JoAnn's poetry and photos sing. Though we had hoped to talk about
posts from JoAnn's tenure, I was so struck by her poetry in the same post Mary Ann chose, I have to share JoAnn's photo and poem, "Landscape with Dog Nose":
stepping into the shot.
She’s always part of the picture.
photo and poem (c) 2012 JoAnn Early Macken, all rights reserved
I'll miss blogmate JoAnn's unique view of the natural world, her kindness, her beautific smile, her poetry...and so much more.
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Howdy, Campers! Author and illustrator Barney Saltzberg is a generous soul, and in his Friday the 13th interview, he offered an autographed copy of his fun and amazing book, BEAUTIFUL OOPS to one of our readers.
And the lucky, randomly chosen winner is...
Sarah Albee--yay, Sarah (who's an amazing author--check out her
website)!
Here's Sarah's
Beautiful Oops:
My oops moment happened when I was a very junior editor at Sesame Street. I was editing my first big book, a SS songbook (because I was the only editor in my dept who could read music and play piano). I went over to Jeff Moss's house (composer of Rubber Duckie) to show him some song arrangements, and when we got to People In Your Neighborhood (his song) we both stared at the composer credit, which read Joe Raposo (his long-time rival and writer of Bein' Green, among many others). Jeff was notoriously curmudgeonly, and I knew there was a good chance he would flip, even though of course it was just galleys and there would be plenty of opportunity to change it. So I quickly made a joke about it (along the lines of how interchangeable he and Joe were, whatevs). After five tense seconds, he grinned broadly. And we became fast friends.
So...drawing the winning name, watching the exciting
announcements of the ALA awards (I felt as if I were in the audience!) and reading
Carmela's,
Mary Ann's,
JoAnn's,
Esther's, and
Jeanne Marie's fabulous and thought-provoking posts about awards, got me to thinking about winning...
...which inspired this poem for Poetry Friday, graciously hosted today by Jim at
HeyJimHill!
WINNINGby April Halprin Wayland
I sit under this treeto sit under this tree.
~
Howdy Campers and happy Poetry Friday! Today's poem and Writing Workout--a poetry prompt--are below.
Poetry Friday is hosted this week by Mary Ann Scheuer
over at
Great Kid Books. Thanks, Mary Ann!
(Yes, I have poems in both anthologies--but that's not why I'm jumping up and down about these two books--they are brilliant and original and poetry tag is a game you can play with other poets and your students!)
And now to today's
TeachingAuthors topic of the week. After five terrific posts on
First Drafts: Quieting the Internal Critic, it's my turn to wrap up this topic--for now. Just so you know, my internal critic is going nuts right this very minute because I am writing something that someone is going to actually read.
Like JoAnn, I enjoy first drafts. Mostly. First drafts aren't promising anyone anything. First drafts are splashing around, figuring stuff out. First drafts are swirling paint onto the page to see if I can convey what was dancing in my brain last night.
And like
Jeanne Marie, I am good at starting and not so good a
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on 9/23/2011
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Howdy, Campers--Happy Poetry Friday!
Nikki's accumulated more honors, and has written more books and more articles than we have space to list, but it's too interesting not to mention that she's also a performing artist, a fine artist, a fiber artist, a jeweler and more...as she says, she's a Jane-of-all-Trades. I've known Nikki for a long time and have always been moved by her unfailing generosity. Toda
By:
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on 8/26/2011
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~
Howdy, Campers!
Before you read today's post, be sure to check out JoAnn's interview with Donna Gephart last Friday. You'll want to enter for a chance to win an autographed copy of Donna's acclaimed (and funny!) novel, How to Survive Middle School. The entry deadline is tonight, August 26th at 11 p.m. Central Standard Time.
The topic rumbling around TeachingAuthors lately is, What Are Your Writing Fears and What Do You Do About Them?
Fears? Who me?
Okay. I do have a fear. But only one. And it's a teeny-tiny, gentle, kindly, whispering voice in my brain: ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR MIND? YOU CAN'T DO THIS! YOU COULD NEVER IN A MILLION YEARS DO THIS! YOU ARE A COMPLETELY INCOMPETENT IMBECILE WHO DOESN'T EVEN KNOW HOW TO SPELL THE WORD IMBECILE WITHOUT ASKING GOOGLE "HOW DO YOU SPELL IMBOCILE?"--NEVER MIND WRITE A POEM OR A STORY OR A BLOG POST!
Er...what I meant to say is that I respond well to deadlines. (We've written about deadlines
x
Howdy to all February Picture Book Marathoners, you can do it, you can do it--you can, you can!
Similes. Metaphors. You know them well.
Similes compare two unlike objects using "like" or "as": That dog is like a lump of clay--he never chases balls.
Metaphors, in contrast, don't: That dog, a lump of clay, never chases balls. Or simply, That lump of clay never chases balls.
Eli being a lump of clay.
"Metaphor" sounds like someone saying, "May the Force," doesn't it? (It does if you tilt your head sideways and sing LALALA really loudly...) Their force, their power can create vivid images in our minds.
When I was writing
It's Not My Turn To Look For Grandma!, my editor asked me to clarify that the story starts at sunrise and ends at sundown. I had no idea how to communicate this without being
too wordy or clunkily obvious. I was actually pretty frightened.
I flailed about. My flailing is not pretty. Want to see what it looks like close up? This Monday I had a boatload of writing to do in the afternoon. But first I had to have lunch--I mean, c'mon. Since I was a little lost and didn't quite know how to start any of the projects looming over me, another helping of veggies and rice seemed like a jolly good idea and oh, that left-over clam chowder sure looked yummy.
After my large lunch, the flailing continued. I had a poem due and no ideas. None. Nada. I lead a pretty pathetic little life, I decided. Except for the dog park and the gym, I'd had no human contact. So I looked around my room. Eli was a lump of clay on the love seat--no help there.
I was too lazy to actually stand up and walk to my bookshelf (sometimes I'm inspired by the pattern or subject of other poems). There was a lemon next to my computer because I'd picked it from our tree and meant to drop it off in the kitchen but brought it into my office instead.
Not to make those of you shivering under snow jealous or anything, but this is our Meyer lemon tree righ
By:
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on 6/4/2010
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Happy Poetry Friday! Poem and Writing Workout below.
Our blog topic is reading as a writer. I'm going to modify it and list some books I'm currently reading as a writing teacher.
You may remember that after ten years as instructor with the UCLA Extension Writers Program, I'm teaching a brand-spanking-new class this summer.
My vision is to make this class as playful as the theater games class I took years ago. No matter how tired my friend Steve and I were after a day in the corporate world, we couldn't wait to get to class.
What was so special about it that energized us? We were moving or we were mediating, we were reacting to smells or blindfolded, we were hugging or we were chasing each other, we turned into gorillas or bananas.
I want my picture book students to be equally energized. I want them out of their desks with exercises that get them stretching, walking, laughing, observing, closing their eyes, tasting, singing, crying, playing group games. I'll be covering such topics as point of view, dialogue, rewriting, publishing and more. Here are a few of the books I'm using:
Writing Workout The poet William Stafford wrote a poem every morning all of his life. Since taking the National Poetry Month Challenge to write a poem a day for the month of April, I'm continuing, inspired by the book, Early Morning--Remembering my Father, William Stafford by
Kim Stafford. Today part of a sentence Stafford wrote inspired me: "At a certain sound today I hear Father turn onto the gravel drive at supper time..." It reminded me of our dog, Eli, sleeping on his couch in the upstairs bedroom as I write.
1 Comments on We Interrupt This Regularly Scheduled Posting....to ask for more writing exercise ideas!, last added: 6/4/2010
Happy Poetry Friday! There's a poem for you at the end and a Writing Workout for you, too. But before we begin, I want you to know that I'm still in the thick of the Poem-A-Day Challenge for Poetry Month. In fact, it's TAKEN OVER MY ENTIRE LIFE!...please don't click on this next link yet...today's poem is the same one I'm discussing in this post. You've gotta read the story behind the poem first. It's the law. And one more thing before we begin: Tricia has just posted an interview with me at her marvelous The Miss Rumphius Effect. Come celebrate our blogiversary!
Enter to win a critique of your work, in honor of our blog’s first birthday! And please note: Your first entry must say how you follow us—via Google, Networked blogs, or email. You must post a SEPARATE comment to get a second entry. This makes tracking entries much easier. Entry deadline is 11 pm (CST) Tuesday, May 4, 2010.
Birthdays. Earth Day.
Poetry Month. Poetry Friday. The world turns. What was cloudy becomes clear. The patterns in our lives rise to the surface. We lean towards structure. Forks, spoons and knives separated by dividers. Children in a choir arranged by height. Blouses at my local thrift store (yay, thrift stores!) arranged by color.
My mother could always count on me to put her pencils, rubber bands and paper clips in order. All my marbles grouped themselves into marble villages. The treasured plastic dinosaurs my sister and I got from a junk shop (all for a dime) quickly found their families.
And something beautiful happens in my brain when a word goes “click,” fitting into a poetic pattern.
There’s an elegant website called
Patterns in Poetry researched, written and created by Constance Curran, of Cranberry Designs. I hope one day she’ll add more types of poetry.
So let’s play with patterns in poetry today, in honor of the patterns of our lives. I’ll take you on the behind-the-scenes tour on how I wrote today’s poem.
I was thinking about how Earth Day and our Blogiversary were both on April 22nd. I thought back to last year, how I almost told my
potential blogmates, “Thank you for inviting me to join your blog, but I’m waaaay too busy to take on another project.”
I thought about the hands of five authors reaching out to me, all the way to the West Coast, and how for some reason I reached back. THANK GOODNESS! I wanted to catch that “thank goodness” feeling in a poem.
I began goofing off, thinking of trees and of leaping across the country, across cyberspace. A first and then a second line came to me:
What does it mean to have made this leap?
To swing from tree to tree to you?<
Ideas are everywhere, right? Wherever you look, smell, taste, hear, touch, or imagine, you run into them—or they run into you. (Write them down! I always carry a pocket notebook for those elusive ideas I’d forget if I didn’t nab them when they first appeared.)
Suppose you want to write a poem. How do you decide which idea to write about? Three things make an idea a good idea. Use these tips to evaluate yours:
1. Write about something you care about. This is true of almost every kind of writing—and especially poetry. If you try to write a poem about something that doesn’t matter to you, you probably won’t be satisfied with the result. The poem will suffer. Readers will recognize your lack of enthusiasm.
2. Write about something familiar. Nothing will derail you faster than running out of things to say because you’ve exhausted your knowledge. The better you know something, the better equipped you are to write about it. Yes, of course, you can research your topic—if you care enough to make the effort.
3. Write about one specific thing. It seems like a contradiction, but you can actually say more about one dog (especially if you know it and care about it) than you can about the whole canine species. Why? Because dogs don’t have all that much in common. Not all dogs bark. Not all dogs wag their tails—or even have tails to wag. Not all dogs have glossy fur or sparkly eyes or an earth-shaking wiggle. Your own dog, on the other hand, has its own quirks and tricks and endearing behaviors, providing a wealth of unique qualities to describe.
So grab your notebook—the one with the long list of ideas—and choose the best one for you!
Writing Workout
Here are some categories of topics you can consider when you write your own poem. Remember to test your idea against the three tips above.
- a family celebration
- your favorite (or least favorite) food
- something you do in your spare time
- a place you've visited
- a bird, plant, or animal you know
- something you remember from a long time ago
By:
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on 11/13/2009
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Happy Poetry Friday!
A new poem and a Writing Workout are below.
But first a brief commercial interruption.
This is a gentle reminder about those goals you set for the New Year in conjunction with the contest to win my book, NEW YEAR AT THE PIER. Remember
that post? Remember your goals?
We’re expecting you to report back to us during the first two weeks in January. If you didn't win the book last time, you'll have another chance in January when you report on your progress. How did you do? Who or what helped you? Who or what hindered you?
And now back to our regularly scheduled program.
I asked my nephew Josh, who’s a high school science teacher, how I could introduce this week’s topic of food and fiction.
“Well, you could have them write a poem in ketchup,” he said. That’s Josh for you. (Wouldn’t you love to be in one of his science classes?)
Message written in ketchup
And actually, that was a very good place to begin, because I’m quite comfortable writing in food.
The night before anyone in our family has a birthday, I sneak down to the kitchen and write “Happy Birthday” in raisins. It’s tradition. I mean, who wouldn’t want to wake up to a raisin birthday card, really?
You guessed it...raisins!
I told Josh this. He said, “Then you could write a poem about what happens to it when the birds come.”
Wow.
I thought about my best friend, author
Bruce Balan who’s sailing around the world on a catamaran. (To be specific, he just left the
Minerva Reef - a ring of coral less than 3 miles across, 250 miles southwest of Tonga – heading 800 miles to New Zealand.)
And I wrote this poem:
BIRD DAY CARD
by April Halprin Wayland
You’re at sea.
I’m on land.
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I love the idea, & somewhere else I read about asking people to write about trees. This particular article said that there always was a memory, just as you said, April. The tree I'd write about is in one of my grandparents' back yard. They said it was 'my' tree. I climbed it & sat in it. I swung from a tree that hung over a branch. It's late so I won't finish, but wanted to tell you I enjoyed the post!
Merci, Linda.
A good start indeed:
I climbed it
sat in it
swung from it...
more!
Now that I am finally starting to submit poems here and there, I'm thinking twice and thrice about putting them on my blog - I must conserve them JUST IN CASE, right? Sigh.
I love this exercise and am sharing it on FB. The tree I'm writing about is a pine tree on the small mountain across from the house I grew up in. You can individuate this particular tree from the house since it's the biggest pine around. The neighborhood kids hiked up there for years (through the cornfield, across the sledding hill, over the broken stone wall, up a steeper hill overgrown with tall hay-like stuff). We used that tall hay-like stuff to build a thatched fort in the bottom branches that were very low to the ground. I went back a few years ago and you can still see my name carved in a branch.
Thanks for the memories, April!
Beautiful artwork of the tree. This post reminded me of the huge mango tree in our backyard when I was little. One end of the hammock was hugging its trunk. Oh, the memories! Thanks for sharing this with us today. =)
April, I used this exercise with my students today. Some results were good, others need work. They are posting on the class kidblog. I may share this on my own blog, but will be sure to link back. Thanks for a great idea. You are so right, everyone has a tree.
Yes, I've started to think twice about posting too, but it's such a great way to build a community and to develop skills and voice. It seems a shame to exclude them from publication.
I used to braid the hair of a weeping willow.
I love the first two lines of your poem.
I'm eager to read Joanne Rocklin's PB! It reminds me of my childhood growing up in Anaheim - our entire elementary school was surrounded by an orange grove. A great place to play hide and seek after school. I'm inspired to write a poem about it and I will probably put it on my poem-a-day blog. (Though I do keep a separate file of poems that I want to send to publishers.) Thanks for sharing your "Winning" poem - we had plum trees on our block, too. Happy Friday! =)
I remember that poem from the first time you posted it -- definitely a "winner"! My favorite tree from my childhood was a cherry tree. I love Liz's comment about braiding the hair of a weeping willow!
I am going to have to return to this over the weekend, when I have time to breathe. But I know the tree I'll choose - the magnigicent oak on our front yard.
Wonderful, April! I'm late making the rounds this afternoon. Just took a break for a walk and around the road noticed a precious little one posing in a tree as her mom snapped a picture. Reminded me of my own tree-climbing daughter (now about to turn 21). And your post made me think of my own "special tree" growing up. (And the orange trees in our yard in Florida. Must get Joanne's book!)
Your poetic homage to just being with a tree makes me smile, too. Thanks for sharing.
Wonderful prompt--and the photo of your lemon tree looks amazing. My tree is a grove of poplars, within sight of the farmhouse, but far enough away to be a safe haven for all kinds of dreaming and building. We called it the Log Cabin Bush.
Violet N.
Renee's pine, Fats Suela's mango, Liz's weeping willow (braiding its hair!), Bridget's orange grove, Tabatha's cherry, Tara's oak, Robyn's special tree, Violet's poplars (I had to pause and find a photo of a poplar--I'm from California!--what a privilege to read about each of your trees.
My mom was right.
I am a big fan of trees in poems (and in real life. :) One of my favorite poems I've ever written is called "What I Thought As I Watched Hurricane Ivan Take Down the Silver Maple in Our Back Yard." Basically it's a poem of tree memories. And now you've reminded me of that, April, and I thank you!