Words with Wings

While any month is good for poetry, the powers that be have designated April to honor this form of literature. You have time to get Words with Wings by Nikki Grimes so you will be ready to celebrate.

The world of children’s books seems to be in a welcome trend of book length poetry. You may have noticed my fascination with Margarita Engel’s novels in verse. Mastering the telling of a good story is an accomplishment. To do it with good rhythm and verse stretches my comprehension. This year both the National Book Award (Brown Girl Dreaming) and the Newbery Award (The Crossover) are done in verse.

In Words with Wings, in a similar vein to Brown Girl Dreaming, Nikki Grimes sticks with the day-dreaming aspect of her character to write a small memoir in verse. I related to each of her main characters in different ways.

Her mother dreads yet another call from the school. Why will her obviously bright daughter not stay on task and finish her work? Been there – except in my case it was a son – and wondered how I could make that son finish and turn in work he knew how to do while I was busy teaching in a different classroom.

I understood Nikki’s distraction when a word caught her attention and took her down a rabbit hole, although it usually took a phrase or sentence instead of a word to send me chasing that hare down a more interesting trail than the one the teacher was pursuing.

As I watched Mr. Spicer pick up on the real value of Nikki’s daydreams, I remembered a kid in my class sketching away in a desk at the back while I taught. I hope I was a Spicer kind of teacher who didn’t allow her students to miss the important things they needed to learn but who valued and encouraged the gifts that made them special. (My sketching student in adult life excels at his art from which he makes his living. I can only hope he remembers a thing or two that I taught.) I loved that she tells in the author’s note that she used her teacher’s real name in her book.

Nikki’s book is short but needs to be read slowly, savoring every word. I’ll give just a taste from my favorite line toward the end as her three main characters have come to terms:
    . . . silver-tipped pen in hand,
    swirling “Best Wishes”
    across the front pages
    of dozens of books
    with my name printed on them.
    I sign hundreds
    round the clock
    for a line of happy fans
    that stretch a city block.
    And there is Mom, beaming
    right beside me.

In a happy coincidence, Nikki will speak at the Fay B. Kaigler Book Festival in April. I plan to get that “Best Wishes” and her name swirled in the front of my copy.

What Dining Table?

My friend went into shock as she came into my dining room. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen the top of this table.” The view was temporary. The top does show up in a couple of instances. Family or friends coming for dinner in numbers higher than five will get it cleared with each stack moved to a vacant bed until the guests leave. Five and under are seated at the kitchen counter.

What my friend saw was the second instance. I’d finished a writing deadline for church children’s curriculum. The day before her visit there had been separate stacks for research, teacher helps, story lines, and children’s learning activities. To the casual observer, it just looked like a mess. I actually knew what was in each stack and about how far down to find it. If she had come back the next week, the table would have been covered again with the next project.

I found myself in good company. In the March 2015 issue of The Writer. Novelist Ann Hood says, “. . . here I am all these years later walking around the dining room table looking at all these stories, rearranging and deleting and making notes to connect them.”

I’ll confess this method of organizing by stacks did not begin when I retired from teaching to write. While I was grade level chair at South Polk Elementary School for many years, the principal had a habit of placing young teachers on my hall. They found amusement in asking me for something and watching me pull it from the right stack on my desk. One of them placed a poster she found on the front of my desk, “Neat people never make the wonderful discoveries I do.” Chuckles and comments from my students, other teachers, and the principal rewarded her for her find.

I’ve seen a quote recently that I believe to be more accurate, “You can be neat or you can be a writer, but not both.”

In any case, we like having friends and family to come eat. Just know if you are coming in groups greater than five, you’ll need to give me time to find an empty bed to hold my stacks while we have dinner.

Spaghetti Fingers

The neighbors didn’t think much of the premature baby when Benjamin Katz brought his son Ezra home after his release from the hospital incubator. Comments were made about how skinny he was. Seeing how frail he looked, someone finally asked the big question, “Do you think he’ll make it?”

Ben held his fingers above Ezra’s head and said, “Watch.” After the baby grabbed hold, his father said, “See that rascal with the spaghetti fingers is pulling himself up. See how strong he is!”

The date was March 11, 1916, and even Benjamin Katz could not have guessed what those fingers would do. In time, anti-Semitism would cause the grownup Jacob Ezra Katz to change his name to the more acceptable Ezra Jack Keats. If you love children’s books at all, you can anticipate where this is going.

‘Tis the season for lists of books children should read from all sorts of groups. I don’t remember seeing one that did not include The Snowy Day, and quite often it leads the list. A marker in children’s literature as the first full color picture book to feature a Black child in a non-stereotypical manner, its real appeal is to the everychild. Peter goes out and does the things any kid does in the snow. The wonder when his snowball melts in his pocket seems familiar. That book was just the beginning for Keats. I have a basketful of his works that followed. And Keats’ influence is not over.  

In a month, the 2015 Keats New Writer and New Illustrator Awards and Honor Books will be presented at the Fay B. Kaigler Book Festival. [www.usm.edu/childrens-book-festival] If these new writers and illustrators follow the path of those who have been selected before them, more books and more recognitions are on the way. Maybe they will even return to the festival in a different capacity as presenters Don Tate and Deborah Wiles are doing this year.

I haven’t read these new books yet, [www.ezra-jack-keats.org/ezra-jack-keats-award-winners] but I will after I buy them for a couple of really cute redheads. Look for that blog after the April festival.

Did that rascal with the spaghetti fingers make it? He did, and the awards in his honor are pointing us to still more writers and illustrators who are following his foot tracks in the snow.

Fatal Fever

Books are colored by what the reader brings to them. Seldom has this been more true for me than with Fatal Fever by Gail Jarrow. Fascinated by the story of Typhoid Mary as a child, I wondered how they zeroed in on her as the culprit for the spread of the disease. I also heard Mama’s story of taking turns with my grandfather sitting up at night with her younger teenaged sister in the throes of typhoid fever. Her mother, already in poor health, needed whatever rest she could get to take care of the other four children. Aunt Dee was so ill that word got out that she had died, and neighbors began showing up with obligatory Southern funeral food. Thankfully, that report was untrue, and she recovered.

Naturally, I jumped at the chance when Calkins Creek offered an advance reading copy. (Release date – March 10) In great detail, Gail Jarrow satisfied my curiosity. The subtitle, “Tracking Down Typhoid Mary” presages the detective work involved in finding her. Not wanting to be found and slippery as black ice, she led scientists and doctors on a not-so-merry chase.

Gail leads the reader in a fascinating mystery with many twists and turns. Reader sympathy lies with Mary, her victims, and the heroes of the story – scientist George Soper, physician Josephine Baker, and health department officials. The sympathy is tempered with wondering if all of them could have handled this bad situation with more compassion. Along with the resolution of the mystery, the cautionary tale of the importance of hand-washing will remain with me for a very long time!

The book is riddled with questions. What causes typhoid fever and how is it spread? Why do mysterious pockets of the disease suddenly show up in areas away from any known cases? How can a person showing no symptoms be a carrier for the disease? Where do Mary’s rights end and those of the community begin? Why was she singled out when other equally dangerous carriers were allowed to go free? What is the status of the disease in today’s world? The author answers the questions for which there are answers and leaves the rest for the reader to ponder.

The book is designed for middle schoolers, but as is my custom, I would suggest that we not let them have all the fun. I did put myself in their place when I read the first line of the last chapter, “Mary Mallon despised her nickname . . .”

Like any normal middle-schooler, I responded, “Y’think?”

Happy Birthday, Dr. Seuss

I thought the young woman in front of me in checkout must have been a teacher with her stack of poster board sheets so I started a conversation. She was not. It turns out she was buying them to make large striped hats for a birthday party for her friend’s four-year-old. He shares a birthday today with Dr. Seuss. Cats in hats will be in attendance.

A wonderment began in my head as I considered what his whimsical books have brought to the children’s book world and to mine. I began with connections that started with my mother’s children’s literature course at Ole Miss when she brought home And to Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street. This one still gives me comfort as the stories of how many times it was rejected vary from twenty to twenty-seven. (More on this story @ http://childrensbookalmanac.com/…/and-to-think-that-i-saw-) Let’s just say the rejections, and hopefully my persistence, give me something in common with Dr. Seuss.

Moving to my offspring and theirs, I follow with the oldest son tagging along with Bartholomew Cubbins up the turret stairs snatching off the 500 hats and wonder why few people place my quote “. . . just happened to happen and was not very likely to happen again.” Then his two siblings learned to read with the series of Dr. Seuss’s ABC, Hop on Pop, and One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish. Naturally the grandson named Sam got a Sam-I-am mug to drink from as he read (and sometimes ate) Green Eggs and Ham. All of them were readied for bed with Dr. Seuss’s Sleep Book. As you can see in the picture, they lovingly wore the covers right off the books.

My kindergarteners and second graders followed suit, and as time went on we even wound up with a book for older children and adults. Oh, the Places You’ll Go! makes a great gift for graduation or retirement.

I only know one caveat in this bit of admiration. Editors have been known to turn down manuscripts as “too Seussian.” Looking at his work, he does a lot of simple rhyming of cup and up, Sam and ham, cat and hat. But somehow, he also figures out how to turn that rhyme on a funny ear – “Every whale in the ocean has turned off its spout. Every light between here and Far Foodle is out.”

How appropriate that the National Education Association has named his birthday, March 2, as Read Across America Day in his honor. (http://www.readacrossamerica.org) 

Although Dr. Seuss himself has been gone from us for twenty-five years, my birthday wish remains, “Many happy returns in the lives of children and in adults who dredge up their inner child.”

Dilemma

A common parental dilemma arose in my son’s recent periodic phone call to report on how the grandchildren are doing. After telling me how much his oldest son (our oldest grandson) was enjoying the extra art classes that will turn his Bachelor of Arts into a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree, he finished with a rueful, “I don’t know how he plans to make a living.”

I’m thinking the grandson could look to his older cousin for a model. She fed her passion for photography through the last part of high school and college as he has done with his art. It has yet to feed her.

Like most graduates in the arts, making a living becomes a bit iffy. In the writing world, the advice is “Don’t quit your day job.” If you are really lucky as I was, the day job feeds a different passion. In her case, it’s “Don’t quit your night job.”  Since she was in high school, she’s known how to approach a table with, “My name is Lauren, and I’ll be your server.” She graduated almost two years ago with a degree in photo journalism and is still waiting tables while she earns enough for her next trip to an exotic location to take more pictures.

I’m guessing it will be a while before she sells enough of her photographic art to put a roof over her head and food on the table, but she’s working at it with an exhibit of her work with other young artists at a recent RAWartist exhibition in Phoenix. According to my unbiased son and daughter-in-law, hers was by far the best. Although I did not see it for myself, I feel sure I would have agreed.

Both of these grandchildren have produced work fine enough to grace my living room wall, but that doesn’t keep me from sharing their parents’ concern for the roof and food. What is my answer to the dilemma in case either of the grandchildren ever asks? Find a day job you can at least tolerate while you pursue the dream that gives you life. Perhaps, it will also eventually also give you a living.

FYI

Perhaps you wonder how closely you can rely on my book reviews. I thought I’d give a few principles I live by when I use my blog for these – more or less weekly.

1. I don’t do negative reviews. If I would not rate a book at least four out of five stars for its category, I pass on doing the review.
•    I know how hard writers work and bashing them does not fit my idea of fairness.
•    My review reflects only my opinion and someone else might like the book much better. I don’t want to be the one throwing a book under the bus.
•    Okay, for just a few, I might go to three stars if it is a subject that really needs to be out there or if it’s just a pleasant afternoon diversion.

2. I review books for all ages.
•    I like books for all ages.
•    I figure, though I assume my readers are adults, they either buy or borrow books from the library for children – kids, grands, nieces, nephews, friends, slight acquaintances.

3. Usually these books are ARCs (Advance Reading Copies).
•    Most of these come from Net Galley which connects writers and publishers with book-reviewing bloggers and offers books before their official release date.
•    I don’t have to review Net Galley books on my blog just because they kindly let me read them. This leaves me free to blog about those that I think will appeal to my audience.
•    I keep a card showing release dates with these Kindle downloads so my reviews will be timely.
•    Others ARCs come from writer friends who send me a copy, but I don’t blog about a book simply because it came from a friend. I still have to have those stars!
•    Just because I didn’t blog about a book doesn’t mean I didn’t like it. I may not have had time to read it yet or I may have liked more books than I have time and blog space.
•    I try to time these ARC blogs close to the release date so my readers don’t have to wait too long for them. (I can’t wait for you to get a couple of the upcoming April releases!)

4. No book is for everybody.
•    This means I can’t guarantee that you will love a book just because I did.
•    It also means I try to give enough about the genre and story line so that you will know whether you want to try it or not. I’ll even note what I see as small flaws in otherwise good books. So many books, so little time – I don’t want you to waste yours.

5. Do I get a reward for these reviews? Yes – a feeling of satisfaction on those occasions when blog readers let me know my recommended book has been just right for them or their gift recipients!

Under the Influence

A recent challenge making the rounds on Facebook has been to name a book that has had a lifetime influence. Like many writers, I could have gone the obvious route and made an honest case for Little Women, picturing myself as Jo, but I’m not going there. Instead, I’m choosing Heidi.

Books were as much a part of my growing up as cornbread – and I grew up in North Mississippi. They came from the limited school library or the bookmobile or were traded about among friends. I don’t recall owning one of my own until my tenth birthday. With a span of only three and a half years among the first three McGee girls, bought books were community property.

On that birthday, Aunt Ruth gave me Heidi for a present. How I loved that book with its curmudgeon grandfather, Swiss scenery, and miracle cure! Another whole layer came from the feeling that this book belonged to me. I might lend it to a friend or share it with a sister, but it came back to me to be read again. And again. And again.

Little did I dream growing up in that rural community that I would someday visit Switzerland more than once or that I would have a grandson who was born there. Nor did I know that Heidi’s influence would be so strong that I would catch myself in the Alps, as an adult who should have known better, keeping a sharp eye out for grandfather’s hut or his mountain goats.

The lifetime influence? Perhaps this joy of ownership is why there’s hardly a room in my house without overstocked bookshelves (with my name in them, often signed by the author) and for sure why none of my ten grandchildren have finished their first year in the family without books of their very own – also frequently signed by the author.

The Sound of Music Story

No book is for everyone – a piece of advice that editors sometimes give to writers who are trying to get their books published. What editors want to know in the query letter is who they can expect to get excited about reading their proposed book.

The Sound of Music Story by Tom Santopietro, to be released on February 17, is a book with a title that probably answers this question. This is a book for fans of the movie – and really big fans, at that. The book begins with a look at the original von Trapp family and the original German movie versions of their story in Die Trapp-Familie and Die Trapp-Familie in Amerika which had previously been combined into an English version called The Trapp Family in 1961.

The book goes on into the Broadway production, the casting of the characters and discussion of the also-rans, the weather problems in production, the reactions of the original Trapp family to the movie, controversy and panning by the movie critics, the afterwards for all the characters in the movie as well as each of the Trapp family. What is fact and what is fiction is a strong thread in the narrative.

It was a book for me since I had good memories of going with Al to see the original English version of The Trapp Family in the Joy Theater in Pontotoc, Mississippi and a few years later to The Sound of Music in London, England shortly after it came out. I know – go to London and see an American movie – but we were on a short vacation from the Army’s current selection of a home for us in Belgium, and we wanted to see what all the hoopla was about.

The first movie had more traditional folk music and none of Rodgers and Hammerstein, but much more of the Trapp story after they escaped. In fact, I found myself just a bit disappointed the first time I saw the second movie end with the escape. The second became a family favorite and one I continue to watch even without children.

If you like The Sound of Music and want every detail of the real and the make believe, this book is for you. If you don’t necessarily want to see every facet of the story, you can skim and skip through parts and still enjoy it. If you don’t like The Sound of Music, we may need to talk, but you can skip this book.  

Backtracking

Seems to be the season for making erroneous claims followed by backtracking, so I’ll take my turn just in time for Valentine’s Day. I’ve told myself, if not the rest of the world, that the reason I could never make the Nashville/folk music circuit was because I’d never been dumped. Growing up in the South, one would have a hard time avoiding the “done-me-wrong” songs. My personal favorite lonesome artist didn’t come from Nashville, but has been Karen Carpenter and her minor music with standards like “Hurting Each Other” or “Want You Back in My Life Again.” In recent days, our church’s Backdoor Coffeehouse had hosted a number of modern folk artists with the same theme.

The most recent performers at the coffeehouse were a couple who’d been married for twenty-one years. She put holes in my excuse by writing a song based on a friend’s “done-me-wrong” story. She’d offered the friend a shoulder to cry on and then “borrowed” the friend’s story to write a song. Apparently the dumping story doesn’t have to be your own.

Nor does it have to be limited to the present day and music. While I was putting this blog together, I took a detour to the USM Cook Library to see their display of antique Valentines. The front of one proclaimed:
    You thought that a selfish lovely life
    Was better than a loving wife
    But now too late the truth you see
    Don’t dream that old fogies are loved by me.
Evidently “done-me-wrong” goes back a ways.

My story goes back to a pastor father (mine) and a deacon father (Al’s) who introduced their high school senior children in the deacon’s country store. I’m not saying it was love at first sight, but it was pretty close and has involved no dumping. Little did we know how far we would travel together from that small North Mississippi community or “the places we’d go” to borrow a phrase from Dr. Seuss. Al has a little less hair and a few more pounds, but he’s worn well and has remained my valentine!

Now that I know that I could have borrowed a story, I’m backtracking and coming clean. My reasons for not making the Nashville/folk music circuit are that I have no guitar, no banjo, and scant musical talent. 

Mother Goose Education

Hey, diddle diddle, Jack and Jill, Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall down at the station early in the morning hoping three bags full of wool from the baa, baa black sheep would break his fall. Give yourself a gold star if you get the references to five of the most humorous beginnings of an education.

Take it from a longtime second grade teacher (fourteen years), by the time kids reached my class there was no difference between those who had solved the mystery called reading when they were four and those who had waited until they were six. There was an immense difference in those who had shared the pleasure of nursery rhymes with special adults or older siblings and those who had not.

That bit of philosophy came back to the forefront of my mind in the reception this past Saturday afternoon for Rosemary Wells in Hattiesburg’s own Oddfellows Gallery. Rosemary’s work includes a multitude of books featuring Yoko, Max and Ruby, and other characters, but I was drawn to and bought the Mother Goose books she illustrated.

Original paintings of her illustrations lined the walls of the gallery, hung just right for close examination with a code by the side of each piece of art listing the book and page number where it could be found. My friend and I joined a host of Hattiesburg residents of all ages poring over each picture to see if we could detect the medium used, find a bit of collage, or note how she used a line or two with her pen to give a character an attitude.

My friend suddenly stopped at a painting to explain how the picture looked just like her memories of living in Spain for many years. “They hung their laundry just like that above the rooftop,” she said, and then she added, “Wait, does that box say ‘Jabon’?” Quickly, she looked at the code, “p. 101, Here Comes Mother Goose.” I flipped open my book, and we read at the bottom, “El Jabon, La Luna, and La Camise.” The facing page had a line, “There I met a Spanish lady, washing her clothes at night.”

The exhibit will remain at Oddfellows Gallery through the end of February and is worth a visit if you are in driving distance. Be sure to look for the authentic Spanish lady and her laundry if you come.

And if you can’t come, My Very First Mother Goose and Here Comes Mother Goose are available where good children’s books are sold. If not in stock, your friendly independent book store will be more than happy to order them for you. These simplest versions of standard and non-standard nursery rhymes will give your youngest preschoolers a delightful start on a good education.

Brown Girl Dreaming

Since I said I’d let you know if I predicted the Newbery correctly, I will just say that if this were an official betting arena, I would have won twice in the “place” category as Jacqueline Woodson carried home both Newbery and Sibert honor titles and once in the “win” with her Coretta Scott King Award. This is my take on Brown Girl Dreaming, written before the awards:

I’ve mentioned before that I liked Jacqueline Woodson’s metaphor of books as windows and mirrors where readers can find those both like and different from themselves. I read her Brown Girl Dreaming shortly after she won the National Book Award and saw another element in the metaphor. Sometimes the light strikes a window in such a way that one can see not only what lies outside but a reflection of oneself.

I grew up in a very different world from Jackie’s so I expected this book to be a window. But I saw a reflection of myself in her sister Dell and a couple of my sisters in Jackie. The poem titled “Tomboy” could have been a picture of me as Dell who never “learned to sprint . . .  become the fastest girl on Madison Street . . . or kick the can because she reads and reads and reads.” Like Jackie, my sister Beth would have loved all of those and earned the nickname “Tomboy.”      

When my sisters looked for me, I might not have been under the kitchen table like Dell, but I would have had a book and could have tuned out all their noise as I turned another page.      

Because Ruth was nine years younger, I could tell Jackie that Dell enjoyed holding her hand to teach her to write her name. I savored my favorite line in the book, “When my sister reads to me, I wait for the moment when the story moves faster – toward the happy ending I know is coming,” remembering that same anticipation in Ruth’s face as I read to her or told her stories.

Brown Girl Dreaming is a beautiful view out the window with the light shining just right to reflect some cherished memories. It makes me think that even as we read looking out the window, we may find as much alike as we find different.

Which leaves me with just one problem. I’ll have to add The Crossover by Kwame Alexander to my reading list to see if the committee really made the right decision in placing it first. It might be noted that I have sometimes disagreed with the illustrious Newbery Committee.

Who Won?

Sunday night – February 1

I write with the Super Bowl in the background, paying slight attention to what has turned out to be a good game. Though I’m a football nut, my teams bit the dust several games back and my enthusiasm has waned. Instead, a much more important contest looms tomorrow morning shortly after this blog is posted.

The American Library Association announces about twenty awards for children and young adult books at 8 AM on February 2, stealing the show even from the groundhog. These awards will put shiny stickers on books that many children will use for clues as they seek a good read when they go to the library. The awards will also keep these books in print and open opportunities for the authors to make school visits and presentations about their work.

I’ve been attending the meeting vicariously for the last few days through friends who are there posting pictures on Facebook of book people they’ve met and the snow they have seen. My computer is set to catch the live-streaming from snowbound Chicago.

To be prepared, I’ve reviewed my reading inventory for 2014. I recorded 74 books which leaves out a few that I forgot to list and a number of picture books I read to grandchildren or while standing at the library stacks making choices. They break down to 68% fiction, 26 % nonfiction; 61% with a white protagonist and 31% from a diverse population; 50% adult, 12% young adult, and 30% middle grade. I realize none of these add up to 100%, but some defy classification. Is this inventory important? Probably only to me!

In this mix, I have a few whose names I expect to be called for one of those ALA awards. I’m listening to see if those fine librarians agree with any of my choices. One of my choices is already scheduled for my Friday blog. I’ll let you know if I get it right.

Two Warnings

My discovery of a new magazine, Creative Nonfiction, brought an intriguing quote on the first page, “When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished.” – Czeslaw Milosz

The first warning of the issue, by implication, is that the writer may tell family secrets. The article that accompanies the quote, “What’s the Story?” by editor Lee Gutkind, sets the stage for an issue devoted to “Lost Truths and Family Legends.” The red flag for the family members becomes the danger of unattractive or vicious portrayals by the writer or stories told that they prefer to keep hidden. Of course, this would return a red flag to the writer if those family members decide to come after her.

The second warning belongs to the reader. When reading a “true” story or memoir, the reader needs to keep in mind that the telling is from the writer’s perspective. One of my friends says if each of her three sons described her to you independently, you would think they were talking about three different people. They each look at her through a different set of glasses. No matter how carefully a writer tries to stick to the facts, personal narratives will be colored by the glass through which she is looking.

So, what is the reader to do? I suggest first if you like true stories told through the writer’s eyes, get a subscription to the magazine. I found the stories covered a gamut of emotions and all were well written and entertaining.

Second, have a little fun and indulge in some speculation as you read stories involving a writer’s family, thinking about how those characters might have told it differently. There is always another side to the story!

In case you are wondering, so far, none of my relatives have come after me. My sister Beth might be the most likely candidate since I may have mentioned that she was a pest when we were growing up. Editor Gulkind suggests a different way for the relatives to get back at the writer. They could always write their own stories. Just be forewarned in case Beth decides to do this. If she should imply that I was bossy, there’s not a word of truth in it.

Endless

One book seems to always call for another. I had scarcely finished posting my September 1st blog about Rory’s Promise by Michaela MacColl when my October issue of The Writer came in the mail. (I could wonder why magazines always come the month before their date, but that would be off topic.) This issue had an interview with Christina Baker Kline about her book Orphan Train, also set in the turn of the century phenomenon of relocating New York City orphans on trains heading west.

I watch NCIS and have learned from Leroy Jethro Gibbs that there is no such thing as coincidence. Clearly, this was a call to find Kline’s book. Thankfully, it was in paperback at the bookstore at 30% off.

The books have some differences. Rory’s Promise is listed as middle grade and Orphan Train as adult, a distinction I found insignificant. I enjoyed both, and middle grade has been in my rearview window for quite a while. At least by junior high, bookworms like me at that age, would enjoy Orphan Train.

The train of Rory's Promise drops off one set of orphans in the Midwest and continues on to the wild West for the final destination of its protagonist. Orphan Train has two narratives running parallel, the Irish orphan who begins her story on the train and completes it on the Midwest stop and a present day troubled Penobscot teen who navigates the foster care system. Each of these stories is better than the other.

Besides the orphan train, the books have a couple of things in common. Both are well-researched and tell the story true. Both are the kind of reads that had me holding the book in one hand while stirring the pot on the stove with the other. I recommend reading them back to back to see what different stories two writers can wrest from the same setting.  

As for me, I see that Christine Baker Kline has four more novels already out. So I’m adjusting my original premise. In this case, one book leads to another which leads to four more. Cheapskate that I am, I think I’ll look for them first at the library.

Three Sips of Beauty

For more than twenty years, The Back Door Coffeehouse of University Baptist Church has held a monthly forum for writers and musicians on the first Friday night of each month with only an occasional skip. The artists are local, national, amateur, professional, sometimes thought provoking, often funny, and almost never boring. I often get an idea from one of the performers that goes into my “blog ideas” folder. This particular one has been waiting a while.

Sara Beth Geoghegan, one of my favorites, has made several appearances interspersing her music with stories that bring both tears and laughter. As I started to write this blog, I put on her CD, Tired of Singing Sad Songs, which includes sad songs in spite of its title. The album has a song whose story resonated with me. “Three Sips of Beauty” honors her aunt’s twelve years of sobriety. According to the story she tells with it, her aunt believes people need three sips of beauty each day. The laugh came when she said four would put you into the M&Ms.

I liked the idea of finding three bits of beauty in each day, though I have not been consistent with looking. The idea comes back to me especially when we are in the midst of these dreary gray days of winter. Of course, the easiest place to see beauty is outdoors so I went looking.

Easy to spot are the nandina with their cheerful red berries and burgundy foliage. And who would not notice the ornamental kale with its curly white leaves nestled inside the dark green? Looking up at the stark leafless tree, I was surprised by beauty in the filigree against the gray sky. Truth to tell, I could have found more than three, but the Christmas weight is not off, and I don’t need to get into the M&Ms.

May you find your three sips of beauty today, including a surprise or two. And if you get more than three, go ahead, have some M&Ms.

The Same Sky

Like two trains traveling toward each other at erratic speeds over unknown rails, with diversions onto sidetracks, the stories of Carla in Tegucigalpa and Alice in Texas move toward each other. The reader of The Same Sky by Amanda Eyre Ward may wonder from time to time if the two stories will ever come together. The closest I’ll come to a spoiler is an assurance that this becomes one story, not two.

The book opens with Carla left with her grandmother and her twin brothers when her mother goes to America. Soon, one of the brothers goes into a car trunk to be smuggled into the United States. The author leaves the reader, along with Carla, wondering what happens after the car pulls away. Switching to Alice in the next chapter, as she will do throughout the book, she establishes compassion for a woman trying to figure out whether to cancel the adoption celebration when the birth mother changes her mind and takes back the baby she has held only briefly.

Carla’s story includes taking care of the remaining brother who eases his hunger pain by sniffing glue. Knowing what this will do to his mind, she remains helpless to do anything about it. Her relationship with Humberto adds a bit of romance to temper this anxiety and the responsibility that comes when her grandmother dies. The overarching question is whether to stay with the danger in Honduras or face the danger of using the coyotes who will take her money in exchange for a promise to get her across the border to America.

Alice’s story is filled with typical family pressures and interactions, an attempt to be a mentor to a teenager on the edge, and lots of Texas barbecue. She needs to find out who she is and how she really relates to her husband.

This is a book that puts a human face on the statistics of immigration. It won’t solve the problem or even suggest solutions. It will give a vivid picture of what it would be like to be one of the children caught in that dilemma. 

Place

Our pastor’s sermon centered on the importance of place. As often happens, my mind trailed off. Fortunately, it can multitask so I heard what he said (really, I did) while I followed a mental rabbit to a dogtrot house in Oktibbeha County, Mississippi.

My grandfather and our family referred to his small farm in Oktibbeha County, Mississippi as “The Place,” capitals heard even in the pronunciation. Papaw’s place was his section of the land that had originally belonged to his father and his grandfather before him. The homestead deed to William Hannah, signed by President Buchanan, lists the date as “the first day of October in the year of OUR LORD one thousand eight hundred and fifty-nine and of the Independence of the United States eighty fourth.” (They liked capital letters back in those days.) My picture of both the house and the deed are copies of the originals.

Papaw, the only grandparent I knew, began and ended his days belonging to this land at least as much as it belonged to him. Seldom did he travel farther than twenty-five miles from home. Dairy cows and “The Place” bound him to a daily routine.

His house, built when his oldest child – my mother – was a preschooler, used a fireplace and a wood stove in the kitchen for heat. He cut and stockpiled wood during lax times with his crops, anticipating winter days and nights when he rose from his rocker to add a log or stoke the fire. When grandchildren came, he raked the logs back to expose hot coals, shelled an ear of popcorn into his wire basket, and popped corn with a delicious smoky taste.

My sense of place goes back here. As the daughter of a Baptist preacher and wife of an Army husband, I’ve lived in 32 houses. My roots in a place have to go back a couple of generations.

The Hannah family sold The Place a few years ago with great sadness to the three generations following my grandfather. It was the only practical thing to do. None of us were ever going back there to live. Unlike Papaw, we wouldn’t have found joy in confinement to the schedules and routines of a farm.

I inherited the wire popcorn popper. For the first time, I live in a house where I plan to stay, and it has a fireplace! Unfortunately, I don’t grow popcorn, and the basket of the popper no longer works properly. Still, as I leave my nest on the couch to add another log or stoke the fire in my fireplace, I remember and know my pastor was  right. In my mind, I travel back to my roots with Papaw and relish the sense of Place. 

Life after Life

Sometimes, no, make that always, a problem with making friends with another avid reader is that your already lengthy reading stack gets taller and taller. Let me illustrate. Friend Ellen Ruffin called to see if I would like to go with her to the Louisiana Book Festival. Now, who could turn down that kind of invitation? She particularly wanted to hear Jill McCorkle, a favorite author to her but a new one to me.

Jill entertained us with her conservative mother’s dilemma of whether to tell her friends that her daughter wrote books because of some of her characters’ language and situations. Then she began to tell about the book idea that had lingered in her head for twenty-one years, coming to the forefront when her father was dying. She read excerpts from Life after Life, this novel based in a hospice situation told from the points of view of the case worker Joanna, the patients, a friend, and one twelve-year-old. A couple of quotes from the book will illustrate why I needed to add it to my stack.

“Sometimes your only chance to beat out a prejudice is to outlive it.”

“Everyone has a weakness and how humans can live with devoting time to rubbing salt in and on another, she will never know.”

Contrary to what you might think, the book is not a downer, though it is filled with death. I think that may be because it reflects something Jill said in her speech, “At the end, we are our memories and the memories we leave behind us in other people.” The memories of the patients and the entries in Joanna’s journal brought empathy rather than pity with those who were facing death and their caregivers. She demonstrated the richness that was left in the lives of these people even as their bodies began to fail.

The book brought a new fan for Jill McCorkle and another set of books to add to my stack – and this is just the stack I need to get to soon. I think I’ll add Tending to Virginia first since the name seems to resonate.

And should you decide to make friends with an avid reader, don’t say I didn’t warn you about the consequences.

Fortune Cookie

My fortune cookie at the Southern Breeze SCBWI conference read: “Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work. Thomas Edison”

I’ve been thinking of just a few examples of great opportunities and the overalls they represent.

College Graduation
•    Boring lectures
•    Cheerfully waiting tables for grumpy people, hoping to increase tips to pay the tuition
•    Deadlines for papers
•    Late night studying

Book Award
•    Endless rewrites
•    Multiple rejection letters
•    Hours and hours with only the company of a chair, pen or pencil, paper, and computer
•    All of the above – without any assurance the book will get published, much less win an award

Musician
•    Tedious runs of scales
•    Hours and hours of practice
•    Repetitive work on trouble spots
•    Skipping fun with friends to practice and take lessons
•    Nerves before performances
•    Embarrassing lapses of memory at recitals

Military Service
•    Basic training accompanied by gnats in Southern heat
•    Following orders that may or may not seem logical
•    Living with danger
•    Separations from family
•    Living wherever Uncle Sam assigns
•    Knowing not to put roots too deeply in any one place

Athlete
•    Daily workouts through heat and cold
•    Single-minded attention to one’s sport
•    Following rules for diet, exercise, and sleep
•    Losing, but coming back to play again

Teacher
•    Years of unending training
•    Grading mountains of papers
•    Lesson plans, following whatever system is current this year
•    Keeping a steady course as theoretical pendulums swing back and forth
•    Caring for the group, but also for each student as an individual

The beginning of a new year seems like a good time to take note of Edison’s quote. Done well, each of these and many more goals follow hard work with satisfaction and fulfillment. In 2015, I hope you’ll join me in donning our overalls to make the most of our opportunities.