My neighbour finally decided to come say hello.
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Among books I bought at an auction last year was this catalogue from the Canadian Libraries Association-- featuring an article on the first Young Canada's Book Week/ Le Semaine Du Livre pour la Jeunesse Canadienne.
We've come a long way since 1949...but thank you Viscountess Alexander of Tunis!
It's Canada's TD Children's Book Week and this year there will be over 116 free public readings during the week of May 5th-12th across Canada.
This means every day writers and illustrators have the chance to meet readers face to face, talk about the creative process, what goes on in the the making of a book, (who are we really- do we have dogs or cats or lizards or hobbies like parachuting and do we make a lot money and how old are we and on it goes.) The creators of books get to hear how a reader reacts to their work or feels about a character. We see the enthusiasm generated by our books and words BECAUSE hardworking teachers, librarians, parents, community members care enough to put "good" books in the hands of children. Books where they will see themselves reflected back and meet and greet otherness, too. A child in Nunavut reads a book about a child in Afghanistan. An inner city child contemplates coastal life he has yet to experience or sails an ocean she has yet to splash around in. A child with depression learns he is not alone. And somewhere someone is talking pure nonsense and getting everyone excited about word music. So I picture children flying this week too -- flying through the wide blue skies of their imagination, the pages of books their magic carpets — zooming across our country—from sea to sea to sea.
Yes, they clap for us, the creators. Yes, we sign our names. We eat lots of cake. We feel happy.We are useful. We work hard but most often, they have worked harder preparing for us and yes, it makes us want to do more and better.
For a look at what is happening across the country this year, check out :
http://www.bookweek.ca/book-week/2012
And as for the past —
For many writers, myself included, we cut our touring teeth during the days when the Canadian Children's Book Centre http://www.bookcentre.ca/ held Children's Book Week in November. Those weeks were busy and full and a way we got to travel beyond our own region and see the bigger country. But the weather.
My first trip north (89?) I was on eight planes in ten days. It was mostly dark all day and cold—very cold and I missed my own children. Still, I loved every second of it and kept pinching myself : was I really in the north at last? There was the night the pilot scraped off the windshield of the small twin engine plane with his credit card before we took off. We circled the airport and landed back down in the same airport. Tuktoyaktuk was snowed in. Had we made it there, I would have been storm stayed for a week. There's many stories to be told by Canadian children book authors and artists --and their hosts-- maybe there's a fund rasing anthology in the making one day.
May seems a better month for Children's Book Week for many reasons-- weather being one --but also it's the time of year when everyone needs reminding reading can be as f-u-n as it is instructional. Or as in the essay above, "wholesome".
I'm shouting out to Yayo http://www.bookweek.ca/authors/diego-herrera-yayo who's on the road with his magical art work and I hope reading from
And yes----
A lot of people , for a lot of years, have cared about children and what they read.
And where, would we EVER be without our libraries ?
Just for fun --- the table of contents. Sir Stanley might have to choose another title were he writing today. Or the topic suggested might mean something quite different.
Some things change.
Scintilla: (a) a minute amount; (b) a sparkling glittering particle.
Time, image, experience, imagination, intuition, memory. Just what sifts through us—when, why, and how—it all fascinates me. All of what we have lived, observed or imagined ends up sparking and morphing into something larger than our own personal photo album when we write or create. That is, to me, either miracle or magic. Perhaps both. Grunt and grind work too, as we revisit and revise, underlay, overlay, glance sideways through the hall of mirrors, groping our way through a darkness so that maybe just maybe we catch an ember—and dance towards what might be a bonfire up ahead in that darkness. Look out!
I'm talking about (or trying to) that which is ineffable—inspiration and mystery—in the creative process, in this case, the inspiration and mystery behind Night Sky Wheel Ride. It's a picture book written by me, with artwork by Diego Herrara, and the way it tumbled out stunned me and left me spinning. Soon, the book will be translated in French, and in stores in June.
This book's publication is, however, bittersweet.
When I was a girl, we spent a few weeks each summer at my paternal grandmother's home in Chester Basin, Nova Scotia.
Cropped Detail from a photo given to me by a friend - signed J. Barkhouse.
The gingerbread homestead was my own version of Anne's Green Gables. Situated on a thumb of land, the fading yellow shingled family home jutted out into vast blueness—the delfinium blue of August summer skies and the ankle-biting cold teal blue of the Atlantic Ocean. My grandparents were teachers, not affluent in any way, but they'd inherited the heritage home. At one time, the house served as the village post office where my Great Aunt Beatrice, a medical doctor, became an eccentric spinster, and the local postmistress. She died before I was born, but family legend kept her alive enough that she inspired a few stories of her own.
One wind blown rainy night, I swear I saw her, dressed in a black cape that swirled around her face as she looked out to sea, like a carved wooden masthead on a ship. Yes, she was there, perched on the crest of the hill behind the house. Then blink—she wasn't. That hill was a mountain to me then and said to be haunted but it was the stone well in the yard I had nightmares about—warned as we were to stay away from the thing lest we, my brother and sister and the cousins might fall through—down, down into that deep, bottomless pit to vanish—never to be seen again. Forbidden! I vividly remember my brother dancing on its surface, swinging over the bar like some trapeze artist on the Ed Sullivan Show then leaping to the grass, ending his stuntboy antics in a grand finale somersault.
"Get down!" "I'm telling!" I'd like to think I never did but that would be a wonderful lie. Truth is, I was the (mostly) kind but bossy older sister who never knew when to shut up and took my responsibility of keeping an eye on the younger ones seriously. Too seriously. I both envied and cheered my brother's rebelion, freedom and boyish bravado.
Nostalgia has its place in our lives and memories come back in the oddest ways—whenever I see a bottle of lime cordial for example OR or maybe catch a glimpse of a ferris wheel...
****
Back in those lime cordial perceived-to-be idyllic childhood days in Chester Basin a community picnic was held every year in a farmer's field. One of many, but this was the one we waited for, the annual Herring Choker Picnic. Besides the pony rides, there was a small (could it really have been wooden) Ferris Wheel lugged in from somewhere every summer. (Where was it stored? Whose was it? I have no idea.)
So there, after years of waiting to be old enough, I rode the ferris wheel with my brother for the first time. A star glittery night, a soul-tingling breathless ride, round we went, to stop at the top, rock back and forth, seeing out to sea. Perhaps my father was with us. But in my recalled memory it was just the two of us, clinging to one in another in that overwhelming mix of joy and terror.
Very simply, that is Night Sky Wheel Ride except distilled, translated into picture book text in a wordswirly poem I hope takes the reader imaginatively and rhythmically on the ride with that brother and sister. Yet it wasn't memory that spurred me to write this book. Not at all. I never would have "made" this book if I had not seen the movie Atonement. I loved the book and the movie, if love is the right word for something beautiful and ravaging but there was one scene in the movie that shook me to the core. I found an image as close I could to the scene I am talking about:
I woke up the morning after the movie so haunted by this image in my dreams that I went to work, dug out some old poems from years back from a previous book long out of print, grabbed images from my own head and then pieced together something new, NEW, very new, trying I (am pretty sure) to erase that grim (beautiful) apocalyptic vision of a landscape raped by war and the image of that macabre-mocking spectre of a ferris wheel that was disturbingly etched in my head. I suppose I wanted my mandala back, my medicine wheel, my "life" cycle not death cycle—I wanted my squealing terrifying night wheel ride of courage and joy. So. I wrote the book, dedicated it to my brother, and submitted the text to Tradewind in 2007. It was accepted. They are a small publisher and good things take time.
The cover art arrived the day my brother Shawn was diagnosed with cancer in 2010. His prognosis was good, he was supposed to get better. Cancer treatment is brutal. The interior proofs arrived the morning of February 10th, 2012. The day we were called to his bedside. The day he died. Just a little over ten weeks ago as I write this now.
I know things are significant to the degree to which we attach significance to them, but I'm not sure quite what to do with timing like this.
My brother never got to see or hear what was to be, I hoped, a gift JUST for him. I think we were beginning to get to know each other as adults after the separation of distance and years, years where we were both so busy raising families and getting on with life and work that we met mostly in large gatherings, quick hellos and too brief passing by. Years we learned that life was no ferris wheel ride of our childhood, but included that other landscape of internal and external wars, of life's sadness, brutality and its darkness.
My brother was a rugby playing private investigator, an actor and a stained glass artist.
What we shared, for the most part, in terms of our own two-getherness was those early childhood memories. I wanted more.. was looking forward to more. So was my mother, my sister, his children his grandchild, his partner. We are no different from any family who has lost a loved one. No matter the timing. Or situation. There is always : shock.
I posted Diego Herrao's (Yayo) spectacular endpaper images on face book last week, with no back story about the book's connection to my brother. So many people responded, I was overwhelmed. I confess, Facebook, Twitter—its distraction can be a remedy or at least a denial to sorrow on days you need it most. But the images Herraro created are other worldy and shockingly resonant to me and I think, will be mind/heart stirring to any reader. Joyfu! Whimsical! Imaginative. For me, salvific.
My brother has vanished, not down the well, but.. where.. into the sky, the sea, the (Fair) grounds of shared memory.
So I will pretend. (I'm told I'm good at that. No. It is just how I stay here.)
Maybe he is turning the pages with me.
And I will keep playing /replaying.
See out to sea, Sister!
Husssh!
Can you hear the mermaids murmur, beluga whales sing,
Can you feel the whirling stir of every little humming phosphorescent thing?
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I love where I llve.
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I didn't know it was Women's World Day of Prayer until last night.
There's not much I could find out about Mary Ellen James—the woman who started this—unless Mr. Google and I are not on the same page this morning.
just got me me thinking
about
every day mystics and ancient visionaries.
The result of prayer is life.
Prayer irrigates the earth and heart.
St. Francis
E-a-r-t-h and h-e-a-r-t --o my anagrammatic head.
Here is a prayer from Rabia of Basra, (c.717-801). A woman. Born 500 years before Rumi, and a central figure in Sufi tradition:
Slicing Potatoes
It helps, putting my hands on a mop, on a broom,
in a wash pail
I tried painting.
but it was easier to fly slicing
potatoes.~ trans. Daniel Ladinsky
Reminds me so much of my mother's words passed down from her mother: when in trouble, scrub the floor!
Finally, from St. Catherine of Siena:
Rest in Prayer
The sun hears the fields talking about effort
and the sun smiles,
and whispers to
me
Why don't the fields just rest, for I am willing to do everything
to help them grow?
Rest, my dears, in
Yes, then maybe dance your prayer.
Pray today, yes, and pray without ceasing.
There are so many ways to pray. Time for a walk wearing my new hat. (Thanks Deanne.)
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Life is sad and beautiful.
I am not God. Doctors aren't either.
My husband has eyes like Jesus and the heart of Buddha.
People suffer and die.
Life is sad and beautiful.
Cats and dogs do get along.
Put a child in my arms and I will smile no matter what else is happening.
It is important to keep brushing my teeth.
Life is sad and beautiful.
There’s a reason “tears” you cry and “tears” as in ripped open heart are spelled the same.
My brother was a very strong man. My mother is a strong woman. My sister is a strong woman. I am a strong woman.
Surrender is sometimes a way to be strong.
Sometimes less is not more. It is just less and you want more.
Life is not about what we want or get
All is illusion
Life is sad and beautiful.
sad sand sad
Life is SA(N)D
And
Beauty
Full
Life
IS
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(words)
Today is family literacy day.
A cause for celebration, a time for awareness. Around the world. In our own neighbourhoods.
(numbers)
A day to pause and reflect a bit, too.
The links beteen illiteracy and poverty, illteracy and violence, illiteracy and crime are indisputable.
Here are some sobering statistics from Corrections Services Canada on federally incarcerated prisoners...
Ten years ago The Nova Scotia Read To Me program was officially born. The vision for the progam had been in the minds and hearts of many for years. It took a team of visionary, hard working, committed people : professionals and volunteers to bring this initiative to fruition. The work is never-ending. The program's birthday means the first babies Read TO Me served are now ten years old.
(community)
The link to the Read to me website is here.
The links to community, the links to the health and well-being , to the literacy education and heart education of the children and families of Nova Scotia are endless and priceless.
The program is about so much more than giving away bags of books and CD's and literacy inforrmation for every baby born in Nova Scotia- although this is no small thing ---and to date 78,500 bags of such treasure have been distributed. 78,500 babies reached!
The Read to Me program is about how we nurture our children in the world and the world of words and numbers, how we cradle our children in the rhythmns of life and language. How we help them find their voices. How reading aloud can create a safe place for imagining and asking, for thinking and dreaming and problem solving.
It's about turning the hope for a more literate culture and healthier society into action and reality.
I'm starting to sound like I'm running for some sort of office.
So, let me tell you a story.
I'm in grocery store. I'm wearing my Read to Me vest. A young mother, child in tow, approaches. The mother is somewhat embarassed but the child is excited. "She spotted the logo. We have a Read to Me Bag." says the mother proudly.
Her child is fourteen months old she tells me.
"Your child is reading!" I almost shriek.
"I know", she says, "I know. We read every day."
I've been both humbled and proud to have been The Honorary Spokesperson for the program since its birth. That's meant I've held more babies and read to even more children than I might have. I've also been blessed to work with special people -Dr. Richard Goldbloom, Shanda LaRamee to name but two. Above all I worked with one of my best freinds as a collegue.
On Read to Me's tenth birthday I want to sing Happy Brithday to writer, children's literature consultant, speaker and teacher, and Executive Director of Read To Me: Carol Mcdougall.
Carol: your vision, your professionalism, your kindness, your endless hours of work, your love and many gifts have made a HUGE difference. Yes, it takes many to make a program run, but your passion for this program and vision of family literacy is inclusive, open-hearted, authentic.
As a mother, a grandmother, a writer, a literacy educator, and your friend, thank you for allowing me to be part of a most wonderful wonderful story. You've taught me much.
So blow out the candles, dear friend ! Dance ! Babies are tapping toes ! Families are reading !
1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10
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Children teach me all the time.
Yesterday, after an hour of tongue-twisty wordplay, stories and poems of the "unrhymed kind" too, a teacher took me aside so a girl named Aubrey could privately hand me her "hand-made" card.
ZAP! ZAP! That's the sound of waking up. My heart when I looked at the flower. Kind of electric. Her sun my spark. Now the flower blooms in my kitchen.
"Were there no God, we would be in this glorious world with grateful hearts and no one to thank.
I like Christina Rossetti BUT
Let me rephrase:
Were there no children, I'm not sure my heart could be glad or have space for gratitude.
Yes, I adore Christina Rossetti even with all her cloyin' old smarmy old maple syrupy sticky old quaintness. A woman who wrote way back in the day. She wrote for God and she wrote for children. She has her own feast day (April 27th.). Also, she wrote my favourite Christmas song : In the Bleak Mid-Winter.
Yesterday, the sun came out and a flower bloomed in bleak mid-winter as if never before.
But see the arrow that says open?
Lesson of the week : Open says-a-me !
What I read inside the card-- stays inside the card. That's between Aubrey and me.
After all, some things are sacred : eternity in a blue tulip, too.
PS. Before Christmas, I had the chance to hear Meaghan Smith http://www.meaghansmith.com/ sing Christina Rosetti's lyrics. I felt as if I'd never heard the song before.
ZAP!
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A swish of skirt, a whiff of lily-of- the-valley talcum perfume as Teacher walked by the girl's desk, closed the door to the classroom-- closed the door to the hallway clatter, to the ammonia smells from Mr. Doak's mop, closed the door to the phantom-like principal who roamed around looking for more of the bully old runny-nosed boys to yell at and strap making a sound that would echo around the school and long after, too, when she was home, tucked in her bed and the sound returned to seep into her dreams and wake her up, afraid.
Teacher closed the door on that trembling and on all the schoolwork yet to do and the many other undone things like the cleaning up of desks or the search for lost mittens or erasing the blackboard which was really a green board or emptying the trash can that smelled of apple cores. Today, Teacher would wait until later to take a ruler to the brushes and fill the air with clouds of chalk dust because now was the time the Teacher closed the door on Time, on all the static and dust and scratch of Busy, the always all day long noise that made the girl's head hurt behind her eyes, pain like an earache hurting so much sometimes that the girl just wanted to cry. Or find a cool dark place to hide.
The girl would know, forever and ever the rest of her life that when people talked about the opening of doors that she had a secret : that the closing of doors was a necessary magical and wondrous thing because now---now with the door closed this girl who was seven knew the day's name was Friday and the bell would soon ring the night would come with fish for supper and funny tv the rolling of dice the games of snakes and ladders and the next day would be a sizzle: of bacon and eggs and comic book colours of freedom from sitting in rows and rows but for now the girl could sit, she would sit, yes, she'd sit and sit and sit forever because Teacher, perched on the edge of her desk at the front of the room, now swinging her legs like she must be happy as a hummingbird too, well, now the Teacher opened THE BOOK.
"Now where were we?" said Teacher with eyes like kindness, eyes like the eyes of Bambi's mother. "Does anybody know where we left off?" She asked, as she asked every time. And the girl, along with others shouted out: Chapter Four! Chapter Five! or wherever they were because the girl had been waiting all week to return again to the world inside that book. She had closed her eyes every night and imagined what could ever possibly happen next when the page was turned. Now, the girl gulped and her breath came all wheezy, little hiccups of breath, until finally, she stopped wiggling and settled, resting her head on the cool hard surface of desk. She smelled lemons and sighed. Listened. She listened to words and the words made a song like the kind she wanted to know by heart. She listened to Teacher's voice go all in and out and around in circles and zig zags in spirals and G clef signs up and down high and low full of blue and purple and deep emerald velvet and sparkle and sadness and those words and the voice of the Teacher made everything impossible possible in the whole everlasting wide world of forever and ever. And the girl was safe and the girl was loved and the girl was blessed with wings of fancy.
The book I remember the Teacher reading was Toby Tyler. It was a tale about a monkey. (Kind of.)
The teacher who read the book to the girl and her class was Bea Goodwin.
(Moncton, 1992.)
Bea Goodwin travelled with me into every school and library reading I've given over the past twenty-five years because whenever I'm asked 'when did you start writing' --- I tell a story. It's a true story. It begins like this:
"When I was in a Grade Two, I had a teacher named Mrs. Goodwin.( How could you ever lose if your teacher's name was Mrs. GoodWIN? How could anything be bad if her name was GOODwin?) One day she said, 'class today, we are going to write poems.' (This was long before a time like now, before most teachers believed that children could write poems and stories of their own.) Write our own! What an idea. We knew what poems were because Mrs. Goodwin read one every day--we knew an elfman could talk down where lilies blew and fog could move on little cat feet. We knew that some poems rhymed and some did not. She said we could write about anything we wanted. The sun, a shoe, our names.... "
I won't tell the whole story but Mrs. Goodwin is largely responsible for why I grew up to be a writer. It's a story best told in person. Outloud. After moving away from Moncton as a child we were reunited in 1987 when I was thirty and Toes in My nose was published. Bea Goodwin was still vibrant and eager to show me poems... three of mine she'd kept all those years.
(Moncton 1987)
When I returned home after a trip to Quebec early in this New Year, I had an email from Mrs. Goodwin's grandson.
You don't know me but you've been a part of my life for as long as I can remember. My grandmother was Mrs. Beatrice Goodwin, your former teacher whom you dedicated your book to. My Aunt recently spoke with you at a book signing and you signed your newest book for Bea. She was so overjoyed to open it and read it on Christmas Day. I'm writing you to regrettably inform you that on Friday, December 30th at approximately 6pm, Beatrice Goodwin passed away.
I know you won't get this message in time to attend any services in Moncton as they're Tuesday the 3rd, however I simply wanted you to know that you were as important a part of her life as she was to you and the mere mention of your name brought a smile to her face even at the darkest of times.
Thank you for your love and support and please continue to do what you do because it touches more lives than you can ever possibly imagine.
With love,
Trevor
December, 2011
It was a story about monkeys.
I was only one of her many students. Bea Goodwin once said in a radio inteview on CBC--- "all my students were special."
I was able to attend the service and hear her grandson's eloquent tribute.
And I thought about how many were with us, about the reach of teachers and how they often never know what lives they've touched or how. I'm glad she knew what she meant to me. I'm glad her family let me know.
Does anybody know where we leave off and another begins ?
To me, it's all as beautiful and sad and mysterious as poetry that speaks to a heart.
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