new posts in all blogs
Viewing: Blog Posts Tagged with: Walk Two Moons, Most Recent at Top [Help]
Results 1 - 4 of 4
How to use this Page
You are viewing the most recent posts tagged with the words: Walk Two Moons in the JacketFlap blog reader. What is a tag? Think of a tag as a keyword or category label. Tags can both help you find posts on JacketFlap.com as well as provide an easy way for you to "remember" and classify posts for later recall. Try adding a tag yourself by clicking "Add a tag" below a post's header. Scroll down through the list of Recent Posts in the left column and click on a post title that sounds interesting. You can view all posts from a specific blog by clicking the Blog name in the right column, or you can click a 'More Posts from this Blog' link in any individual post.
"How about a story? Spin us a yarn,” says Grams. And so Sharon Creech does in Walk Two Moons. And it’s a thumpingly good one, as the main character Sal would say.
Writers should read, we’ve been told that. They should be literary carnivores. According to author Roz Morris, “reading—the good and the bad—inspires you. It develops your palate for all the tricks that writers have invented over the years. …there’s no substitute for discovering for yourself how a writer pulls off a trick. Then that becomes part of your experience.”
Elmore Leonard says writers should decide which books they like and study that author’s style. Then, you should take that author’s book or story and “break it down to see how he put it together.” The thought was echoed by Jennifer Nielsen at a recent 2014 Professional Writer’s Series event at the Pleasant Grove Library.
Fine, I’ll do that. Since I want to write like Carol Lynch Williams, Matthew J. Kirby, and Sharon Creech, placing Walk Two Moons under the microscope is a good place to start.
What works so well in this story? Quite simply, everything.
Creech has plot, two of them in fact. Sal is traveling with her grandparents to Lewiston, Idaho to learn why her mother abandoned the family and went there. Along the way, she shares a story of her friend, Phoebe, whose mother also has disappeared. Sal admits that uncovering Phoebe’s story was a lot like discovering her own. The road trip to find her mother becomes a journey of acceptance and understanding for Sal.
Plot involves characters. Creech delivers not just Phoebe and Sal, but a multitude of others, each richly drawn, each deserving of a book of their own. Sal’s mother had her reasons for leaving. Phoebe’s mother is multi-layered with a lot of stuff going on. Other memorable people include Sal’s father, Mrs. Cadaver, Mrs. Partridge, Ben, and Grams and Gramps. Creech seamlessly weaves all of them into the story without any sense of it being clunky. It’s most definitely a character-driven plot. But there is so much else going on in this book.
The title is from the Indian saying about not judging another man until you walk two moons in their moccasins and the metaphor is used effectively. Creech layers numerous subplots. Inspirational, secret messages, including the one about the moccasins are left on Phoebe’s doorstep and come into play throughout the story. Phoebe’s wild imagination conjures up lunatics and ax murderers. There is a kiss just waiting to happen. Creech twists and turns the story arc over upon itself revealing the multiple layers. She wraps up every loose thread and ties it with a bow. And she keeps you guessing, keeps you hoping, even though she drops hints along the way. It is masterfully told.
To better understand the craft, I revisited this story over the summer. I read it as a writer but still managed to get choked up about it, even after sharing it multiple times with students when I was teaching.
Huzzah! Huzzah! The story works on so many levels.
What works have inspired you?
(This article also posted at http://writetimeluck.blogspot.com)
February 6, 2013
Dear Librarians at Champaign Public Library,
While reading The News Gazette yesterday, I read that you had prepared a list of books called "110 Books for Every Child." When I read "every child," I wondered if you were thinking about all children in the area. Were you thinking about American Indian children, too? We are part of the Champaign-Urbana community.
When I clicked on the link and opened the list, I was glad to see some titles on it, like Bud Not Buddy and The Giver and Poppy. But I am disappointed that it also includes Little Town on the Prairie.
On page 257, Laura is amongst the crowds gathered in the schoolhouse, waiting for the "Literary" (performance) to begin. Here's an excerpt:
Then up the center aisle came marching five black-faced men in raggedy-taggedy uniforms. White circles were around their eyes and their mouths were wide and red. Up onto the platform they marched, then facing forward in a row suddenly they all advanced, singing, "Oh, talk about your Mulligan Guards! These darkies can't be beat!"
The five men take the stage (p. 258):
Here's the text on that page, just above the illustration:
When the dancing stopped, the jokes began. The white-circled eyes rolled, the big red mouths blabbed questions and answers that were the funniest ever heard. Then there was music again, and even wilder dancing.
Darkies? Big red mouths?!
Earlier in the book, Laura and Mary listen to Pa tell them a story about how, when he was a little boy, he'd pretend he was hunting Indians (page 53):
When I was a little boy, not much bigger than Mary, I had to go every afternoon to find the cows in the woods and drive them home. My father told me never to play by the way, but to hurry and bring the cows home before dark, because there were bears and wolves and panthers in the woods.
One day I started earlier than usual, so I thought I did not need to hurry. There were so many things to see in the woods that I forgot that dark was coming. There were red squirrels in the trees, chipmunks scurrying through the leaves, and little rabbits playing games together in the open places. Little rabbits, you know, always have games together before they go to bed.
I began to play I was a mighty hunter, stalking the wild animals and the Indians. I played I was fighting the Indians, until all woods seemed full of wild men, and then all at once I heard the birds twittering 'good night.'
Stalking wild animals and Indians?!
I'm not calling for this book to be removed from the library, but I do think it ought not be endorsed as a "good book" for "every child." I don't think its good for any child at all!
Imagine reading it aloud to an African American or an American Indian child. How would you manage those particular excerpts?
I know people who say that reading these books lets kids know that there was racism in America's past, but, isn't endorsing them in 2009 as "good books" a bad idea? Children should learn about racism in the past and present, too, but might that be better done in another way?
See--if you're reading this book aloud to a child, you're probably doing it in a way that will cause them to like the characters. And then you're going to interrupt the reading to explain that, essentially Pa was either a racist, or, engaged in racist thinking. It seems a better idea (to me) to select a book to enjoy that doesn't do that sort of thing.
I wonder how many people actually take time to explain those passages as racist?
My guess is that a lot of people just blow right past them, thereby inserting racist ideology into the minds of the children that are being read to, and/or affirming the already-existing racist ideology that has crept into that child's world view.
And---if a child is reading this book alone (without an adult to mediate it), how will that child make sense of those excerpts?
I have similar concerns about other books on the list and am sharing brief notes on them:
The Indian in the Cupboard is very popular, but it makes people into the playthings of children. This is especially troubling because of the identities of the characters. In it, you have a white child manipulating the life and death of an Indian man.
Island of the Blue Dolphins has stereotypes in it and the information it provides is outdated. Today, we know so much more about the people involved in this story. This book doesn't accurately portray them. Shouldn't we set it aside in favor of terrific stories that don't misrepresent someone, especially when that someone is a group for which most American have little substantive knowledge?
We keep recycling romantic and stereotyped ideas and images of American Indians. Maybe that is what makes it possible for a book like
Walk Two Moons to win awards. It, unfortunately, has a great many stereotypes of American Indians in it.
As I noted earlier, I'm not asking you to remove the books from the library, but I do think their place on a list of "good" books ought to be reconsidered. Perhaps if they were removed from the list, you could replace them with award-winning books that provide children with accurate knowledge about American Indians. Given our proximity to the Great Lakes, Louise Erdrich's
The Birchbark House and its sequels would be terrific additions to the list.
Sincerely,
Debbie Reese
American Indians in Children's Literature
#70 Walk Two Moons by Sharon Creech
28 points
Yes, it’s a Newbery, but I really loved it when I first read it, and I cried and cried, too. I also laughed at Salamanca’s grandparents a lot. – Libby Gorman
Creech has the amazing ability to spin a web of stories within stories, and this is one of her finest. - Heather Christensen
Well it was #68 on the previous Top 100 poll. Now it has slipped a mere two slots to #70. Back in 2001 Ms. Creech once said that “Walk Two Moons seems to be the one most frequently taught,” but there are plenty of children’s chapter books taught out there that never made it to this Top 100 list. Clearly, there’s gotta be more to it than that.
The plot as described by School Library Journal reads, “13-year-old Salamanca Tree Hiddle travels west with her Grams and Gramps to Lewiston, Idaho, the destination from which her mother did not return. As Sal entertains her grandparents with stories of her friend, Phoebe, who sees “lunatics” around every corner, threads from many life stories are seamlessly entwined. This pilgrimage wonderfully mirrors the journey of discovery that is adolescence, as Sal’s search for the truth about her mother becomes a journey of discovery about much more.”
We can credit the appearance of all the books on this Top 100 list to a lot of things, but this may be the first one that came about because of a message in a fortune cookie. When she was 12, Sharon and her family took a road trip that was later re-created in Walk Two Moons. That was part of her inspiration. In an interview with Reading Teacher (Feb. 1996), Ms. Creech recalled yet another: “When I began to write, I was living in England and I was missing the States. I was also missing my grown children who had just gone off to college there. I wrote Walk Two Moons from the notion of a parent/child separation, and I decided to do it from the child’s point of view. These were the kinds of things rolling around in my mind.” When asked about the structure, she gave an answer that should be heartening to those folks trying to write in today’s book economy: “Part of the way Walk Two Moons turned out was the result of the economics of publishing at the time I was writing the book. There was a recession going on in that industry [in the U.S.] and in England and editors were being very selective.” The writing was hard, her editors changed, and “I was ready to toss it into the trash–and then I got the message in the fortune cookie.” The cookie merely read: “Don’t judge a man until you’ve walked two moons in his moccasins.” She had her hook. We have her book.
By the way, I rather like this statement in the same article about winning the Newbery and how it changes your life. “I still don’t know how I feel about it. It’s like someone has given me this beautiful suit of Armani clothes. Normally I would not wear them. They look nice and everyone admires them, but I’m a little uncomfortable in them. I like to wear them for brief periods of time and then change back to my blue jeans.”
When asked by Teacher Librarian (April 2001) the extent to which she places people she knows in her books, Creech confessed that, “Usually I am not aware that I am drawing on family when I am writing. It is only after a book is done that I sometimes see some of the sources. For example, it was after Walk Two Moons was published that I recognized that Gram contained pieces of my mother, grandmother and sister (goodness spiced w
Have you ever used Google Earth? It's a fascinating tool that lets you look at a place (like your hometown) via satellite photographs.
A few years ago, I started seeing "lit trips" online. Using Google Earth, people put together a webpage that shows places named in any given book. A few days ago while reading Open Culture, I came across a site called Google Lit Trips, where "lit trips" for books are categorized by grade level. There, teachers have uploaded the lit trips they created.
Google Lit Trips is a great project. As a person who loves technology, travel, and children's literature, I find great value in the project itself. I wondered what books teachers have created lit trips for...
In the K-5 category is Holling Clancy Holling's Paddle-to-the-Sea. It's an old book, published in 1941. It won a Caldecott Honor Medal, which attributes to its staying power. In it, an Indian boy (his tribal nation is not named and he does not have a name) carves an Indian in a canoe (from the illustration, the canoe is about ten inches long) and puts it into the water in Canada. The Indian--called "Injun" by some characters--travels to the Great Lakes, the ocean... I can see the allure of doing a Lit Trip for this book, but I wonder what the teacher does with the word Injun?
In the 6-8 grade category is Walk Two Moons, by Sharon Creech. Her book is the focus of today's post.
Walk Two Moons won the top prize in children's literature--the Newbery Medal--in 1995. Obviously, the committee believed the book is extraordinary. As I noted on Feb 17, 2010, the book is on the Top 100 list of novels on Elizabeth Bird's blog, A Fuse#8 Production. There, Elizabeth writes:
The plot as described by School Library Journal reads, "13-year-old Salamanca Tree Hiddle travels west with her Grams and Gramps to Lewiston, Idaho, the destination from which her mother did not return. As Sal entertains her grandparents with stories of her friend, Phoebe, who sees "lunatics" around every corner, threads from many life stories are seamlessly entwined. This pilgrimage wonderfully mirrors the journey of discovery that is adolescence, as Sal's search for the truth about her mother becomes a journey of discovery about much more."
Most of what I've read about the book focuses on the themes of loss, grieving, acceptance. Here, I provide a close reading of the Native content in the book.
In an interview, Creech says that the idea for the story came from the fortune in a fortune cookie. This is from the
Scholastic interview:
How did you come up with the title Walk Two Moons?
I had discovered a fortune cookie message in the bottom of my purse and the message was: “Don't judge a man until you've walked two moons in his moccasins.” I realized that everything that I was trying to say in this book had to do with that message; that you need to get to know someone well before you form an opinion about them, and in a way, that's what we writers are doing every day with our characters. So I liked the parallel there.
The words on that fortune sound familiar, right? Perhaps you know the phrase as "never judge a man until you walk a mile in his shoes." The
Yale Book of Quotations has the "walk a mile in his moccasins" phrase listed in its "Modern Proverbs" section as follows:
Never criticize anybody until you have walked a mile in his moccasins.
Lincoln (Neb.) Star, 10 Oct. 1930. This 1930 usage is act
The second passage you quote isn't from LITTLE TOWN ON THE PRAIRIE as you state. Have you read it?
Anonymous,
A correction to the post has been made.
Thank you,
Debbie