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I posted recently about the CLN Books and Breakfast event, and I thought I'd share a couple of photos from the event today.

Here I am as the safari guide (to promote my book Stampede). I'm trying to push myself beyond my comfort zone when it comes to marketing. This was way beyond my CZ...but fairly painless after all.





And here are the little goody bags (assembled by Maddie--thanks, sweetie!) for the explorers at my table:




You can see a few more pix here. I wish you all could have heard the fantastic ways all the authors and illustrators shared their books in just a few minutes each, like Marsha Wilson Chall, whose table did a fast Reader's Theater version of her forthcoming One Pup's Up. It was so wonderful to feel the excitement in the whole group, and also fabulous to see crowds of people lining up to buy books by local writers/artists. There's nothing like a roomful of book people:>) Thanks, Children's Literature Network!

Last week, I went to a Children's Literature Network event featuring Gennifer Choldenko. It was a lovely dinner and then a simple Q&A talk with Gennifer, author of the the Newbery Honor book Al Capone Does My Shirts and the brand new sequel, Al Capone Shines My Shoes. (More on the sequel as soon as I finish reading it!)

I had met Gennifer over the summer at ALA in Chicago, and we had had a nice walk and chat one morning. I hated to monopolize her time, since I'd at least had the opportunity to talk with her before, and the home we were at was jam-packed with accomplished authors and illustrators and eager librarians and parents, all waiting to talk with her. So, although I said hi, I didn't really have a one-on-one conversation with her. On the way home, I wished I'd been more assertive and had done more than ask how her travels are going. I'm so bad at party-setting chat, though.

Anyway, here are a few tidbits from the Q&A session.

Before writing Al Capone Does My Shirts, Gennifer had one picture book out and hadn't sold another book in seven years. (Her breakout novel Notes from a Liar and Her Dog sold and came out--if I got the timeline correct--while she was working on Shirts.) She saw an article in the newspaper about families who lived on Alcatraz when it was a prison and thought, "Now this might get a New York editor's attention."

She modeled the relationship between Moose and Natalie (the main character, who lives on Alcatraz in the 1930s because his father works there, and his autistic sister) on the one between her older brother and her older sister, who had autism. Her brother said, "That's not me." His best friend said, "You nailed him."

She knew it was going to be a trilogy when she started. "But to think that I was going to write three unpublished novels..." was too much, so she just concentrated on book one, not worrying about sowing seeds for later storylines or anything.

On Al Capone: "He's not all that interesting. It's all that mythology about him" [that is].

Scholastic Book Club lobbied hard for title changes (before book publication) to exclude Al Capone's name from the title.

On finding Moose's voice, which she really struggled with at first: "I realized there were millions of boys alive in the 1930s, and they didn't all sound the same."

On her writing process: "I do write outlines, but if I stick to the outline, I know the book will suck."

On balancing the business side with the writing side: "I try to give my best time to the writing and then push the other stuff to when I'm tired."

Gennifer was funny and charming. I'd love to see her do an actual presentation, too. I'm sure she captivates the crowd. Meanwhile, her books have definitely captivated tons of readers. I'm halfway through Shoes and wishing I was going to have time tonight to finish it. But we're going to the So You Think You Can Dance show (yay!), so Moose, Natalie, and all the cons (and I include Piper in that group) will have to wait one more night.

 

I attended an event called "Poetry on the Spot" at the Minnesota Reading Association's convention last Saturday. Featured guest Nikki Grimes (whose Barack Obama: Son of Promise, Child of Hope is #1 on the NYT Bestsellers List) joined with five area (Minnesota-Wisconsin) poets: Joyce Sidman, Susan Marie Swanson, Lisa Westberg Peters, Sharon Chmielarz, and Rob Reid for a kinda-sorta-little-bit-likea-poetry-slam.


Sharon Chmielarz, Nikki Grimes, and Rob Reid




Susan Marie Swanson, Joyce Sidman, and Lisa Westberg Peters

The event was sponsored by the Children's Literature Network, and it worked like this: Nikki would read a poem, any poem, from any of her many published or unpublished works. Then it would go around the table, with each poet reading a poem of their own that in some way connected with Nikki's poem.

It was fun to see their minds scrambling as they sought and found connections between poems. Sometimes it was serious: "This poem also touches on the theme of goodbye or loss." Other times it was more tangential: "This poem also mentions a shoe!"

Some of my favorite poets were reading here, and in addition to enjoying their poetry, I learned a few tips about presenting poems in front of a large room! I've got to work on my own presentation style as I get ready to present and promote my book Stampede! next year, so I'm going to try to remember that:

While quiet, serious, or wry poems may work well in a smaller, coffeehouse-intimate setting, you have to really have presence to pull them off in front of a large room. I think each person in the audience has to be focused solely on you, and you have to have created a connection. For a scattered audience, like teachers tired after a long conference day, very funny or very dramatic (not quietly dramatic) poems work best.

Sometimes it works well to have a "poetry persona." You can tell Susan Marie does tons of school residencies and works with kids a lot. She has a "poem voice," a child's voice and inflection that isn't present in her regular speech but that comes out when she reads her kids' poems. It helps the audience connect the poem to kids, I think.

Update your poems! Rob Reid performed a fabulous rap (I'm going to have to find out exactly what it's called and where you can find it), and he said later that the original was decades old, but that he updates it periodically. It now contains a reference to Harry Potter and other more recent cultural touchstones.

Be dramatic. Nikki Grimes has a dramatic, confidence voice when she reads her work. She demands attention--and gets it.


My daughter Annabelle is also naturally dramatic. Here she is during open mic.

Speak up. Sometimes, in quieter, more serious poems, the poets let their voices drop to reflect the intimacy of the thoughts in the poem. But that just made it hard to hear.

Slow down. Listening to poems is hard work. The language is dense, and a lot is going on in just a few words. I really appreciated it when the poets spoke clearly and very slowly, giving my mind a chance to keep up.

OK, right now, I just have to work on being able to say my poems out loud without my voice shaking. Lisa Peters called me up for the open mic part, and I read one poem from Stampede! But the presentation was not good. But once I master the basics and get decent at reading in front of a crowd, I'm going to try to implement some of the things that worked beautifully during this Poetry on the Spot event. After the event, I got to chat with the poets (most of whom I already knew because they're local). That was fun to catch up and also to chat with Rob Reid, whom I didn't already know. And then later that evening, my husband and I went to dinner with Nikki Grimes. It was terrific to get to chat with her about her travels, her experiences with her Barack Obama book, and lots of other things. And I tried Indian food for the first time. (I know, I know. I'd NEVER eaten at an Indian restaurant. I don't like the flavor of curry, and I thought pretty much all Indian food had curry in it. Wrong.) The whole evening was delightful!

Me with Nikki Grimes

Lost in the hubbub about the new words and disappearing hyphens in the latest edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary is a more subtle type of editorial revision. The Shorter, as a dictionary built on historical principles, provides information about the age of words and their main senses. The date range of earliest known use is noted in each entry by E (early), M (mid), or L (late) plus a century number: thus “M18″ means a word was first recorded in the mid-18th century. This style of dating is admittedly approximate, but giving the exact year of a word’s first recorded use would lend a false sense of precision. We very rarely can determine the first “baptismal” usage of a word with any confidence. But even with dates given by rough century divisions, the editors of the Shorter have been able to revise the dating of nearly 4,500 words and senses based on discoveries of earlier recorded uses, known as “antedatings” in the dictionary world. Much of this new antedating information is derived from the ongoing work done for the third edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. Since I dabble in what my colleague Erin McKean recently called “the competitive sport of antedating,” I thought I’d share a discovery of mine that made it into the new edition of the Shorter.

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