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This winter, and now thank goodness spring, I've been working by videoconference with two classrooms in Missoula, Montana, helping them with their writing projects, through iNK Think Tank's Authors on Call program, posted publicly at http://district1missoula-dorothyhinshawpatent.wikispaces.com/. At Franklin School I'm working with fourth graders, and this month they are sidelined by testing. But the third graders at Lewis and Clark School have finished their project. My book, "When the Wolves Returned: Restoring Nature's Balance in Yellowstone," is their guide to writing well, and they have been working very hard at it.
In our first videoconference, I talked to them about the importance of beginning a story with something mysterious or exciting, with a beginning, middle, and end, just like a little story in itself. Each student is writing about a member of the deer family. Here is Oliver's first paragraph:
"Imagine walking through the woods. You see something with fangs. A lion? A wolf? A sabertooth tiger? No. It is a musk deer, the only deer with fangs."
Another student wrote:
"On an early foggy morning you can hear distant clanking in the air. As the fog clears you can see two kudu. You come closer and can that their horns are interlocking. They are pulling and tugging but can't get separated."
Wouldn't you want to read more?
In our second videoconference, students were able to read their beginning paragraphs to me, and I gave them specific advice on how to improve the writing. When an author makes suggestions, the students accept them very easily, while sometimes if it's a parent or teacher making suggestions they aren't as willing to make the changes.
The students are carefully studying my writing and noting down the "powerful" words I use and looking them up if they are unfamiliar with them. Then they compare them with "ordinary" words I could have used:
I'm very proud of these young writers who are working so hard to do their best, and I think having a "live" author work directly with them to help them with their difficulties can lead not only to rapid improvement in their work but also in increased enthusiasm about writing and reading.
At the end of March, I’ll be flying to Michigan to receive the Mitten Award from the Michigan Library Association. The award is for a book (“Dogs on Duty: Soldiers’ Best Friends on the Battlefield and Beyond”) that does a good job of communicating information to its target audience. I work hard to achieve that goal, so I feel honored to receive this award. At the conference I will also be giving a keynote address, which has gotten me thinking: What topic is especially appropriate for a keynote? This question has been wandering around in my head for a while, and I’ve finally decided on the answer for me, at this time in my career.
A nonfiction writer is a person who loves learning new information and feels the urge to communicate the fascinating information she/he has learned to other people. We go through the years finding intriguing topics, enjoying our research, and putting it all together in a form we hope will inspire and engross our readers. We learn a lot, meet all sorts of experts, and probably visit some fascinating locales. But I realize now that we do so much for ourselves in the process of being dedicated to looking for truth and communicating our knowledge to others.
This work helps make us be more open in a number of ways. We learn to explore all sides of a topic, to investigate different versions of the “facts,” and to communicate the complexities of “there are no simple answers” to our audience in clear, nonjudgmental language. I think nonjudgmental is a big part. Years ago I wrote “Where the Wild Horses Roam,” about wild horses in the West. There were, and still are, big controversies about these animals. To some, they are a symbol of wildness, an integral part of the history of the American west that must be honored and protected. To others, like ranchers who purchase grazing leases on the public lands that house the horses, these equines are not just a damn nuisance, they steal the vital and sometimes sparse food their cattle need to fatten up and provide income for the ranchers.
I did my best to express the concerns of both sides and shrugged. “If both ranchers and horse advocates hate me after reading this, I’ll know the book is good.” But I was wrong—both sides appreciated what I wrote because I stated each side of the story accurately and without any evaluative language. They just wanted to be heard. I try to keep that lesson in mind whenever I write about a potentially controversial topic. “Just the facts, ma’am” has become my mantra.
That's just one example of the unexpected bonuses I've received from this work. Now, after more than 40 years in this business, I realize how much of value I’ve learned, not just the facts and theories, the interactions and exceptions, but also the variety of it all—so many cultures, so many ways of seeing the world and of being in the world, so much glorious variety in Nature. So, as you can imagine, I’m nowhere near finished yet. I want to continue learning and communicating as I keep finding more and more intriguing stories available for exploration.
Here I am, writing from beautiful Whitefish, Montana, late with this blog--the internet here is on the iffy side! I spent the weekend at the Flathead River Writers Conference in nearby Kalispell, MT. The word "Flathead" has nothing to do with the state of the writers; it's an unfortunate name whites gave some western Indians because they purposely flattened the heads of their babies.
A featured speaker at the conference was Mark Coker, the creator of Smashwords. Mark is the ultimate democratic person. Anyone can publish a book on Smashwords, with a few content exceptions, for no cost, and Smashwords takes a modest cut of revenue. Sounds perfect for the frustrated author who can't find a publisher for her/his masterpiece, doesn't it? The problem is that many thousands of writers have posted their creations, and it's very difficult to get noticed. Mark believes that the best will ultimately be rewarded, and the lousy will sink into obscurity. However, even the best of the best need considerable savvy on the part of the author.
What opportunity does Smashwords create for nonfiction writers? From what I heard over the weekend, both from Mark and from a local author/promoter team, my conclusion is "not much," unless the works are in the "how to" category and in a series. The lone book without sequels is hard to promote, as one of the easiest promotional tools is to write a series, then offer book #1 or #2 for free. Free books "sell" quite well on the internet and can result in 4 or 5 star reviews that give buyers confidence they aren't wasting their money. So if book #1 in a series is free and gets good reviews, the author has a good chance of actually getting revenue from subsequent books in the series. The price of book #1 can also be changed over time, going from free to, say $2.99--which seems to be a prime price point--in hopes that the good reader reviews will boost the book into visibility.
So for now at least, I'm sticking to the traditional "slow but (sort of) sure" route of proposing books to publishers, signing contracts, and getting to work. And for nonfiction, an advance upon signing the contract is usually part of the deal, so there's a "sure thing" factor that's hard to resist in the traditional publishing world.
Epublishing does, however, also offer an opportunity for us to get our books that have gone out of print in front of readers. I've put my one OP novel, "Return of the Wolf," up in a variety of e formats, but so far, it has gone pretty much unnoticed. I'm going to experiment with some tricks I've learned this weekend and see if I can change my beloved novel's fate, but I'm not holding my breath!
In recent years I've found myself choosing some book topics that could be difficult for young readers. My 2011 book, "Saving Audie: A Pit Bull Puppy Gets a Second Chance," dealt with a dog rescued from the Michael Vick dog fighting operation. My Spring, 2012 book, "The Horse and the Plains Indians: A Powerful Partnership," had to face up to how the U.S. government dealt with Indians and their horses during the westward expansion movement, and my most recent book, "Dogs on Duty: Soldiers' Best Friends on the Battlefield and Beyond," is about Military Working Dogs. In each case, I needed to figure out how to frame the difficult truths I needed to present so that children could understand what was at stake in these situations but not become frightened or depressed by the information.
My Walker editor, Emily Easton, rightly insisted that readers needed to know what was at stake for the Vick dogs had they not been rescued--certain death. I dealt with that issue by writing two short paragraphs for the first spread that appeared over a dark gray background, with Audie's worried-looking face on the opposite page. Then, when the reader turns the page, the immediate topic is the happy news, the rescue of the dogs, who now had the potential for survival and love. When I heard from a mother on the book's Facebook page, Audie's Journey, that her 4-year-old loved the book so much she had to have it under her pillow at night, I relaxed.
"The Horse and the Plains Indians: A Powerful Partnership," is luckily for an older audience, so I was able to include more detailed information about how the Indians and their horses as well suffered from the determination of the American government and settlers to take over their lands and leave them with very little in return. I was the one who ended up on the depressed side from the research and writing, but I knew what mattered was telling the truth, and the positive reviews the book has received validated my approach.
"Dogs on Duty: Soldiers' Best Friends on the Battlefield
and Beyond," presented its own difficulties for young readers, since it deals with an ongoing struggle against people who plant bombs meant to kill. As I researched and wrote, I kept my mind focused on the main important facts--these dogs save lives and provide a bonus service with their wagging tails and gentle snuggling after the days of difficult and scary work. Again, the positive reviews the book has gotten help me know I reached a good balance.
Now I'm on to new projects with happier focus, and I'm looking forward to the fun and challenge of research. One of my favorite activities is learning new information--gee, I never knew that!!--and writing books for children gives me the excuse to indulge myself.
By:
Dorothy Patent,
on 5/17/2012
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Springtime is my favorite season, and wildflowers are a major attraction here in beautiful western Montana. The parade has begun, starting with buttercups in March and continuing through a roadside trio of larkspur, star flower, and biscuit root—purple, white, and yellow, a combo that would make a beautiful flag.
I’m celebrating the season by taking a class in wildflower journalling, both because I love the flowers and because I am not fundamentally a detail person. A class like this, where I’m sketching the plants to document them, forces me to switch into the often neglected detail mode. And I know, as a writer, that details are critical in bringing my writing to life. Details help the reader ‘see’ what you’re writing about and can jump start a movie in the brain that will carry your reader seamlessly through your work. This principle can be used to lead a reader through a sequence of ideas or information to a conclusion every bit as well as to carry the reader along through an exciting fiction story.
While pondering these thoughts as I climbed a trail up the mountain we live on, I noticed delicate yellow-flowered Arnica plants blooming in the dappled shade I leaned over and focused in on a single plant with my camera to document it for my wildflower project. Further up the slope, I saw an image that epitomized Arnica’s habitat preference—an oval of tall pines created a shady spot decorated by a patch of Arnica, its borders sketched by the shade of the trees. I suddenly realized that two kinds of detail exist, small detail and big detail. Small detail would encompass the minute features of each plant, while big detail consisted of larger but still specific features such as the way the plants are growing in the shady patch among the pines.
When we writers wish to create images for our readers, we may move from small detail to big detail, or vice versa, depending on where we’re going with our words. Here’s the masterful nonfiction introduction from my friend Jeanette Ingold’s Montana Book Award Honor Book novel, “The Big Burn” that moves through many small details, then widens to the big picture:
The wildfires had been burning for weeks.
I’m sitting at a table in a condo in Whitefish, MT, not far from the Canadian border, on a writing retreat with two writer buddies, Peggy Christian and Jeanette Ingold. Jeanette writes YA contemporary and historical fiction (most recently “Paper Daughter”, about a Chinese American girl whose internship on a Seattle newspaper launches her into a mystery from the past) , and Peggy has written fiction for young people in the past (“The Bookstore Mouse”) and is now developing a blog (Backwoodsandbeyond.com).
At breakfast we pondered Vicki Cobb’s question for us nonfiction Ink Thinkers—what does our writing bring to the table that’s special, that makes us unique, that enriches the material we write about in a special way? As we talked, I realized that it isn’t just us nonfiction writers who uniquely help ‘educate’ our readers about the world—all good writers do the same thing, perhaps sometimes in different ways.
Historical fiction like Jeanette’s (she always aims to make sure that her information is 100% historically accurate) is a particularly obvious example—when Jeanette drops her characters down into a real situation, such as the terrible firestorm that engulfed the mountain west in 1910, in her book, “The Big Burn,” readers come away with an understanding of this event that’s seared into their memories. The characters may be made-up people, but their experiences of the fire are those of real people who went through that terrible time.
What does my nonfiction book, “Fire: Friend or Foe,” give readers that they couldn’t glean from Jeanette’s story? My work may cover some of the same territory, but it offers a broader view of the role of fire in the world. I can step back from a story like the 1910 fires to provide a greater context for that event, and I can help explain the various factors involved when wildfires rage, as well as provide a modern perspective on that fire’s role in shaping America’s attitudes and policies during the 20th century and into the 21st.
Perhaps h
A couple of weeks ago I was in a waterfront hotel in Vancouver BC where I received a Lifetime Achievement Award from AAAS/Subaru Science Books & Films. It was certainly a validation, a crowning moment, (here’s the video) but awards are a funny thing. If one is truly engaged in life, it’s the struggles that are the focus. So right now I’m thinking about what happened this past weekend.
We are midway through the school year and about half of the authors participating in iNK’s pilot project, where we are collaborating with both teachers and students of Bogert Elementary School, have completed their missions. Roz Schanzer worked with two fourth grade classes. They had to learn about New Jersey’s government, a somewhat dry subject. But under Roz’s direction they produced an amazing book called The Golden Government. You can read a rave review of the project from teacher Heather Santoro here. Dorothy Patent worked with two fifth grade teachers. Read what Chris Kostenko said about that experience here. I worked with Carla Christiana and Alicia Palmeri on the solar system and we’re about halfway through the unit. I’ve written an article about our experience that will be the lead feature in the April edition of Science Books & Films but you can see the effect on student learning in this video where the kids are exclaiming over the NASA website. What we’re doing is groundbreaking because of its scale, its intimacy, and the effective timing of the conferences so that we are truly transforming the learning of the children. That’s where the rubber meets the road in education. It’s far more effective than a school visit, which generates enormous interest and excitement, very little of which is channeled into the work kids do in the classroom every day.
I may be a little impatient, but I want people to realize that using children’s nonfiction authors and their books as a resource for education produces powerful results. So whenever possible I’ve been submitting proposals to conferences to present our work. The conferences are NOT library conferences. (Librarians have their own problems trying to get classroom teachers to use nonfiction.) I’ve been sending in proposals to conferences for teachers of technology. I figure that many schools have videoconferencing equipment sitting around, gathering dust and the techies in charge of the equipment are looking for reasons to use it. It stands to reason that they’d like to find something that their classroom teacher colleagues will appreciate. Maybe this is a kind of oblique approach to marketing but hey, I have an experimental nature. I have no illusions that my reputation as an author is meaningful to technology teachers. Basically, I’m starting over, a humbling experience. So finally, after being rejected twice by the BIG conferences ISTE (international Society for Technology in Education) and NYSCATE (New York State Association for Computers and Technology in Education) I was finally accepted, for this past weekend at a little regional NYSCATE conference in Wappingers Falls, NY (about an hour from my home.)
Wow! This was exciting news. So I lined up Bogert’s media specialist, Heidi Kabot, and Dorothy’s two teachers, and Roz and Dorothy, to hang around their computers on a Saturday afternoon, so I co
Last Wednesday evening I did an interactive videoconference with Marc Aronson’s Ebook and App class of graduate students at Rutgers. It was a terrific opportunity for me use a technology medium to elaborate on what the Authors on Call group of Ink Think Tank is doing in its pilot project with Bogert Elementary School. (Some of the results are starting to come in and if you want to watch them unfold, you can go to the project’s wiki.) Since Marc is a vocal advocate for nonfiction literature in his SLJ blog, I was somewhat surprised to find that so many of his students seemed unaware of the struggle to get schools to use nonfiction literature in classrooms as the primary reading material and to use its authors in a timely and productive way to enhance the learning of both teachers and students. We, readers of this blog, who are committed to nonfiction literature as authors and educators, are all inhabitants of a “bubble” where the use of nonfiction literature is prevalent. And, since we mainly talk to each other, we can delude ourselves into thinking that it is more widespread than it actually is.
This month, I’ve also been travelling—first to Doha, Qatar where I attended the World Innovation Summit for Education (WISE) as I did last year, and then, a week later to Israel with a delegation of school superintendents. (50 hours in the air, don’t ask!) At WISE I attended a workshop where a study was presented to see how the delivery systems of reading material—i.e. print vs digital—affected literacy. Conducted by www.educationimpact.net, the results, it seems, are equivocal. In some countries kids learned more from books and in others they learned more from a screen. I finally raised my hand and asked, “What were these kids reading?” No one seemed to know. I then made the point that not all books are equal and not all digital materials are equal. I gave them an example of how to write to engage readers. At the end of the session a number of people asked for my card.
I was at WISE wearing my journalist’s hat, covering the conference for Education Update. I did a video interview of Dr. Jeffrey Sachs, head of the Earth Institute at Columbia University. He was extremely interested in what iNK (not a typo, we’re getting new logos, thank you Steve Jenkins) is doing in its pilot project. His organization is tackling some major issues world wide—like poverty, disease, ignorance and global warming. I asked him, “What can be done to accelerate change?” In a nutshell, Sachs said that networking is very important but, in addition, you must act—do something to prove that it works and acts as a model for others to follow. (You can see my three minute interview here.)
In Israel, we visited schools that are making breakthroughs in serving minority and impoverished children and in technology in the classroom. But, again, nowhere did I see evidence that there is attention paid to the quality of classroom instructional material. The lessons I observed seemed very pedantic and traditional. It’s almost as if no one is taking a hard look at instructional material.
At the end of my session with Marc’s class a student asked me, “How can I help?” I see ver
I’ve been thinking a lot about habitats lately. One of my favorite hiking spots features two very different habitats—a woodland and a pond—and each one has provided a special experience that eventually led to a book.
So today I’m going to share a video about that very special place and a list of some of my favorite children’s book about habitats.
I See a Kookaburra: Discovering Animal Habitats Around the World—Steve Jenkins and Robin Page
Like all of Jenkins’s books, this one offers a combination of glorious cut paper collages and clear, concise text. It also has a fun, interactive game-like quality that invites participation. I See a Kookaburra introduces children to six of the world’s habitats and some of the animals that live in them. As an added challenge, and to make the point that ants live all over the world, one of these insects is hidden in each scene. Rich backmatter with maps rounds out the presentation. School Library Journal calls the book “A first-rate foray into ecology that will encourage readers to explore the world around them,” and I couldn’t agree more.
When I speak at conferences and schools, I sometimes hold up my first published book from 1972 to show how much children's books have changed over time. But that really wasn't my first book. My entire eighth grade class of 24 authored a book way back in 1954 called "Shark Point and High Point." The title referred to our home towns, Tiburon, which means 'shark' in Spanish, and Belvedere, loosely translated into Italian/French as a 'high point' commanding a beautiful view. Our teacher, Miss Wilson, felt that this group of 24 students, could accomplish the goal of researching, writing, and illustrating a an accurate and valuable local history, and that's what we did.
In the process, we learned so many skills--how to research newspaper archives, carry out informative interviews, evaluate historic documents, write collaboratively, and so much more. Our history has become a landmark document, and creating it enriched and changed our lives.
When I look at one of my precious copies of our classic, I think about how different such a document would look today, with Google maps, color photos, actual book binding, professional type. We had to hand type, then mimeograph our pages; hand draw the maps, and hand assemble the pages into binders by collating as we each circled around a big table, picking up the pages one by one to create a single volume. I don't know our final "print run," but I imagine it must have been more than 100 copies. Each copy was created for a specific member of a family. I now own three or four of them, my own plus those of my late grandfather (shown here) and sister, and perhaps another that's in a storage box somewhere.
Creating this book taught us all so much we never would have learned otherwise, and I wonder how many young people today could be blessed with such an opportunity. I doubt many public school teachers could pull it off--modern concerns about tight budgets, law suits, teaching to the test, and so forth, keep such precious, creative, and priceless experiences out of the reach of most American children these days. Our book was revised by other Reed School eighth graders in 1958 and 1970, but to my knowledge not more recently. I just hope that any students today who are able to participate in special projects like this realize how fortunate they are. I am still grateful.
We nonfiction writers tend to live more in the real world than in the world of the imagination. I know I feel very grounded in place, wherever I am, and I’m experiencing what goes on around me—the sun, or not; the breeze, or the heavy dense air; the soft forest path under my feet or the hard concrete sidewalk. Roz Schanzer expressed this feeling very well in her recent blog about her Costa Rican photo safari. At times, like during a drab, hard winter, our way of being so intimately in touch can be perhaps more difficult than for those who can escape into their heads with flights of fancy.
But when spring finally does break, as it did just a week ago at my home in Montana, the natural perception and appreciation of the real becomes an energizing joy. With a bedroom window open, my house soaks up the amazing smell of spring—of growth, life, fruit trees in bloom, whatever goes into that heady concoction that proclaims, “Spring is here!”
I haven’t discussed this idea with my fiction-writing friends, and maybe I’m wrong; maybe they find a gray, cold winter just as oppressive as I do. It depresses my creative juices, and nonfiction writing is a creative art, as we nonfiction writers struggle to recreate the real world through words invented by humans. We struggle especially hard to describe sensations like smell and taste, for which our language has few useful words. And when I see the amazing variety of color and size and shape in natural beings like these flowers in the garden of my friend, I’m overwhelmed by the idea that I might even try to express their beauty and variety in mere words. Then I remember that doing is not only my job, it’s my passion and my great challenge.
By:
Melissa Stewart,
on 5/13/2011
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Ever since desktop publishing software became available in the early 1990s, the visual appeal of nonfiction books for young readers has grown by leaps and bounds. These programs make it easy to experiment with a book’s layout.
As a result of this new freedom, many books now include multiple illustrations per spread and make clever use of white space. Examples include Ballet for Martha: Making Appalachian Spring by Jan Greenberg and Sandra Jordan, An Egg is Quiet by Dianna Aston, and Born to Be Giants: How Baby Dinosaurs Grew to Rule the World by Lita Judge.One of the true masters of nonfiction book design is Steve Jenkins, who often works with his wife Robin Page. Books like How Many Ways Can You Catch a Fly?, Never Smile at a Monkey, What Do You Do with a Tail Like This, and Move! are all about animal adaptations. The fun, innovative design of these books couple with the brief, clear text is irresistible. Jenkins does a remarkable job of selecting animals with unique adaptations and organizing them into clever categories to create books with a game-like feel.A current trend in science-themed titles for the picture book crowd is layered text. Books like Beaks by Sneed B. Collard III, When the Wolves Returned: Restoring Nature’s Balance in Yellowstone by Dorothy Hinshaw Patent, Meet the Howlers by April Pulley Sayre, and my own book A Place for Butterflies feature two kinds of text that serve different purposes and that is distinguished visually by size and font. For the most part, a larger, simpler text provides general information and can stand on its own. The smaller text presented in sidebars provides additional details to round out the presentation. These books are perfect for the Reading Buddy programs popular
By: SSPP Reads,
on 5/11/2011
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Some interesting animal stories of late that beg a trip to the public library:
- Silent Knight, a blinded California Sea Lion, was brought to his new home at San Francisco Zoo on May 6, with buddy Henry, also blind. Silent Knight was shot in the head with buckshot and found at Swede’s Beach in Sausalito during the Christmas Season. Silent Knight is seven feet long and weighs 350 pounds. Henry and Silent Knight seem happy in their new environment (mercurynews.com). Check out Sea Lions by Caroline Arnold.
- San Francisco Zoo will be getting a Siberian Tiger from the Henry Doorly Zoo in Omaha, Nebraska in June. Martha, this 9½ year old female, will be the first Siberian at the Zoo since the fatal attack in December 2007. Zoo Director Tanya Peterson says the Doorly Zoo “has made a decision to start paring down their (big cat) collection.” Martha will live in the tiger exhibit with walls 22 feet high (sfgate). Check out Big Cats by Dorothy Hinshaw Patent.
- Underground for 13 years, cicadas have emerged in the states of Tennessee, Alabama and Georgia. They are big, loud, and in your face but other than that, cicadas are harmless according to Belmont University entomologist Steve Murphree, also a member of the Tennessee Entomological Society (The Tennessean). Check out Cicadas! Strange and Wonderful by Laurence Pringle.
Graphic from Flickr Creative Commons License sduck409
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When I read in the most recent Consumer Reports magazine that grocery stores carry 14 different kinds of Tostitos chips alone, not to mention other brands of corn chips, potato chips, taro chips, pita chips, and so on, it got me into thinking about choices. We Americans seem to relish having as many choices as possible when buying everything from pain killers to computers. And we especially like choices when it comes to our reading material. Just look at the variety of magazines at your local chain bookstore, and the plethora of book categories on the groaning shelves. We want to read the kinds of books that appeal to us as individuals. The husband of a children's YA fiction writer I know never reads fiction, including what his wife writes. My brother's shelves are loaded with the science fiction he used to read and the mysteries he's now into, while my husband has a generous collection of cookbooks and other food related books, as well as a smattering of volumes about Broadway and Hollywood. Me? I prefer nature books and select fiction authors.
Yet how many of you have, as I have more than once, observed the following scene:
An adult with a child in a bookstore is going through one bunch of titles as the child is eagerly thumbing through just one book. The adult chooses a totally different one to buy, pointing at the one in the child's hands and saying, "That's too young (or, too old) for you." Or, "This one looks more interesting."
And why is it that we expect school children all to read the same assigned books most of the time? Sometimes they are expected to choose books and write book reports, but often even those choices are restricted--I've been shocked to hear from some teachers that children in their school are not allowed to write reports on nonfiction books! But what if a child is one like I was, who wanted to know about the real world, not some writer's imaginary world?
A friend recently told me about his grandson, who didn't see the point of reading at first. But once he got into it, he plunged in enthusiastically and, at the age of 9, insisted on getting a copy of the Guinness Book of World Records, which he proceeded to devour the way his friends might do with a Harry Potter volume.
Let's all keep our educational focus on helping children become enthusiastic readers because they gain pleasure from the activity, especially during the early school years. Let them read as much for pleasure as possible; they will also learn in the process, either learn the tricks of story telling in fiction or the facts of what fascinates them in the real world. And the more they read, whether it's about fairies or tigers or motorcycles, the better readers they will become, which has to be the first goal of education.
1. That floppy protrusion on a turkey's head is called the caruncle. An agitated turkey's caruncle will grow longer and hang over its beak. The fleshy skin under its chin is called the wattles.
2. Male turkeys gobble to show they are dominant. The sound can be heard a mile away.
3. Male turkeys have spurs on their legs that they use to fight other toms and to fend off predators.
4. Turkeys prefer to run from danger. But they can fly, sometimes as fast as 50 mph.
5. Domesticated turkeys usually have white feathers and are much too heavy to get off the ground.
6. To stay safe from predators turkeys roost in trees at night.
7. A turkey has binocular, or 3-D, vision. It can spot movement a hundred yards away.
8. Although turkeys don't have external ears, their hearing is sharp.
9. Female turkeys lay between 8 to 18 tan eggs. The hatchlings are called poults.
10. While wild turkeys have the capacity to live to about 12, most don't make it past two. And for domesticated turkeys it's half that.
I found most of these facts in
All About Turkeys, written and illustrated by Jim Arnosky. Published in 1998, Arnosky's book remains a good introduction to the bird that was Ben Franklin's choice for the United States national bird.
Wild Turkeys by Dorothy Hinshaw Patent and illustrated by William Munoz provides additional information for kids to chew on.
Today's host for Nonfiction Monday is Practically Paradise.
We nonfiction writers often puzzle over the prejudice many teachers have against nonfiction. Sometimes these are so strong that they won't even allow a child to read a nonfiction book for credit or use one for a book report. One reason for this makes sense at first. Most of the school day, they will say, the children are reading fact after fact as they study math, science, social science, and grammar. They need a break. They need reading that will stimulate their imaginations.
Sounds good, doesn't it? Let's give the kids something to read that's different from what's required of them. Facts aren't all that matters in a good education; exercising the imagination is also important, and novels are what do that. But wait a minute--what's wrong with this picture? For one thing, where do the ideas for fiction writers come from? They come from the real world, from real events, things that really happened. And think about science fiction--it's a wonderfully imaginative genre that takes its inspiration from real scientific discoveries and inventions.
Some people prefer to call nonfiction books "informational books." I agree that the word "nonfiction" can have a negative sound to it--it says what our books are not instead of what they are. But "informational" sounds plodding and boring, and our books are far from that.
Reading exciting history, such as the recounting of the adventures of great explorers, for example, can really get children imagining. Take this tidbit from my book, The Lewis and Clark Trail Then and Now, describing the journey ahead:
"For more than two years, your diet will be limited to a few items.......You will work so hard that you can easily gobble down a meal of nine pounds of meat. Many times you will go hungry. You will be completely out of touch with family and friends except for one chance to send, but not receive, letters after the first winter."
A mathematically inclined reader might think for a moment, then realize--wow! Nine pounds of meat--that's 36 Quarter Pounders! The child who is constantly visiting his Facebook page and texting on his cell phone may wonder--how could I survive not being able to contact my friends? These kinds of reactions stimulate the readers imaginations to take them places mentally and emotionally that they have never been before.
Good nonfiction writing can also take something that seems mundane, like dust, and transform it into something magical. Here's a sample from April Pulley Sayre's book, Stars Beneath Your Bed The Surprising Story of Dust:
"Dust can be bits of unexpected things--a crumbling leaf, the eyelash of a seal, the scales of a snake, the smoke of burning toast, ash from an erupting volcano.......Old dust stays around. Dirt that made King Tut sneeze is still on Earth. It might be on your floor. That dusty film on your computer screen might have muddied a dinosaur." Now that's writing that will stimulate any reader's imagination!
One final point that has been brought up before in our blogs--there are children out there whose imaginations are more stimulated by nonfiction than fiction. They may even put down fiction as "just made up stories" and only be interested in reading about "real" things. If one goal of education
Vicki Cobb's new book What's the BIG Idea? Amazing Science Questions for the Curious Kid is published by Skyhorse Publishing on June 6. You can see Vidki's promo for the book at http://vickicobb.com/Video1/whatsthebigidea.html
Karen Romano Young is headed for the Arctic! She's taking part in the NASA-sponsored ICESCAPE mission aboard the Coast Guard Cutter Healy, and will be at sea for two weeks in June. The Healy, an icebreaker, will carry nearly 50 scientists who are studying the effects of climate change on the Arctic Ocean and its ice. Karen will be researching a new book called Investigating the Arctic, drawing a science comic for Drawing Flies (http://www.jayhosler.com/jshblog/), creating a podcast for the Encyclopedia of Life (www.eol.org), and blogging at Science + Story. (http://scienceandstory.blogspot.com/) And her new book, Doodlebug, is in the warehouse June 8! (www.karenromanoyoung.com)
Dorothy Patent just returned from a trip to California for research on a book about one of the dogs rescued from the Michael Vick dog-fighting ring. She's fallen in love with her subject, named Audie. Look for the book is Spring, 2011.
Susanna Reich be speaking at the Metro New York SCBWI Professional Series on Tuesday, June 8. Author illustrator Melanie Hope Greenberg and I will be talking about "Marketing to the Max: Publicity for Children's Book Authors and Illustrators." http://metro.nyscbwi.org/profseries.htm
Writers often comment that their work is lonely, or at least that it's carried out mostly alone. But some of us also enjoy collaboration--I had a coauthor on all three of the adult books I've written, two with a dear friend and one with my husband. Nonfiction writers for children also have a chance at collaboration in working with a photographer or an illustrator. While editors do their best to keep picture book writers away from picture book illustrators, a nonfiction writer needs to work with an artist to make sure the illustrations work factually. And with photos, there are always some images that the text requires, and the author must make sure the photographer produces them.
Lucky authors like me find illustrators who help create a happy collaboration, and the illustrators' influence can expand the author's ideas of what she can write about. In the late 1980s, I needed photos of different horse breeds for my book, "Horses of America." I happened across a newspaper ad that led me to Bill Muñoz, who lived in a small town nearby. Within a few years the two of us became frequent partners in creating books, first ones on domesticated animals like horses and cows and then on wildlife topics, a much more challenging type of subject.
Bill would do his best to get the photos I needed, and every once in awhile, he'd get an image he was so fond of he'd ask me please to find a way of getting it into the book. I always managed to oblige him, and in the process, sometimes expanded the text into an interesting area I hadn't originally considered.
Bill's strongest influence, however, was on the actual topics for books. I'm trained as a biologist, so my mind tends to go to animal and nature topics when I'm searching for subjects. Bill is trained as an historian, so he is able to see opportunities for us way beyond what I do, and his perspective helped expand our work together into the history of the American West. Our first foray into history came about because Bill was fascinated by a neighbor farmer who restored old covered wagons. Bill loved the beautiful restorations and found out that a whole group of folks would take their wagons on a wilderness trip every Memorial Day weekend, living out of their wagons drawn by draft horses or mules. The result of that project was "West by Covered Wagon," which used photos of that group and information about them to bring freshness to the story of the Oregon Trail.
My one obsession in life is learning new "stuff," and writing books involving history means learning lots of fascinating new material, so I've been happy to go along with Bill's suggestions. Our next history project was "Homesteading," which I especially enjoyed as my father had grown up on a homestead in Idaho.
I credit Bill with an especially busy period in our collaboration after he listened to "Undaunted Courage," Stephen Ambrose's biography of Meriwether Lewis in the late 1990s. Bill realized there'd be a boom in interest about the Lewis and Clark Expedition in the early 2000s as the bicentennial approached. We got busy and ended up producing three books, a set of classroom posters, and a number of magazine articles about the expedition. My own curiosity about life in early America was further whetted, but not satisfied, and we've continued to explore this topic through "The Buffalo and the Indians: A Shared Destiny" and our 2011 book, "The Horse and the Plains Indians: A Powerful Partnership." Without Bill's influence, none of these books would have been written.
It's also intersting to see that Seymour Simon and a bunch of other authors have started an e-book venture for bringing back their OP titles. It's called StarWalk Kids Media and I believe it just went live a few days ago.
iNK is also publishing OP titles for authors in this blog group. We're on the verge of launching the first set of titles as iBooks. You can check with Vicki if you have any OP books you'd like to see made available.