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Our favorite books for April teach some important lessons!

One celebrates the human body and diversity, while others teach kindness and the keys to a true friendship. You’ll find a story that will help foster kids’ sense of empathy and understanding and an award-winning novel that tackles the topics of prejudice and police brutality.

For Pre-K –K (Ages 3-6):

Happy in Our Skin written by Fran Manushkin and illustrated by Lauren Tobia

This affirming and informative book is a charmer and a true celebration – both of diversity and of the human body! Kids will enjoy poring over the diverse faces and hidden details on these pages as they learn about the important role skin plays in their lives.

 

 

For 1^st and 2^nd Grade (Ages 6-8):

My Best Friend written by Mary Ann Rodman and illustrated by E.B. Lewis

Friendships and healthy relationships – those are two key themes of this read-aloud that will have your students’ undivided attention. Honest and relatable, it perfectly illustrates the confusion kids experience when they want to be liked but set their targets on the wrong person. This book will help them understand that a true friend treats others the way we all want to be treated – with kindness.

 

 

For 3^rd & 4^th grade (Ages 8-10):

Toys Go Out: Being the Adventures of a Knowledgeable Stingray, a Toughy Little Buffalo, and Someone Called Plastic written by Emily Jenkins and illustrated by Paul O. Zelinsky

Hilarious and heart-warming, this chapter book is a perfect pick for kids wanting a laugh-out-loud funny book to read on their own. It also makes a perfect family read-aloud!

 

 

 

For 5^th and 6^th Grade (Ages 10-12):

How to Steal a Dog written by by Barbara O’Connor

Empathy, understanding, and a clearer sense of right and wrong – these are just some of the lessons kids will take away from this wonderful, highly accessible book about a well-intentioned girl whose frustrations get the better of her when her family loses their apartment and is forced to live out of their car.

 

Grades 7 & up (Ages 13+):

All-American Boys written by Jason Reynolds & Brendan Kiely

Teens will be both won over and bowled over by this tremendous novel about prejudice, power, and police brutality. Fantastic fuel for discussion, it’s A 2016 Coretta Scott King Author Honor book and the recipient of the Walter Dean Myers Award for Outstanding Children’s Literature!

The post Monthly Book List: Our Five Favorite Books for April appeared first on First Book Blog.

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     Santa isn't the only making his list and checking it twice. It's Award Season, when everyone and his dog make up "Best of the Year" book lists. This month, Teaching Authors takes a more casual approach; we're talking about the books that were memorable to us.

     I read a lot. So how did I narrow down my "memorable" books? They are the ones I could remember the author, title, story and characters, without consulting my reading journal. My number one choice was a no brainer, since I put my life on hold until I finished the book.  However, two others were a dead tie for second place. Surprise, surprise, all three are young adult. No grand plan on my part.  They are the most outstanding books as far as I am concerned.

   In a tie for second are:

Conviction by Kelly Loy Gilbert--What made this book memorable is that religion is part of the everyday lives of the characters without it being a book about religion. Religion is not viewed in a cynical way, nor is it presented as the answer to life's questions. In fact, the characters
discover religion generates more questions than it "answers." A messy, complicated story that hops around from various points in the past, to the present, but somehow never loses the reader along the way.

                                     


Dime by E.R. Frank.  Frank is known for her fearless approach to tough topics. She took on a big one this time; teen age prostitution.
Dime is a fourteen-year-old, lost in the foster care system. All she wants is a family and someone to love her.  She finds it on the streets of Newark--a "daddy" to "take care of her," along with two other "wifeys" who work for Daddy. Dime will do anything Daddy tells her to because he "loves" her. Gradually, Dime sees the truth about her "family." The voices of Dime, Daddy and the wifeys are distinct, and non-stereotypical. To be honest, this book was heavy and intense that I wasn't sure I could finish, especially after I thought I where the story was heading. Dime herself, compelled me to finish. I'm glad I did.





So what kept me up nights, reading reading reading, even though, I knew how the story ended?" My first choice for personal reading is non-fiction, so it figures that one would be my "most memorable" of the year. My winner is a volume with the intimidating title of Symphony for the City of the Dead: Dmitri Shostakovich and the Siege of Leningrad by M.T. Anderson. (Disclaimer: Although M.T. Anderson was one of my instructors in the Vermont College MFA program, we haven't been in touch in 15 years.)
I had misgivings. The book is 450+ pages (70 of which turned out to be documentation and indexes.) I already "knew" what happened: Shostakovich writes writes his Seventh Symphony, the "Leningrad" and the Nazis lose the Siege of Leningrad. Reading this book is truly not about the destination, but enjoying the ride. Even with such a potentially heavy subject, Anderson always finds a touch of humor in events. We see young Dmitri, a sheltered piano prodigy in Czarist Russia, evolve into a master composer within the confines of the Soviet system. We also see his career nose-dive when his work falls out of favor with The Party. What struck the deepest chord (sorry for the pun) in me was that while his physical world was in constant turmoil (messy love affairs, unemployment, starvation, Nazis...and a whole lot more) what gave his life meaning was music. He composed the "Leningrad" during the two and a half years the Nazis first tried to bomb, then starve, the city out of existence. Creativity triumphs all. Shostakovich's story (as well as the city of Leningrad's) has everything I love in a book...suspense, adventure, danger, intrigue, love, and most of all music. You don't have to know anything about Shostakovich, music or even Russia, to be sucked into this impeccably research story.

May 2016 be blessed with such terrific books as those of 2015!

Posted by Mary Ann Rodman

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“I come from a family where family stories are told over and over,” says Mary Ann Rodman, who grew up in Washington, DC and lived in Chicago, Illinois before moving to Mississippi in the 1960s (the setting of her autobiographical novel, Yankee Girl), and who now lives in Georgia. “Instead of a bedtime story of say, Cinderella, I heard such stories as When Mom and Her Siblings Dug a Swimming

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For the last three weeks, Teaching Authors has celebrated the season of gratitude by writing Thanks-Giving Thank U Haiku. And with each offering, Carmela, Esther, April,  Mary Ann,  and JoAnn offer hauntingly beautiful poetry that, as JoAnn stated so eloquently, asks us to add our light to the sum of light.

Now it’s my turn. 

Alas, I am not a poet. After hours of trying to compose a Thank U Haiku, I concede that I cannot do it.  It’s worrisome.

There are many things that I cannot do, of course. 

I cannot drive a truck. I’m not talking about the little SUVs, complete with manual five-speed stick shift. I’m talking about those eighteen-wheeler, semi-trailer big rigs. Complete with forward engine, steering axle, two drive axles. Ten forward drive gears and two reverse gears. And a bed. Vroom, vroom! Wouldn’t it be fun to drive across country, to see this vast and changing landscape? To see those very steps where Martin Luther King said he had a dream? Where on Christmas Day George Washington crossed the river for his own country’s honor? Where Abraham Lincoln spoke about a new birth of freedom? What about to walk the ruins of the Alamo or march across the fields of Gettysburg? Or the hills of San Francisco, where Harvey Milk imagined a righteous world?


Well, true enough I have seen many places. And you don’t really need a truck. As a working writer, I visit the landscape where my characters once walked. I do that to make them more alive. But it’s more than that, too. It’s why I write historical fiction. History is important. As Penelope J. Corfield said,  “All people and peoples are living histories,” and studying those stories that link “past and present is absolutely basic for a good understanding of the condition of being human.” That’s true now more than ever, given recent events. Still, wouldn’t it be fun to be a truck driver? Vroom, vroom! 

There are many things I cannot be, of course.

I cannot be a worm. How important are worms! Big worms! Small worms! Rain worms! Dew worms! And everyone’s favorite, angleworms! They burrow beneath our feet, sight unseen, churning the inorganic into the organic. Even their poop – I mean, worm casts – are invaluable in enriching soils. Which grows gardens. Which feeds the world.

I am not near as important as a worm. Still, I am a writer, and if I do my job as well as a worm does his, perhaps I might enrich at least one mind.

Speaking of important, I suppose I cannot be a rose either. Even the most imperfect rose is perfect compared to other flowers. Or, so a rose thinks. They are an old, old flower. Maybe that’s why they feel so entitled. Sacred to their Goddess Venus, Romans covered their sofas with roses. Cleopatra covered her floor with roses whenever Marc Antony was about to visit. Roses even have their own language: red rose for love, yellow rose for joy, purple rose for royalty, and white rose for innocence and peace. “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet,” wrote William Shakespeare. In a story that has lasted hundreds of years.




I have wild roses growing like brambles in my back yard. They certainly share the same hoity toity attitude as their hybrid cousins, despite having the nastiest thorns around. Still, bees love them. And in their thorny tangle hide rabbits and wild turkeys with their fledglings. And skunks. There’s nothing sweet smelling about them.

All the same, I prefer the dandelions that blanket my acres every spring. When they bloom, they look like a thousand bright yellow suns, shooing away the last memory of winter. When the blooms turn into puff balls, they look like a thousand moons. And when the puff balls explode, dispersing their seeds, they look like a thousand shooting stars. My galaxy is growing!


Of course, the result of all those shooting stars is a yard full of weeds. But I like weeds. “And, constant stars, in them I read such art as truth and beauty shall together thrive,” as Shakespeare also wrote.




But the question remains, how can I write a haiku? I'll try once more...



My Broken Haiku

Discover your world

Honor what lies beneath

Expand your galaxy



Thank U for being a part of my universe.

Bobbi Miller
(PS: All photos courtesy of morguefile.com)

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We are deep into our season of gratitude here on Teaching Authors. The series started off with Carmela giving thanks for insights gained through the loss of her kitchen.  Esther thanked the Chicago Cubs for a season of hope, with April appreciating good health. And now it's my turn.

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Happy (early) Internet Day.

My husband and I are former drama majors, who met in community theater.

What does this have to do with the Internet?  Patience, please!

We are huge movie fans. Pre-child, we would see three or four movies a week. Post-child and Pre-Netflix, we were Blockbusters' best customers. Watching movies is not a passive experience for us. We discuss the direction, the acting, the anachronisms that pop up. (The average upperclass American 1950's wife did NOT have pierced ears!)

 For years our biggest argument was over a line in The Godfather.  Did Tom Hagen say to Michael Corleone, "You know Pop worked hard to get you a deferment" or "You know Pop worked hard to get you into Furman"? (A small Baptist college in South Carolina...my husband is a South Carolinian.) It didn't matter that the book said Michael went to Dartmouth.

"They changed it for the movie," my husband insisted.

This guy went to Dartmouth.

    Enter the Internet!  I first met "the 'Net" when I was a university reference librarian in the mid-90's. I learned that the right combo of search terms on the right search engine (my favorite was Alta Vista) would get me any information my heart desired. The Godfather screenplay was online. Yes, Don Corleone got Michael a deferment, not into Furman.

   Having settled the matter of Michael Corleone's alma mater, my husband and I continue to "discuss" movies and actors. Thanks to a wonderful database, www.IMDb.com, our differences in opinion are settled before the first commercial.

"Oh there's what's-her-name.  You know her; she was the Lucky Hat Girl in Goodfellas?"

Tap tap tap. "Welker White. She does a lot of Law and Order."

"Didn't we see Goodfellas when we were dating?"

"Nope.  We were living in Wisconsin."

Tap tap tap. "We're both wrong.  Goodfellas  came out September 1990.  We were living Alabama."

     What does all this have to with writing? The Internet, used with caution, saves a boatload of research time. I wrote the first version of Jimmy's Stars in 1984. I spent months in the microfilm room of the Pittsburgh Carnegie Library reading old newspapers, making hundreds of pages of notes. After I finished the book, I sensed it was missing something. (A plot! A conflict!) So, Jimmy lived in my bottom desk drawer for nearly 30 years. (Never throw anything out. Especially something you have researched so long!) When I re-wrote the book (this time with a plot and conflict), I could re-verify my information from my home office with just a couple of hours of online searching.

   In the past, I would begin a writing project by collecting information.  Pictures, maps, books and bits of ephemera picked up here and there (ration books, streetcar schedules, old postcards.) My tiny office looked like an episode of Hoarders. Now my pre-writing prep consists of a list of questions and items in an notebook.  99% of what I need, I can find and use online. The other 1% comes from my collection of diaries, family letters and photo albums. (OK, there is a still a corner of my office that looks like Hoarders.)

   Fairy tales can come true, if you are a reference librarian! No more juggling enormous reference books. No more waiting for the new edition of that reference book to come out. Instant reference gratification! Almost everything you could ever want to know is online, somewhere.

   Along with the good stuff, comes the wrong, the bad and the half-truths (to say nothing about the wonderful world of Photoshopped pictures).  It's the Wild Wild Cyberspace out there. Anyone can publish anything online, and it doesn't have to be the truth. I am reminded of students from my first school library job, circa 1982.  Do you remember the old Sprite commercials, that showed a "limon--half lemon, half lime"?  I could not convince otherwise intelligent kids that a limon was not a real fruit because...they saw it on TV!  

A limon is a mythical fruit.

 Just because it's online, doesn't make it true.

There is no such thing as a jackalope, either!

The Internet is an endless source of information and misinformation. Some sites may or may not have accurate information (Wikipedia) that has to be verified another way. I found "satirical" news sites, such as The Onion, masquerading as legitimate information sources. If it's too weird to be true, I either search the name of the original source (which will tell me if the site is "satirical" or affiliated with a particular political agenda) or I hit www.snopes.com.  Snopes keeps up with latest rumors, urban legends and conspiracy theories.

 Some people avoid writing by playing Solitaire or Candy Crush online.  Me?  I can spend hours happily toggling from one site to another, answering for own curiosity (and not story research) question after question.  And then double checking those answers.

As the old Russian proverb (which was swiped by President Reagan's speechwriter) says, "Trust but verify." If you don't verify on the front end, some editor is going to ask you to do it eventually.

Now, I am taking a break from blog writing to scroll through my new obsession, www.murderpedia.org, a data base of murderers, living and dead, from around the world.

Don't ask, OK?

Happy Internet Day on the 29th, y'all

   Posted by Mary Ann Rodman

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I love writing for kids and working with them. But I have never (at least not as an adult) had any illusions that I could support myself working solely as a writer. This "Ah-Ha!" moment came during a banquet while I in library school, (as we called it back in the day.)

I was graduate assistant to the children's services specialist.  (Who knows where I'd be today if I assisted the specialists in government documents or cataloging?) He had put together an all-star children's literature symposium--Ellen Raskin, Ashley Bryant, Jean Fritz--award-winning authors and illustrators all. At the banquet, I was thrilled when my boss seated me next to the brilliant Ellen Raskin.  The year before, her Figgs & Phantoms had been named a Newbery Honor book.  Her own Newbery for The Westing Game would be three years in the future.

Always a big fan of Ms Raskin's funny, quirky books, I was thrilled to discover that the author was just like her books--funny, quirky and blunt. Too chicken to ask this Great Author anything more than to pass the salt, please, I listened as she answered the questions of our tablemates.  I learned that she had a daughter, was married to an editor at Scientific American and lived in a funny (quirky?) house on a private, gated street in Greenwich Village. Her studio on the top floor had a big skylight. (Odd the details the memory records.)

I was ready to chuck my previous career role model, Mary Tyler Moore, and move into Ellen Raskin's seemingly perfect life.  Then someone asked "that question" which really wasn't a question.

"So, you must be doing pretty well with your books," said a person whose name and gender is lost in time.

Ms Raskin's fork clinked against her plate."That depends on how you define 'pretty well'," she replied.

"I mean financially," the Person said blandly, with a smile that assumed Ellen would answer, "Oh yes, I am making buckets of money." Young, dumb me, assumed that would be the answer too.

Ms Raskin paused, as if calculating something in her head. "Well," she said. "I have ten books in print."

Wow! I thought. Ten books in print. She must be making a fortune. Three-story houses in Greenwich Village aren't cheap. The thought of anyone having ten books in print at the same time was simply mind-boggling.

But Ellen was still talking.  "...and last year I made..." and named a four digit figure. Even in 1976, it was a ridiculously low amount of money. Ten books and this is all she made?  She has a Newbery Honor book for crying out loud!

Long silence at our table. After a moment, Ellen laughed and made a comment about writers needing employed spouses. Dinner went on, but that conversation was a wake-up call for me. Now I knew what people meant went they said, "Don't quit your day job." And I didn't for a long, long time.

Quitting my day job was not my choice. My husband's company transferred him to Thailand, a country with notoriously tough labor laws. I became a full-time writer, whether I wanted to or not. I wrote ten and twelve hours a day.  I wrote and sold My Best Friend and Yankee Girl in those years.

Fast forward to today. I have written and published seven books, plus contributed to two YA short story anthologies. My Best Friend won both the Ezra Jack Keats and Charlotte Zolotow Awards, and is referenced in many children's literature textbooks. Yankee Girl was nominated for a dozen State Book Awards. I am extremely fortunate that all but one of these books is still in print. One, Jimmy's Stars, is only available as an e-book. For someone who is considered a mid-list author, someone who is not J.K Rowling or Suzanne Collins or Rick Riordan, I am doing really well.

Last year, my royalties were half of what my daughter makes as a part-time waitress at Golden Corral. My very best year, royalty-wise, equalled my teaching salary when I left to get married. That was 1990, and I taught in one of the poorest school systems in my state. My very best year, in real money terms, was a lot less than my best year teaching.

Luckily, I enjoy doing school visits and teaching. However, in the last couple of years, school budgets and curriculum have rarely accommodated author visits.  I pick up teaching/tutoring gigs here and there, mostly for homeschool groups. I've done freelance editing and worked as a private writing coach. My most reliable source of income is the Young Author's day camps I run each summer, with
weekend workshops during the school year.

One of my first school visits, Davis Elementary, Jackson, Ms

    In the beginning, my non-royalty "author jobs" income equalled my royalties.  Now it surpasses it. I love working with these young writers. It's my dessert, after spending the rest of the year writing in solitude. I began with a single week camp. Now, ten years later, I  conduct writing camps for the Parks Department and local historical societies nearly every week from Memorial Day to the start of school.

Young authors at work! Roswell, Ga, summer 2013.

Sure, if I were still a school librarian, I'd be
making more money. I am super lucky to be married 25 years to my best friend, who has a good job and insurance.  If my income dried up to zero, we would not be out in the streets. But I have always been a working mom. I love what I do. I can't imagine ever retiring.

Don't forget to sign up for our latest Book Giveaway (click here) for info.  Don't miss out;  
the deadline is October 10.

Posted by Mary Ann Rodman
   

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   I've had so much fun reading the Letters to My Younger Self of my fellow Teaching Authors.  Some TA's I know well, and some I have never met in person.  Every single post has resonated with me in some way, and allowed me to know them a little better.  Go back and check out Jo Ann's, Esther's, Carla's, and April's posts.  You might find a little of you there.

      Now it's time to talk to someone I haven't thought about in a long while, 16-year-old me.  I don't like her because she was cocky, insufferable and over confident as a writer.  She once told a Pulitzer Prize winning author that she never revised anything, "because I get it right the first time."

      See what I mean?

      Hello, Rodman (as you are known, back in the day).

This is Your Future Self speaking, and I have some bad news for you. You do not win the 1976 Pulitzer Prize as you predicted in the class prophecy. As bad as you are in math, I am sure you didn't realize that you would be a college senior in 1976. Saul Bellow wins. He gets interviewed by Johnny Carson instead of you.

Here's even worse news.

There is no Story Fairy.  You know her, first cousin to the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny, and Santa Claus.

13-year-old me

Right now, you think that Story Fairy waves her Magic Story Wand (sound effect: harp strings) sparkly story dust showers you and ta da! a story, appears, full-blown in your head.  A couple of hours later, you are ready to mail it off to the latest writing contest.

And you always win those contests.   Local, regional, national, you win them all. You are editor of your school paper. You write a weekly school column for the local paper for four years,  without breaking a sweat. Writing is easy. It's the one thing you know you can do. Even though it is not considered a real asset in your teen world (like cheerleading and looking like Christie Brinkley), Writer is a far better label than Nerd or Girl Without Boyfriend.

You eventually become an adult (even though you don't really want to) and something terrible happens.  Story Fairy deserts you.  You write as fluently as ever, sailing along on your little blue typewriter when bang!  You hit a wall. You don't know what happens next. The main character just sits there, staring at you, refusing to move or talk. Hey, Fairy.  Where are you?  There must be something wrong with me.  Maybe I'm not a real writer after all.  And you quit writing.

But you can't stop. You keep journals.  You go on writing and hitting walls.  Sometimes a kind editor will scrawl a sentence on the form rejection letters you receive. You write very well, but this isn't really a story. No one ever explains why it's not a real story. And you keep writing.  For many, many years. All alone.

Then one day, through a set of Magical Circumstances, you find yourself in an MFA Writing Program.  You discover there are lots of other people just like you, who write all the time, never get published and don't know why.  You go to lectures, work with real writers and talk to your new writer friends.  Eventually you learn (you are a very slow learner) that there is no Writer Fairy.

Stories don't just happen.  They come in dribs and drabs.  A character chatters in a corner of your brain.  You remember family stories.  Music will paint a mental setting, like a stage without actors. You go back to the journals you've kept since third grade and discover story treasures there.

In other words, writing takes a long time. Right now, a long time means two days, only because you are a slow and terrible typist. You discover it takes months and years to turn those dribs and drabs into a story. You will stop and start, write and rewrite. A little voice in your head tells you when something is not quite right.  You write some more. (This is different from that other voice that says Who do you think you're kidding?  You're not a writer!  You tell that voice to shut up and go away.)

There is no bibbety bobbety boo to writing. It takes the three P's--patience, persistence and perspiration. It means writing something--even a journal entry--every day you possibly can. (In years to come, you will read that Stephen King writes every day except Christmas.  You learn that most people are not Stephen King.)

Still there, Rodman?  Still awake?  Here comes the good news.  You never give up, you read and write and learn from others and when you are really old (like forty), you start writing real stories that other people (editors) like and publish.  You will still get rejection letters (sometimes they come in something called an e-mail that hasn't been invented yet, so don't worry about it) but you keep on writing.  Because it's a compulsion.

Because you are a real writer. You always were.

Love, Future You, Mary Ann Rodman, published author.

P.S.  No, you don't marry Robert Redford or ever look like Christie Brinkley, but you do OK.

Future you and your mom, at a signing for your first book, My Best Friend

Posted by Mary Ann Rodman

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    I don't remember a lot about kindergarten. I was in the "morning class" when three hours was all that educators thought five-year-olds could handle.

My teacher, Mrs. Palmer, looked exactly like "Dear Abby" in the newspaper. I was fire drill captain, or as I proudly told my parents, "If the school burns down, I'm the first one out." I tackled Jimmy R., my kindergarten crush, in the classroom playhouse and kissed him. (It was a decade or two before that happened again.)

     I nearly flunked kindergarten. In addition to such skills as using scissors "responsibly," counting to ten, and reciting the alphabet without singing it, you had to be able to tie your shoes. I tried and tried all year until it occurred to a neighbor that Mom being left-handed and me being right handed made a difference. She had a left handed son who couldn't tie his shoes either.  Moms swapped kids, and both of us skinned out of kindergarten with a day to spare.  Talk about academic pressure.

    Because kindergarten was so unmemorable for me, I looked forward to going through it with my own daughter, Lily. Boy had things changed! Kids wore Velcro strapped sneakers. They were supposed to count to 20 and know the alphabet BEFORE kindergarten. Lily had been in a Bangkok pre-school that was about learning through exploring rather than memorizing. Lily's kindergarten teacher was a Sweet Young Thing whose worst admonition was "someone is not being considerate." Her classroom was a mass of pinatas and Chinese dragon kites and African violets. Lily was proud to be named "Class Gardener" and "Permanent Paper Passer Outer." Sweet Young Thing figured out that Lily was ADHD and at her best when she was "helping"  It must have been a long day for both of them because by then, kindergarten was a full school day. However, Lily and her teacher had a mutual admiration society, even if Lily couldn't quite manage numbers and letters...at least not in their correct order.

    In promoting Lily to first grade, Sweet Young Thing took into account that Lily had spent two years of pre-school and half of kindergarten in a "foreign" environment. She was promoted to the ominously named "transitional" first grade, kids who weren't "reading ready." I didn't give it a lot of thought.  Neither did Lily. She knew she would sail through school, watering violets and passing out papers. What could go wrong?

   I picked Lily up that first day of first grade. She didn't say anything, but I figured she was pooped out, getting used to a new teacher and classmates.

   At home, I unlocked the front door and went in the house, knowing Lily was straggling behind me. Slam! went the front door. We don't slam doors in our house. Ever. I turned to see Lily fling her red backpack across the room, narrowly missing me.  She slumped against the door, crossed her arms, pushed out her lower lip and announced in a voice that I'm sure the neighbors heard. "That's it! I'm never going back! I hate my teacher and there's only one other girl in my class and there's only one recess and the kindergarten kids got lunch first and ate all the chocolate ice cream. I hate vanilla! First grade stinks!"
   Suddenly, I flashbacked to my first day of first grade, telling my mother that if school was going to be this boring, I wasn't going to college. I remembered my teacher, a troll (henceforth known as Mrs. Troll)who was about to retire after forty-something years of first graders. A woman who yelled a lot, slammed her fist on your desk if she thought you weren't paying attention, and when all else failed, used what I later learned was guilt as a motivator.

"You are thankless, spoiled children," she'd shrill.  "I work and work to teach you to(fill in the blank) but you just won't learn! What is wrong with you?" She didn't know? We were terrified of her. She yelled if we got the wrong answer, yelled if we asked a question.

     I made her mad the first day of school when she said "Now when you can read this big book" (a giant sized version of a pre-primer prominently displayed next to the teacher's desk) you can have your very own book. You let me know when you think you're ready."

    I raised my hand. I had taught myself to read from billboards and TV ads before kindergarten. And while I was sure the words "mouthwash" and "rest area next exit, clean restrooms" weren't in that big book, I had filled in my vocabulary with what are now called "Dolch words").

   "I didn't mean, now." Mrs. Troll squinted at her seating chart. "Mary Ann. I meant after you know how to read."

     "But I know how to read now," I insisted. As an adult who has been a teacher, I can sort of understand her exasperation. Five minutes into the school year and she already been challenged by the likes of me.

     "Fine, then," she said in an-I-dare-you-voice. "Come on up and read for us." She stood behind the book, simpering, waiting for me to fail.

     I didn't fail. Dick and Jane were a snore as literature but I read all 32 pages of it without a mistake.  Now Mrs. Troll was really mad, because she didn't have any primers.  She hadn't counted on anyone learning to read in the first month, let alone first day.  She sent me to the office to requisition my first reader, six weeks early. Although I pride myself on remembering the most insignificant details of my childhood, the rest of first grade disappeared in the mists of trauma.

    Now it was happening again with my own child. As the Mom part of my brain registered Lily's outrage, the writer part thought First Grade Stinks.  What a great title for a picture book!  As I explained to Lily that not only would she be going back to school tomorrow and the next day and the next for twelve years (it was a little early to spring college on her) My own first grade disappointments melded with Lily's.  I started listing my possible plot points.

    The year never got any better for Lily. I grew alarmed when Lily announced at the end of the first week that five kids had been "flunked back" to kindergarten.  I immediately showed up for a teacher's conference.  The teacher (aka Mrs. First Grade) was perhaps my age, but looked older. Much, much older. She had surgery three times that school year (the only days Lily arrived home happy) so I tried to cut her some slack. But Mrs. First Grade affirmed that yes indeed she had just demoted five kids back to kindergarten "because I could tell they weren't going to cut it." (After a week?) She left no doubt that Lily would be joining them if she would "stop being lazy." I already knew that Lily was dyslexic so I asked about special ed testing. "Oh we don't do that until the student has flunked first grade and kindergarten."  What? A classroom of eight-year-old first graders?  My sympathy was wearing thin.

   It wore out altogether when Mrs. First Grade informed in February to tell me she was flunking Lily for the year because "she won't do her board work." I snapped. "You do realize she can't read, right?"  Well, no apparently she didn't. Lily had kept her secret by having the teaching assistant read to her when the teacher wasn't looking. Then Lily, having memorized the story in one hearing, would recite it for the teacher, word perfect, right down to the timing of the page turns. I told the teacher to hand her a random book and ask her to read right then and there. Teacher called me back in ten minutes. "She can't read! I guess she's dyslexic!" You think, person with twenty-five years of teaching "transitional" children?  I couldn't finish writing First Grade Stinks fast enough.

    However, fiction and real life rarely turn out the same. In First Grade Stinks, the main character, Haley, realizes that although the two grades and teachers are entirely different, first grade would bring her the ultimate reward of learning to read on her own!  Haley learns to appreciate her new, less flamboyant teacher.

   In real life, Lily hated everything about first grade except for physical education and art.  She never did learn to read that year but was promoted to second grade anyway. We changed school systems. She tested into special education in second grade, where she stayed until she graduated from high school (in the college prep track and with a high B average.) Reading will always be a challenge for her but she has developed a repertoire of coping mechanisms. She is in college now,  Guess what her major is.  Go ahead.  Guess.  Pre-K special ed!

    "After all," she says, "I've had years and years of thinking how I would teach things differently."

     I guess Lily's first grade didn't stink entirely.



Posted by Mary Ann Rodman
                                   

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     On July 3, I saw my first "back-to-school" ad.  Outside it was 97 degrees.  On TV, children dressed in sweaters and boots did handsprings over the notion of new notebooks and backpacks.

     Even though school in Georgia starts ridiculously early (sometime in the first two weeks of August), I can't get serious about "back-to-school" while I am in the heart of my summer. The week of the 4th I was halfway through what I call my Young Writer's Camps. (The sponsoring organization...two different ones this year...call them something else, that I promptly forget.)

   

 Young Writer's Camps have been the best part of my summer (or year, for that matter) for nine years. While my Facebook friends are posting from Maui and Montana and Myrtle Beach, I take a twice-a-day selfie at camp,perhaps to compare the damage done after seven hours with twelve young authors. Young Writer's Camps are my idea of vacation. Seriously. Yes, the first camp week reminds me of my public school teaching days when I felt as if I had been worked over with a Louisville Slugger, standing on cement floors in hard soled shoes, after a summer of sneakers and sand. But now, as then, no matter how wasted I feel, emotionally and physically, it's a good feeling. Every day is a good day at writing camp.

    Starting out with one camp per summer in downtown Atlanta (the commute alone would kill you), I moved on to two camps with my local parks department (zero commute!) This year we not only added an Advanced Writers Camp for returnees and serious writers, but I also conducted a camp for the Historical Society of a neighboring county (hello, long commute!) Both my sponsoring groups are hoping to add additional weeks next summer.  This summer there were four sessions. Next year we are aiming for a minimum of six, maximum enrollment of twelve.

    These are creative days, where my writers can continue the dystopian novel they started last summer, write stories based on family history (some are pretty hair raising), personal essays, poetry. If it is not part of the Georgia writing curriculum, it's part of mine.

    Like most American public schools, the emphasis is on essay and report writing. I understand. Being able to write well as an adult is an important skill. But in a world where recess has vanished in favor of more "instruction time," and music and the visual arts are considered so much expensive foofaraw, the child whose talent is creating fantasy worlds or sonnets...well, do it on your own time, kid. After you finish that enormous amount of homework.

   When I first began the camps, deep in the darkest days of No Child Left Behind, I had kids who were afraid to write anything, for fear that it was wrong. Wrong spelling, punctuation, grammar, subject...they were terrified of writing. My first rule that year and forever after is this: There is no right or wrong way to write in my camps. I make sure they understand that creative writing and whatever it is they do in a classroom are two different things. The kids seem to get the difference. You can just see those tight little shoulders and pencil-gripping fingers relax as soon as they know they are free to mess up. It's my own version of Anne Lamott's giving yourself permission to write terrible first drafts.

    Once they know there are no writing rules, I tell them that they are all writers right now. This is not strictly the truth since there are always those kids who are there because their parents need childcare and we are a bargain compared to horseback riding camp or Young Gourmet camp. With one exception, in nine years of camps, I have never had a parent or student tell me they didn't enjoy the week, even if they were massively unenthusiastic about being there on day one.

   I begin by telling them they are good writers, but by the end of the week they'll be better writers. I tell them how even after my books are published, I always want to go back and fiddle with them. I am never finished with them in my head. This is a less threatening way of easing kids into being critiqued. I call it "conferencing" where we meet one-on-one to praise their strengths, and sneak in a few subtle grammar points. ("Does this story all take place in the past or in the right-now? You can fix that by making all the verbs "match.") I try to use as little "teacher talk" as possible. After all, it's summer, this is a camp. Camps are supposed to be fun.

     I disguise writing skills as "contests." Vocabulary building is "re-branded" into "Can you name an animal (or color or action verb or adjective) for every letter of the alphabet?" This particularly good when I have kids who are ESOL, or whose parents insist they speak their native language at home. We play "charades" by acting out action verbs. We make lists of words to substitute for more pedestrian ones. (This year's favorite word...undulate!)

   We talk about books we love and why, as well as books we disliked and why. I don't force anyone to "share" their work with the group, although 99% of them do. I do insist on two things on two share items every morning. One, they have to tell something unusual they have observed, This is considered "homework" and must be read from their notebooks. This is to get them in the habit of keeping a writer's notebook of story ideas.  The other is that they have to contribute to "Ms Rodman's reading list" by giving me a suggestion for my own reading. This not only lets me know what kids like (as opposed to what librarians, teachers and book reviewers like), but has broadened my reading tastes considerably. Thanks to their suggestions, I have come to enjoy dystopian worlds (!!!) any number of new-to-me series, and my newest love, graphic novels. I learned about the world of Fan Fiction through my students. At the end of the week, I feel that I have learned more from them than they have from me.

     Last Friday was the end of camp season for this year. I packed up my gigantic sticky note pad, markers, thesauri and odds and ends of writing books. I said a mental good-by to the four girls who have attended camp every year in it's current location.  The boys who wrote historical fiction about WWII and the Iraqi War. This year's edition of the Fan Fiction writer (a girl this time who was into Dr. Who). The kids whose powers of observation are almost superhuman. I load up my car, turn off the lights, and lock the door.  I'll be back next year.

    It's my vacation.

Posted by Mary Ann Rodman

 

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     Young Author's Camps are well under way. It's Sunday night, and I am anticipating tomorrow's new group of writers. To (sort of) quote Forrest Gump, "Writing campers are like a box of chocolates.  You never know what you are going to get."

    If this camp is true to form, it will be a Whitman's Sampler of writers. Kids whose parents think I am running a remedial writing boot camp despite the Parks' Department naming the program "Writing is Fun!"  (Remember that exclamation point.)  Learning disabled kids.  Kids who are there because their parents need a place to park them for the week...and mine was the only camp that still had openings. (Always flattering to hear, "You're all that was left.") And of course, there are usually some kids who there because they love to write. Usually. Not always.

   For the last several years, every session has had a core of writers for whom English is a second language. No one can put together a perfect English sentence the way a 10-year-old who learned the language in school can. Their subjects and verbs agree, something that seems "optional" to a number of "English only" kids. Tenses don't leap from past to present to future in the same sentence.  Punctuation is meticulous. Speaking of punctuation, these ESOL kids have learned the Power of the Punctuation Point.

    A lot of kids let the exclamation point do all the heavy lifting in a sentence.  Rather than show the reader fear, joy, surprise (fill in the emotion here), they toss big handfuls of exclamation points instead.  A paragraph of five sentences will include six exclamation points. (More is better, right?) After awhile those little points seem to rise off the page in platoons, stabbing at my eyeballs. A slight exaggeration, but after awhile all you see on the page is !!!!!!!!!!!!!

    Example:  I was so sad when we moved!  I left all my friends behind!  I didn't know anybody at school!  I hated school! I was always in a bad mood!  Even my dog was in a bad mood!!!!

    Why are these kids so dependent on the point?  My first thought is to blame texting and email which has shrunk language down to emoticons and acronyms (OMG, LOL, 😄).  But most of my students are not allowed on social media, or have email accounts. Back in the day, teachers blamed comic books for sloppy punctuation (Pow! Biff! Bam!  Take that, Batman!).  I haven't run across any of comic fans among my writers.  Video games like World of Warcraft or Call of Duty, yes.  Comic books, no.

     There are a handful of chapter book writers who go over the top with the punctuation points for comic effect. I'm not laughing, but the kids are.  Still, even those writers do it a couple of times per book at most, not every sentence.

    It comes back to something I've posted about before...vocabulary.  For my young writers, it is easier to use my two pet peeves, the word "very" combined with an adjective and an exclamation point.  In revision of their work, I encourage them to find another way of expressing the emotion without using "very."

   Example:  The test was very hard!

  Alternatives:  The test was: challenging complicated confusing demanding difficult exhausting puzzling tiring unclear. (Pick one.)

  Each of the alternatives offers a clearer picture of how or why the test was "hard."  Was it physically
hard?  Did your head ache?  Did you write so much your hand hurt?  Or was it hard to understand?  Were the directions unclear?  Did you mix-up your facts?  Or were the questions more difficult than you expected?  Or did it just make you think harder?  "Hard" can mean a lot of things in describing a test.  What exactly did you mean?

    At this point I bring out my trusty thesaurus collection: beginners, intermediate and Roget's.  My students are familiar with the thesaurus...the one on their word processing program.  I compare the meager selection offered by the computer program to the many, many options in the thesaurus. They learn they cannot slide by with what I call "wimp words"...words too general to say what they mean. The substitutions for wimp words are in the thesaurus.  By the end of the week, they have almost eliminated phrases such as very beautiful, very hot, very boring. Instead, flowers are exquisite, days swelter and TV shows uninteresting.

    Once the "enabler" word "very" disappears, the punctuation marks often disappear as well.  At least they do in descriptive passages.  They still seem to show up in dialog.  How else do you show some one is excited?  Example:  "It's raining!" she said excitedly.

   In this case, the culprit is "said." Said is a perfectly good word.  It's meant to be unobtrusive in dialog.  Sometimes, however, you want to know how that sentence is...well...said. How could you show the speaker is excited without that pesky exclamation point?  Swap said for one of the following verbs:  screamed, shouted, yelled, exclaimed, moaned, groaned, cried, wailed, howled, wailed, gasped, choked,shrieked, rejoiced, squealed, cheered, announced.

   If after all those choices the writer still can't let go of that exclamation point, I issue an ultimatum. Two exclamation points for the whole piece.  More than two, I tell the student, "Imagine that I control  the world supply of exclamation points.  If you wan to use on, they are now a hundred dollars apiece."  The silliness of the notion usually makes the writer think twice about using them.

    Again, in the words of Forrest Gump..."And that's all I have to say about that."

    No exclamation point.

    BOOK GIVEAWAY

    Today is the last time to register for our give away of JoAnn Early Macken's board book, BABY SAYS MOO.  For details, see JoAnn's June 12 post.

    Posted by Mary Ann Rodman



    

   

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     I find inspiration in real life. Rummaging through flea markets and antique stores, examining the jumbled pieces of other peoples' lives sets my story radar pinging. How did these odds and ends come to rest, unwanted by their "families," in a junk store? A story begins simmering in the back of my brain.

    I am addicted to old family pictures. I gaze at the walls of other people's houses, memorizing family portraits. My mother practically raised me at estate sales and junk stores. I was not allowed to touch anything, but I could ask all the questions I wanted. What was this metal thing used for? Who wore shoes that buttoned up the sides? Did you have a doll like this when you were a little girl?

   The two people who encouraged my curiosity in the past would be surprised to learn I consider them the fairy godmothers of my writing.  Those two people were my Grandmother Rodman and my mom, both natural born storytellers.

The couple in the middle are my Rodman grandparents

      Although her father had been a country schoolmaster, my Grandmother Rodman's education ended at 11. However, she loved to read and never stopped learning through out her very long life (she lived to be 97). Her childhood was positively Dickensian; orphaned at 11, she lived with an "evil stepfather" and numerous half-siblings. Her older brothers had gone off to "seek their fortunes" and escape their abusive stepfather.  Murder, the county poor farm, setting off on her own at 15 to make her way in the world...all these elements were part of my grandmother's story.  As a young mother she survived the most deadly tornado in U.S. history. She told "The Storm Story" when few people talked about tragedies.  My grandmother made sense of her own life by telling the stories, over and over, always in an undramatic, matter of fact voice.

     She knew which details would make her story real for a little listener...the taste of homemade peanut brittle, the mustard color of a funnel cloud so enormous it blocked the sky, the stiff, slick material of her mother's "Sunday dress." Her stories were peopled with characters named Country and Myrtle and Ardell.  She evoked the sound of their voices, the way they stood and moved, the little quirks that made those long-dead people come alive. She was economical with her words, as she brought the events to the climax, never once saying "Oh I forgot to say that..."

   Not only could my grandmother put names to the family photos she kept in a big silk stationary box under her bed, she could spin stories about every one of them. She also told me about my father growing up in small-town, Depression-era,  Southern Illinois. My father did not tell me his own boyhood until very recently.  Learning what kind of little boy he had been, helped me understand my sometimes puzzling, taciturn dad.

Mom on the far right, her brother Jimmy and sister Agnes

   My mother would be shocked to learn that she inspired me. I was a sickly kid and missed a lot of school. Mom entertained me with stories of her childhood, first on a small family farm and then helping her mother run a Pittsburgh boarding house during the Depression. The middle child of eight, her stories seemed exciting and exotic, better than any library book. Mom prefaced her stories with, "Now times were different when I was a little. We probably shouldn't have done some of this stuff then, and you aren't to do it now. If you do, I will stop telling you stories." That was threat enough to keep me from trying some of the stunts of Mom and her family.  My uncles' trapeze in the farm's apple orchard. The Great Silverware War of Easter 1932. Their beloved maiden aunt who taught them to play poker. The first story I ever wrote at age seven was about Mom moving from to town after the bank took the farm.  My 11-year-old mother and her sister rode a streetcar back to their old home, to gather whatever they had could of what was left behind. (No, I'm not telling you what they took...I'm still working on this story.)

   Mom was a one-woman show. She imitated voices, created sound effects and even acted out the events when her vocabulary failed her.  Ironically, she considered herself shy and disliked speaking in public. Writing anything, such as a letter, was a laborious process that would go through several drafts before she would write on her good linen stationary with a fountain pen.  Since Mom wrote to at least some of her family every week, that was a lot of moaning and groaning and crumpled up notebook paper. (I learned the pain and value of revision early!)`

    Jimmy's Stars began when I found a WWII two-star service flag in a box lot of china I bought at an auction. I knew from photos that Mom's family had a four-star flag in the window of the boarding house (three for my uncles and one for Mom who was a WAVE). Looking at that flag, I heard my mother's voice recounting life on the Homefront, the terror of receiving a telegram, the peculiarity of wartime rationing. With those stories as a foundation,Jimmy's Stars was the fastest I've ever written anything...18 months. (That included lightening striking my computer and wiping out the unbacked-up first five chapters.)

  Yankee Girl is based on my own childhood stories I told my daughter. I am currently working on two books that are based on Grandmother Rodman tales.
                                                                                                             
    I'm sure that neither my grandmother or mother knew they would inspire my own books. Their stories taught me the beauty and drama of everyday life. This sense of wonder in what seems ordinary to us, I try to pass on to my own students. Over the years, they have told me about grandparents who wandered in the rubble of WWII Europe, orphaned and homeless. Of their parents as children, in refugee camps, fleeing Asia by boat. One girl's family escaped the Holocaust by immigrating to Cuba... and then fled Cuba after the Revolution. My hope is that these tales will live on in my students' writing.  I think the best gift you can give a child is a family story.

     I was blessed to be descended from two of the best storytellers ever. Thanks, Meemaw.  Thanks, Mom.

Posted by Mary Ann Rodman

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    Books where the main characters are animals are among my favorite.  Charlotte's Web is forever and always the one book I would take to a desert island.  I love the work of picture book authors Kevin Henkes, Carolyn Crimi and Lisa Wheeler, who often place their stories in the animal world.  (If there is a Hall of Fame for picture book authors, those three should definitely be included.)

     I love what I call "talking critter" books, in which the animals are anthropomorphic.  I just can't write them.

    To me, anthropomorphic books are a form of fantasy.  Animals don't talk or go to kindergarden or wear sneakers. Fantasy.  I don't write fantasy. I can't write fantasy.  My creative mind just doesn't work that way. My stories are mostly rooted in the real world of children. I'm a literal sort of person.

    I have published two "talking critter" books.
Surprise Soup was written about little boys. Something about that manuscript inspired the art department and the illustrator to make the little boys into little bears. Changing the species of the character made it a much funnier book...but I can't take any credit for writing an anthropomorphic book.  The illustrator did it for me. (Thank G. Brian Karas!)
     The other book, Camp K-9, was inspired by my dog, Nilla. She was a cocker-spitz mix, with floppy ears, a thick white coat, and a joyful personality.  In fact, Nilla was far more popular with the neighbors than the Downing family.  She was actually invited to parties that we weren't! Nilla was so human-like, it wasn't hard for me to imagine her as a teen-age girl.  My husband and I would invent adventures for her. Nilla as a Laker Girl.  Running up a phone bill.  Hanging out at the mall with her (also imaginary) BFF, Stacy.

     When we traveled, we boarded our "child" at a kennel called Camp K-9, which had a cute logo of a dog toting a sleeping bag and a tennis racquet. That got my imagination going.  What would dogs do at camp? I used my own experiences as a camper and a counselor to put together a day as a "doggy camper." I used a lot of dog puns and references to add humor.  The other "campers" were based on the dogs in my neighborhood.  That was pretty easy.

    After that, I had to find some tension, a problem, that my girl dog might experience with her bunkmates. That was the hard part. I fiddled and fiddled with the story for four or five years. Finally, after many many critiques by my friends and writing group, I felt Camp K-9 was as good as it was going to get. (Fortunately, my publisher liked it.)

     Will I write another "talking critter" book?  I don't know.  I had been inventing "Nilla adventures" in my head for ten years before I tried to write one down, and it was the most difficult thing I've ever written.  Cute one-liners and puns are one thing; shaping them into a coherent story, with a beginning, middle and end. Who knows?  Right now I am "inventing adventures" for my extremely ill-behaved cat, Rosie.  (She's giving me the evil eye right now.) Maybe...

     Don't forget to enter our latest book giveaway for Stephanie Lyons' new book, Dating Down.  The deadline is midnight, May 15 2015, so don't miss out.

Posted by Mary Ann Rodman

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       I was a teenaged poetry hater.

       There. I said it.  I blame whoever threw together the literature curriculum for the many school systems I attended.

      Poetry was no big deal in elementary school. Maybe once a year our teacher would substitute writing a poem for a book report,  Yes, it had to rhyme.  Yes, it had to have rhythm.  Yes, I was awful at them. I think I recycled the same poem about a pretty kitty in the city every year.  

     When we moved to Mississippi when I was in fifth grade, I discovered we had a subject called "oral expression." (You can't make this stuff up.) Every Friday we had to memorize and recite a poem, the longer the better. That brought the natural ham out in me.  You haven't lived until you've heard 10-year-old me doing "Christopher Robin is Saying His Prayers"...complete with British accent copied from Herman's Hermits records.  I could always count on an "A" in "oral expression." I read a lot of poetry those years, looking for unusual choices (I just remembered another one..."Sea Fever" by John Masefield. Yep....another British accent.) I enjoyed the poetry because I could read whatever I wanted. However, all that reading didn't improve my poetry writing skills.  I was still using my "Pretty Kitty in the City" poem.

   Middle school let up on the poetry writing requirements except for the short and snappy (haiku and limericks). But oh the reading assignments. Someone on the curriculum committee had a thing for Longfellow and narrative poems.  We read "Hiawatha."  "Evangeline." "The Courtship of Miles Standish." I loathed them all. We had to keep voluminous notebooks of commentary on each one. God bless, Mrs. Stokes, my eighth grade English teacher who appreciated my snarky take on "Evangeline." At least I could put "Pretty Kitty" to rest.

    High school was more of the same. "Kubla Khan."  "Rime of the Ancient Mariner." When the school switched gears and allowed students to take specialized literature course such as "Modern Drama" and "Modern American Novels" I immediately signed up for all the courses that didn't involve poetry.  Goodbye, Longfellow. Hello, Faulkner.

     Fast forward many years. I am a high school librarian. I learn that every student is required to put together a poetry notebook, the major grade for the semester.  I, the librarian, am to lead my flock of students to the deep wells of Great Poetry.  I discover that these students are also weary of Longfellow.

   Flipping through the library's poetry selection, I re-discover a book that I read toward the end of my own senior year of high school, Reflections on a Gift of Watermelon Pickle compiled by Stephen Dunning and Edward Luedders.  These weren't childish poems, or poems written for teens.  They were just poems that could appeal to a teen. They certainly appealed to poetry hating me. They used plain English, sometimes slang. Sometimes they didn't even rhyme!  The poems were about flying saucers, The Bomb (the book was published in 1967 and is still in print) as well as more timeless thoughts on strawberries, popsicles and water sprinklers.  That collection got heavy circulation during "Poetry Unit" time.

     My favorite poem, however, is not fromWatermelon Pickle. It's by Gwendolyn Brooks. This is the poem I always showed "the dudes"....the boys who thought poetry was for geeks and girls. This one poem usually made them a believer, and sent them in search of more Gwendolyn Brooks.

     "We Real Cool."

     We real cool. We
     Left school.  We

    Lurk late.  We
    Strike straight. We

    Sing sin.  We
    Thin gin.  We

    Jazz June.  We
    Die soon.

     Years of "Poetry Units" introduced me to other kinds of poetry...free verse, blank verse. Cinquains. diamantes, shape poems.  I have a whole new bag of poetry tricks that I use with my Young Writer's Workshops.  And oh yeah.  I have started writing poetry myself...the non-rhyming kind.

Posted by Mary Ann Rodman
     



     

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     On our first date, my husband-to-be asked what I did for a living.  I told him I was a school librarian.  "Well there's a profession that will be obsolete in twenty years," he chuckled. I did not chuckle. I did marry him and twenty five years later I am still waiting for his prediction to come true.

   OK, I admit that twenty five years ago I never dreamed that I would have a phone that could help me find my way around the zillion streets of Atlanta named "Peachtree."  Or a device that could download hundreds of books, cutting down considerably on overweight luggage fees. My 1989 school library had computers, but they were little more than fancy typewriters. Who knew that entering the right search words on my jazzy little laptop could find pictures of the battleships my father-in-law served on in WWII?  Or the history of the long demolished amusement park of my childhood, the genesis of The Roller Coaster Kid?  Yes, Craig was right...I could access all that information without setting foot in a library.

    But yet there are still libraries. In my neck of the woods, it appears that most people are there for free computer time and to check out videos. If I am there, it is to do research. Guess what? Not everything is available on the Internet. At least not for free.  When I wrote Jimmy's Stars and Yankee Girl I spent months reading newspapers from WWII and the 1960's....on microfilm machines.  While there are a good number of old periodicals available online these days, they never seem to be the ones I need or there is a hefty fee to join a database.  All the branch libraries in my immediate area were built in the last 15 years and don't have microfilm machines. But if I need one, all I have to do is go downtown to the main library.

   The library is a source of professional literature such as Library Journal or Publisher's Weekly. Usually they are kept in the librarians' work area, but they have always let me read them on the premises if I ask.  There are also databases and reference materials that I can't find anywhere else...at least not for free.

    I have had the good fortune to have worked in a university library which gave me access to all
kinds of information not found in a public library. My library allowed the public to use the collection for a nominal yearly fee. As an employee I had free reign, but even if I hadn't, I would have paid the fee.  It's something to investigate.

     I could go on forever about the information that you will find only in a library....but why tell you?  Check it out yourself. By the way, my husband has had to finally admit that libraries and librarians are not obsolete or likely to become so any time soon.

Posted by Mary Ann Rodman

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    First off, a big Teaching Authors welcome to our latest TA, Carla McClafferty. Not only did Carla and I meet and bond some fifteen years ago at an SCBWI retreat in Arkansas, we once shared an editor. Greetings, old friend, and welcome aboard. For the next couple of posts we are going to be talking about your genre, non-fiction, and what it shares with fiction.

    I have always wanted to be a Carla-sort of writer, a non-fiction writer. "Write what you love" is one of those things writing teachers (like me) tell their students. I love non-fiction. My "adult" reading consists almost entirely of biographies and history. If I read two adult novels a year, that's a big deal for me.

   So why don't I write non-fiction for children?  The reasons are endless, so I'll boil it down to one.  I just can't stick to the facts.

    Both of my novels, Yankee Girl and Jimmy's Stars began life as memoirs. YG was about my life, JS about my mother's family. Because they both took place in other times and places...Mississippi 1964 and Pittsburgh 1943...I did a boatload of research to make sure I had the details right. For the World War II world of Jimmy's Stars, I made a timeline of what battles occurred where and when between September 1943 and September 1944, and when news of those battles reached the States.  I compiled a radio schedule for the Pittsburgh stations. I studied streetcar routes. I poured over the various rationing schedules for gasoline, food, clothing.

    You would think that Yankee Girl would not require quite so much research, since after all, this was based on my own elementary school years.  I even had my 5th and 6th grade diaries. Still....do you remember what week the Beatles' "I Feel Fine" reached number one on the charts?  Neither did I.  Since the main character is a huge Beatles fan, there is at least one reference to a Beatles' song in every chapter. In addition, this the height of the Civil Rights Movement (the Selma March to Montgomery occurs about three quarters of the way through YG). I had to know exactly what date  this protest or that bombing occurred.  I remembered that these things had happened but that wasn't enough. I had to know exactly when. I spent a dismal five months in the microfilm room of the Jackson Mississippi library, going through a year's worth of newspapers, reliving a sad and scary time.

    By now you are thinking, "Well, with all this research, why didn't she just go ahead an write those memoirs?"  Good question. All I can say is that my mind refuses to march in a straight line . Yes the facts are there, because they are part of the story.  But once I start writing, my "real" character refuses to stick to their own "real" story.  I start thinking "but wouldn't it be more interesting if this happened instead?  Or if her best friend was this kind of person?"  Before I know it, I am off on a completely different story than I had first intended. The only thing that remains the same is the structure of historical fact and detail that makes the story "real" for me (and hopefully for the reader as well.)

    I am just beginning to write contemporary fiction for young people and guess what?  There is no less research involved.  Next month I will have a story in a YA anthology called Things I'll Never Say. 
I live in Georgia.  My main characters live in Georgia.  I have lived here for fourteen years.  Yet, for a 3,000 word story here are just a few story points I needed to find out to make the story real:  price of admission to the Atlanta Botanical Gardens, driving times between different towns, the academic school year of Emory University, the most popular spring break towns with Georgia teens...well, you get the point.

    My point?  Getting the details right is one of the ingredients for making a story real.  Editors care about details. I spent weeks nattering back and forth with my Yankee Girl editor over the dates of those Beatles songs.  Readers care.  I had an adult write me that if the mother in Yankee Girl used a steam iron, then she didn't also need to sprinkle her clothes before ironing. I was a little miffed that someone could read a 225 page book and this is what she chose to write me. It never occurred to me look up that sprinkling/steam iron detail.  That's the way my mom always ironed. (I still probably need to look that up.)

    I once read a Big Time Award Winning Book that took place in a state where I had lived and knew very well.  This author had placed four major cities within an hours drive of each other. In reality, they were in different corners of the state and hours away from each other.  Whatever affection I had for the book died right then. Good grief, anybody could look at an atlas (this was pre-Internet) and see where those cities were.  I later read an interview by the author and discovered that she had never visited that state (or apparently done any research) but she "knew" somebody who "used" to live there. That was one of those moments when you want to scream and throw the book across the room.

   That was the moment when I decided that for me, getting the details "right." Facts are front and center of a non-fiction, but they are no less important in fiction.

     Now about that steam iron....

  Posted by Mary Ann Rodman

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     There are two things about writing that never get any easier for me. . .coming up with a good title and naming characters.  I still have a hard time with titles, but I have developed strategies to give my characters good names.

    I spent most of my pregnancy struggling to come up with just the right name for my daughter, a name that would be all her own. In writing, I do not have the luxury of spending eight months on one character name.

    I believe that name is the single most important aspect of a character. It is usually the first thing a reader learns about him.  The name should reflect the character's personality is some way, however subtle.  Sometimes that is a mysterious process that goes on in the author's head, unexplainable to anyone else.  I do not know how E.B. White decided on Charlotte and Wilbur, but can you imagine them named anything else?  A book called Barbara's Web?  A pig named Bob?  No, somehow Charlotte and Wilbur, along with Fern and Templeton and Mr. Zuckerman are so right, they could not be anything else.

    Since I write historical fiction, I have a second barrier to finding just the right name. My names need to fit the time period.  The characters in Yankee Girl were pretty easy.  The book was about my sixth grade class.  I used names that were popular in 1964, as well as names that were popular in the South.  Jimmy's Stars, which takes place in 1943, was a little more difficult.  I knew that my main character was born in 1932, and would have graduated from high school in 1950. I scoured libraries and second-hand stores for 1949-50 high school annuals. (There were an awful lot of girls named Betty.)

    Contemporary fiction isn't much easier.  Names change as quickly as any other fashion.  Some names scream a particular decade.  I am a baby boomer, and I was usually the only Mary Ann in a class full of Debbies, Karens, Cathys and Sharons.  When I was a middle school teacher in the late 80's, I taught more than a few Farrahs. My friends who had babies about then named them Ashley and Kate (not after the Olsen twins!)  When I had my daughter in 1994, I was the only one in my childbirth class who did not name their child Tyler or Taylor (regardless of sex).

   Then there are adult names. In children's books, they are usually not a central character but occasionally they are.  (Miss Gruen and Reverend Taylor in Yankee Girl come to mind.) How do you name adults?

   Here is a list of sources I have compiled that help me with The Naming Game.

   1.  Baby name books.  These often reflect the popularity (or lack of popularity) of a name, as well as give a cultural origin. (Warning:  I learned not to carry one of these in public unless I wanted to start rumors about a possible new addition to my family.)

   2.  School annuals.  These work for both contemporary and historical fiction.

   3.  School directories, websites, newsletters, newspapers, class lists.  Schools in my neck of the woods generate an enormous amount of student information. If you don't have access to your own personal student, read the school news pages online or in your neighborhood paper/website.

   4.  Obituaries.  Yeah, I know it's kind of morbid, but I have collected a number of "old-timey" names from them.  Around here, they usually include the person's nickname as well.

   5.  Observation.  I live a mile away from the fastest growing immigrant community in the country.  Call me nosy (or a writer), but I notice workers' name tags.  I ask the employee where they are from and how they pronounce their name.  No one has been insulted (yet), and I have collected names I would never have thought of on my own.

    6.  The Social Security Index of Popular Baby Names. This site is unbelievably cool.  It lists the top 200 names for boys and girls for each decade, from 1880 to 2010.  Not only is it searchable by decade, but by each state as well. (Apparently Mary and James were the hot names of my decade.) http://www.ssa.gov/OACT/babynames/decades

   What do I do with all these names?  I list them in a notebook, separate from my regular journal. Right now, the 1910 Social Security list is getting a heavy workout from me.  My characters are named.

      Now if I could just think of a title...

     Don't forget about our current book giveaway.  For more information click here.

Posted by Mary Ann Rodman

 

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     Happy New Year, readers. I hope you had a wonderful holiday season that included reading some of our favorite books from December.  (Too much to hope that much writing went on. At least not at my house.)

     So we are starting off 2015 with a discussion of plotting a story.

     Uh-oh.  Houston, we have a problem.

     I don't plot my stories. Ever,  So if you are hoping to learn how to plot in this post, you can stop reading now.  One of the other TA's will tell you everything you need to know in the following weeks.

     I'm here to tell the rest of you still reading, it's OK to not plot.

     I have visceral reaction to anything requires plotting. Anything that has to be done in specific sequential steps, sends me over the edge.  Cooking, math, putting anything together with instructions. I'm awful at all of those things. A couple of years ago, when educational testing discovered that my daughter has the same difficulty I learned this had a name...something like "difficulty with executive reasoning." (Which I suppose means I'll never be President...but I digress.) Sometimes dessert should come first.  I almost always read the end of a book first.  Working from step A to step B to step C just doesn't work for me.  Never has.

     I was the student who wrote the term paper first, then the outline.  When I was first trying to be a real writer (as opposed to that seat-of-my-pants writer I had been as a teen and young adult) I discovered that some real writers outlined everything they wrote as a first step.  This news was so discouraging I stopped writing for several years, because obviously, I had been doing it wrong.

    Of course, that didn't last forever. I went back to writing in the same old any-which-way-I can (including out of sequence) method.  I did learn a few things. I learned to plan before I wrote.

    Planning and plotting are not the same thing.  Plotting is knowing what happens first, then next, then next and at the end. I never know more than one of those things before I start writing.  I've stopped worrying about it.  Planning is knowing what you need to know before you type that first word.

   I've mentioned before that writing the minute you get a good idea is not usually the best thing to do.  You need to know your characters before you write about them.  Who can you write about more successfully?  Your best friend or someone you talked to for five minutes at a party? You should know your characters as well as you do your friends before you write about them. That's the first step in my Plan.

    Because once a librarian, always a librarian at heart, I think about what I don't know but should for my story. Do I need to research a geographic area?  A time period? Speech patterns and slang for a particular area?  A disease?  A career that I know nothing about?  Now is the time to get as many of those answers as you can, before you start writing. What is more frustrating than reaching page 100 and discovering you are missing a chunk of important information. (This will happen anyway, but not as much if you do it upfront.)

    This is also the time I pick my Imaginary Reader. Imaginary Reader is the kid I envision reading my book.  Imaginary Reader sits next to me while I write. Is IR a girl or a boy, or both?  How old? Do they like to read or not?  What about my story would interest them?  (Actually, I should probably come with my IR first. See?  That old executive reasoning problem.)

    So if you are not a Plotter, fear not.  You can be a Planner.  It's worked for me so far.

Posted by Mary Ann Rodman

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     December 1.  The year is winding down.  While to some December means end-of-the-year holidays and cold weather, to me it means the arrival of  "Best of the Year" booklists.  I pore over them the way I used to study the old Sears Christmas catalogs, agreeing with some selections, shaking my head over others and marking those still to be read. The Teaching Authors don't think the reviewers at Publisher's Weekly and School Library Journal should have all the fun.  In the next couple of weeks we will be discussing our own favorites reads of 2014, whether they were published this year or not.

     In fact, my favorite read of the year, the graphic novel Drama by Raina Telgemeier, was published in 2012. Telgemeier also published this year, Sisters, which is every bit as good as Drama.  However, Drama first caught my eye because it is about a subject close to my heart...a middle school drama club.  Having been a middle school (and high school) drama club director for many years, I wanted to see how close the book came to my own experience.

     Telegemeier not only nailed the excitement of producing drama on stage, but all the little "dramas" that go on every day in middle school.  Callie, the main character, can't sing or act well enough to perform on stage in the school musical, but she loves theater so much she is thrilled to design and build the sets. The characters are not the school "cool" kids but the "stage rats," kids besotted by the world of theater.  One detail that the author captured perfectly is the ability of these junior actors to accept each other unconditionally.  Nothing really mattered except whether or not a person could perform their assigned task, onstage or off.

     Telgemeier is also the author of Smile, a graphic novel of living though orthodontia. Smile is geared for an elementary audience getting their first braces. Drama is most definitely for an older reader, sixth grade and up.  My review for Drama?  Standing ovation, all the way!

posted by Mary Ann Rodman

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     It's a good thing we have a holiday dedicated to thankfulness. Otherwise I would rarely give my blessings a thought. I am one of those "the glass is half empty" people.  So here is what fills my glass this year.

     Sorry, Carmela, but I have to begin with one you already mentioned, our terrific Vermont College MFA group, The Hive.  Outside of my family, they are my longest sustained relationship. Most of us met on the airport bus going to campus on a July evening in 1998. Rarely a day goes by that at I am not in contact with at least one of them.  Collectively, they are a never-ending source of energy, enthusiasm and advice. I truly do not know how I survived as a writer without them.  Thank you, lovely Bees!

     Next up on the gratitude list is my own local critique group, WINGS (Writers in North Georgia).  Every month (with occasional sabbaticals) since October 2001, I have driven the hundred miles, round trip, to meet with this group of five in Conyers, Georgia. Driving that far in Atlanta traffic is no small matter, but the reward is worth every nerve-wracking mile.  Connie, Nancy, T.K. and Stephanie as well as our Fearless Leader Susan (plus member-in-absentia, Maureen) are the best writers and critiquers one could ever hope to find.  Almost everything I have published is the result of their sharp eyes and spot-on suggestions. I could not fly without my WINGS.

     Lastly, I am grateful for SCBWI, The Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators (we writers do like our acronyms!)  I learned about SCBWI from a Hive member while I was at Vermont College and wasted no time joining.  SCBWI is more than just an organization of like minded people.
It is an endless supply of all a writer needs:  the latest publishing information, editorial contacts, writing conferences, and most of all Opportunity (with a capital O). The conferences alone provide the opportunity to meet editors and agents, to submit manuscripts to houses that would otherwise be closed to unagented authors (like me), to have work critiqued by industry professionals. SCBWI, you are worth every penny in membership dues and conference fees.

    To enter our latest giveaway, a copy of Children's Writer's and Illustrator's Market, check Carmela's Friday post.  (http://www.teachingauthors.com/2014/11/thanks-giving-CWIM-giveaway.html).  Good luck and Happy Thanksgiving to everyone.

Posted by Mary Ann Rodman

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     I'm ba-a-a-ck!  I have been on sabbatical since the first of the year.  In an ironic twist,  the person who has written little in nine months has been asked to write a post on---creativity.

     I wasn't writing, but I was still teaching my Young Authors Workshops.  I did not feel my own creativity entirely dormant, because I was encouraging creativity in my students daily.  They, in turn, forced me to explore new ways of thinking about writing.

     This year some of my older students are into fan fiction.  They are some of the best writers I have ever had.  I believe they wrote better because, having their subject pre-selected, they could focus their energy on writing well, and often.  They didn't experience the first block that a lot of my students have, finding something to write about.

     I don't like giving my writers "prompts."  Most of them attend schools where "writing prompts" are given at least once a school day to write about a very specific topic in a "journal."  I thought this was a great idea until I learned from my daughter that the "journaling" was done for the five minutes or so the teacher took attendance.   The teacher riffled through the notebooks from time to time but never actually read them.  By the time students come to Young Authors, they have had it with "writing prompts" and "journaling."

    This past summer brought the most challenging groups to my writing workshops. My students are ages 9 through 14. A few were extremely competent writers (one had even been published in a national magazine at age 11!)  As I said, some were into fan fiction. There were the superhero fans.  Since two of the workshops were during the World Cup, all some could think and write about was soccer. And then there were "the unwilling participants"---the handful that were there because their parents use day camps as daycare--and mine was the only one open that week.  I was also working under the handicap that, no matter how the city recreational department described my workshop in the catalog, most of the kids (and all of the parents) were under the impression that it was a remedial writing/grammar/English-as-a-second-language class.  (Or as the kids put it "More school.")

     How could I get such a diverse group enthusiastic and creative about writing without getting too regimented and "teacher-ish."  Focused but not too focused?  Structured but not overly so?

     First, I gave them permission to write bad first drafts. (Anne Lamott's advice from Bird by Bird, re-rephrased in G-rated terms.)  Then, as a fellow TA mentioned last week, I told them not to think too hard.  Finally, I gave them "freedom of subject" without letting them know it.

     Just as a too specific writing prompt turns my students into a block of ice, unable to proceed with the voice of their language arts teacher echoing in their heads, telling them to "write anything you want" will make half the group also go into freezer mode, because it requires them to come up with something all on their own.  I get a lot of kids who have no idea how to create something out of thin air.

     So how do you give a prompt without being too general or too specific?  Thanks to my students, over the years, I think I have come up with the best prompt.  I give it as part of a list of specific prompts, the kind they are used to (and hate.) This is to give them the illusion that they have a choice in topics.  (No one has ever picked a decoy prompt.)  Then I give them the following suggestion:

     If you could be anyone or anything, in any time or place (in this world and time, or another), could do anything you wish, and know you could not fail, who would you be  What would you do?

     This open-ended, semi-focused prompt seemed to bring out the creativity in everyone.  The fan fiction people inserted themselves into their already-created characters and world.  The soccer kids became members of World Cup teams.  Super heroes made an appearance. Some became time travelers, putting themselves in the historical past, or the unknown future.  All of them took this exercise in many directions I had not anticipated.  It was great!

     This made a great foundation for the students to expand their work.  Once they had written three or four pages, it was easy for them to turn the main character (themselves) into something more fictional.  Or, in the case of the fan fiction writers, change the pre-packaged main character into something of their own invention.  In subsequent drafts we would worry about conflict and  subject- verb agreement and logic.  The main thing was to get over the initial road blocks to creativity, a blank page and a feeling of restriction.

     I am still not back to writing. When I do get out my half-finish WIP, I hope to remember the lessons my students taught me this summer.  Don't think too much.  Don't sweat the details in the first (or second) drafts.  Most of all, I will give myself permission to imagine myself in other time.  Another place.  Accomplishing what I have only dreamed of, knowing that I cannot fail.

     It's good to be back, you guys!.

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This is a time of transitions here on the TeachingAuthors blog. Laura announced on Friday  that she is leaving our team. Even though she'd signed on as a temporary sub, I'd hoped we'd be able to convince her to continue as a regular. Unfortunately, other pressing demands are tugging at her. But I do hope she'll keep us in mind if circumstances change. J

Meanwhile, we wish her the best. At least we'll all be able to keep tabs on Laura over at her own blog.

Farewell to the lovely and talented, Laura Purdie Salas!

In two weeks, we'll also be saying farewell to long-time TeachingAuthor, Jill Esbaum. I'm VERY sad to see Jill go, L but she's leaving for a new, exciting adventure. I hope she'll share a little about it in her final post here. Of course, we wish her all the best, too. We're SO going to miss you, Jill!

We're going to really miss the wise and wonderful, Jill Esbaum!

But the news isn't all doom and gloom! I'm happy to announce that Mary Ann Rodman will be returning to the team! Hurrah! You can watch for her posts here every third Monday.

Mary Ann's BACK! YIPPEE!

Finally, I'm excited to report that a new TeachingAuthor will be joining the team in October. But I'm going to keep you in suspense about the new TA's identity a little while longer. J

I WILL tell you though, that we'll be sponsoring another great book giveaway this month! Be sure to see April's post this Friday for details.

Happy writing, all.
Carmela

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     October is Anti-Bullying Month, a campaign I did not know existed until I was asked to blog about it.  These days bullying has so many more outlets (thinking here of the many, many ways to cyberbully) that it appears to have reached epidemic proportions.

     When I was growing up, each school year brought a new teacher and a new set of classroom scourges, the Bully Boy and his female counterpart, Mean Girl. Although they were equal opportunity bad guys, picking on whoever struck their fancy, their favorite target was always the Class Goat (usually male.)  As a ten-year-old I wondered how those things were decided. Was there a committee who decided who was going to be the bully and who the bullied?

     If you have read my book Yankee Girl, you know my history of being the Class Goat, although at the time I didn't think of myself that way. As an adult I can see that Mean Girls are bullies the same as the boy in my second grade class who had a nasty habit of throwing bricks at recess. However, I wasn't the only Class Goat in fifth and sixth grades.  There was Todd (not his real name).

    On the days when people weren't putting chewed gum on my bus seat, calling me names (none of which can I mention here) or "accidentally" dropping their lunch trays on me, there was Todd to abuse.  What happened to me was subtle enough to be done in front of a teacher and passed off as an "oopsy" if caught. Todd was just plain tortured.  We waited for the teacher to leave the room to work over Todd.

   I say "we" because while I didn't actively participate, I did nothing to stop it either. Part of me knew that standing up for Todd wouldn't do any good.  If anyone had less status than Todd, it was me. The other part of me was secretly releived that I had the day off as The Goat.

    Even though Todd lived in my neighborhood, I never saw him outside. He was too terrified to show himself except for his morning sprint to the bus stop, where the name calling and book throwing began the minute he got on.  At the time there was a weird little pull toy that was advertised incessantly on TV, called Odd Ogg. The jungle went "Odd Ogg, Odd Ogg, half turtle and half frog." It wasn't too hard to turn that into "Odd Todd, Odd Todd, Half turtle and half frog."

   Todd was one of the smaller boys in the class.  When the teacher stepped out of the room for a "minute," leaving one of us in charge, (big mistake) that was the signal for our favorite game, "Hide the Todd." Our classrooms had an abundance of cabinets and closets and cubbyholes, just the right size to stash an undersized ten year old. Todd was curled, crumpled and crushed into the supply closet, the teacher's coat closet or under the sink in the back of the room.  In a classroom of forty students, Todd was rarely missed when the teacher came back. On the rare occasions that she noticed that his desk (last one, last row) was empty, she would call "Todd, stop wasting our time with your silly hiding games."  Sometimes Todd didn't reappear until it was time for him to get on the bus ...for more abuse.

     Some time during the summer between sixth and seventh grades, Todd disappeared. I never discovered what happened to him. I don't remember a "For Sale" sign in his yard. Maybe he changed to private school. Maybe he just stopped going to s tool. (Mississippi did not have a mandatory school attendance law at the time, so legally, no one could make you go to school.) I am sorry to say that no one missed Todd or wondered where he went, except for me. I wasn't a junior high humanitarian. My concern was real, but selfish.  With Todd gone, I was the new Fulltime Class Goat for seventh and eighth grades.  All I can say about that was I was too big to shove in a locker and junior high storage space was all under lock-and-key. Still, junior high bullies, particularly Mean Girls, are quite skilled at psychological warfare.

    I got rid of most of my Mean Girl demons by writing Yankee Girl. However, enough fear remained that I did not go ito any of my class reunions until this past year, for fear of running into the real life counterpart of my fictional character, Saranne.  She had continued to make me her favorite target until the day we graduated from high school.  I was relieved when I didn't see her at the reunion.  I later found out that she did come, pulled a few of her old Mean Girl tricks and within an hour learned that the MG act doesn't fly when you are old enough to be a grandmother.  I think I really am, at long last, rid of her ghost.

     I wonder if Todd ever rid himself of us?

   And now for the details of our current book giveaway to win Alexis O'Neill's new book, The Kite That Bridged Two Nations, check April's Friday post for details on entering through Rafflecopter.

Posted by Mary Ann Rodman

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     I am a thoroughly unimaginative writer. I had this pointed out to me by a second grader (!!), during the Q & A part of a school visit.

     "Where so you get your ideas" is always a favorite question.  This particular day I was explaining the origins of My Best Friend and First Grade Stinks (my daughter, Lily), Yankee Girl (my own childhood) and Jimmy's Stars, (my mother's family).  When I finished another little hand waved from the back of the pack,

    "So you just write about your own family?" said the student.

     I had to take a beat before I answered "yes."

     It had never occurred to me before,  All of my stories up to that point did have their origins in family stories,  I come from a family of storytellers, and I grew up always looking for stories of my own to add to the family collection.

     Since then, I have broadened my scope a little.  A Tree for Emmy is based on Lily's best and oldest friend.  The Roller Coaster Kid came from the father of my next-door-neighbor.  I am currently working on a short story based on two of Lily's friends,  But try as I may, my stories always seem to begin with a character or situation that I have encountered in my own life.

 However, starting off with something that happened in "real life" does not mean that I am merely narrating an actual occurrence.  Life is not so tidy as fiction. Life does not have opening scenes, exposition, a climax and a denouement.  Sometimes live does have those elements, but it also has a lot of extraneous stuff as well.  Fiction has filters.  Fiction has to be shaped.

    Yankee Girl is the book that hews closest to the events of my life.  The first draft was around 400 pages.  I included every detail and incident that happened when I moved to Mississippi as a fifth grader.  While I wrestled to get this sprawling mess into something that resembled a story, I learned a cardinal rule of fiction writing:  Just because something happened, doesn't mean it is important to the story.  For example, your Irish setter may have been in the room when you had a monumental fight with your best friend.  You may have been wearing a pink sweatshirt and matching high tops.  Unless your dog plays an active part in the scene (she jumps on your friend to break up the fight) or what you wear is essential to the character,  these are details that can be cut. They clutter your story.

     Or, as one of my mentors at Vermont College told me over and over, "Because it "really happened that way" is not a good enough reason to include it in your story.

     She usually followed this admonition with "How does (this detail, character, plot point) move the story along?"  The answer was usually "It doesn't."  And another page of perfectly good but pointless prose would disappear into the "Delete and Save" file.

   I have yet to write a story beginning with a character totally imaginary. I have edged a bit away from the side of the pool, venturing deeper into the wholly fictional end of writing. My current work-in-progress is based on an event that happened to someone my daughter knows.  She doesn't know him well, or any of the details of what "really" happened.  It doesn't matter.  My mind is creating characters, envisioning scenes and hearing conversations.  All of this from the offhand remark "Mom, there's this guy at school who..."

    To celebrate the arrival of Esther's new book, TXTNG MAMA, in the warehouse, we are extending our giveaway of the book through August 20, 2013. Click  here.

Posted by Mary Ann Rodman

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     As a kid, writing was the one thing I knew I could do well.  There weren't many opportunities for me to shine, until I discovered writing contests. 

     Ironically, (for some whose first published book was a historical fiction set in Civil Rights Era Mississippi), my first writing award was courtesy of....of all things....the United Daughters of the Confederacy.  In eighth grade I came in second place in a city-wide essay contest. The subject?General Peter Alexander Stewart, a fairly obscure Confederate officer.  Trust me, in those pre-Interenet days, it took several weekends of camping out in the reference section of the library before I dredged up enough information for a 500 word essay. On Awards Day, I proudly skipped to the auditorium stage to collect my five dollar prize.

     Five dollars equaled ten hours of babysitting.

     Winning was good.   I was hooked.

      I was blessed to have grown up when Mississippi had an annual state Arts Festival.  Along with a multitude of other arts related events, there was a statewide junior writing contest for high school students.  I won the short story contest  my sophomore year. My prize?  Fifty bucks and lunch with Willie Morris. I had no idea who Willie Morris was other than the former editor of Harpers.  (Later he would write My Dog Skip and I would come to admire his talent.) Then I just knew he was an Important Writer from Mississippi.   I later found out that my hometown writing idol Eudora Welty had been one of the writing contest judges.

     Fifty bucks = One hundred hours of babysitting.

     Winning was good.

     Winning gave me confidence.  Having conquered Mississippi, I didn't think twice about entering a contest sponsored by the Girl Scout magazine, American Girl (not to be confused with the magazine sponsored by the Pleasant Company and the American Girl dolls.) Winning the top short story prize made me positively cocky. I actually got some fan mail, plus a strange phone call from a Baptist youth group in Florida, who wanted to know the "story-behind-the-story."

      The prize? A ridiculous amount of money (to a sixteen-year-old) for something I banged out in study hall one day.  My math skills could no longer translate it to babysitting hours.

     From American Girl it was a short hop to the Grandmama of junior writing contests...the Seventeen Magazine short story contest.  Seventeen Magazine was our fashion-beauty-dating bible. In between the  pictures of Christie Brinkley in hot pants and floppy hats and the Bonnie Bell Lipsmackers ads, there were at least two short stories per issue by nationally recognized authors. (One that made a huge impression on me was by Pulitzer winner, Annie Proulx.)  I entered the contest, hardly believing my own daring.  these girls were good.  They went to fancy Eastern private schools.  Could I compete? I could and I did.  I came in second behind a teenage Joyce Maynard who had just published her first book at 19.

     So what's my point?  My point is that I was allowed to experience early success and gain confidence through these contests.  Even those there was a decades long gap between winning my last contest and selling my first book, I never lost that winning feeling, that confidence that deep down, I had what it took.

     I no longer enter contests.  Most of them aren't open to me as a published writer.  The last one I entered was 25 years ago when Delacorte Press still had their First Middle Grade contest.  However, I recommend entering contests for several reasons.

     1.  A deadline.  When you ares till a pre-published author, writing is can get shoved to the bottom of your priority list. After all, the only person who expects you to write is you. There isn't a publishing deadline, no editor emailing you for revisions.  A contest deadline makes you accountable for getting the work done.

     2.  Honing your craft.  Contests not only have deadline, they have rules. Word counts. Specific genres, formats, subject matter.  Working within contest parameters disciplines your writing.

     3.  Winning.  Winning isn't always about publication or money.  Sometimes the prizes are a conference scholarship or a free critique.  Whatever the prize, it is usually something that will help you in your quest to become a better writer.  (A caveat: I am wary of contests from entities I don't know that charge an entry fee.  Some of these are just plain scams.  When in, doubt check Predators and Editors.)

Posted by Mary Ann Rodman



   

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