucky enough to get the book from her aunt and uncle just before our trip, and we were happily ensconced in that time-and-space adventure as our own adventures unfolded.
It was a wonderful trip, full of explorations of emerald caves and mangroves. We spotted colourful kingfishers and giant hornbills, and a typical Malaysian day was not complete without a visit from some mischievous, eyebrow-wiggling macaque monkeys.
One of N’s Christmas presents on board was a book of watercolour postcards and watercolour crayons. This is her kingfisher, just one of many great depictions.
Each night after a full day, we’d settle in to read about Meg Murry and her genius little brother Charles Wallace, and their complex mission of finding their father, a government scientist who disappeared while working on a top-secret project. N seemed very engaged. She particularly liked Meg, a bright girl who has trouble believing she isn’t dumb.
“How do you know I’m not dumb?” she asks her mother. “Isn’t it just because you love me?”
We were more than halfway through the book when we came upon a chapter called “The Man With the Red Eyes.” The title startled N so much that she didn’t want to continue. Not even the charming Mrs Which, Mrs Whatsit, and Mrs Who — supernatural beings who assist Meg in her quest — could draw her back to the story. It sits hidden in a top drawer now, because even the cover reminds her of “The Man with the Red Eyes.”
No matter — we will return to it one day, and hopefully to the rest of Madeleine L’Engle’s Time Quintet as well. Apparently L’Engle wrote Wrinkle in 1959, but had difficulty finding a publisher who would accept it, just as so many authors have — Dr Seuss and Beatrix Potter come to mind. A Wrinkle in Time went on to win the prestigious Newbery Medal, and needless to say found a huge following.
I can only assume N is not quite ready for such scary wrinkles. After we got back from our trip, she craved picture books. Each night she’d carefully select a new pile and we’d sit and go through them one by one, with a Bing Crosby Christmas CD playing over and over in the background, right up to late January (Christmas away meant she didn’t get enough of him this year). Some of the books we hadn’t read in years, and it was lovely to watch her expression change as she began to recall the story or the pictures. I’ve posted before about the theory that children move away from these books too early. This, to me, was proof that — for N at least — they still have enormous value. Comfort food, in a way, just like Bing.
Here are some of the books we’ve enjoyed over the last while:
Nicole’s Boat by Allen Morgan, in which Nicole “sails away to the end of the day, down the long winding river that leads to the sea.”
Oh, the Places You’ll Go by Dr Seuss, in which “You will come to a place where the streets are not marked. Some windows are lighted. But mostly they’re darked.”
There’s a Barnyard in My Bedroom by David Suzuki, in which a family discovers that “nature is everywhere.”
Manners by Aliki: “Some people have them; some people don’t.”
Mrs Armitage on Wheels by Quentin Blake, in which the ingenius Mrs A outfits her bicycle with everything it needs, and too much more.
I am not sleepy and I will not go to bed by Lauren Child, in which Lola is not sleepy and will not go to bed.
La Bella Magellona and the Little Cavalier by Oscar de Mejo, in which the giant, four-footed Magellona and her tiny friend learn how to love each other.
Rita and Whatsit by Jean-Philippe Arrou-Vignod, in which Rita unwraps a dog on her birthday.
Skippy Jon Jones by Judy Schachner, in which a Siamese cat discovers his inner chihuahua.
The Amazing Bone by William Steig, in which Pearl the pig befriends a talking bone.
In my novel The Girl Giant, the main character Ruth loves her rubber boots because they take her through puddles to the shores of a distant land, where trees talk, and flowers grow taller than she does. It’s a make-believe place – an escape from the hardships of being an outcast. I’ve been thinking about the many imaginary worlds of children’s literature, and what an adventure it would be to travel to them.
This is an old drawing of N’s from years back. I was fascinated by her spelling. The heading means to say “The BFG Catching Dreams.” She often used just “h” for the “ch” sound, which makes a lot of sense when you think about it.
In Roald Dahl’s The BFG, Dream Country is a flat, treeless, colourless land of “swirling mists and ghostly vapours.” Here, the Big Friendly Giant collects dreams with a butterfly net, bottles them, and doles them out to sleeping children. From golden phizzwizards to trogglehumpers, “This is where all dreams is beginning.”
In JM Barrie’s Peter Pan, Neverland is two stars to the right and straight on til morning. “Of all the delectable islands the Neverland is the snuggest and most compact, not large and sprawly, you know, with tedious distances between one adventure and another, but nicely crammed.”
In Neil Gaiman’s Coraline, the Other World is just through the drawing room door: an identical flat right next door to Coraline’s, with an “Other Mother” and an “Other Father” who have button eyes and evil intentions.
In Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Wonderland is “down, down, down,” by way of a rabbit hole, and easier to get into than out of. The Cheshire Cat grins and tells Alice, “We’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad…. You must be, or you wouldn’t have come here.”
In JK Rowling’s Harry Potter series, the Wizarding World exists right alongside the Muggle World, with a complex transportation system: you can catch the Hogwarts Express by penetrating a brick wall on platform 9 ¾, but there’s also the Knight Bus, the Floo network, and apparition – plus handy tools like the Marauder’s Map and the Invisibility Cloak that make traveling all the more wizardly.
In Frank L Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, The Emerald City is at the end of the yellow brick road, in the centre of Oz. “I thought,” the wizard confesses, “as the country was so green and beautiful, I would call it the Emerald City, and to make the name fit better I put green spectacles on all the people, so that everything they saw was green.”
In CS Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Narnia is covered with snow when Lucy first reaches it from the wardrobe, because the White Witch has got the land “under her thumb. It’s she that makes it always winter. Always winter and never Christmas.” (Remember you can also get to Narnia through the worn brown tile in N’s room.)
In PL Travers’ Mary Poppins, Fairyland is inside one of Bert’s pavement pictures, and he and Mary Poppins simply step in. “How green it was there, and how quiet, and what soft crisp grass under their feet!” But if Cinderella wasn’t there, it couldn’t have been Fairyland, the children later tell Mary. “Don’t you know?” Mary sniffs, “that everybody’s got a Fairyland of their own?”
In Dr Seuss’s Horton Hears a Who, Whoville is a floating dust speck planet teeming with minuscule Whos discovered by Horton the Elephant, the only one who can hear the creatures’ tiny voices. “I know,” called the voice, “I’m too small to be seen. But I’m mayor of a town that is friendly and clean. Our buildings, to you, would seem terribly small, but to us, who aren’t big, they are wonderfully tall.”
Where the Wild Things Are, by Maurice Sendak, is reachable by private boat, through night and day, in and out of weeks, and over a year. A boy once wrote to Sendak to ask: “How much does it cost to get to where the wild things are? If it is not expensive, my sister and I would like to spend the summer there.”
Those are just some … anyone know of others to add to the list?
Thank goodness for Wordless Wednesday, since lately I have few words. But I will be back blogging soon….
Visit my wordless friends:
Allyson Latta
Matilda Magtree
Cheryl Andrews
Elizabeth Yeoman
Visit my wordless friends:
Allyson Latta
Cheryl Andrews
Matilda Magtree
Elizabeth Yeoman
Back for the new year! See if you can guess where we’ve been from this fabulous picture by N. And please visit my Wordless Wednesday friends!
Allyson Latta
Cheryl Andrews
Matilda Magtree
Elizabeth Yeoman
A quick post before I take a holiday break. N and I finished The Nutcracker by ETA Hoffmann. It was a wonderful read, and N loved it right the way through — at least until quite close to the end.
One night while I read aloud, she worked away on a Nutcracker scene in her room, placing a doll in a cradle as Princess Pirlipat, with a larger doll playing the role of Marie Stahlbaum nearby. A Yeoman of the Guard tree ornament played Nutcracker himself, and several other dolls and animals filled in the backdrop.
Now and then she paused from her work to study Maurice Sendak’s drawings. “He’s good,” she said solemnly. “He’s really good.”
As the story drew to a close, it became clear that Marie and Nutcracker, aka young Drosselmeier, had fallen in love. “In a year and a day he called for her in a golden carriage drawn by silver horses. At the wedding, two and twenty thousand of the most brilliant figures adorned with pearls and diamonds danced, and Marie is believed to be still the queen of a country where sparkling Christmas woods, transparent marzipan castles, in short, the most wonderful things, can be seen if you have the right kind of eyes for it.”
N does have the right kind of eyes, to a point. She has no problem with transparent marzipan castles, with dolls that come alive at night, with mice that have seven nasty heads, with towns made of candy, and sweet-toothed giants swallowing sweet towns whole, with cities made of gingerbread, and rivers made of honey, orange and lemonade, all emptying into Almond Milk Lake, where the plump little fish look just like hazelnuts. That houses are made from chocolate, roofed with gold, and trimmed with shelled almonds and candied lemon peel, is no surprise to her. Was Marie dreaming or was the world she traveled through (in a jewel-encrusted gondola drawn by golden dolphins) real? Either way, N accepted it.
But what was absolutely unfathomable — what yanked her right up off the page and straight out of this winter wonderland, was that news that Nutcracker and Marie would marry.
“What?!” she cried as I read the last words. “She’s seven! Mom! Marie is seven years old! She can’t get married!”
As Godfather Drosslemeier would say, “Stuff and nonsense!” Then and there, N was through with The Nutcracker, classic or no. But I suspect she’ll be drawn into its candy world once again next year.
A quick note to let you know that my wonderful Canadian publisher, Freehand Books, is having a super sale to encourage books as gifts for Christmas — 50% off some excellent books, with And Me Among Them among them (sorry, could not resist).
I think I, too, will do some shopping!
Happy holidays everyone.
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Our own grandchildren who have always enjoyed being read to have become avid readers and library goers in spite of modern technology. Thanks for the wonderful blog Don Elzinga
A thoughtful and graceful exit. Well done!
Thank you for sharing all the way along, Kristen. This is a beautiful book end post.
Thank your for the wonderful postings over such along time. I have enjoyed all of them. It is so gratifying to see how Ns reading has progressed. She is well on her way to being a book lover. Good luck with your next endeavour.
Bittersweet! I’ll miss the updates and insights here, but look forward to more from you between the pages. Thanks to you and N!
Thanks for the inspiration. I hope you and Nellie enjoy moving on to new things, more writing and more reading.
I’m happy to report that one of my short stories is a finalist in the Alice Munro competition this year; another incentive to keep writing and sending it out.
Susan McCrae
Kristin: This was a gorgeous post. Your descriptions of your reading journey with Nellie in particular struck me, as well as her development and taking flight as a reader. I too was read to as a kid, and then I read to my youngest sister, and of course am a reader now on my own. I think there is little more valuable than reading to your child, and though I don’t wish to have kids, that would be my sole reason for wanting them, I admit!
Thank you for writing this post, and the blog in general. It’s been wonderful to read.
PS. Now I want to revisit the Little House books!!
-Steph
Thank you Don!
Now to be as graceful about the entry into the next endeavour! Thanks Kim…
It was great to have you as a contributor, Carrie, and I so enjoy your posts too.
And thank you for always reading them!
Miranda, I was so pleased to be able to post your Bea story here…. Here’s to secret gardens.
Wonderful news, Susan! Congratulations to you.
Thanks for all your enthusiasm over many posts, Steph, and for great tips like the Roald Dahl CD…. You could always read to your dog!