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Last month on National Astronomy Day, I was at the Clay Center Observatory signing copies of How Do You Burp in Space? And Other Tips Every Space Tourist Needs to Know. After inscribing a copy for a young boy, I looked up at his older sister. “Do you want to go to space, too?” I asked.
“I did once,” she said.
“What happened?”
She gave me a small smile, a Mona Lisa smile—that is, if Mona L. were a just-budding adolescent proud of her newly acquired sense of condescension.
“Oh…other things took over,” she said in a tone that implied I couldn’t possibly know what she meant.
Oh…but I do. Having been there and done that, I was actually thinking about something else. Do these other things that "take over" really have to edge out wanting to go into space or a daily check on favorite animal cams? Is this really an either/or situation? Do the hormones make us want to pack away those childish things? Or, despite so many strides, do we still think there’s only one type of girl that does those hormones justice?
This last question still on my mind, I later googled “nerds becoming popular” and immediately clicked on the images page. I already knew that Sheldon’s chic and Zuckerberg’s billions have brought those three words in close company. What I wanted to know was how many pictures of girls I would see sprinkled in among the guys wearing pocket protectors and suspenders.
Discounting “popular” girls torturing geeks, here’s the first “nerd girl” picture I came upon. I was hopeful. What a fool I was. Once I clicked through to its home site, here are the words I found: Who would have thought that being a nerd would be cool? Well the time has finally come. There is nothing more fashionable that an over-sized pair of geeky glasses. PS-When I saved the picture to my computer to easily transfer to this post, I noticed it was labeled, "pretty nerd." Little Mona Lisa Girl at the Clay Center, the deck has been stacked against you. Come on, STEM books, cool geek girl role models, Neil Degrasse Tyson. Help girls aspire to go to space and wear cool nail polish in orbit, if that’s what they want. Help everybody feel as if science and smart is back in fashion and sexy.
I spoke to astronaut Sunita Williams when writing Burp in Space, but never asked her if she felt she had to choose between lipstick and her dreams. I wish I had. Maybe I would have been primed to say something to this young girl. Even if she couldn’t hear me now, perhaps it would plant a seed. I know lots of girls get reacquainted with previous interests as women, but I hate to think of what has been lost in the meantime because their intellectual passions couldn’t coexist with the teenage definition of femininity.
On June 20, Liz Rusch is publishing I.N.K.’s last recommended booklist. This time it focuses on STEM-related topics. Let’s all take a second look.
* * * * *
Thank you, Linda. Thank you, I.N.K. Thanks to all of our readers. It’s been a pleasure.
I started writing for I.N.K. in March 2008. With nostalgia and curiosity, I went back to look at some of my initial posts. I kept on reading and realized that I was also looking at a history of what has happened in the field of kids’ nonfiction from then to now. At least, some of its zeitgeist, its ups and downs.
By 2008 we nonfiction writers had had time to road-test our liberation from straitjacket association with encyclopedic information. We had seen or written books such as Dance, Actual Size, and Action Jackson, celebrating the changes that came with cheaper color printing and more experimental styles and formats. It was no wonder my second post for I.N.K., A Rose by any Other Name? bridled against the confines of the word used to describe our field. I wrote:
As we all know, words matter. So what about the one that describes our genre of writing: nonfiction. I used to feel just fine about it, but now I have a slight twinge. After all, it does have a negative point of reference. The “I’m not fiction” instead of the “I am something” kind of writing…
If you link to the post you can see a discussion of the issue and the difficulty I and other commenters had trying to find a good solution.
Artistically booming , we were about to take a fall. In June 2008, however, most of us didn’t know that. I’m a glass-half-full-AND-half-empty type, perhaps I had a premonition. In The Lucky Thing about Friday the 13th, (prompted by my assigned post date) I amused myself with cheerful grumbling about the luck factor (or lack thereof) in writing nonfiction for kids. Here is part of it:
The lucky thing is that schools and libraries can always use a well-written book to update their collection on a particular subject.
The unlucky thing is that they can’t afford to buy them.
The lucky thing is that you can create books on subjects kids will love.
The unlucky thing is that many publishers can’t imagine marketing nonfiction to the trade market, so the kids don’t find them.
If you click on rest of the post, please note I do end with the lucky side; I love what I do and have, luckily, managed to make a living at it.
Nevertheless a few months later, the fan was hit plunging us into the biggest fiscal crisis since the Great Depression. It hit the book industry the same way it affected the nation at large. I know many people whose completed, even paid-for manuscripts were dropped by publishers looking at a shriveling market with no immediate change in sight. One of my own was pushed to a pub date over a year in the future so it could be “supported more successfully.”
Happily unagented for most of my career, I began to think about the comfort of having an ally. I started a search for an agent and was shocked by what I found on their web sites. Another post, Agents-Agents of Change was born.
A personal nadir perhaps, but hope springs and swings eternal along with changing fortunes for people and professions. In other words, if you stick around long enough, the pendulum swings. On a personal level, I had three books come out in 2012. More globally, picture books, declared a dying form, managed a “rebirth.” YA nonfiction is growing. Nonfiction books are more frequent winners and honor winners of the Newbery, Printz and Caldecott.
I’m not exactly sure when the phrase Common Core first appeared in I.N.K. posts, but it increased exponentially in 2012. My book Skyscraper was included in Math Reads, Marilyn Burn’s series using actual books to teach math; and I posted about future models of using our books in the classroom. When Penguin combined The Truth About Poop and Gee Whiz in a new edition, I wrote about what was lost and gained by very intelligently reissuing these books in black-and-white digest form for the burgeoning middle grade market.
I wasn’t the only one commenting on the Brave New World of nonfiction’s role in education. I.N.K. devoted the whole month of October 2013 to Common Core and nonfiction in the classroom with a spirited discussion about the author’s role in the process.
Is Common Core going to change the role and status of nonfiction in our culture? Who knows. I know more imprints are opening their lists to it. And I wish we’d have more time and posts to report on what happens as a result. But it’s been great to have an opportunity to think and write about all things nonfiction until now. Thank you, I.N.K.
This post, in fact, my tenure at I.N.K. is dedicated to Linda Salzman, without whom…
Last Saturday, I attended a terrific conference put on by the Foundation of Children’s Books (FCB) at Lesley University. It’s a regular event and this year it concentrated upon nonfiction. The speakers were nonfiction all-stars including Michael Tougias talking about adapting to write for middle grade after being an adult nonfiction author, Kathy Lasky reflecting upon the evolution of the nonfiction part of her career, Jason Chin finding the narrative arc of science through words and illustrations, and Steve Sheinkin being wildly entertaining while discussing books about very serious subjects.
I was especially pleased, however, to listen to fellow I.N.K. contributor Melissa Stewart. She appeared in the middle of the lineup, and that’s when you could hear pens scratching on notebooks. Melissa was there to discuss “Nonfiction Books You’ll Love” from 2013 and 2014.
The way that she presented them would do any nonfiction writer proud. She organized her info into topics that provided context to her audience. She gave just enough description about each book to inform and create the desire for further research. Her enthusiasm for her subject/s was infectious. She even supplied back matter: a takeaway list of 30 books arranged in alphabetical order by title and by year.
I guess what impressed me most besides Melissa’s careful curation was the generosity of her presentation--praise, yes, but also ways we could appreciate and use the books she mentioned. That’s why authors in the audience were writing down titles as potential mentor texts while teachers and librarians were listing books to add to their collections.
I remember a post Melissa did a while ago, saying that Common Core is here to stay and one of the best things writers can do (if they have the time and interest) is to give teachers easy ways to use their books to teach these standards. Then she helped us further by providing 10 ways to help educators, complete with with examples of these ideas.
During her presentation at the FCB, Melissa showed us a new idea she is using, a multimedia revision timeline that chronicles the very long road she took to finally publish her book, No Monkeys, No Chocolate. It was a fabulous way to show students and beginning authors that effortless writing takes an enormous amount of steps and work.
Now, she has given us 11 ways to help educators.
As kids’ book writers, when we think conference, we usually think NCTE, SCBWI, IRA, or ALA. Now that I teach at the Low Residency MFA Program in Creative Writing at Lesley University in Cambridge, MA, I’m also a member of AWP (the Association of Writers and Writing Programs). Last week I went to my first AWP conference—a crazy confab of over 550 readings and panels with 12,000 writers spending four days trying to find connections, inspiration, and bathrooms at Boston’s Hynes Convention Center.
Writing for young people is a relatively new addition to MFA programs so the proportion of programming devoted to our genre is much smaller. I also noticed that many of our sessions were the first and last of the day, seemingly less desirable times. Interpret that as you will.
Hating Your Writing: A Love Story didn’t have a children’s book author on its panel, but still seems a useful discussion for any of us. Five poets and prose writers (Richard Bausch, Molly Peacock, Daniel Nester, Melissa Stein, and Chuck Sweeney) discussed that hideous moment when your euphoric assessment of your draft somehow plummets from brilliance to dross upon the next reading. What are these literary mood swings? Is there ever an upside? Can dejection lead to breakthroughs and better writing?
If any of these writers were feeling literary despair on Saturday, they kept it to themselves. Instead they tried to share their insights on managing the emotional ups and downs of creative life. Here are some of their points that struck me:
Chad Sweeney likened these emotional downswings to exhaustion, then commented that exhaustion is sometimes a healthy reaction, especially if you are trying to write to anticipated criticism or expectations or in a style that once fed you but no longer does so. It can be a sign you have to figure out how you’ve gone off course—dig in or dig out—and come up with something new.
Melissa Stein suggested that there are two types of internal critics: one is discerning and can make helpful comments you should consider, the other is the bad parent (think Joan Crawford in Mommy Dearest) who insists you don’t even have the talent or right to tell this story. Give yourself the time and space to figure out which critic is in your head and act accordingly.
Richard Bausch spoke like a veteran. He said it’s working that is important. Put in the time and at the end of the day, ask yourself, “Did I work?” If the answer is yes, you’ve accomplished your goal. Develop a sense of calm; you can’t mess your writing up because you can always do over. If all else fails, lower your standards and keep on going. Remember, revision is all.
Molly Peacock agreed. Keep your standards high and your expectations low; it helps you keep going. But allow room for dormancy; it’s all right to walk away for a while with the intent of returning. Furthermore know yourself and how to interpret your energies and feelings. Peacock is a morning writer. As a result, she refuses to make any judgments or decisions about her writing after 3 p.m.
Donald Nester said he sometimes gets unstuck by changing the form that he’s writing in a little. Let yourself get lost again and something new might happen. Even journaling can transform material into the nugget you need to find your way.
Other miscellaneous tips:
--Be kind and compassion, give yourself permission to fail by reaching into new areas.
--Create the conditions you need for good writing--good food or walks--anything that makes you feel more open and engaged and closer to the source.
--Banish the critic and get it out there. Then draft by draft by draft, things proceed toward grace.
--If you can’t turn off the critical voice, acknowledge it and go on.
--Always remember, things may not be as bad as you think. Vladimir Nabokov dumped his manuscript of Lolita in the garbage, only to have it rescued by his wise wife. In other words, wait a week and read it again.
In 2004, my book Skyscraper was published. In 2010, it went out of print. I wrote a post about it, Skyscraper RIP, a eulogy for a book that was well received, but really because I loved the experience of researching and writing it.
Lazarus, you aren't the only one. I'm happy to say that Skyscraper is alive once more, in some classrooms at least. The story of its resurrection, however, is also the story of how some publishers and school systems will be handling Common Core.
Scholastic has published a series called Math Reads. Marilyn Burns, whose resume in teaching and designing math curricula seems impressive, headed a team of other teachers to create it. Here is a description of their product:
Math Reads is the NEW math and literature program from Marilyn Burns. Designed to support the Common Core State Standards for K–5, each grade-level collection of books brings math alive and serves as a springboard for math instruction.
Each grade-level Math Reads program includes:
- 25 children’s literature titles (5 copies of each)
- Lessons written by Marilyn Burns and Math Solutions authors
- eBooks of select titles for interactive whiteboards
- Math Solutions’ Math and Literature professional development book
If you look at the curriculum for Math Reads' 5th grade, you'll see Skyscraper has been included and is in some very good company, including Hottest, Coldest, Highest, Deepest by my I.N.K. colleague Steve Jenkins, Pennies for Elephants by a friend Lita Judge, Wilma Unlimited by the always good Kathleen Krull, and Mordicai Gerstein's The Man Who Walked Between the Towers, an extraordinary book I've blogged about before. So this Math Reads series contains good fiction and nonfiction books (although only 5 copies of each per classroom), additional titles in eBook format, and lesson plans to use all these books to satisfy Common Core. Hopefully, teachers and students will be exposed to good literature they might not have ever seen. Hopefully it will spur a greater interest in reading as well as a better understanding of math. It will help overworked teachers adapt to the demands of Common Core quickly and, again hopefully, once they get their bearings, they will feel confident to use their own ideas and own favorite books to enrich their teaching. These are possible positive outcomes of this series--along with good profits for Scholastic.It also seems to be a model we will see more and more as publishing and education fulfill both the needs and opportunities that Common Core has created in terms of nonfiction in the classroom. I'm not advocating for this model, I mentioned it to start a discussion of what other models and reactions we'll see. What we think about them. What we realistically hope to see. What we think are practical and will work.
What do you all think? I'm particularly interested in what all the teachers, librarians and other educators who read our blog have to say about the mat
What is the sound of one hand typing?
Plunk, plunk…plunk……………plunk…oops, backspace.
What is the sound of two hands typing?
In my case, it’s been: Ouch! Ouch! Ouch! Then, after a while, a retreat downstairs to the couch.
About six weeks ago, I had a bad car accident and broke all the bones in my left forearm and carpel (I guess I now have my own version of carpel tunnel syndrome). I feel lucky I wasn’t hurt more severely and that I’m right handed. Two operations and several casts later, I’m slowly on the mend.
So how has this affected my writing? Well, I’m glad I could confine what little writing I did in the early days to email. Back then, painkillers and only one useful hand made the keyboard feel like a wilderness to be conquered. I am a touch typist and have found that using one hunt-and-peck forefinger means a lot more hunting and less pecking than I imagined. My fingers know the keys much better than my visual memory does. It doesn’t help that my emotional attachment to a decade-old keyboard means many of the letter symbols have worn off the keys.
Yes, I know that I can just compose longhand, the way I used to hammer out all my articles when I first started my career as a magazine writer. But technology changed a long time ago. I made the switch and my brain has too. I am so used to my hands being able to keep up with my thoughts that I’m no longer trained to hold the upcoming words --long phrases or a word picture--in my mind for that length of time. Tap, tap, tapping of the forefinger creates the same problem.
Dragon, the voice recognition software? Thought about it, bought it, returned it unwrapped. Maybe it would have been a godsend for email. But, for me, there are essential components to thoughtful writing it just wouldn’t satisfy. The process isn’t all that different, but dictation feels distracting, moor less, as if the words I really want, their order and the meaning I want to make of them could just float away. When typing, words and ideas go from the mind through the hands, then via the eyes back to the brain to continue the process. Mind, hands, eyes—three parts, each with its own job to do, which includes freeing the others to do theirs.
I know Steven Hawking has managed just fine using a different system. And, he’s hardly the only one. If my injury had been worse or permanent, I would work to rewire my creative circuitry. Seems a little daunting, though. So, even though I’ve given serious thought to a book I’m gearing up to refashion, something tells me it will stay on simmer until my cast comes off.
By:
Susan E. Goodman,
on 3/12/2012
Blog:
I.N.K.: Interesting Non fiction for Kids
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Have you ever waited at a bus stop? Waited and waited at a bus stop? You watch cabs rolling by, watch buses going the other way, watch your watch with increasing irritation. Finally your bus does come--with two or three other buses right behind it. A herd, a pod, a troup of buses. Very annoying, isn’t it?
A similar thing has happened to me in the publishing world, but I’m not sure whether it’s annoying or not. In 2004, I had five books come out in one year. And, up until a few months ago, I thought I would have four coming out in 2012.
How does this happen? I’ve never written four or five books in one year, so how do they get bunched up on the other end like buses? Good question. Some books go into production relatively quickly, while others take a long time to write. For example, I wrote a book called Skyscraper that chronicled the making of the Random House Building and I couldn’t write any faster than the construction. It had a four-year gestation period and came out in 2004 along with Choppers! that took about two years from research to release. Other reasons? Editors have babies. It can take a while to find the right illustrator or to wait for an illustrator to finish two other projects before starting yours or the illustrator goes on strike. The economy tanks and publishing houses thin their seasons and spread out the books so your pub date jumps a year or so into the future.
Let me be clear, I’m not complaining, really. I know having a bevy of books is an embarrassment of riches. It’s certainly better than no books at all, or a surfeit of buses traveling in a pack. But what are the pros and cons for the author—and the books?
In the old days, the perception was: bringing out more than one book a season or a year meant the author was competing against herself. Mark that down as a notch in the “con” section. Of course in the old days, most authors published with only one house so the publisher would be competing against itself too; they controlled supply and demand.
Today many children’s book authors work with several houses. We cannot act as traffic cops giving Simon & Schuster the green light for one season and putting Penguin on hold. Now publishers are competing against each other. Has that changed the model? Does it help or hurt the author? And given the increased avenues of media, does having multiple books out at the same time increase buzz? Advertising wisdom says the more consumers hear something, the more likely they will remember it, perhaps become interested and start word-of-mouth.
In 2004, I decided that if there was any time to hire a publicist, having five books come out was it. Susan Raab and I concentrated on three of them. Susan was great and responsible for a good deal of the media coverage they received. S
By:
Susan E. Goodman,
on 2/12/2012
Blog:
I.N.K.: Interesting Non fiction for Kids
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Like so many New Yorker subscribers, I am always months behind. They pile up week by week, screaming their silent rebuke. Sometimes I hide them in a corner; rarely, I become defiant and throw them out without a glance of what I might miss. Keeping up with this magazine is the best (only?) reason I can think of for computing to a job on the subway instead of just carrying my coffee upstairs in my pjs.
I’m glad the November 14, 2011 issue didn’t end up unseen and in the recycling. Yesterday I read an article by John McPhee, one of the greatest nonfiction writers around. In “Progression,” he discussed the evolution of many of his ideas, when he lets his subject matter dictate the structure of his piece, and the few times (just two in a very full career) he chose a structure and searched for a subject to fit it.
Many of us here have written about such matters already, but I find the topic endlessly fascinating.
I thought I might pluck a few points from the article that could hopefully spur some conversation in the comments section from my fellow bloggers and some of our readers.
1. McPhee said he once listed all the pieces he had written in decades and realized that 90 percent of them were related to subjects he had been interested in before he went to college.
Is that true for you? I’m not sure it is for me. I really liked biology, but I’d never have predicted I would write so much about science. Is that because I was a young girl at a time when females considered other types of careers? Or is it that I didn’t understand then that there is a poetry in pure science that is as lyric as Shakespeare?
2. McPhee said that his readers aren’t shy with suggestions, then noted these ideas are often closer to the readers’ passions than his own. Yet he did end up using two of their proposals.
Anybody here ever turn an suggested idea from a reader or a kid into a book?
3. McPhee mentioned that “new pieces can shoot up from other pieces, pursuing connections that run through the ground like rhizomes.”
I bet so many of us have written books or articles this way. I’ve already talked about one of mine in an earlier post (http://inkrethink.blogspot.com/2011/02/on-and-on-and-on.html). Have you met a minor character while researching one story who demanded a book of his or her own? Or turned an idea on its ear for another go-round?
4. And finally, what about McPhee’s ultimately successful attempt to tame a potentially disastrous idea: trying to find the right subject to fit within a pre-set structure. His result turned out to be the classic Encounters with t
Tanya Lee Stone. Susan Goodman. Jim Murphy. Kelly Fineman. You know these folks. They’re regular contributors to this blog. They’re also four of the thirty or so authors featured in Real Revision by award-winning children’s book author Kate Messner. The book is such a gem that you’ll definitely want your very own copy.Real Revision is published by Stenhouse Publisher, which caters to educators, so this book is written specifically for teachers. That makes it great for all you educators out there. But I know plenty of writers also read this blog. This book is a MUST READ for you, too.Some chapters focus on fiction-specific revision strategies, but the lion share of the book is useful to nonfiction writers as well. Here are few of my favorite quotations from nonfiction writers.Kelly Fineman on why she takes time away from a manuscript between writing the rough draft and delving into the revisions: “It could be as little as half an hour or as long as a year, but I need to have established some sort of distance from it in order to read it at least somewhat objectively and not like a doting author.”Loree Griffin Burns on the importance of reading widely and carefully considering the structure of nonfiction writing: “I pay close attention to the structure of the books I am reading all the time, and I compare and contrast them to the structure I’m working with. This is always helpful to me because it gives me confidence . . .or in some cases, helps me see why my own structure is not working.”Susan Goodman on striking the right balance between sharing information and engaging readers while writing Life on the Ice:“. . . I was trying to fit in so many facts that I had lost sight of what my book was all about—the excitement on exploration . . . So I sat down at my computer with an imaginary nine-year-old kid beside me. And I simply told that kid an adventure story—one where scientists were the explorers.”Jim Murphy on finding the proper voice and storytelling technique for his Newbery Honor book The Great Fire. “I read newspapers and personal recollections of the Chicago fire until I had absorbed the pace and language of the era. . . . I didn’t try to duplicate voices from the past, but I knew I had a faint echo of them in my style.”Tanya
a good & worthy post, Ms. Susan. That last passage was right on the money: at the very least, get a good night's sleep before casting your work [or yourself] out the window.
Thanks, Cheryl. I have tried, at least, to wait before doing myself bodily harm. With my work, not as always as patient.