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5. Meeting my hero, Tomie dePoala was great fun! He came all the way out West to meet ME! Ha!… Okay… so I never met him in person until this day, but he did write me a couple of times after I wrote to him. Yes, if you write an author or illustrator, they MAY just write you back!
2 Comments on Hindsight, last added: 9/7/2011
What with yesterday's door-day blog group-art-event, looming deadlines, and being in total denial about the cold/flu knocking at our door (no pun intended)... it's been a crazy week around here. So today I thought I'd just post some doodles. Doodling is a great de-stresser.
I'm thrilled by how many people shared their doors and ideas yesterday, and am still wandering around from blog to blog. It's been fun and inspiring and educational! (Oh that last word can be so clunky, but really, what could be better?) I may be late to the game, but isn't it awesome how powerful a tool the internet is for spreading ideas? Group art rocks!
Here are a few more people who jumped in at the last minute-- bravo to you!
Sara at Read Write Believe
Cloudscome at A Wrung Sponge
Tricia at The Miss Rumphius Effect
"It's a blog group art event!" as Jennifer Thermes says. Bloggers from all over the world are posting pictures of doors today. Go check it out. (Do not miss the doors from Marrakesh.)
I wish I had a picture to contribute. I have a poem that I wrote for The Longest Night which begins "Open the door and greet the moment the dark begins..." And my first blog post proclaims my love of entering rather than beginning. But I have no door pictures. Only a question:
What's your favorite memory involving a door? Or your favorite book with a door in it?
After reading The Secret Garden for my book club, I will state the obvious: it would have been much more believable for Mary to have found the door behind the ivy early on---I mean, if the wind can lift the ivy, it couldn't have been that hard for her to lift it herself and look--- but then she should have had to struggle to find the key. But who cares if an anthropomorphic robin dug up the key for her? The important thing to the story was that she got in. I also remember that after reading Nancy Drew books, I began to knock obsessively on walls to search for hidden doors and passageways. I was regularly and cruelly disappointed by the unimaginative architecture of most buildings. But for some reason, when I think of doors, I think of The Borrowers by Mary Norton. If you do a "Look Inside the Book" search of The Borrowers at Amazon, it reveals 54 pages with a reference to "door." And this particularly memorable scene (search and choose page 138) is representative of what I remember most---the Borrowers living on the edge of getting found every day. Of the door opening at the wrong moment. The door as opportunity and danger. The door as the gateway between the world of the real and the fantastical. Hey! What are you still doing here? Open the door and go look already!
Elizabeth and Frank came up with the idea of having a day where everyone does a post with a "door" theme. And today's the day! It's a blog-group-art event! Check out the list below to see everyone from around the world who's participating. So here we go:
Our house has many different styled doors, most tending toward the rustic, since the original part of the house was built around 1720. Over the years it has been added on to and changed in all sorts of bizarre and interesting ways. We've been trying to bring it back to the colonial era. It's been a neverending renovation-- and we've done almost all of it ourselves. (Believe me, it's better to pay someone to dig a new septic field.) Along the way we've made a lot of discoveries...
The green door with the wreath (at the top of this post) is where the original front door of the house was located. The door is definitely not colonial-- it dates from about the Victorian era-- but it's nice, because it lets more light in to the room.
Inside there's a half door that leads to a little room we call the library. We think this room was actually a small barn that used to be on the property, and that it was added onto the house in the late 1800's. (I tried to show the door with the top part only cracked open, but the floor is so tilted that it just swung back before I could snap a picture! Life in an old house can be a little off-kilter...)
This door was rescued from our neighbor's dumpster. (Oh please don't get me started on people throwing away lovely old doors and windows and beams...) This room is in the part of the house that was added on in the 1960's. And believe me, it looked it! (We called this the "time warp" house when we bought it-- old wide board floors paired with... mmm... orange shag carpeting. Nice!) We have been trying to bring this part of the house "back in time" a bit, and really liked the roughness of the door.
And lastly is my favorite-- our bedroom door. You can get a rough idea from this picture of how low the ceilings are upstairs. (I'm 5'9" and in my bare feet I can put my hands flat on the ceiling.) The right hand panel is one solid piece of wood measuring 23 inches wide. Now, given that the door is the same age as the house, imagine how old that tree had to be when it was cut to make a panel of this width!
So there you have it-- a sampling of my colonial doors. Nothing fancy-- but they have served their purpose for a long, long time. There's something very comforting about that.
Here's a list of everyone participating today. (Apologies to anyone left off the list!):
Elizabeth Wix, "The House in Marrakesh", Marrakesh, Morroco
Frank Gardner, "My Paint Box", San Miguel de Allende, Mexico
Ambera Wellmann, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada
Constance, "Rochambeau"
Jennifer Thermes, "Art-Words-Life" - Connecticut , USA
Joanne Giesbrecht,"Thistledown Arts", Alberta, Canada
Eric Orchard, Nova Scotia, Canada
Jack Riddle, Portland, Maine, USA
Christine Mercer-Vernon, "An Artist's Log", Pennsylvania, USA
Faye Christian Phillips , Kentucky, USA
Britt-Arnhild, Norway
Kate and Roger "The Skophammers", Norfolk, Virginia, USA
Terry Rafferty, USA
Barbara,"Ramblings from an English Garden", London, United Kingdom
Pam Aries,"Art and Soul", Charleston, S.C. ,USA
Mary Sheehan Winn," Just Painting", Florida, USA
"Some Pink Flowers", St. Augustine, Florida, USA
Rima, "The Hermitage", Scotland
Merisi,"Merisi's Vienna for Beginners", Austria
Paz, "Paz's New York Minute", New York
"Down Under Dale", Australia
The Aesthete, "Aesthete's Lament", USA
Mari/ Kameravena, Finland
Maryam, "My Marrakech", Morocco
Willow from "Willow's Cottage", California, USA
Ari, "Typo Blog", Finland
Lea,"Tales from the Labyrinth",USA
Stephanie, "Rodrigvitzstyle"
Madelyn,"Persisting Stars", Vancouver, Canada
Leslie,"Snips and Snails and Puppy Dogs Tales", Pennsylvania, USA
Karen Cole,"Artsortments", Pennsylvania, USA
Barrie, San Diego, California, USA
Sherry/Cherie, Toronto, Canada
Claudia Schmid, London, United Kingdom
Sue, "The Magic Armchair Traveller", Congresbury, Bristol, United Kingdom
Gemma Wiseman, "Greyscaale Territory", Australia
Neulekirppu, Finland
Laura Fortune, "Amongst The Oaks",California, USA
Sara Lorayne, "Come Away With Me", California, USA
By: Aline Pereira,
on 2/28/2008
Blog: PaperTigers
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Aung San Suu Kyi, Whitney Stewart, biography for children, Blues Across the Bay, Dalai Lama, Deng Xiaoping, Edmund Hillary, Jammin on the Avenue, Katrina, Mao Zedong, the Buddha, biography for children, Blues Across the Bay, Deng Xiaoping, Jammin on the Avenue, Mao Zedong, Young Adult Books, Picture Books, Children's Books, Authors, Aung San Suu Kyi, Whitney Stewart, the Buddha, Katrina, Dalai Lama, Edmund Hillary, Add a tag
“Katrina did something to my psyche,” says New Orleans children’s writer Whitney Stewart. Along with her teenage son and her 87-year-old mother-in-law, and with a cast on her own injured ankle, she was rescued by helicopter late at night after five days stranded on the fifth floor of the Tulane Medical School building during the hurricane’s aftermath. It was “a crazy, chaotic, unsettling experience… We’d tried earlier to leave but our rescue boat had been overtaken by people with guns… After Katrina, I needed to do new things. I needed a new paradigm for New Orleans.”
Whitney is now learning to kayak and doing volunteer work with the public schools. On a whim, the former high school actor sent photos of herself, her guitarist son, and her geneticist husband to casting agents; her son landed a role in “Cirque de Freak,” to be filmed in New Orleans this year.
But this writer had an adventurous life long before Katrina. After trekking the Himalaya twenty years ago with her mom, Whitney, who’d discovered her affinity for the biographical form as a Brown undergrad, wrote biographies for children of the Dalai Lama, Aung San Suu Kyi, Deng Xiaoping, Mao Zedong, Sir Edmund Hillary, and the Buddha. Her love of travel has also led her to write two young adult novels that present kids’ eye views of New Orleans (Jammin’ on the Avenue) and San Francisco (Blues Across the Bay).
A primary concern is getting across the message of subjects like the Dalai Lama and Aung San Suu Kyi. Her biography, Aung San Suu Kyi: Fearless Voice of Burma, is soon to be re-issued, with proceeds going to a non-profit that benefits the Burmese cause. “I’m amazed that so few people have heard of her,” Whitney told me. She’ll tell us about meeting this brave Burmese woman in an upcoming guest blog. Stay tuned!
Librarian Mary McCoy from the This Book is for You blog is going to be up all night this Saturday blogging and raising money for ALA’s Hurricane Katrina Library Relief Fund. She’s looking for donations and company as she blogs the night away. Stop by and say hello.
ala, blogathon, katrina
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This is wonderful, Les! What an impressive and beautiful journey you have embarked upon.
Its funny how it all came about…. I kept finding pictures I had saved over the years. Like pieces of a puzzle.