For the first in the Museum of My Archive in 10 Objects  (apologies to Neil MacGregor and the British Museum) I bring you a sketch of our house, drawn just before my 17th birthday from our back garden during the sweltering summer of 1976.

23 Butler's Lane from the Back Garden Rotring pen and Winsor & Newton ink on paper, June 1976.

We lived in Butlers Lane, Sutton Coldfield from 1970 until the end of 1977,  this was the house where I grew from child to teenager.

It was a corner house and significantly bigger than any of our previous (and subsequent!) homes. My parents bought it for a bargain, it hadn't been altered since it was built in the 1920's and was in desperate need of complete modernisation, much of which my dad did himself. I still have clear memories of when we moved in - there were slate fossils of ammonites and other pre-historic sea life left in the kitchen from the previous owner, also a big, black cast iron built in range, and in one of the bedroom cupboards an old clockwork railway set. All were disposed of very quickly in the urgency to fix up the house, much to my regret!

The reason this is the first in my History is because this house is where it all started, this is where I really embraced a love of history and of art, where I began drawing in earnest. I've more fond memories of this house than any other.

One of the best things about it was the long extended back garden, which had two large trees and several smaller ones (not visible in this drawing), a rock garden and an allotment at the bottom, which my grandfather cultivated when he later moved in with us. I shared a bedroom with my brother (on the whole amicably), on my side of the room my dad built a study alcove which we were supposed to use for homework, but which I actually used mainly to paint Napoleonic soldiers. Airfix model aeroplanes hung from the ceiling in an eternal dogfight. On my brother's side of the room was a large cardboard cut-out of Marc Bolan, Roger Dean posters and a fur trimmed record player. We gone on okey. My sister always had her own room, bedecked with posters of Black Sabbath and David Bowie. The house was easy walking distance to school and local shops at Mere Green, a bike ride from Sutton Park, and just a couple of minutes walk from Butlers Lane train station, which gave us access to Sutton Coldfield and Birmingham. In the summer I'd cycle the opposite direction along country lanes out towards Lichfield.

From this distance in time it seems a pretty well perfect place to have grown up. I loved this house.

This wasn't the first time I'd drawn it, nor would it be the last, but this particular image seems to me to sum up a perfect summer at one of the happiest and most carefree times of my life.

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Detail

This movie is my childhood.

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Chatting with a friend just now made me think: I am older than I expected to get. 
When I was a teen looking forward to the millennium change in 1999 I was disappointed that I'd be an old lady, barely able to enjoy it. The millennium change was 17 years ago. I enjoyed it JUST FINE. Ahem. 

What would my teen self think of me now? 
She wouldn't approve of my short hair or my body, but she'd like my studio and work. 
She'd want to be friends with my kids. 
She would think today's Charlie is a nice old guy, and the Charlie I fell in love with in 1980 was romantic. 
She'd like my dogs. 
She'd think it's weird that I eat vegetables for breakfast. 

She'd think it's cool but not groovy that I became friends with my siblings, 
that I have so many good friends in my life today, 
and that I'm this happy. 
All of this makes me plan what I'll be like in 2046. 
I'd better not disappoint me.

Have you entertained your 17 year old self lately? 
Or your 87 year old self?

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‘My first impression is of daybreak, light and colour and golden and purple fruits at the level of my shoulder.’ With this beautiful sentence, so characteristic in its fusion of poetry and physical, bodily detail, Rudyard Kipling evokes the fruit-market in Bombay, the city (now Mumbai) where he was born in 1865.

The post Something of myself: the early life of Rudyard Kipling appeared first on OUPblog.

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This month, the middle-grade authors at Smack Dab in the Middle are blogging about what we did during the summer when we were kids.

Click this link to read my blog about Jabberbox.

And while you're there, check out the other authors.

This photograph is of the woods near the house where I grew up in Wisconsin.

Not too far from where Jabberbox was first discovered.

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Kaleidoscope - Poetry by Carole Anne Carr [Kindle Edition]

£0.00 includes free wireless delivery via Amazon Whispernet available from 1st to 5th May

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During the 1930s, as movies, radio, pulps, and comic strips developed, the Big Little Books® appeared on the scene. The product was small, stubby, thick, and inexpensive. The books drew much source material from motion pictures, radio, and comic strips and successfully competed with pulp magazines and comic books until the end of the decade. They served to promote films and radio programs and were produced in such quantities that they could be sold for a dime.

In 1932 the seemingly paradoxical term Big Little Book® was given to certain books published by the Whitman Publishing Company of Racine, Wisconsin. The term promised the buyer a great amount of reading material and pleasure (BIG) within a small and compact (LITTLE) book. These Whitman books set the standards for similar books, and Whitman's copyrighted description has become popularized in a generic way to umbrella similar books.










The first BLB, The Adventures of Dick Tracy, came off the presses just before Christmas in 1932. It
preceded the first true comic book by a year, and the subsequent BLB production spanned more than a half century. Within the span, there are historical patterns which clearly define three major periods of publication.

The Golden Age (1932 to mid-1938) is a description reserved for the most interesting, influential, and memorable production of the books. These were the true Big Little Books®. During this period, the effects of the depression were still being felt, and numerous publishers besides Whitman produced inexpensive BLB-type reading materials of great variety. In mid-1938 the two major companies, Whitman and Saalfield, made major changes in their trademarks (Whitman's Big Little Books® became Better Little Books® and Saalfield's Little Big Books® became Jumbo Books®).

The Silver Age (mid-1938 to 1949) produced a less innovative set of books. Their production was influenced by the growing comic book market and paper shortages during WWII. The number of competitive companies diminished. Only Whitman maintained a continuous output of books through the war years. It used the "flip-it" feature extensively to attract buyers, and as these years went by, the books gradually contained fewer and fewer pages. In 1949, the last Better Little Book®, Little Orphan Annie and the Ancient Treasure of Am (288 pages) was published.

The Modern Age (1950 to the present) is characterized by more than 40 years of sporadic and short-
lived attempts to revive the books in different forms and with different content: New Better Little Books® (1949-50); BLB TV Series® (1958); the hard cover 2000-Series (1967-68); the soft cover 5700-Series (1973-present). During this period, Whitman became subsumed under the auspices of the Western Publishing Company.


So if you’re wandering through a garage sale or flea market and happen to spot a Big Little Book® in a pile of dog-earred novels, do yourself a favor and buy it. It just may be the start of a beautiful relationship between a child you know, and the written word.

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April is National Poetry Month! All month long we’ll be celebrating by posting some of our favorite poems for Poetry Friday. For our second Poetry Friday post, we chose Family Garden by Francisco Alarcón, illustrated by Paula Barragán from Poems to Dream Together/Poemas para soñar juntos.

Family Garden

in the backyard/of our home/there is a garden

all in our family/do our part/in maintaining

Mamá loves/to plant and nip/flowery rosebushes

Abuelita keeps/her mint herbs/in a small pot

Papá really likes/to come out hose/in hand and water

the lemon tree/the squashes/and the tomatoes

that my sisters/would grow/every spring

my brothers and I/in turn weed out/and mow the lawn

all in our family/take time to tend/each other’s dreams

even our puppy/knows how/to grow bones

in this garden/the sun shines/green smiles

What poems is everyone else reading? Feel free to share in the comments section!

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The interior life is often stupid. Its egoism blinds it and deafens it; its imagination spins out ignorant tales, fascinated. It fancies that the western wind blows on the Self, and leaves fall at the feet of the Self for a reason, and people are watching. A mind risks real ignorance for the sometimes paltry prize of an imagination enriched. The trick of reason is to get the imagination to seize the actual world—if only from time to time.

…

The world did not have me in mind; it had no mind. It was a coincidental collection of things and people, of items, an I myself was one such item… I could be connected to the outer world by reason, if I chose, or I could yield to what amounted to a narrative fiction[.]

- Annie Dillard, An American Childhood*

I am an introvert, but don’t worry. I’m not about to launch into one of those self-fascinated pieces about how I am special and misunderstood. It’s just that I do have a very interior life, full of reflections and broodings and spun narratives. I imagine most writers are like that (perhaps not all), but I was struck by this passage and how it crystallizes a constant struggle of mine to do an objective assessment of my reality and spring it free of fancy, to know know what I actually know, and what I’ve constructed.

Writers tend to fancy that every bird symbolizes their own hope, and it’s easy to forget that the bird is minding its own business. This is why I opined recently that I wished I had majored in some “hard science,” where enough information surrounds an object that you can understand it on its own terms: the bird striking across the sky becomes a kestrel, and you know a thing or two about its behavior and habits, so it is no longer a stark image but a living thing. It is not there to inspire you; it is chasing a wren.

This bears on a work in progress and an essential scene — essential to character, not to plot — and I now know what I was trying to accomplish with that scene, though I don’t think I actually need to change anything.

*I may post more about this remarkable book, which recounts a cognitive and perceptual awakening by a child with astounding detail. I do not think Ms. Dillard has ever written a book for children, but her ability to recall the experience of being a child is like nothing I have ever read.

Filed under: Miscellaneous Tagged: childhood, dillard, interiority, shelley

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One idea that drives me as a writer for children is that our childhood experiences and decisions determine our character as adults. I think “experiences” is well treated in literature, which has drawn a lot from Freudian ideas about trauma and triggers, and adults as living late reactions to what happened to them as kids. Less often are adults seen as the consequences of decisions, and this is what I want to preach: that children are architects of their own destinies.

 

But what if it’s all wrong? We’ve so absolutely accepted this “child is the [parent] of the [adult]” theory that we don’t question it. It’s one of those rare ideological principles that seems across political and religious differences, we frequently opine (for example) that a privileged childhood can makes a political candidate unable to “connect” with “regular people.” We agree that an abused childhood fosters an abusive adulthood. We owe our own character–good traits and bad–to the way were raised and the efforts of our parents.

This article doesn’t offer much besides questions, but I think they are intriguing questions. As every cell in our body is refreshed, do we disconnect from our childhood selves? For those of us (like me) who end up in new places with entirely new networks throughout our lives, is there enough continuity to explain our adult “self” with childhood experience?

For example, I have lived in Minnesota for nearly 20 years, and now, outside of fleeting facebook encounters, know few people from before I moved here. There are elements of my childhood self in my current self, of course, but the child I used to be is practically unknowable to me. I honestly don’t even know if Kurtis, age 11, would like the author “Kurtis Scaletta” who purportedly writes for children like him. Sometimes when I meet people who knew me as a child, but have not seen me for decades, they describe a child Kurtis I don’t remember or recognize.

I do think I am largely informed by the corrections I made in my 30s to mistakes I made in my 20s that were due to trauma suffered in my teens… so there’s a domino effect in play, but there is a lot to be said for the relationships I have had, the books I have read, and the decisions and experiences I have had since I turned 30… these things are of their own soil. My wife and son, my writing life and writing friends, have made me who I am, and most of those people weren’t in my life until five years ago (my wife, ten). Any one of a few major decisions could have led to a completely different life and a completely different Kurtis.

In a book the world has largely forgotten, Love Among the Mashed Potatoes, Gregory MacDonald (best known for the Fletch series), gives the advice via his columnist protagonist: you have until age thirty to forgive your parents; after that you have to begin forgiving yourself. It may be one of the best tidbits of wisdom I’ve gotten from a book, and as I get older I appreciate more and more what it means to forgive yourself and stop blaming your problems on a lousy childhood.

As a writer I will have to persist with the premise that children are laying the foundation for the selves they will build, but this article has given me something to think about.

Filed under: Miscellaneous Tagged: adulthood, childhood, deep thoughts, goldstein, gregory macdonald, popova, spinoza, william wordsworth

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I love Peter Pan.

I remember watching the televised Mary Martin version as a child; the first Broadway show my grandparents took me to see was the 1979 revival of the Broadway show.

I watched those as a child and saw magic of Peter Pan as a child: the wonder, the adventure, the fear and avoidance of what growing up would mean. That Peter was played by a woman barely registered in terms of text or subtext.

Growing older, growing up, meant learning more about Peter Pan and J.M. Barrie, the man who invented him. I'm not going to get into that -- there is plenty out there about it. While the origins, inspiration, and evolution of Peter Pan are fascinating right now I'm writing more about viewer response, and one viewer in particular: me.

I love Peter Pan. Watching it as a child was magical. And I got it: Wendy and the boys went, had adventures, and when they had had enough, they went home.

I want to give a nod to three subsequent versions of Peter Pan I adored:

Hook (1991), which said that growing up doesn't mean losing touch with one's childhood. Traditionally, Peter Pan views growing up as either/or, with growing up a putting away and forgetting of "childish" things. Hook said that becoming an adult can be a good thing, but it doesn't mean a rejection and forgetting of childhood and that Peter doing so wasn't healthy. It was just as unhealthy as rejecting adulthood.

Peter Pan (2003), which gave us an age-appropriate boy, Jeremy Sumpter (born 1989) playing Peter Pan. This meant that when Pan said he was a child who hadn't grown up, the viewer saw an actual child. The other children were also played by children of the right ages for the text; Rachel Hurd-Wood was born in 1990. It captured the magic of Peter, the desire for adventure, and kept it child-centered. It's practically perfect.

As a lover of Once Upon a Time (TV series), I have to also mention their version of Peter Pan. Robbie Kay (born 1995) played Pan in 2013. Pan was played by an older teenager, and Kay clearly wasn't an adult but he also wasn't a child. This take -- spoilers -- was perhaps the darkest one yet, in which Peter Pan was not a child who refused to grow up but rather an adult who refused to remain a grown up. Once that adult was offered the chance to become a child again, he not only took it, he was willing to kill to stay a child. For this version, being a child was not about being "innocent" but was about refusing responsibility.

As an adult, how I view Peter and Wendy is more complex. The recent TV version, NBC Peter Pan LIVE, got me thinking about Peter Pan and childhood and how we view that, and I'm not sure if they intended it to be that way. Except for the roles of Michael and John, all the actors were adults. Wendy, Peter, the Lost Boys: all grown ups. Seeing adults say the lines about being a child, pretending, not growing up, just made me really think about those lines and what was, or wasn't going in the play.

As I think about it, I realize that the hero is, and always has been, Wendy -- it is Wendy who goes on the adventure to Neverland, it is Wendy who is faced with the conflict of her "let's pretend" being challenged by those around her as not good enough, it is Wendy who realizes that playing by someone else's rules gets tiring, and let's just all go home now, OK? It is Wendy who later realizes she cannot deny that same pretending to her own daughter, just because Wendy herself is older and wiser.

Because of the age of the play, much of Wendy's choices are presented in some very old-fashioned ways, and many of us watching wished mightily for a feminist retelling of Peter Pan. But as I write this up, and with the acknowledgement that the play is over 100 years old -- really, what's so wrong with wanting to play house or play school, as Wendy does? She also wants Peter's version of adventures, but what is so wrong with her manner of pretending, and why won't the boys play along with her? The problem is not in Wendy's desires, but it's in Peter's denial to recognize her dreams as being as valid as his own, and wanting to keep Wendy in a box of "mother." That's not just because the play is old -- it's because Peter is a child and that's how children think. Only their own dreams matter; other people exist only in the child's own reality. (Ask any child who is shocked to see a teacher in a store, outside of school.)

Part of the problem is that it is Wendy's adventure in Peter's world. Emily Asher-Perrin has a brilliant analysis of Peter, and how Peter himself is hardly a hero, in Peter Pan's "Greatest Pretend" is Heroism at Tor. As she explains, "Here’s the thing about Neverland—it is Peter’s playhouse. He is like the guy who owns the casino; the house always wins and he is the house. Everything in Neverland is set up so that it caters directly to his whims." Most children, myself included, would not pick up on that because the whims of children can be so similar so it's not obvious to younger viewers that this is Peter's playhouse, not any child's playhouse.

That it is Peter's playhouse, and all those his playthings, is part of the problem with Tiger Lily. Tiger Lily -- that's another area where much has been written. Two recent articles on that: at Why 'Fix' Tiger Lily? Why Not Just Let Her Go? by Dr. Adrienne Keene, posted at Indian Country; and #NotYourTigerLily: Nine Months Later and They Still Don't Get The Point by Johnnie Jae, posted at Native News.

As Asher-Perrin concludes at her article at Tor, "as Barrie states, Pan will always come back to steal our runaways and lost boys, and will continue to do so as long as children are “Innocent and heartless.” The genius of Pan’s tale, is that innocence does not automatically denote goodness. Instead, it makes a child’s lack of experience a very frightening thing after all."

These things happening to children, by children, as in the 2003 version, make sense. Peter played by a child has it make sense, even if the child has lived years and years as Peter has. As adults, we recognized that children are, well, children, and excuse or understand.

Now, suddenly, have adults say those lines? Do that pretend? Refuse to grow up?

The NBC version is no longer a brilliant and honest look at childhood and growing up; instead, it is a look at those adults who avoid growing up, even as they physically grow and mature, and it shows that this resistance to adulthood is not charming - it's creepy as hell. Holding onto childhood and avoiding responsibility or making decisions is neither innocence nor goodness. It's creepy.

And that creepiness? Is why yes, I still love Peter Pan. Because it gives one thing to the child viewer and another to the adult viewer. Because it's willing to say that children and childhood aren't perfect; and are not something to idealize. Growing up is not a bad thing; refusing to do so, fighting against it, isn't a good thing.










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© Elizabeth Burns of A Chair, A Fireplace & A Tea Cozy

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From the Toy Box, Ltd Gallery 

I’m so excited to announce that I’ll be participating in Ltd Art Gallery Seattle’s show “From the Toy Box”. It’s my first piece in a gallery and I was lucky enough for Ltd to choose my illustration for the poster representing some really, really, REALLY awesome talent! I’m so honoured to be in this show amongst these fantastic artists. You can see the event here:http://www.facebook.com/events/769836919741028 and if you’re in Seattle and happen to go, I’d love to hear about it!

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Today, three stories, followed by a few thoughts...

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Just over a month ago, it was the centenary of Tove Jansson's birth.  There were public celebrations in her home land of Finland, and an exhibition at the Finnish National Gallery dedicated to the paintings, illustrations, and writing of this extraordinary figure.

I believe this exhibition also included the original miniature Moomin house on loan from its home at the Moomin Museum Tampere.  This is a blue, five storey building which Jansson built with her  partner Tuulikki Pietilä in the 1970's.  It's about three metres high,

Moomin House, Tampere (Adele Pennington)

I haven't been to see it, but my cousin and fellow Moomin-fan Ann  - who lives in Norway - has. She describes how "Tove and Tuulikki built the house using materials they found washed up on the beach. The roof tiles, by the way, were made from cedar bark they found and cut into shape using nail scissors. Fish-scale pattern. And Moominpappa stands in his room which is  equipped with maritime clutter, looking out of his window through his telescope. The small shy people are in tiny rooms in the basement."

But Tove didn't build this wonderful house to put in a museum. She didn't build it to market her books, or as a wonderful photo opportunity for social media. This house is a labour of love, a work of art, an act of pure creation by someone who felt compelled to write, draw and make from an early age, and for whom imagined universes arrived so fully realised in her head, they could literally be translated into bricks and mortar.

That house, along with so much else - like the sculptures and montages of scenes from the books they made together and put in glass cases - is for me a beautiful representation of why in some ways, Tove Jansson was the ultimate children's writer.

She wasn't just a children's writer, of course, not by a long stretch - but she was one of the greatest artists to write children's books.

In a famous 1961 essay, “The Deceitful Writer of Children’s Books”, Jansson writes that she writes for children not because she is particularly interested in them, or because she wants to entertain or educate them, but much more because she needs to satisfy "the childishness in herself".

This is not emotional immaturity or arrested development, of course - but rather a profound connection as an adult with the intuitive world of childish make believe and play, and a sad awareness at its passing.

Born into a somewhat madcap household of artists, from an early age Jansson was drawing, writing and making, at a dizzyingly prolific rate. It was like a compulsion, and I think any writer would - at certain times - envy that inexhaustible drive to produce and create. She developed her craft in all disciplines over many years, but in the 1970's, was able to sit down and build a toy house for her Moomins just as she might have done as a child at the beginning of the century.

Moominland is the world through the eyes of a child, captured with the skill of an adult, a synthesis of pure-make believe and acute, uninhibited natural observation, a perfect marriage of pictures and words. And it is a world of mystery tinged with an ineluctable sadness.

"It was the end of August — the time when owls hoot at night and flurries of bats swoop noiselessly over the garden. Moomin Wood was full of glow-worms, and the sea was disturbed. There was expectation and a certain sadness in the air, and the harvest moon came up huge and yellow. Moomintroll had always liked those last weeks of summer most, but he didn’t really know why.” (Finn Family Moomintroll)



The Moomins are popular worldwide, very accessible stories with pictures for readers young and old, with a warm and human cast of family characters, but the Moominvalley with its Hattifatteners and the Groke is also a strange, and occasionally frightening place - just like growing up. The mysteries of the wild country beyond are never far away:

“The very last house stood all by itself under a dark green wall of fir-trees, and here the wild country really began. Snufkin walked faster and faster straight into the forest. Then the door of the last house opened a chink and a very old voice cried: ‘Where are you off to?’

‘I don’t know,’ Snufkin replied.

The door shut again and Snufkin entered his forest, with a hundred miles of silence ahead of him.”

The genius of Jansson is her ability to take children so simply and so naturally on exciting night journeys down mysterious paths, never to deny the human impulse to grow and to wander - even if gallons of milk, berries and buns will always be waiting in a warm Moominhouse on your return.

The elegant drawings and poetic prose of the Moomins tread the finest of paths between an enticing retreat of warmth, family eccentricity and humour - that we know cannot endure forever - and the mysterious unknowable forest beyond. It's a path every child must take one day, and who better to guide you down that road than a Moomin? Which other cast of creatures so gracefully demonstrate the wonder, mystery and sadness of growing up?

If it is childish to memorialise childhood with such imagination and feeling, whether through a miniature blue house or the pages of a book, then let's always try and write for the childishness in ourselves.

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  i just wanted to be mork, as a kid. make everybody laugh and go to another planet as maybe that's where i came from, all along? sigh...xoxoxoxo, robin. 

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©the enchanted easel 2014

©the enchanted easel 2014

"the rainbow connection" ©the enchanted easel 2014

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I've been a very bad blogger this year, mainly because of this, of course. But G's treatments are now done, and we're working toward getting our life back to our "new normal." But first, we're moving apartments this week and packing is exhausting!

As always happens, while packing I've been finding forgotten things, like this letter Grace had sent me back when we were both seniors in high school. I had brought this with me from my parents' house in California a while back because I wanted to quote some of the letter in a talk I was giving, I think.

In it, we talked about boys, of course. I had asked her to send me a boyfriend, so she sent me this guy:

Cute, huh? She named him Roger.

And here are a few snippets from the letter:

"I'm going to illustrate children's books, y'know. That would be so cool. One day when we're all grown up, you'll see in a book store: Illustrated by Grace P. Lin. That would be excellent."

and:

"I wish I could show you my portfolio. Then you could tell me if you think I'm talented. Or then you could lie to me and tell me you think I'm the bestest artist in the world and of course I will make it into RISD."

I wonder if Grace has the letter I wrote back to her. But I'm sure I said something like:

I think you're talented, Grace! You are the bestest artist in the world, you will make it into RISD, and you will become a famous children's book author and illustrator.

See, I can predict the future!

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Childhood, The Grand Adventure! Kids just wanna have FUN!

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 I, blessedly, had very good parents.  But, not everyone has very good parents.  Parents try to be good - for the most part.  But sometimes we/they are not.

Here is an illustrated interview with Maurice Sendak on how hard it is to be a child.  He is truly missed.
Thanks to Betsy at Fuse#8 for sharing this.  Check out her other Sunday videos.

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WordPressers, day in and day out, you entertain us, you make us think, you make us laugh, and you make us grateful to be exposed to so many voices all over the world. It’s a pleasure to read what you’re writing. Like everyone in the community, we value that feeling of connection that comes from reading something that speaks to you, that resonates, that makes you feel not so alone.

For this edition of Freshly Pressed Faves, we’re looking at three posts that do just that, all around the idea of “busy-ness.” Modern society seems to embrace the idea that unless you’re “swamped” or “super busy,” you just aren’t being productive enough. Free time? Fill it up, preferably with something that pays! This attitude permeates children’s lives, too, with scheduled after-school dance classes and soccer practices and violin lessons and foreign language tutors. The idle hours that once allowed kids to daydream seem to be no more. When’s enough enough, though?

Doing more only to do less — do we glorify busy?

Author Tim Kreider believes ‘Our frantic days are really just a hedge against emptiness.’ We feel we are nothing, not worthy, unimportant or left out if we have nothing to do.

But there is another aspect to it. Perfectionism – that shadow from our childhoods. We want to be excellent – because if we are, we will be worthy of love. So we take on anything and everything that is thrown us. Even when we are aware we are overwhelmed, we find it hard to say ‘NO’. Because we fear that if we do – people will think less of us. So we end up doing more than our fair share.

Sofagirl at Campari & Sofa writes eloquently about her own fight with the “busy” beast and the scary personal episode that drove her to question it all. Weaving in others’ research on the topic, she presents a compelling argument for taking a step back — and a deep breath — and for refusing to participate in the tyranny of “busy” any longer. Bet you’ll find it difficult to disagree.

The Quiet Contemplation of Inactivity

As kids we could come up with 16 ways to put our lives on the line using the jungle gym in ways no designer ever intended. They were days when we simply looked at clouds and imagined animals (or teachers or, for the juvenile delinquents, body parts) hiding in the puffy expanse of the heavens. … We were bored, but no one was ever bored enough to learn something.

Except it appears, according to recent research, that boredom is good for the brain. Evidently, boredom switches our brain’s little buttons and the synapses and neurons start firing on more cylinders, pushing us to creativity and intellectual growth.

John Wegner of Consistently Contradictory harkens back to a time when “boredom” and free time were acceptable and even encouraged, when we didn’t rely on technology and scheduling quite so much, and when we allowed our brains to wander. Are we losing the benefits of this today? Should we re-introduce some “slack” into schools? Read John’s convincing and thought-provoking post and you’ll probably be answering “yes.”

The Kid Stays in the Picture

When I was a kid, Dad made it clear that ‘mere play’ was being idle—something lazy people did. And boy, you couldn’t get lazier than me.

Michael Maupin from Completely in the Dark takes us back to his childhood and the lasting effects of not being encouraged to “play.” He explains, “As a shadow, it darkened the room, filling me with anxiety and self-doubt: ‘What am I doing now? Is it practical? Is it useful? Shouldn’t I be ashamed?’ … For years that sound, that shadow, was all around. It blocked up my writing, my artwork, my self-esteem — everything. I was psychologically held at gunpoint by an ethic that carries little currency in my world.”

Not one to be bullied, however, Michael has found ways to protect and embrace his natural tendencies towards “play and reverie.” Read his post, and you’ll be inspired to do the same.

Did you read something in the Reader that you think is Freshly Pressed material? Feel free to leave us a link, or tweet us @freshly_pressed.

For more inspiration, check out our writing challenges, photo challenges, and other blogging tips at The Daily Post; visit our Recommended Blogs; and browse the most popular topics in the Reader. For editorial guidelines for Freshly Pressed, read: So You Want To Be Freshly Pressed.

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I spent the last couple of days writing a post for this blog. It was jolly and fun and hopefully entertaining. But after yesterday's news about a horrific and heartbreaking shooting in an American school, I couldn't help feeling that a blog written today should have a different focus.

I write books for children. I write about mermaids and fairies and time travel and pirate dogs. Mostly, though, I write about family and friendship and love and loyalty. These are the things that are important to me. I believe that these are the things that are important to most of us. In one afternoon, in an elementary school in America, at least twenty families have had all of these things taken away from them, by a young man with a gun.

At the time of writing this, there aren't many facts available about the background to any of this, so I can't comment on that. I'm not going to get into the politics of it either – although, if I wanted to, it would be just one simple sentence: America – do something about your gun laws now.

So what do I want to say? I suppose I want to reflect on what kind of a world we live in – what kind of a world we have created. And I want to ask whether it's possible for us to do something about this.

The night before last, I watched a Panorama programme about homelessness in the UK. I thought the same thing then. Innocent children who haven't had a chance yet to make any mark on this world are in situations where they're losing something that so many of us take for granted. Their homes. Yesterday, twenty children had their entire lives taken away from them.  And in recent months, we have all heard the appalling stories that have come to light about Jimmy Savile and others who stole hundreds of children's innocence and blighted their lives forever.

We live in a world where space travel is taken for granted, where lives are saved with incredible medicines or operations, where with the touch of a few buttons we can talk to and even see someone on the other side of the planet. We live in - we have created - a world where unbelievable things are possible.

With all this intelligence, how have we not managed to create a world in which our children are safe?

As a children's author, I am quite often asked if I would ever think about writing books for adults. Right now, I can't help thinking – why would I want to do that? Adults are the ones who harm. Adults are the ones who damage. Adults are the ones who should know better.

Children are the ones who see things as they are. Who see the beauty and simplicity and excitement and innocence and incredible potential of this world.

At this moment, I am proud of my job. It is about celebrating childhood – and right now I can't think of anything more worthy of celebration and protection than childhood.

I'm not a parent, but if I was, tonight I would hug my children that little bit tighter. I'm not religious, but tonight I will take my chances and ask God to look after the twenty innocent children who were ripped from this world when their lives had barely begun. 

And I will ask us as a society to grieve for their families, to be thankful for our own and to do everything we can each do in our own way to create a world that is worthy of all of the gifts, riches and knowledge that we have.

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