How to use this Page

We’re just hitting it out of the park now.  Fast on the heels of our last Salon with Jeanne Birdsall and N.D. Wilson (info below), this coming Saturday I managed to bring together the three kings of children’s book social media.  Behold!

If you’d like to watch the discussion live, tune in 2:00 CST here.  And if you live in the area, you simply have to come.  Never before have these three been interviewed at the same time by . . . uh . . me.  Or possibly anyone else (note to self: check if this is true).

Curious about Travis Jonker’s picture, by the way?  As I recall it was made for him by video and film director Michel Gondry.  You can read Travis’s piece about it here.  John’s is by Dan Santat.  I’m going to need to ask Colby who did his.

By the way, did you miss our last Salon last Saturday when Jeanne Birdsall and N.D. Wilson spoke on the topic of how their personal belief systems inform their writing?  Good news!  Not only did I record the, quite frankly, killer talk but the sound quality was a lot better than last time.  Here’s the timeline of the video:

• At 0:00 Nate is running a bit late but since it was a live feed I wanted to keep folks watching in the loop.
• At 2:36 Jeanne Birdsall and I have a finger puppet show as we wait for Nate to show up.  I have flashbacks to my sock puppet interview from 8 years ago.
• At 3:30 the talk begins.
• And at 12:45 I tilt the screen back a bit so that it doesn’t look like our heads are all scraping the ceiling.

Enjoy!

-

I’m a big fan of Donalyn Miller.

Do you know her? As classroom teacher, Donalyn made a splash with her book, The Book Whisperer. I met Donalyn during a trip to a reading conference in Dublin, Ohio, where I had the opportunity to hear her present to a large audience.

If you are an educator, you should read this book.

Long story short: Donalyn has made a deep impact bringing books and young readers together, and she does it without ego or self-aggrandising motive. There’s nothing phony about Donalyn. She’s simply a positive force in the world of children’s reading. A tsunami of inspiration. My kind of people.

Several years back she started The Nerdy Book Club with, I believe, Colby Sharp. It’s an active, inspirational resource/blog for teachers and librarians who care about children’s literature. I recommend it. Over the past couple of years, Donalyn has allowed me to contribute a few essays to it, and I’m always grateful to reach that specific audience, and participate in that grand conversation.

I’m quite happy with my recent essay and I invite you please check it out (link below). The idea came as the result of a few things going on in my life, particularly the end of my coaching career. I reflected on what I had learned from those experiences with young people, and I connected those lessons to what I believe about teaching and writing. But don’t go by me. Judge for yourself.

Here’s the opening:

I’m at loose ends.

For the first time in 16 years, I find myself not coaching a baseball team. During those seasons, I’ve coached a men’s hardball team, and all three of my children at various stages of Little League, including All-Stars and competitive Travel teams.

Now it’s over.

All I’m left with are memories, some friendships, and my accumulated wisdom, which can be reduced to a single, short sentence. So I’m passing this along to the readers of the Nerdy Book Club because I think it connects to teaching. And writing. And maybe to everything else under the sun.

When I started coaching, my head was exploding with knowledge. I knew all this great stuff! Boy, was I eager to share it. I had an almost mystical awareness of the game: tips and strategies, insights and helpful hints. Baseball-wise, I knew about the hip turn and burying the shoulder, how to straddle the bag and slap down a tag. The proper way to run the bases, turn a double play, and line up a relay throw. As coach, I simply had to pour this information into my players –- empty vessels all –- and watch them thrive.

But something happened across the years. I found myself talking less and less about how to play. Fewer tips, less advice. It seemed like I mostly confused them. The learning was in the doing.

I became convinced that the most important thing I could do was believe.

< snip >

Please click here to read the whole enchilada.

But before you go, here’s a nice quote from Donalyn that I figured I’d share.

Truth!

This past week has brought a couple of happy developments for my new book with Don Tate, The Amazing Age of John Roy Lynch (Eerdmans Books for Young Readers).

First, the book has received a Silver Honor from the Parents’ Choice Awards. Thank you, Parents’ Choice!

And another big thank you goes to Colby Sharp and Jon Samuelson for including The Amazing Age of John Roy Lynch (along with Bob Shea’s Ballet Cat and Victoria Jamieson’s Roller Girl) in the latest episode of the Booklandia podcast.

I love the surprise in Jon’s voice when he realizes that the story of Lynch’s 10-year rise from slavery to the U.S. House of Representatives during Reconstruction is nonfiction rather than historical fiction. I also appreciate the thorough notes on this episode — very helpful, guys.

Note: A variation of this essay first appeared a while ago over at the fabulous Nerdy Book Club, founded by Donalyn “The Book Whisperer” Donalyn, Colby Sharp, and possibly some other folks. It’s not entirely clear to me. Nonetheless! You can follow all their nerdy, book-loving, classroom-centered hijinks on Facebook, Twitter, and various other places. 

These days, young people are crazy about zombies. That’s just a plain fact. Not every kid, of course, but a lot of them.

And I’m here to say: Use that as an advantage in your classroom. Seize the day zombie! Particularly when it comes to student writing. Some girls wants to team up to write a story about a zombie apocalypse? Here’s a pen and paper. Go for it, ladies.

Many students, as young as third grade and on up into high school, are watching THE WALKING DEAD. The secret that quite of few of them don’t realize is that the television show is not about zombies at all. It’s about people surviving zombies. The zombies themselves are boring, without personality, almost irrelevant. They could be switched out for deadly fog, or World War II, a forest fire, or a tsunami. The zombies are simply a device to propel a character-driven story forward. It’s the ticking bomb that drives plot forward and gives each moment heightening meaning.

That’s my essential point here. The action -– the story – is almost entirely about character.

What we need to recognize is that, counter-intuitively, the zombie plot device perfectly lends itself to purely character-driven story. It could even be argued that it’s about family, blended, modern, or traditional.

With, okay, some (really) gross parts thrown in. Warning: Some characters in this story may be eaten. Ha! And why not, if that’s what it takes? If a little bit of the old blood and guts is the hook you need to lure in those writers, embrace it.

You can’t write a good zombie story without creating an assortment of interesting characters. Then you place those diverse characters in danger, you bring them into conflict with each other, you get them screaming, and talking, and caring about each other.

As, okay, they are chased by a bunch of zombies.

There’s no drama unless the writer makes us care about his or her characters. Your student writers will be challenged to make those characters come alive, be vivid and real. We have to care that they live or, perhaps, really kind of hope they get eaten alive in the most hideous way possible by a crazed zombie mob.

Don’t be turned off by that. Remember, it’s really all about character development, turn your focus to that. Dear teacher, I am saying this: embrace your inner zombie –- and turn those students loose.

What they will be writing will be no different than your typical Jane Austin novel. Except for, you know, all those bloody entrails.

——

There are currently five books available in my “Scary Tales” series.

You start it with . . . EXCITEMENT!

A show of hands.  Who, right now, is weeping a little over the fact that we will never have Mr. Colby Sharp as the 4th grade teacher of our youth?  That is, perhaps, the first video I would show to my students if I were teaching a graduate course in children’s librarianship.  And everyone should watch it just before the school year starts to get pumped up.  Thanks to Gretchen Hardaway for the link.

Book trailer time!  So I have some good news, and I have some bad news.  Literally.

Fact of the matter is, thanks to Flash animation, book trailer technology just grows more and more accomplished every year.  We’re getting to the point where they may as well be little movies in and of themselves.  Case in point, The Insomniacs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAbeV_gPUNA&feature=player_embedded

And as for this next one, a Grimm story retold as a graphic novel by James Odone . . . WANTWANTWANNAWANNAWANT!

Trouble is, this one’s in the works so we’ve no info on it yet.  James, for the record, is the fellow behind the fantastic picture book Honey Badgers (it came out before the YouTube video so no snorts, people) as well as this year’s Mole Had Everything (a natural companion to I.C. Springman’s More, illustrated by Brian Lies.

And for our off-topic video of the day, let’s just think of this one as Make Way for Ducklings 2.0.