Writing Up A Storm

Dia's Story Cloth

Some people come to America by way of war and terrors that most of us cannot imagine. This book is a true story about a girl named Dia who was born in Laos, who fled with her family to Thailand, who spent four years in a refugee camp, who finally came to the United States.

Dia's Story Cloth is not really a children's book, but it is a very powerful picture book story told by the stitched vignettes that Dia's aunt and uncle embroidered into a story cloth. You might want to wait until your children are in middle school to introduce them to Dia's story, and to be there with them to talk about what some peoples on this earth have endured in their journey to freedom.

Dia's Story Cloth: The Hmong People's Journey of Freedom is written by Dia Cha, and stitched by Chue and Nhia Thao Cha. It is published by Lee and Low Books in cooperation with the Denver Museum of Natural History. The following is from the introduction:

"This story cloth shows the journey of my people. We are called Hmong, which means "free people." Our journey begins long ago in China, and continues to Laos and then the refugee camps in Thailand. For over 125,000 Hmong people, the journey ends in the United States."

As you peer into the embroideries, you find all the pieces of this long journey, from its beginnings in the pastoral settings of a rural life, with flowers, ducks, chickens, rivers and ponds and the surround of mountains.

 

The journey is long and complicated and when you peek into one small part, it seems as if you might be able to put your finger on this one step of the journey, and almost be there, just for a moment.

But when you draw back and see the immensity of all of these vignettes, all of these footsteps, this terrible and long journey, it falls into that realm of human experience that makes us all say, "Why?" A million times, "Why?"

It is a question that we must all try to answer, together.

Here is a long line of refugees, and the refugee camps, and the great unknown that awaits these people. Not everyone is allowed to leave these camps, and some families are torn apart here, with some leaving and some staying behind.

There is no poetry, nor any rhyme nor reason, to what the Hmong people have had to endure, but, even so, their journey has been transformed into poetry in this embroidered story cloth.

For art has the power to transform and to redeem.

Here are planes and cars and helicopters, all the trappings of the modern world, waiting to carry the Hmong people to somewhere else. To begin again. And again.

At the back of this incredible book, there is compendium which tells us more about the Hmong people including the pronunciation, which is "Mong."

Included in a deeper look into the history of these people is a collection of their art. I picked out just a few items to show you here, with the descriptions that are underneath each one in the compendium:

"A baby girl's collar with curled 'snail house' motifs in appliqué and embroidery."

"A pocket purse with 'lightning' toward the center, in appliqué and embroidery."

"A boy's jacket with 'hearts' on the sleeves and 'bird's wings' down the front."

"'Rooster combs' (or 'dragon's tails') in reverse appliqué and couching stitch on a contemporary sampler made for sale."

Please note, from the copyright page:

"The story cloth and all objects pictured in the compendium are from the Hmong Collection, Laos and Thailand, Denver Museum of Natural History. The actual story cloth measures 66 inches high and 103 inches wide."

"A portion of the proceeds from this book will benefit the Hmong Women's Education Association of Colorado, Denver, CO."

This particular book will eventually be donated to the Austin Public Library so that many children and their parents and grandparents can learn from its story and its beauty.

This is a book which tells us how important the word "embrace" really is. That there are people living somewhere near us who have come from too far away, whose stories are unfathomable, whose lives are precious. I want to put my arms around Dia and her story cloth. In lieu of that, I have her book in my arms, and I can almost put my fingers on the beautiful and bright embroidery threads that have stitched her people's journey all the way from China to us.

I hope you will embrace and be embraced this weekend in some unexpected and miraculous way!

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A New Coat for Anna

If you are in need of a new coat, you should read A New Coat for Anna, written by Harriet Ziefert and illustrated by Anita Lobel. This story is set during World War II, a time when many things were very hard to come by. It is based on a true story, and is lovingly told, both in the gentle loving words and in the soft loving pictures. It begins this way:

"Winter had come and Anna needed a new coat. The fuzzy blue coat she had worn for so many winters was no longer fuzzy and it was very small."

But Anna's new coat turns out to be a very slow coat, for she and her mother cannot go to a store to buy a new coat. The stores are empty, and they have no money.

So they go to the sheep instead.

(The number 4 in the pink dot on the upper left-hand corner of the book in the photo above was to indicate which basket of books in my classroom this book belonged in, a very informal system whose rhymes and reasons elude me now.)

 

The sheep are wonderfully fluffy-white, and the farmer is willing to trade their wool for a fine gold watch. But Anna must wait until spring for the sheep to be sheared.

And so begins the long slow wait for the long slow coat.

Anna visits the sheep every Sunday, bringing them hay, hugs, paper necklaces, and apples. I love it that this story takes the time to establish a friendship between the sheep and Anna, making the new coat something that comes about because of a loving relationship between people and animals.

Most of us no longer have our own sheep grazing in our backyards or just down the street at a neighbor's, but it is so important that we do not forget where everything comes from.

Finally, spring comes, and the shearing comes, and Anna receives a big bag of wool.

This illustration is from the title page, showing the mother and daughter in their war-torn world, waiting at a window. There is a quietness in this book, a lesson about picking up the pieces, and slowly, slowly, finding something new and bright again.

The bag of wool is taken to a woman with a spinning wheel, where a lamp is traded for the spinning. Then Anna and her mother gather lingonberries to dye the new yarn a beautiful red, and the red yarn is hung in fantastic loops to dry in the kitchen.

Then a weaver is given a garnet necklace to weave the yarn into a bolt of cloth. A tailor is given a teapot to make the cloth into a red coat. Measuring with a tape measure must take place, and then:

"The tailor set to work making a pattern, cutting the cloth, pinning, and sewing and stitching and snipping."

And, finally, Anna has a new red coat! On the last page, she visits the sheep to thank them for her pretty coat.

It is mind-boggling, really, to think of how much is in such a small book: World War II, sacrifice, bartering, sheep and shearing, spinning wheels and spinning, dyes and dyeing, looms and weaving, patterns and measuring, and some new vocabulary words, such as "carding" the wool and lingonberries. 

If you have a child or a grandchild who needs a new coat, now might be the time to make friends with some friendly sheep . . .

And if you live in a place where winter is still upon you, I hope you have a coat to keep you warm, a fire to keep you cozy, and a very good book to keep you company. Happy weekend!

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The Keeping Quilt

My Thursday children's picture book is The Keeping Quilt by Patricia Polacco. This might be the quintessential quilt story. It carries a quilt from the clothes on a person's back to the quilting bee to the passing down of the quilt through the generations. Here is how it begins:

"When my Great-Gramma Anna came to America, she wore the same thick overcoat and big boots she had worn for farm work. But her family weren't dirt farmers anymore."

With these words, we learn that this is an immigrant family whose whole life in a new country has taken a new turning. And we are given the first hint that this is a true story, and that it is about the author's own family.

The only color in this beautiful book is in the colors of the quilt. Everything else is done in rich charcoal pencil drawings. Because the quilt is the only thing that colors the scenes, it stands out on every page, and soon becomes the most colorful character of all the wonderfully-drawn family characters.

The word "babushka" can mean both "grandmother" and "kerchief." In this story it means "kerchief." The quilt begins with Anna's old red babushka and her old blue dress, to which are added Uncle Vladimir's shirt, Aunt Havalah's nightdress, and Aunt Natasha's apron. Stir in a quilting bee and soon you have a quilt!

"We will make a quilt to help us always remember home," Anna's mother said. "It will be like having the family in backhome Russia dance around us at night."

And so the quilt is born and begins its own life as part of the family, not only as a quilt, but as a tablecloth, a wedding tent, a baby's welcoming-blanket, a pretend-cape, a play-tent.

The quilt enfolds and embraces and encloses the family through births, marriages, playtimes, picnics, and death. Its folkloric motifs grace every occasion.

This would all be enough to make for a classic story, but this picture book is profoundly enriched by the way in which Patricia Polacco draws people, real people. As one reviewer wrote, her people are not "pretty-pretty" people. No, these are people with all their foibles, their moods, their smirks, their stares, their grimaces, their guffaws, their tears and joy. She captures everything, but in the most endearing way. She allows us to laugh at and enjoy being human.

Well, I do believe The Keeping Quilt is a keeper! 

And may you have a wonderful weekend, full of all things keeping: keeping quiet, keeping friends, keeping secrets, keeping the peace, keeping safe and sound all the things that you love!

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Edited to add: Ancient Cloth has begun just such a quilt here in "Family Clothes."

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Harold and the Purple Crayon

 

A very sweet friend told me that Harold and the Purple Crayon by Crockett Johnson was one of her favorite children's picture books. I had never heard of it, but I started looking for it right away. I found a YouTube video of the whole book here, very nicely done, and completely faithful to the book, but it does not have the vibrant purple color of the book.

I really think this is a must-have book for every child, for its message is all about the power of creativity. It begins like this:

"One evening, after thinking it over for some time, Harold decided to go for a walk in the moonlight. There wasn't any moon, and Harold needed a moon for a walk in the moonlight. And he needed something to walk on."

With his big purple crayon, Harold draws the moon, and the walk, too. He draws everything that he needs. He creates the horizon line of his own world, puts the moon in the sky, draws a vanishing point, and sets off on a series of adventures.

Crockett Johnson uses a lovely sequence of cause and effect to propel the adventures. For example, Harold takes a short cut to where he thinks a forest ought to be. This leads to two of my favorite lines:

"He didn't want to get lost in the woods. So he made a very small forest, with just one tree in it."

Oh, I love that! The tree is an apple tree, which prompts the drawing of a dragon to guard the apples. The dragon is so frightening, Harold's purple crayon shakes on the page, creating an ocean of waves, which leads to the need for a boat, which leads to . . .

There is a picnic, a mountain, a hot-air balloon, a search for his own window, the drawing of his very own window and his very own bed, and the satisfying conclusion of a little boy tucked under his very own covers.

I wish I had known about this book when I was teaching. I would have started off every single year, on the first day of school, with this book. It had not been published yet when I was four, or six, or eight years old. It would have meant the world to me, literally. My husband would have loved it, too, for he was always quietly drawing his own little world. I was trying to write mine, but I always wanted to draw, too. 

I've been looking for this little book in secondhand bookstores, but it is never there. Perhaps no one ever wants to give up their copy of it? So I got it at the library, for I very much wanted to feature it this week, as I have been speaking of all things at that end of the color/light spectrum where ultra-violet can be found.

The "purple" in Harold and the Purple Crayon is the color that I always call "violet," for I think of purple as having more blue in it, a royal purple, perhaps. But I am remembering, now, how my mother used to always talk about loving something "with a purple passion." The perfect color, then, for a book about creativity!

And in researching Harold, I discovered that this little book is so important that it has its own Wikipedia page here.

I hope you will follow your purple passions to the ends of the earth. Take a purple crayon with you. Draw your way into and out of adventures. Be sure to be home before dark!

Oh, I do hope you will have a weekend of unbridled creativity!

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The Quilt Story

The Quilt Story is one of my favorite children's picture books, written by Tony Johnston and illustrated by Tomie dePaola. I'm always attracted to a story about a quilt, and this is one of the loveliest, both for its gentle, poetic wording and its gentle, poetic illustrations.

It begins this way:

A little girl's mother

made the quilt

to keep her warm

when the snow came down

long ago.

I think these words are proof that the simplest of words can carry the whole world in them. Tony Johnston is a master at taking the most ordinary of words and creating pure poetry from the way in which she puts them together.

Tomie dePaola does the same thing with his art. His drawings look so very deceptively simple, almost like children's art, not that there is anything simple about children's art! But he captures the essence of a thing in the most wonderful child-like way.

The little girl's name, Abigail, is stitched into the quilt in large letters. Abigail falls in love with the quilt. It not only keeps her warm, it becomes a part of her playtime, and a part of everything that means home to her. I love these words to describe her tea party in the woods:

She had tea.
Her dolls had tea.
And the quilt had tea
all over it.

Abigail and her family move. There is a long journey "across wide rivers and over a rock-hard trail." And all along the way, it is the quilt that keeps Abigail "warm from the wild winds."

There is a new house in a woods built by her father, "chop, chop, chop." And it is the quilt that makes Abigail feel at home in the new place. 

Eventually the quilt ends up in the attic, forgotten. I love how this story requires children to think outside the pages. They do not see Abigail all grown up and gone away to a new life, but they must imagine that this is what has happened.

Ahhhhh, but the story does not end there. For there is a grey mouse who makes a home in the quilt. And then a raccoon. And then a cat.

(And don't you just love the expression on that cat?)

And then another little girl comes looking for the cat. She finds the quilt, her mother makes it all new again for her, they move, and once again, it is the quilt who helps a little girl feel at home in a new place.

Because this story takes a quilt from its beginnings and passes it on from one family to another family, I think it mirrors the true story of so many quilts. I often read in blogs how someone found a quilt in a thrift shop, and I think of how wonderful it is that the life story of that quilt goes on and on.

If you want to cozy-up in the warm-hearted story of a quilt, do please find a copy of The Quilt Story! And I hope your weekend is as warm-hearted as this story is. I hope you have your own quilt to wrap up in, to feel at home in. I'll be wrapped in mine (thank you, Helen, Treva, Tom, and Fenwick!)

We are expecting temperatures in the 20s again, so our snow ladies will be back in full force to keep our plants warm.

You keep warm, too!

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In Her Hands

I love any story about an artist, writer, musician, who strives against all odds to create the work they know that they were born to create, and the story of Augusta Savage, sculptor, is one of triumph against the greatest of odds.

Augusta had too many strikes against her for making it in this world. She was not only a woman, she was an African-American woman, born in 1892 in the Deep South in Florida, and born to a father who tried to thwart all her early attempts to make things out of clay.

Her story is told in a brand-new 2009 children's picture book, In Her Hands, written by Alan Schroeder, illustrated by JaeMe Bereal.

Alan Schroeder, most engagingly, tells Augusta's story from her childhood in Florida to her acceptance into Cooper Union Art School in New York City in 1921.

There was a pit of "just-waiting-to-be-shaped-into-something clay" behind her house when she was a child, Schroeder writes. It is with this red clay of the earth that Augusta makes her first clay figures, of ducks, chickens, pigs.

Schroeder does not mince words about the difficulty of her journey, for it seems that her father might have been her most terrible hurdle. He literally crushed her early clay sculptures, for he did not understand her art or her talent. But even he was brought around in the end.

I love the detail of the light bulb on the cover, showing the artist late at night, working into the wee hours, with just a bare bulb and the spark of her own inner glow to keep her going.

But there is another glow in this lovely book.

JaeMe Bereal, whose paintings are stunningly beautiful, has taken the warm orange-red color of the clay that began Augusta's journey and melted this color into every illustration, leaving an impression of deep and abiding warmth on every page. As you leaf through this book, you will see this glowing sunset color everywhere, in a house here, a horse there, a face, a vase, a dress, the fiery light in a window, the bright ground beneath children's feet.

The end papers of this book are little pictures, set in ovals, like Victorian silhouettes, of all her early clay figures. A very lovely way to give them a special place in this rich and thoughtful book.

(Photo copyright Morgan and Marvin Smith, courtesy of Monica P. Smith and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture)

I very much like it that this picture book includes some extra information about Augusta in the last two pages, with some photos of her work. The sculpture in the forefront in this photo captured me completely. It is called "The Harp." It is 16 feet tall, and you can see Augusta working on it.

The strings of the harp are children, standing straight and tall, with their mouths open in song. I love how the hand that forms the frame of the harp so lovingly cups all the children in its palm. This makes you realize what a perfect title, In Her Hands, is for this book!

Yes, indeed, Augusta Savage created the whole world in her hands, the wind and the rain, the ducks and the chickens, and a handful of singing children, too.

May you make something with your own hands this weekend and find yourself safe in the loving hands of the world!

 

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Note: This book is a gift from Lee & Low Books, and will be donated to the Austin Public Library for many children to enjoy. Lee & Low Books is an independent children's book publisher with a focus on diversity.

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The Arrival

It is Thursday. Time for a children's picture book. The Arrival by Shaun Tan came to me by way of one of my dearest friends who knows very well what might entrance me. This is one of the most extraordinary books I have ever seen. It has been published as a children's picture book, but it is much more than that, and if you use this book with children, you need to be there with them, to guide them through its incredible labyrinthine journey. And do be warned, for some of the scenes depicted are very dark ones, and not for every child.

The Arrival is the journey of a man who leaves his wife and child to immigrate to a new country to find a new home for them.

The book itself comes with a battered, olden look, as if it were a long-lost photo album. It is wordless. The whole story is told through all the old sepia photos that have been placed in this album, with an eloquence that speaks and speaks and speaks.

You will not notice there are no words, for you will find yourself deep-reading the pictures.

The Arrival begins with the departure. It begins with nine small pictures that are arranged like a nine-patch quilt: an origami bird, a clock, a hat, a pot, a child's drawing, a teapot, a cup, a suitcase, and, lastly, a family photo of a man, a woman, and a little girl.

Turn the page.

Another series of nine pictures, on the left, shows the family photo being wrapped up and placed in the suitcase. On the right is a full-page picture of the man and his wife in their kitchen, hand on top of hand on top of the closed and strapped suitcase. Every item from the very first page is in the kitchen: the bird, the clock, the hat, etc. Children will absolutely love to find all of these things.

And so the journey begins. The parting, the trip across water to a very strange new land.

The man debarks and must find his way in a country where everything is different, the language, the food, the architecture, the kitchen utensils. What I especially love is that Shaun Tan, with a stroke of pure genius, has created a new world that is both futuristic and wonderfully old-fashioned.  

He has based his drawings on actual photographs of the 1900 immigrant experience of arriving at the Statue of Liberty, going through customs, finding a room in a tenement. But, oh, the differences he has imagined!

Everything is familiar and yet totally foreign: For example, the "Statue of Liberty" is two tall Asian-looking figures shaking hands, one with a rabbit, one with a dove, and yet the minute you see it you know you are looking at another world's version of our own Statue of Liberty.

The man finds an apartment, and it comes with a curious creature, very much like a child's drawing come to life. The little creature tags along with him, like a friendly pet, a sweet touch which helps to lighten the overwhelming strangeness of the new surroundings.

The people are all people as we know them. It is in the architecture, the appliances, the strange fruits and vegetables, that this new place is shown to be different.

As you work your way through the pages, you cannot help but feel a sense of awe for all those people who made this kind of a journey to a strange new place to begin new lives.

My own father was born in Germany in 1910. His parents brought him here to America when he was two years old, making this very same immigrant journey. All the photographs I have of my Oma and Opa and my father during these early years are reminiscent of some of the drawings in The Arrival.

The ending of The Arrival is wonderfully satisfying, for all of us who love a happy ending, for the man's wife and child join him, and Shaun Tan brings the story full circle with another set of nine-patch pictures, only this time each item is from the new world: an origami creature instead of a bird, a new world version of a clock, a new world "teapot," etc.

The little girl ventures out into the new world, and befriends another brand-new immigrant with a battered old suitcase. They look at a map. The little girl points the way.

The Arrival. Stunningly brilliant. Deep. Beautiful.

And it makes me realize that every time we step outside our own front doors, we are embarking upon a journey of our own. Every time we put pen to paper, or needle to cloth, or brush to canvas, we are stepping into the unknown. And, then, of course, the arrival is always the beginning of a new journey . . .

May your journey into this weekend be an enchanted one!

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The Treasure

Today is Thursday, and I have dedicated Thursdays to children's picture books, for I love words and I love art, and both of these loves of mine come together in picture books.

Last December a very dear friend of mine gave me a copy of The Treasure by Uri Shulevitz, and I've been saving it to use for the first book of the new year. It is the retelling of an old story, and there are many versions of this story, of seeking treasure far away only to find that it was in one's one home, one's one heart, all along.

I love how this one begins: a totally blank page, blank on both sides, with only these words at the bottom of the right-hand page:

"There once was a man and his name was Isaac."

Oh, my! Just one step shy of "Call me Ishmael!" It is often the very simplest of words that strike us to our heart and soul.

Isaac, who is very poor, has a recurring dream of a treasure beneath a bridge in a faraway city. He decides to make the journey to find the treasure. It is a long journey, through forests and over mountains. Sometimes he gets a ride with someone, but mostly he walks, and walks, and walks.

When he reaches the bridge in the city, he finds it is guarded day and night. Isaac tells his dream to the captain of the guards. But the captain has had a similar dream, that the treasure lies far away under the stove of someone named Isaac!

And so Isaac makes the long journey back home, through forests, and over mountains, to find the treasure that was always right there, close at hand.

"Sometimes one must travel far to find what is near."

The illustrations in this book are glowingly golden. It is as if the earth itself is the treasure. Wherever Isaac walks in these pages, the ground beneath his feet is aglow. The Treasure is a Caldecott Honor book, and rightfully so!

And all that gold reminds me of the version of this story that I grew up with, called "The House With the Golden Windows." As I recall it, every morning at sunrise, a boy sees a house on a hill across the valley from where he lives whose windows shine like gold. And oh! how he wishes he could live in the house with the golden windows.

One day he travels across the valley to find the house. It takes him all day to get there, finally, at sundown. But there he finds only a poor little hut like his own, with no golden windows, and a girl who points back across the valley to show him where the house with the golden windows can be found.

Of course, it is his own house, aglow in the setting sun.

If you read The Treasure with the children in your life, be sure to give them a chance to see a little bit of magic that Uri Shuvelitz has done with the cover, for the back cover is a mirror image of the front cover. Children are often fascinated by this kind of dual image, and will study both illustrations to see the doppelgänger effect, that wonderful Alice-through-the-looking-glass magic.

This mirrored cover is such a simple way to show the two journeys, outward and inward, back and forth (or forth and back). The journey to the ends of the earth and back again that each of us makes in our own way.

In my own lifetime, I went too far away and have not quite found my way back home again, but my feet are on that "long and winding road," and really, is there any place more wonderful to be??

And speaking of treasure, which is so often depicted in fairy tales as being of the gold and silver variety, I will have to admit that I have never been drawn to those precious gems that shine and sparkle, like diamonds, but, instead, I have always always loved things that have the patina of weathered and storm-tossed age. Old wood and rusted iron and peeling paint and threadbare fabrics. I don't really know why, but these things make me reach out for them. I'm always finding the treasure buried in them, I guess!

May you find your own treasure in your own heart! And may you keep warm this weekend, if you are some place where it is cold this time of the year.

My husband spent yesterday stapling extra plastic around the skirt of our old house, for we are expecting to be in the 20s tonight, which is cold for us. I know, I know, some of you have been below zero! Our little house happens to be of pier-and-beam construction, and the cold and the wind can blow right underneath it and come up through the floorboards. Insulation is our big project for the coming year, although we need to relevel the house first, perhaps! 

On second thought, perhaps first we should dig under that old chimney that lies hidden behind plaster in a corner in our kitchen to see if the treasure is buried there . . .

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Edited to add for Pom Pom: Here is another type of magic that children love, a book cover for "The Bed-Time Book" by Helen Hay Whitney, illustrated by Jessie Willcox Smith, 1907, showing a book inside a book inside a book, ad infinitum, or a treasure inside a treasure inside a treasure (a lovely reader helped me find this illustration about a hundred posts back, in this post, in a comment): 

Baboushka and the Three Kings

One day when I was about nineteen years old and a student at The University of Texas at Austin, I found myself in the children's section of one of the campus libraries. There was a display of some of the Caldecott Medal winners, and first and foremost was Baboushka and The Three Kings by Ruth Robbins, illustrated by Nicolas Sidjakov, and adapted from a Russian folktale. A very tiny book, a booklet, really, not much larger than six inches squared.

It caught my eye and and I stood before the display and read it and then I checked it out and carried it around for a couple of weeks as if it were a magic charm.

I had not known that children's picture books could receive such prestigious awards. I had not fully realized that the art in children's picture books could be extraordinary, breathtaking, enchanting, holy. This one little book stopped me in my tracks and made me look at the world of children's books in a different light. I was already very interested in writing folktales, I was fascinated by the long reach of the old fairy tales, and here, in my hands, was a kind of vindication of all my instincts.

There was something important about children's literature!

The art in Baboushka and The Three Kings is ethereal. I'm not sure if I have ever seen anything else quite like it. I have seen these illustrations described as looking like stained glass, but I see them more as if they are beneath glass. Beneath layers and layers of glass. Or beneath water. Nicolas Sidjakov's art feels a little out of reach, giving it a timeless quality. We seem to be looking through a prism into the very heart of a deeply religious experience. 

The story begins in the time-honored fashion of all the olden stories:

"Long ago and far away, on a winter's evening, the wind blew hard and cold around a small hut."

Three kings knock on Baboushka's door, asking her to come with them to find the Child who has just been born. Baboushka chooses to finish her chores and go in the morning. In the morning, she puts "a few poor but precious gifts" into a sack and goes in search of the Child, but the snow has covered the path and she cannot find the way. She goes from village to village, searching, but no one can tell her where the Child is. Every year at the same time, she goes out into the world again, looking for the Child she cannot find, and giving her gifts to the children she meets along the way.

Some reviewers have found the story sad, saying its message is if opportunity knocks and you procrastinate, you will regret it for the rest of your life.

But I don't see this story that way at all.

Baboushka is an old woman, living alone. Three strangers come to her door wanting her to help them find a child in the middle of the night, in the middle of a snowstorm. She invites them in to take shelter with her. She does not go with them. She is a good, hard-working woman. She finishes all her chores and goes first thing in the morning. Then she spends the rest of her life searching and giving.

Is this not the essence of a deeply-lived religious life?

She does not find the one child she is looking for, but she finds many children, and as the years go by, they begin to look for her.

"And it is said that every year little children await the coming of Baboushka. They find joy in the poor but precious gifts she leaves behind her in the silent night."

She becomes, in fact, a very folkloric version of our Santa Claus, an old peasant woman carrying a sack of gifts from village to village in deep winter. I find this very wonderful, as in "full of wonder."

Holding this little book is like holding an illuminated manuscript, or a kind of mirror, perhaps, in which we might find ourselves, for most of us spend our lives searching for whatever it is that we are looking for, and giving of ourselves along the way.

As I was writing this post this morning, I did a double-take at the opening words of this beautiful little book: "long ago and far away," and I was deeply humbled when I took down my own children's picture book, A Far-Fetched Story, and saw that I, too, had used these same words to begin my own folktale. Well, I don't suppose anyone can lay claim to "long ago and far away."

And it is in the great long ago and far away that we so very often find what we are looking for!

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Prayer for a Child

I grew up with Prayer for a Child by Rachel Field, illustrated by Elizabeth Orton Jones. This lovely children's picture book, published in 1941, won the Caldecott Medal, and it has stood the test of time, for it is still in print.

This little book, as its title says, is a prayer for a child. It is a Christian prayer, for its last three words are "for Jesus' sake." My father was Lutheran and my mother was Episcopalian, but in reality, my father did not go to church at all and my mother went to many churches. And she took us with her.

We went to a Greek Orthodox church, a Black Baptist church,and a Jewish synagogue. When we were not going to places of worship, we went to talks on reincarnation and extrasensory perception, or we listened to my mother reading from The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran, for my mother cast her spiritual nets far and wide.

I have followed in my mother's footsteps, and I, too, cast a very wide net. I sometimes envy people who were raised in one church or one temple or one mosque, and have never strayed outside of one particular way of looking at the world, for it must be very comforting. It must feel very safe and certain.

But I am only able to see the world through my own experience, and curiously, this one little book, Prayer for a Child, opened up the whole world to me, for there is an illustration in this book that is crowded with all the faces of the world's children. I would come to a full stop at this illustration and look and touch and think and look some more. It was here for the first time that I learned that the world was full of children of many races besides my own.

The copy of Prayer for a Child that I grew up with did not survive my childhood. But I found one in a secondhand store about 15 years ago, in perfect condition. In order to protect the cover, I ran it through the laminating machine at my school and, to my great dismay, watched the beautiful cover wrinkle as it passed through the machine. You can see the wrinkles above. This is from the inside flap and gives you an idea of all the many children who are illustrated inside this beautiful book.

The part of the prayer that goes with the illustration of all the children is this:

"Bless other children, far and near,
And keep them safe and free from fear."

Such a sweet and simple and kind little prayer. Such a timeless little prayer.

I don't know if the times we live in now are any more dangerous than the world of 1941 or 1929 or 1492 or 1100 or 800, or 4000 BC and beyond. Here at the end of 2009, we may well have reached a tipping point in terms of the health and the safety of our planet, but each of us can only live within the hopes and fears of our own little worldview, for the world is very large, and we are not that much older, really, than the children we used to be.

"Through the darkness, through the night
Let no danger come to fright."

If you want a prayer for yourself and for the children in your life, you might want to consider getting Prayer for a Child, if you don't already have it, for it is a lovely and gentle prayer with golden and gentle illustrations that invoke the very best of what childhood should be.

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Happy Birthday to Oleta! from Emma!

It is my mother-in-law's birthday today! I thought I would wish her a happy birthday by way of Emma. Emma is wonderful little children's picture book written by Wendy Kesselman and illustrated by Barbara Cooney. This book was both written and illustrated in honor of real-life artist Emma Stern. I think Emma Stern may have been a German artist who lived from 1878-1970, but I am not sure.

This sweet little book is no longer in print. Sigh.

I thought a book about an artist who painted all the way through her golden years would be the perfect picture book to say Happy Birthday to Oleta, who has painted all her life as well as all through her very golden years. I cannot remember a single time when Oleta has not had her easel up in her house with a painting-in-progress upon it. To view some of Oleta's fine art paintings, click on Art by Oleta (on my sidebar).

Oleta, you are my inspiration to keep on keeping on! Happy Birthday!!

I should tell you a little bit about Barbara Cooney, the illustrator of Emma. She is a wonderful "Grandma Moses" artist who won the Caldecott Medal twice, for Chanticleer and the Fox and Ox-Cart Man, but I also love another book of hers titled Miss Rumphius.

Ms. Cooney said of her school days: "My favorite days were when I had a cold and could stay home from school and draw all day long."

Her art is considered folk art, and maybe that is why I love her illustrations so much. They are colorful, whimsical, full of heart and soul, hearth and home, and yes, very, very folksy.

The story of Emma begins when Emma is seventy-two years old. Although she has a large family, she is lonely. Her family gives her a painting of her little village across the mountains. The painting is the springboard for a whole new life for Emma, for this painting of her old village is not how Emma remembers her home.

Emma decides to paint her village as she remembers it.

This begins her career as an artist, very much a Grandma Moses story. But I love the other information that we are given about Emma, too. For example, when her cat Pumpkinseed gets trapped in the top of a tree, Emma climbs the tree herself to rescue him. In bare feet, no less.

This is exactly what my mother-in-law Oleta would do, too! 

The painting of the barefooted Emma reaching for the pumpkin-orange cat in the flowering tree is my favorite illustration in the book. I love knowing that as I grow older there is nothing to keep me from climbing trees, writing stories, making fabric art, and hey! maybe taking up painting, too!

And I love knowing that I can conquer loneliness or illness or old age itself by following my heart's desire. When we are very young, our heart's desire is often a romantic one, but as we grow older, it becomes something deeper and larger.

I am still trying to find what it is that I'm supposed to be doing with my own life. But I feel myself getting closer and closer to it. Something to do with writing and cut paper and torn fabric, with words and colors, with poetry and art, and most definitely with things that are olden and frayed around the edges. I feel myself almost pouncing upon it in the middle of the dark of the night!

And I absolutely love knowing that when I am 72, or 89, or 102, I may very well find myself hurrying down to the store to buy paints and brushes and an easel.

Thank you, Oleta and Emma, for showing the way . . .

And Happy Birthday to Oleta: Mother, Grandmother, Great-Grandmother-To-Be, Cook, Gardener, Reader, Genealogist, Computer Whiz, and Fine Art Artist!!!

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Frederick

Frederick by Leo Lionni is, I am happy to say, still in print! This is a Caldecott Honor Book and a classic children's picture book with a message for the world that is eternal. The art is made of torn and cut paper, and each piece of paper looks to have been prepared by hand, with watercolors, perhaps.

The story begins in the autumn with a family of mice. Four little mice are very busy gathering food for the long cold winter to come. The fifth little mouse, however, is not gathering food. Frederick is always a little separate from all the others, going the other way, looking the other way. 

Instead of food, Frederick is gathering sun rays, colors, and words. He sits in quiet contemplation of the world, observing everything, while all around him his family is busy, busy, busy, gathering corn and nuts, wheat and straw. The other mice want to know why Frederick doesn't work, too.

"I do work," said Frederick.
"I gather sun rays for the cold dark winter days."

The winter days come, and the first snow comes, and the mice all scurry into their winter hideout. At first there is plenty of food, but soon the deep dark and hungry part of winter is upon the little family. No more food, just the cold and the dark.

Now Frederick brings forth what he has gathered. He warms the dark with sun rays, and brightens the dark with colors, and enlightens the dark with words. And now his family understands his true value.

"But Frederick," they said, "you are a poet!"

What a powerful story this is! I have found in my own life that when you reach a point where you are beyond the help of worldly goods, of nutrition or medicine, when you have to fall back on something else, it is very often in the words that someone wrote down that comfort can be found. And the older I get, the more I turn to poetry and to the poet to show me the way.

Long live Frederick!

Speaking of poetry, here is a little poem by Elizabeth Barrett Browning to bring the story of Frederick to a close:

"Earth's crammed with heaven,                
And every common bush afire with God:
But only he who sees takes off his shoes."

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The Backyard

 

Speaking of memories, as I have been doing of late, The Backyard is a very powerful children's picture book by John Collier that conjures up some very powerful memories. Alas, it is no longer in print, but the Austin Public Library has five copies which I think is a good sign that other libraries may have it, too, and there are used copies available online.

The paintings are stunningly beautiful.

The book itself is fiction about history, about the present, the near past, the distant past, and the creation of the world.

It starts with a boy playing ball in his backyard, and goes back, back, back in time, to when the boy's house was first being built, and then farther back. It takes the boy and the reader to long ago events that happened right there in the boy's backyard, to something as dark as a cowboy who died there, to Indian braves and maidens who loved there, and Indian chiefs who fought battles there, all the way to something as large as the dinosaurs who walked there.

And then it goes back farther still.

It takes the boy back to the time when "hydrogen and darkness and the hand of God moved"  in the boy's backyard. I love the last painting of a child's swing set with the swings flying in the tumult of a great wind. It gives the impression that all the fierce energy that started the universe is still right there at work in the boy's own backyard.

"All in my backyard" is the repeating phrase that holds all the events together, but the words are the author's, not the boy's.

The setting seems to be some wide-open prairie land. I can easily see this as a Texas setting, especially with the mention of the cowboys who "sang lonesome songs and died on cold plains."

This book is not for every family, but if you feel it is right for your child, it is a very powerful way in which to imagine one's own backyard.

I often think to myself that just one hundred years ago my little neighborhood was on the outskirts of Austin, and a very much wilder place back then, a land of mesquite trees and dirt roads and wild grasses. And once you start thinking about the early 1900s, you're just a hop, skip, and a jump away from the whole of history.

Is history still taking place all around us, I wonder sometimes. If so, I must be passing the little old lady who used to live in my house a hundred times a day as she and I hurry back and forth through these rooms.

But now I must go into the backyard and see what awaits me there. Have a wonderful weekend exploring your own backyard!

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Home Place, Crescent Dragonwagon

Home Place by Crescent Dragonwagon and illustrated by Jerry Pinkney is a lovely mystery about a home that isn't there anymore. A girl and her parents go hiking into a woods where they find the remnants of a house and of the life that was once lived in that house. A half-standing chimney, a stone foundation, a blue glass marble, nail, horseshoe, piece of a plate, small yellow bottle, and a china doll's arm. All artifacts of another family from long ago.

The girl begins to imagine that family.

The text is prose-poetry, with the lines on each page written in poem form rather than in paragraphs. This way of writing out the text makes the reader slow down to savor each phrase of each sentence. And the watercolor illustrations capture completely the poetry of the text.

I noticed, also, that when the text refers to the present-day girl in the woods, the illustrations go all the way to the edge of the paper, but when the text is about the family from long ago, the illustrations are set in frames as if we are looking through a window into the past.

Here (below) is a part that I particularly love, just to give you an idea of the poetry in this children's picture book and of how the text is placed upon each page. In imagining the people who lived in this house long ago, the girl sees the mother and father watching a rainstorm in the middle of the night. In a flash of lightning, the mother in a white nightgown almost looks like a ghost.

"And now she is a ghost, and we
can only see her
if we try. We're not sure
if we're making her up, or if
we really can see her, imagining
the home place as it might have been, or was, before
the house burned down, or everyone moved away
and the woods moved in."

I love the quiet mystery of this book, a little girl in the present day in a woods with her own mother and father, conjuring up the past.

This is the back cover. Throughout the book, these greens and browns and yellows and sparks of red capture both the woods that have grown up where the house used to be and dreamy past that was once lived there.

I did notice that one of the reviewers caught an error which I did not see at all, I am so clueless about my flora and fauna. But there is a page in which the text is about "a honeysuckled-vined chimney" and the illustration shows a chimney entwined with morning glories. Ahhhhhh. We have honeysuckles on our back fence and morning glories in our garden, and I should know the difference . . .  

I seem to be drawn to children's picture books that are no longer available, but I checked on this one and I am quite sure that it is still in print. I do hope so, it is such a beautiful story. And I love it that the little girl is white and that she imagines a black family in the house. It gives such a wonderful extra dimension to this book, showing with what tenderness people really do reach out to try to understand one another.

And so, I, too, reach out to you, and wish you a lovely, and perhaps mysterious, autumn weekend!

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Pumpkin Moonshine

Pumpkin Moonshine was Tasha Tudor's first published children's book, which she originally made for a young niece of hers, perhaps named Sylvie Ann like the little girl in the story. This is a very sweet, old-fashioned story. Sylvie Ann goes to the field to find the fattest pumpkin, it rolls away from her, causing havoc along the way, until finally the girl and her grandfather scoop it out and carve it into "pumpkin moonshine," which is another way of saying "jack-o'-lantern." The book ends with Sylvie Ann back in the field planting pumpkin seeds for next year's crop.

This one little book started Tasha Tudor on her long and very wonderful career in illustrating and writing for children.

The text is carefully handwritten, with letters gently squeezed or elongated to make the lines both right and left justified on the page. This reminds me of my first little book which I wrote at age nine on my grandmother's typewriter. I, too, tried to justify all the lines the way they would be in a real book, and puzzled deeply over how this was done as I tried to trick the typewriter into squeezing letters together.

Pumpkin Moonshine is a small book. My paperback copy measures 6 and 1/2 inches square. I am quite certain it is currently back in print again. It has an innocent appeal that has "stood the test of time."

Sadly, however, I'm not sure that Tasha would stand a chance in the publishing world today, if she were offering this little book as a first-time writer. The last I heard from people in the publishing world is that publishers are looking for children's picture book stories that are "edgy." This may be true, but I honestly think that there is hardly anyone outside of the publishing world who is looking for edgy in children's picture books. Or it might well be that I don't understand the meaning of the word "edgy" in this context. It sounds very sharp to me on the one hand, or about to plunge off of a precipice on the other hand. Perhaps it means "cutting-edgy" as in "on the cutting-edge?"

I love the sweetness in all of Tasha Tudor's drawings, but it is her life that really fascinates me, for she lived the life she illustrated. The Tasha Tudor website says that she "lived without running water until her youngest child was five years old." She wanted to live back in the 1800s, and so she did. She made her own candles, soap, and dolls, wove her own cloth, made all her four children's clothing, knitted, baked, gardened, canned. And she did all of this while living in the twentieth century from 1915-2008.

I have a memory of one of my favorite photographs of her, an eighty-year-old woman in a kerchief, in a very long dress, plus apron, sweater, and scarf, all in browns and grays and faded prints and dusty stripes and charcoal woolens, in the middle of an autumn field, carrying an enormous bundle of kindling, and barefoot.

My mother-in-law Oleta has lived a very Tasha Tudor life herself, as an artist, gardener, cook, and keeper-of-the-fire. On camping trips, Oleta is the one who tends the fire and banks the coals at night. And that reminds me of another photo of Tasha, painting by firelight . . .

I love how Tasha Tudor simply lived her life as she saw fit without for one minute trying to fit into what the rest of the world was up to. She might have been on the cutting-edge of something here!

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Victoria House

Speaking of saving things, as I have been doing in my last two posts, here is a wonderful children's picture book about saving a falling-down Victorian house: Victoria House, written by Janice Shefelman and illustrated by Tom Shefelman.

Janice and Tom are a wife-and-husband team who have worked on other books together, and they make a perfect team for this book. Tom is an architect, and because of his knowledge of architecture, his very fine watercolor drawings of the house give an in-depth architectural dimension to Janice's warm-hearted storytelling.

They begin the story on the front cover by showing where this wonderful old house begins ~ in the long ago past. Here is Victoria House in her prime in a countryside setting and in a time period when people still rode about in wagons drawn by horses.

Then you open the book and now the house has fallen into disrepair. The land has been sold, and the house is in jeopardy of being torn down until Sarah and Jess and their son Mason find it. They want the house for their own, but it will have to be moved from the country into the city.

Victoria House is the story of exactly how this happens. Step by step, this book shows how a two-story house is taken apart, how each separate story is loaded onto a flatbed truck, how it takes two trucks following each other to drive the bottom part and the top part of the house into the city in the middle of the night, how it is all put back together again in a new place.

Tom's extraordinary three-dimensional drawings make it possible to look down into the empty rooms of the first-floor story of the house as it is pulled by the truck through the night.

Another drawing, when the house has been put back together again in the city, shows a dollhouse view of the insides of the whole house. You feel as if you could reach right in with your fingers and help the workers downstairs by the fireplace, the two men carrying a couch up the stairs, someone hanging a painting in an upstairs room, the little boy Mason in the attic.

Tom also includes some architectural floor plans of each floor of the house, plans that look like a professional architect's drawings but are simple enough for young children (or architecturally-challenged adults) to understand.

And there are lots of details in all the drawings: for example, if you look closely, you'll see that one of the workers looks suspiciously like a very famous country-western singer.

This is the back cover of Victoria House. It is a scene of an olden tranquility, and I think it is a very fine representation of the loving care that has gone into this book by both the author and the illustrator to show the restoration of a beloved old house.

Because the subject matter is very complex and comes with words like gazebo, foundation, studs, girders, concrete piers, and spindlework, Janice has done something I find incredibly wise: she has made the story very simple. Once a house was lived in and loved, then it fell into vacancy and disrepair, then it was lived in and loved again.

And a little boy named Mason gets to have a bedroom ~ in the attic.

The house is never "just a house" because from the very first, Janice gives the house a name: Victoria. Such a lovely way to give this old house a heart and a soul!

For anyone who is thinking of purchasing an old house and moving it to a new location, this book is a wonderful blueprint for what is involved in actually making this happen. We've had any number of old houses moved into our neighborhood, and it is exciting to see it all take place. Once, in order to save a house from demolition, it was bought and moved only a few blocks away. It sits this very minute just down the street from where we live. We can see it from our front porch.

You can find out more about Tom and Janice Shefelman here, and about Victoria House here.

My husband and I have many times given this book as a gift. Tom Shefelman is an architect and so is my husband; Janice Shefelman is a former teacher, and so am I; they live in Austin, and so do we; they love old houses, and so do we. It has been the perfect gift for us to give away!

Anyone who loves old houses and who cares about saving old houses will love this very beautiful and architecturally-vivid children's picture book.

Anyone who has children who love to draw should grab this book up right away. And maybe get a tablet of tracing paper, too. Your kids will want to see if they can turn something two-dimensional into a three-dimensional view.

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Edited to add: Alas, it turns out that this wonderful book is currently out of print, but there may be used copies available online. I am hoping that one day it will be reissued!

The Last Train

The Last Train by Kim Lewis is much more than a story about a ghost of a train that makes one last run across tracks that aren't there anymore. You'd think that would be enough of a story right there! But Kim Lewis, the author and illustrator, does something much more profound in this very lovely and magical children's picture book.

Even the cover art shows that something "out of the box" is happening, for the steam from the train billows right out of the framed illustration and off the edges of the cover ~ into space.

Two children, Sara and James, find an old hut where the railroad men used to have their coffee when they were working on the tracks. The hut is in ruins. But it is here that the children begin to imagine the last train.

Sara and James coax their parents into helping them fix up the old railway hut. They work together all day until Sara hangs a red handkerchief on the old fireplace, and "a crack of lightning split the hot air just as low rumbles swelled from the hills."

And the last train comes thundering in out of the thunderstorm.

Only the children see the last train. But it is made very real not only in the illustrations, but also in the words. That night when they tell their parents that they saw the last train, what do Mom and Dad reply?

"Of course you did . . ." they said and smiled.

I love it that what these two children saw is sanctioned in this book. It is not written off as only a dream, or only the thunderstorm, or only imagination.

Only imagination!

Now there's a thought to ponder ~ as if something that is "only imagination" is less than something that is "real."  I can remember how I felt as a child when I came to the end of a story and found out that "it was only a dream." I always felt so disappointed. Betrayed, even.

So I really love finding children's stories where imagination is allowed to be real. It makes me stop to think that it is in the imagination of scientists and artists and thinkers of every ilk that our world is imagined and re-imagined, made and re-made, invented and reinvented, in ways that 8th century or 18th century peoples would have never imagined, to put a very bold point upon the word "imagined."

Well, as far as I can tell, this wonderful children's picture book is out of print, but there are four copies available in the Austin Public Library, so I am hoping that you can find a copy in your local library, too, and there's a good chance you might be able to find used copies on Amazon. If you scroll down "below the fold" on the Amazon page for this book, you will find reviews by School Library Journal and Kirkus. The back of the book itself says "Age 4 and up," but Kirkus says "3+" and School Library Journal says "Kindergarten-Grade 3."

I love The Last Train because it is written in words that would be just as wonderful to find in an adult novel, but somehow it is even more wonderful to find them here in a children's picture book. 

You can also find more books by Kim Lewis on her website here.

And I hope your weekend is full of trains, either real or imagined, and that at least one of your trains takes you to that most wonderful of all destinations: Imagination. A place on the map of the world well worth the journey ~ anytime!

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Yonder

Yonder, by Tony Johnston, illustrated by Lloyd Bloom, is a gentle peek into the olden days and olden ways. To my way of thinking, the word "yonder" ranks right up there with the back o' beyond, vanishing point, North Pole, and the Milky Way for taking the mind to some far away and wonderful place.

Tony Johnston starts the first page by using the word "yonder" five times, and in this way she takes us immediately to some distance horizon line: "Yonder. Way over yonder."

And then she sets us right down smack in the middle of this yonder place by saying "There. Just over there." This phrase is a repeating phrase used throughout the rest of the picture book, until she brings us back again to "Yonder. Way over yonder."

With a kind of poetic magic, Tony Johnston makes "yonder" seem like "here" just for few pages of time.

The story grows up around a tree. A man comes with his bride. They plant a plum tree. They build a cabin and a barn. Children come, and the seasons come and go, too. There is one really wonderful two-page spread where the mother is sewing a patchwork quilt on the left-hand page that perfectly mirrors the father on the right-hand page who is plowing his field in front of a patchwork of land like the one show above.

The mother's quilt is a fabric painting of all those patchwork fields outside.

This is the mother from the cover of the book. I love that little button of a baby's face peeking out at us.

Tony Johnston's words cast a poetic spell, and Lloyd Bloom's illustrations have a lovely impressionistic look to them. In the springtime, the plum-tree blossoms are strewn upon the page in a hundred tiny pink and white splashes, and in winter, snow spatters everywhere, both inside the house and outside on the trees.

Soon all the children grow up. The boys are taller now than their father. A daughter gets married. A new baby is on the way, and the mother and father become grandma and grandpa. The plum tree keeps on growing. And it all takes place:

"There. Just over there."

The father gathers all the grandchildren on his lap and tells them stories. I think one of my favorite parts is that during the telling of these tales:

"Owls are listening. Bears are listening . . . There. Just over there."

The father who is now the grandpa dies and one last tree is planted for him. Such a tiny book, only 32 pages, to carry the whole story of one family, from the first bride and groom to the first children to the first grandchildren to the first death, in and out of years, and through all the seasons.

If you want an old-fashioned story with a wagon in it, a swing and a quilting frame, pigs, geese, and a goat, a wedding and a cradle, children in nightshirts, pumpkins and knitting, and the planting of a tree to say goodbye to a loved one, it's all there, just over there and way over yonder, in a beautiful children's picture book called Yonder.

It's a very "Tasha Tudor" kind of book, both in the lifestyle it portrays and in the sweet illustrations.

This book is sadly out of print (I found it in a second-hand store ~ by chance), but I do see that a few used copies are available on Amazon. I checked with the Austin Public Library and found that two copies are available in Austin, so if you live in a largish city, I hope you can find it in your library, or can receive it through an inter-library loan system if you live in a smallish city.  

I would love to know how easy or how hard it is to find a book like this where you live, and especially if you live on the other side of the world. And have a wonderful weekend, wherever you are, way over yonder or there, just over there!

The Big Big Sea

This is an extraordinarily luminescent children's picture book, The Big Big Sea, written by Martin Waddell, illustrated by Jennifer Eachus. The very first words draw you in immediately, as if the author had reached out, taken you by the hand, and led you right down to the sea in the dark:

Mama said, "Let's go!" So we went . . .

The illustrations are done with colored pencils, although it is very hard not to feel that they are photographs, Jennifer Eachus has so completely captured this little girl, the sea, the seashore, and the moon, and other details throughout, like the mother's hands in the very last picture.

The story is told by the little girl, with only the words that she would have used herself, and every word is so sweetly simple, direct, innocent. 

Martin Waddell is pitch-perfect in putting this story into her child's voice.

"and I saw . . . THE MOON."

"I went right in to the shiny bit."
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We are told on the author/artist page that the book's setting is near Martin Waddell's home "where the mountains of Mourne sweep down to the sea" in Northern Ireland.

The artist Jennifer Eachus traveled there to see what the author was writing about. She even made sure that she went when the moon was full. I am touched beyond words that the artist took the time to honor the author's words in such a wonderful way. Her illustrations are a glowing tribute.

The back cover says "Age 3 and up," but I really think it could say age 2 and up. You can read some Amazon customer reviews here. A simply beautiful book. It is a big, big sea experience in itself, but it is also a perfect bedtime picture book, too.

I hope you will give it a try! And have a lovely, big, big weekend!

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Come By Chance

I found Come By Chance by chance in a second-hand bookstore in Austin about 15 years ago. It is written and illustrated by Madeleine Winch who lives in New South Wales in Australia.

Come By Chance is a beautiful fable. It begins in such a plain and simple way: "Bertha was alone." Bertha finds herself "far from anywhere" and comes upon a "tumble-down old house." It's a fixer-upper, and she fixes it up. Then she names it "Come By Chance" and settles in. Winter comes, and one by one, animals come, too, looking for shelter.

And no one is left out in the cold. 

Yes, a fable for all time, and maybe especially for our time, when times are hard, and we really need to try to live our lives like Bertha. We really need to make sure that no one is left out in the cold, that no one is turned away from the table.

I love how Madeleine has given Bertha's hair a voice in the story. It speaks.

You know how a dog's ears perk up or lie flat or stand out like a pair of airplane wings? Bertha's hair speaks like that throughout the story. So sweet!

And Madeleine captures, completely, the love that exists between animals and human beings.

But there's even more because the text of this story does not tell the whole story. You have to "read" part of the story in the pictures. This is so important for children. Listening to the text and reading the pictures are both a part of learning to read.

For example, the text on the left-hand page says that "a storm began to rage." But when you look at the picture on the right-hand page, there is Bertha, opening the door, and a cow is peering inside, longing to come in out of the raging storm.

A child has to both listen to the words and also "read the picture" to get the story.

This is from the back cover. Silent tracks in the snow making their way to a house with lighted windows.

I love it when a children's picture book lets the pictures tell something important that is not in the words. It teaches children that understanding the written words on a page goes hand in hand with everything that surrounds those words.

Later they will need to know that understanding a single word inside a sentence goes hand in hand with understanding all the words that come before it and all the words that come after it, and maybe a whole lot of other things, too. They need to be ready to bring the whole world into the act of reading in order to develop what we call "comprehension."

My goodness! Listen to me talk! You'd think that I think I know something about reading! Honestly, I don't really. It's a mystery to me from beginning to end how, for most children, reading simply miraculously takes place. But if I can put my finger on even just one tiny little thing that helps anyone in helping children with reading, or with anything else, I would so love to find a way to do it.

Anyway, I can tell you for sure that Madeleine's animals are wonderful, and because she is from Australia, there is a kangaroo.  Such warm, cozy paintings for such a warm, cozy story about companionship and taking care of one another.

I think Come By Chance was out of print for awhile, but, in doing research for this post, I am so happy to be able to tell you that it was just reissued in April 2009! I think you can find it here at Walker Books Australia and New Zealand. Or check with your local bookstores to see if they have it or if they can order it for you.

Also, Madeleine Winch has her own website here, if you would like to see more of her prints, drawings, and paintings.

Please do take a chance on Come By Chance. And have a wonderful weekend!

I Think I Can

Most children grow up with some version of The Little Engine That Could story. I am quite sure there are Chinese and African variations on this theme, though I don't know what they are. But it is very hard to do anything unless you think that you can. I made this card for my students, but honestly, I made it just as much for myself, or for any friend who has reached that point in life where the top of the hill seems too far away.

This was the easiest card to make. I ran blue Canson art paper through my printer to print the words at the top. After I had cut the card to size (5" x 7"), with the words centered, I cut out a large circle of that night-sky blue cotton fabric. I positioned it with double-stick tape on the card so it left enough space on the card for the train. Then I trimmed off the unneeded parts of the circle.

The train is four little stickers. I mixed and matched the colors to make sure I had a blue engine and a red caboose ~ I couldn't imagine my little train any other way.

It turns out that perhaps I was remembering this 1954 version of the story by Watty Piper, The Little Engine That Could. The engine is definitely blue! And everyone knows that a caboose is supposed to be red.

The story is so simple: a long train must be pulled over a mountain and none of the larger engines will do it. Only the small engine goes to help. And the only way it finally pulls the long train over the big mountain is by chanting to itself, "I think I can, I think I can, I think I can."

There are days like that, when it feels as if we are pulling a very long train of burdens through a very long train of hours. Sometimes the only way we make it through those days is by thinking that we can. I can remember chanting myself through those first years of teaching. Through every year of teaching, if truth be told.

There are some children's stories that children need when they are children so that later when they are grown-ups they can summon them up again in times of need. I think this is one of those stories. A life-long life-line of a story.

Maybe the story of The Little Engine That Could is part of the reason that old steam trains are so enchanting for most of us. I think this old story must be entwined into the sight and sound of trains. This is "The Lilly Belle pulling Walter E Disney's coaches," photographed by SteamFan.

Well, the engine isn't blue, but it is decorated with bright colors, and seems more like a toy than a real train. I love the crayon-bright colors and the storybook look of it.

But I love this older-looking steam train, too. It is the "Blue Mountain and Reading Railroad 4-6-2 number 425 getting ready for the day's tourist train," photographed by Sean Lamb. I hope it is still making its daily run. I would hate for us to lose these old trains.

I took the train from Austin to Illinois a few years ago. I could not make it all the way to my hometown in northern Illinois by train anymore, for a wonderful train called "The Land of Corn" no longer travels through my little birthplace. I had to get off somewhere southeast of where I was born, and go the rest of the way by car. (Thank you, dearest aunt and uncle, for picking me up!)

It took a day and a night and another day to make this trip by train. I'll have to tell you about it another time, but if you ever have the chance to go alone as I did, and have a sleeper compartment to travel in, with only you and your journals and books and thoughts and dreams, please, please do go. Just go. As soon as you can.

 

Of course! Here is why that caboose is supposed to be red. It must be because of The Little Red Caboose, first written by Marian Potter and illustrated by Tibor Gergely in 1953, published by Little Golden Books.

And I might just take a moment to mention that my own personal color spectrum is all the primary colors of a first-grader's 8-color crayon box at one end of the spectrum to these colors at the other end: rust, umber, driftwood, smoke, pewter, ashes, charcoal, and pitch-black.

Before I end this post, I want to explain how the earth got turned into the night sky. I tried to make the night sky fabric the background and the earth was a patterned forest-green, but the little train got lost in the other patterns. I wanted the train to stand out more, in full relief.

So I chose the plain blue for the background, but I couldn't bear to give up that night sky fabric. I tried it out as the "earth" and suddenly the whole planet became the universe!

I felt, or I hoped, that it put the whole idea of "I think I can" on another level. Something more spiritual. Sometimes it's easier to make it up the mountain of a bad day if we can see ourselves ascending into the starry universe instead.

I hope your day today is a good one. And if it is a hard day, too hard for you to even imagine getting to the top of its impossible mountain-climb, please chant your way up its too-steep slope, step by step, star by star:

I think I can, I think I can, I think I can.

I know that you will make it.

Two Books, One Secret Connection

I got to wondering if Michelangelo painted his famous creation painting in just this way because he was thinking about how we use our pointing finger with children to say Look! to make the world come to life for them. It's exactly what we do, isn't it? By pointing and saying Look! we give our children all the things of the world, one by one.

Look!

It's one of the most important things that we adults say to children. And sometimes we find ourselves saying it a hundred times a day, and pointing when we say it: Look at this! Look at how beautiful this is! Look at how this works! Look up there! Look down here! Look out!!!

I had a huge experience with the word Look! with a third-grade class of mine. It involves two children's books which happen to have a secret connection. One of the books has an illustration that must have been inspired by a photograph in the other book. The two books need to be side by side in order to see this. And seeing this is an amazing experience.

If you want to try this with your own children or your own class, here is what you need:

The first book you need is Watch the Stars Come Out, written by Riki Levinson and illustrated by Diane Goode. A poignant story told with warm and loving words that are mirrored with warm and loving illustrations.

The children in my class were either Hispanic-American or African-American, and we had just recently spent a period of time studying how their families had come to America. Sometimes we knew for sure, sometimes we had to look into history to find their ancestors' stories.

We were now looking at that wave of immigrants who came here in the early 1900s by way of the Statue of Liberty. Watch the Stars Come Out is a perfect book to read to capture this particular immigrant journey from a ship to Ellis Island to the first night in a brand-new land.

But I also knew of a book I could show them with real photographs of this period of time, too.

The second book you need is Immigrant Kids by Russell Freedman, a profound look at what it was like to be an immigrant child at the turn of the century. So there we were, a couple of days after reading Watch the Stars Come Out, going through the pages of Immigrant Kids.

I turned one particular page and there was a photo that just blew me away. It happened so fast, I couldn't stop myself. Look! I heard myself saying, and then I was reaching for Watch the Stars Come Out and saying Look! Look! and we were all looking and talking and pointing, and questions and answers were being tossed around like confetti. 

There is a photo in Immigrant Kids that Diane Goode must surely have used as the model for one of her illustrations in Watch the Stars Come Out. And it was so exciting to know that an illustrator takes the time to research a children's picture book story like that. So very exciting to get this insight into how an illustrator goes about creating an illustration, what she used from the photo, what she didn't use, what she added that wasn't in the photo. And then we went on to wondering if she had seen this photograph in Russell Freedman's book or had she seen it somewhere else? Could she have seen it somewhere else?  All of a sudden, we're looking at copyright dates and photo sources!

All of it was exciting. Plus we couldn't help but feel we had discovered a secret. A secret connection between an illustration and a photograph. How cool is that?

The first year that it happened, I was the one who said Look! The next year, I managed to stop myself from doing that and let my class find the secret connection so they could be the ones to say Look!

I don't know if it matters which book you read first, but I repeated the same sequence, first the Levinson book, then the Freedman book, except this time I didn't say a word.

No one saw the connection. We read both books twice, I kept them on the class reading table, I asked kids to go and find this, that, or the other for me, one kid looking in one book, another kid in the other book, side by side. I left the books oh-so-casually open to the appropriate pages among other books on the reading table, some closed, some also open to various pages.

I came to school for days with my hands in handcuffs behind my back to keep from pointing, with tape over my mouth to prevent myself from saying Look!

It felt as if it took forever. And then it happened. One kid saw it. Hey! Look! Then two, three, four kids crowded around the two books, pointing. Then the whole class began looking around, getting up. And then they brought the two books to me and they presented them to me, saying Look! It was as if they were giving me the keys to the kingdom, the secret to the universe, the creation of the world.

If you try this, you will have to figure out how to keep yourself from pointing and saying Look! I promise you, it is very hard to do, especially since the only way that this can really work, if you want to let them find it for themselves, is that you can't tell them there is something in one book that is almost the same as something in the other book. You can't say a word. Otherwise they'll know that you already know. They'll still have the fun of finding it, but they won't be able to give the surprise to you.

Just below is an 1881 painting by Camille Pissarro titled "Conversation." I do love these two women talking so intently across that weathered old picket fence. Telling secrets, if you ask me. And since I don't really want to keep you in total suspense, if you scroll down past these two women telling their inner-most secrets to each other, I will give you the page numbers to look for in the two children's books.

Just in case you scrolled down by mistake and really want to find these two pages by yourself, I'll put the page numbers into a little "code" of sorts ~ Goodness! I must have been a secret agent once upon a time! 

Watch the Stars Come Out is an unnumbered picture book so you have to count the pages. Find the page that is the answer to 11 + 22 - 7 =

Immigrant Kids is a numbered book, so it will be much easier. Find the page that is the answer to 10 + 24 -12 =

If you try this with your own children or your own class, I would really really love to know how it worked out for you. It was a high point of my teaching days. I hope the authors, illustrator, and photographer won't mind that I put this little secret on my blog. It's still a pretty secret place here!

If you know of any other illustration/photograph connections like this one, I would really love to know about that, too.

xo Kari

P.S. And if I got the page numbers wrong, please, please do let me know! I don’t add, subtract, or count as well as I used to . . .

A Story for Bear

A Story for Bear by Dennis Haseley and illustrated by Jim LaMarche is one of those rare picture books that profoundly spans interest levels all the way from childhood to adulthood in the way in which it depicts the friendship of a gentle and kind woman with a gentle and wild bear.

It takes us from season to season, and in and out of years, and all the while, it is taking us deeper and deeper into the great mystery of the strange markings that make words in books, and the power that these markings have even when they are undecipherable. Maybe especially when they are undecipherable.

Haseley's poetic prose and LaMarche's enchanting illustrations are a perfect match.

And maybe what I love the most is that this is a book about reading that allows for "reading between the lines" to take place. Not everything is explained. The mystery of this world of ours is given a place here.

A woman who is spending the summer alone in the woods is approached, shyly, by a bear who wants to listen to her reading. She reads to the bear all summer long.

A bear who cannot read is drawn first to the tiny marks on a letter he finds in the woods. Then he finds the woman and her books and the sound of her voice. He returns again and again to listen to her read.

Autumn comes, and she must leave him. Oh, how many times in my life have I longed to be able to speak to a beloved pet, to let my pet know that I'll be back, that all will be well?

She cannot tell him that she'll be gone for a while, that she'll be back again. She cannot tell him what she wishes for him, but she leaves behind that part of herself that the bear has loved the most: her books.

The back cover shows the bear sitting among all the books that she has left for him. LaMarche has found a way to make this bear a real bear and yet child-like in the most wonderful way: here is a bear-child sitting among all of its toys, pondering which one to play with. Its little toes are curled up, like a smile. So sweet!

Winter is coming, and the bear takes the books one by one to his cave for the long winter hibernation. From beginning to ending, Haseley's choice of words throughout are pure poetry.

I feel it is a crime for me to write a synopsis of this beautiful picture book. It is like using prose to explain a poem. I justify it only because I hope (if you haven't already) that you will find this book in your local library, or buy it, and let a child in your life experience it, with you right there, just the two of you, reading and listening together.

And if you are teacher, it will be just the same, just you and your class, reading and listening.

This book will take you right into a state of awe.

I tried to recreate the back cover (above) with a little stuffed bear of my own. I surrounded him with the tiniest books that I own. I gave him Emily Dickinson right off the bat, and the Chinese-English pocket dictionary seemed as if it might be of interest to him. I have a small, fat book titled Witch's Brew: Good Spells for Prosperity, so I put that one before him. Who knows how far his interests might range? The rest of the books are sweet little books from China with bright covers and blank pages, for writing in, plus that little fat black spiral notebook. He'll want to start making his own marks soon enough. And lastly, the video of The Bear just in case he gets tired of all that reading and writing.

I started thinking about how most of us never outgrow our ability to fall in love with a stuffed animal, and how we have this curious ability to breathe life into inanimate objects.

And then I couldn't keep from thinking about how children who cannot read will bow their heads over the pages of a book, looking and touching, breathing life into those strange inanimate markings, turning those marks into something called story.

I have a little gecko who asked to listen to A Story for Bear, too. So I let him.

If you click on the Amazon.com link to this book here, be sure to read the reviews here ~ and I also found a very interesting interview with both Haseley and LaMarche that you might like, too.

I hope you have a chance to read A Story for Bear: It captures something that can't really be captured. I wonder how it does that??

.

Thunder Cake

Thunder Cake by Patricia Polacco is one of my favorite children's picture books. For one thing, nobody does babushkas in kerchiefs better than Patricia Polacco! If you have read any of her children's picture books, you know the wonderful way in which she dresses her characters, especially her grandmotherly ones, in halos of scarves and billowing layers of patterned clothing, with little details like that lace petticoat peeking out.

And I adore her animals. Look at that goat with its fantastically floppy ears!! 

Thunder Cake is a wonderful story for helping a child through a thunderstorm. I can remember the crash of thunder in the middle of the night when I was very young, and the lovely sound of my mother's footsteps padding down the long hallway to check on each one of us. The eternal maternal guardian watching over her little ones.

Here is the full cover of Thunder Cake, front and back. I was much influenced by this story when I wrote The Secret Remedy Book, for my book is a step by step remedy for feeling better, and Thunder Cake is a recipe for being brave during a thunderstorm. And there is an actual cake recipe included on the very last page: "My Grandma's Thunder Cake." Such a very nice touch in this children's picture book.

The illustrations are a glory of colorful fabrics, quilts, rocking chairs, painted chairs, tablecloths, bowls and churns, and all her wonderful animals. Oh, and a teapot and teacups, too. Not to mention the precious little girl and the storybook grandmother . . .

Patricia Polacco invokes this wonderful grandmother in many of her stories. I have a definite fixation on grandmothers and thunderstorms. And teapots, too. That might have led to this greeting card of mine below:

The old-fashioned, very grandmotherly saying ("A tempest in a teapot") gave me such an ideal excuse for making a little storm and putting it in a teapot.

Hmmmmm. I've hardly ever sent this card to anyone because I find it very hard to judge just which tempest, exactly, in someone's life would this card be appropriate for? By the time I've worried myself over wondering (should I or shouldn't I send this card), the tempest is long gone, whatever it may have been, or it has turned into a hurricane and needs a very different kind of card. Still, I do like this little "cloud and lightning" storm in a teapot.

I understand that the English say "storm in a teacup." Wikipedia says here that there are other versions, too: "storm in a cream bowl" and "storm in a wash-hand basin." And I found one article here that says the Netherlands version is "storm in a glass of water." This same article also says the idea may go all the way back to Cicero, who is said to have written, in perhaps a loose translation, that someone was "stirring up billows in a ladle."

Well, if you have a tempest or a storm or any kind of thunder threatening you in any way, I do suggest running out and getting a copy of Thunder Cake, and maybe even making "My Grandma's Thunder Cake" recipe and sitting down and eating cake. Instead of worrying, as I am prone to do.

Or maybe we could all try standing in the middle of the world and pointing!

.

Once When I Was Scared

I thought I would talk a little more about this children's picture book, Once When I Was Scared by Helena Clare Pittman and illustrated by Ted Rand, as it is wonderful on so many levels. If you want to give your child the "dark and stormy night" experience with a warm and cozy ending, plus a peek into the past and the importance of fire, plus a wonderful way to conquer fear, this is the perfect book. It's also a story within a story within a story.

There is a present-day boy whom we meet at the end of the story. He is the one who has been listening to grandfather's story.

There is the story of Daniel, the grandfather when he was a boy, making a trek through the woods to get coals.

There is the story that Daniel makes up to help himself conquer the dark and all the dangers lurking in the deep dark woods.

Here is the tin box, all aglow with the coals Daniel has borrowed from a neighbor. Oh my! Nowadays many of us almost do not know anymore how important fire is to our lives.

During storms where I live, we often lose power. Someone's tree in our neighborhood is always falling on a power line. There is a terrible explosion. All the lights go out. We scramble for matches and candles. In my house, we heat and cook by gas, but all the switches are electric. Even so, our power outages have only ever lasted for a few hours at the most. I do know how much worse it has been for others, but I myself have been very lucky this way.

And I have never in my life had to make my way through a woods in the dark, in the middle of a storm, to borrow fire. . .

Here is the cover with a closer look at the boy running through the woods. In the dark, he calls upon the powers of the fox, the bobcat, the eagle, to help him make it through. And there's a feather that plays a part, too.

Here are a few odds and ends for your next night alone in the dark. If you look closely, I did try to arrange seven of those stars to form the Big Dipper, to help you find your way home. The little angel is a candle snuffer with spread wings.

This is all to say that I hope you will try Once When I Was Scared if you haven't already.

If you read this story with a class, you'll usually get a chorus of "I wouldn't have been scared!" or "I've never been scared in my life!" ~ Oh! I love the bravado with which children face the world! ~ But there will always be one very brave little one, the one who sits right at your feet and always keeps his or her fingertips right upon your shoe, who will whisper, "Ms. Cates, I was scared once."

And that's when you wish with all your heart that you had thought to bring feathers, so you could pass out feathers to every single child to take home, just the way the grandfather in the story gave two eagle feathers to his grandson.

And then you think, well, wait, we could make paper feathers, tomorrow!