Mysteries Solved

For the multitude of readers (all right, it was just one) who wanted me to post the end of the Mother’s Day mysteries, here you go. “In the previous episode,” as they say, a package of “Dutch bulbs” arrived four days early with a happy Mother’s Day greeting, but no signature, creating the mysteries of what kind of bulbs came and from which one of the children.

The daffodils turned out to be a profusion of delicate yellow buttercups and did, indeed, come from the AZ son who first claimed them. They had popped up by Mother's Day and were beginning to bloom.

On Mother’s Day, the TX daughter sent an email that read, “You didn't get a card yesterday in the mail because all the cards were stupid . . . and I checked several places. You will be getting a different kind of card in the mail but I'm just not sure when as it relies on another entity. You'll like it though.” This was an added and unexpected mystery since she normally is right on time. I did understand the card dilemma. We skip over the cards with the sweetness of maple syrup as well as the x-rated ones and look for funny ones that recall family jokes. Clean funny cards are becoming quite scarce.

The following Wednesday, after Mother’s Day, I got another Jackson and Perkins delivery just like the first with a card that said, “From MARK AND KELLY and a bunch of kids.” (That would be five.) MD little brother – now 6’3” – followed in the footsteps of AZ big brother – now 5’9” – as he did in their younger days. That didn’t turn out quite like MD son planned since he paid extra for Saturday delivery to back up his claim for having sent them and to assure that I had matching pots for either side of the fireplace. You can see the first daffodils are ahead and the second ones trying to catch up, much like younger brothers do with older brothers.

The TX daughter’s mystery card came late in the week from The University of Southern Mississippi Foundation. It said, “We are pleased to share that a donation was made in honor of Virginia McGee Butler on Mother’s Day on Thursday, May 07, 2015 by Anna Lane  . . . to the de Grummond Children’s Literature  Collection Endowment at the University of Southern Mississippi Foundation.” I think that makes her on time, as she usually is, since the delay was for USM’s paperwork. And she was right. I did like it.

Do I lobby for normal Mother’s Day celebrations with on time conventional gifts? Nah – too predictable, over too soon.

Besides, somebody might ask, “Who raised these crazy people?”

Got Caught - Too Late

Sarcasm sometimes reigns in the comment, “Oh, he just wanted to get caught.” And there is the two-year-old who can’t stay hidden long enough to be found in hide-and-seek, or the second grader who commits a blatant minor infraction so he will be kept in for recess out of the Mississippi heat. Or there is me, trying very hard for notice in this “Get Caught Reading Month.” Getting caught sometimes has its perks. The “too late” part? Not so much.

I must admit to an ulterior motive as I worked on this post. I found out about this special month from the Eerdman’s Books for Young Readers blog with their book people getting caught reading some interesting books. My motive is their offer for those who post about this celebration on social media to enter into a drawing for eight (8!) books. Mister H, Just for Today, Red, Roger Is Reading a Book, Edgar Wants to Be Alone, Animal Supermarket, The Yes, and The Amazing Age of John Roy Lynch.

All eight books appeared to be good reads and would look fine on my bookshelf after I finished reading. A couple in particular intrigued me. The copy of The Amazing Age of John Roy Lynch signed by both author and illustrator, which I’m reading in the picture, will remain with me only until it becomes a gift for a couple of red-headed brothers. That surely calls for a copy of my own to replace it. Then there is the intriguing resemblance on the cover of Roger Is Reading a Book to Roger Sutton, editor in chief of The Horn Book Magazine. Hmmmm.

The “Too Late” part comes with a moral for this story which I found as I looked for the website to include for my blog readers. Not paying close enough attention to the instructions can be the end of hope for contest winners as well as writers. You can see the instructions (and my mistake) yourself by clicking on the picture of the stack of books, along with some of the “caught reading” pictures, at www.eerdlings.com.

Since this is the month for being caught reading, my assumption that it ran to the end of the month would have been better served by reading all the information carefully – like the one that says the contest closes at midnight on May 20. Why do I feel a bit like a hare who took a little snooze unaware that a tortoise was passing him by?

Crystal Kite Award

Only on a special occasion do I blog about the same book twice, and seldom am I later than early morning doing my post. This is a special occasion, and I had to wait for the press release before I could tell! I first blogged about Hurricane Boy by Laura Roach Dragon on March 10, 2014 when it had its debut.

Now it has won the Crystal Kite Award. These awards come from members of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (the longest name of any organization to which I belong and lovingly called SCBWI for short). Normally, one award is given in each of fifteen regions, but in this case, there will be two since there was a tie in the final vote from Mid-South Region.

Books published in 2014 by a list of recognized children’s and young adult publishers are eligible. Voting is done by members of the organization so the award is given by one’s peers, much like the Oscars. Authors are prohibited from active campaigning although they are allowed to remind their friends to vote. Anything resembling spamming disqualifies the author and book. Since the Mid-South region covers Kansas, Arkansas, Tennessee, Kentucky, Missouri, Mississippi, and Louisiana, the original list was long. (I know – Kansas and Missouri in the Mid-South? All I can say is, I did not make the divisions. But it’s no worse than football’s new configuration of the Southeast Conference.)

What does Laura get for this? A big round of applause and several hugs at the announcement during our local meeting last Saturday when we were sworn to secrecy, an engraved Crystal Kite Award (some hinted that it had only been handled with white gloves to prevent any tarnishing of its beauty), and a silver sticker for her winning book.

And why am I blogging about this book a second time? Not because her autograph in my copy ends with “ . . . I couldn’t have done it without you.” I wouldn’t want to seem proud. Okay, so I am proud, but I’m also giving you a heads up on an award winning book in time for you to read it on the tenth anniversary of Katrina on August 29 – the storm that started the story in Laura’s head.

Gone, but Not Forgotten

My first knowledge of today’s birthday boy came when my father returned from preaching at a country church “in view of a call” as they used to say. In his description of the prospective church, he returned several times to the young man who played the piano. The church called and Daddy accepted, but it would be a few months before the family moved so I could finish my last year of high school without a change. On successive trips, Daddy’s reports often returned to the young piano player, also a senior in high school. One weekend, a family visit to the new church brought us to Mr. Butler’s country store where he introduced us to “his baby boy” – the piano player. Mr. Butler died unexpectedly that spring before we made the move.

Daddy always got edgy at this point when he heard me tell this story. He said I made it sound like an arranged marriage. It wasn’t. I had a mind of my own that Daddy had always encouraged me to use. I could hear Allen’s piano and see his dark wavy hair. The red and white Buick hardtop convertible he drove didn’t hurt anything either.

While Daddy never objected in principle to my good taste, he did become worried about the speed at which I took a liking to his musician. He made a statement in my hearing to someone else – obviously for my benefit – that none of his girls had better think about marriage before they were eighteen. Little did he know he was giving permission for the plan Allen and I had already hatched that would allow me to finish junior college before the wedding.

When I stuck my hand under his nose to show the engagement ring not long before that sophomore Christmas and said, “Daddy, I’m eighteen,” he replied, “Yes, you are.”

The dark wavy hair and the Buick are long gone but not forgotten, and the piano fingers aren’t quite as quick and sure when they tickle the ivories these days. But we’ve had more adventures than either of us would ever have expected, many because of the “Greetings” sent by Uncle Sam on another birthday. (Really, how can a draft notice be timed for your birthday!) And three children, their spouses, and ten grandchildren have added many more.

His piano-playing fingers have taken a liking to baking cakes himself so I’ve skipped that and made a reasonable facsimile of his mother’s chocolate pie for the occasion. Happy birthday, Allen! And, thanks, Daddy, for pointing him out, though I probably would have found him all by myself.

The Sound of Glass

The prologue of the advance reading copy of The Sound of Glass by Karen White (release date – May 12) sets Edith in Beaufort, South Carolina – July 1955, “An unholy terror rippling through the sticky night air alerted Edith Heyward that something wasn’t right.” She pictures her hand-made blue and green glass wind chimes shivering like a hanged man from a noose.

Chapter 1 sets Merritt in Beaufort South Carolina – May 2014, “Fires can be stopped in three different ways: exhausting the fuel source, taking away the source, or starving the fire of oxygen.” Merritt knows her fire-fighter husband Cal’s death, as he walked into the burning building, was no accident.  

So begins a Southern tale told in alternating chapters between the two women. Inexplicably, Merritt inherits her husband’s family home two years after his death. Her stepmother, too close to her own age, and her ten-year-old stepbrother show up on her doorstep before she can dispose of the house. Edith’s story and Merritt’s weave toward each other to the background music of the chimes.

Getting rid of the chimes becomes an early goal, a concrete thing Merritt can do while she unearths the mystery surrounding the unexpected inheritance and figures out what she is going to do with the other legacy of the stepmother and half brother. The reader knows quickly there will be more to this than the couple of days she mentally allots them until they can find a place, just as she (he) senses that the chimes are staying.

For those who like “beach reads,” this would qualify. I’d recommend instead a tall pitcher of iced tea and a porch swing with a full afternoon ahead to enjoy meeting the well drawn characters that will have you thinking of them even after the last page is finished.

Merry Mother's Day Mysteries

The mysteries began with a delivery for me from Jackson and Perkins by UPS shortly after noon on Wednesday. My husband brought in the box and waited with curiosity. “Mother’s Day,” I said. He raised his eyebrows. Typically, our children are pushing the deadline or a day late for holidays, not four days early.

Inside the package was a utilitarian pot inside a decorative one with moss covering the dirt and clumps of chartreuse poking out the top. Pulling out the paperwork, I found instructions for taking care of the plants identified as “Dutch bulbs” and a slip that said, “A Special Message for You: Happy Mother’s Day!” No signature.

The Mother’s Day greeting left me with three choices – AZ Son, TX Daughter, or MD Son. All three have been known to sometimes, but not always, send flowers for special occasions. Figuring it out, I seemed to recall that AZ son had an account with Jackson and Perkins and had used them before, but early is not a word I use often to describe him. In fact, until he married a wife, I could usually depend on a Mother’s Day card sometime before the first of June. The TX daughter was more likely to send flowers for an unusual occasion or in the form of a gift card to a garden center for plants to go in the yard for the gardening passion we share. The MD son more often sends cut flowers, but varies his choices enough that it could have been him.

In the second mystery, “Dutch bulbs” and “Mississippi trees” are equally definitive. We’ve been to Holland when it was in full bloom, and the bulbs could be tulips, daffodils, or any number of their relatives.

I quickly sent the family group an email that substitutes for the conversations around the dining table now that the kids have scattered across the US. I sought a solution to my two mysteries. They used the “reply all” to answer.

TX daughter responded, “Count me out. Maybe they’re Pennsylvania Dutch?”

MD son said, “They’re from us. We, uh, may have lost our receipt but, yep, they’re from us!”

AZ son retaliated, “No they’re not. And they will be daffodils eventually.”

By Thursday morning, the little clumps raised their heads and stretched upwards into stems. This morning they’ve grown taller and turned green with promise of the solution to what kind of daffodils will bloom.

As Mother’s Day approaches, I wish for each of my blog reading mothers, and those who have stood in place of mothers, a merry Mother’s Day and maybe even a bit of mystery to go with it.

Book Dilemma

Torn with book decisions involving too many books and too little time, I often get help with my choices from the American Library Association lists. ALA does not resolve all dilemmas. More than once, I have personally liked an honor book better than the winner for the Newbery or Caldecott Awards.

This year I had read Brown Girl Dreaming (honor book) by Jacqueline Woodson before the Newbery awards and could not imagine how another book could come in ahead of it. I have just finished The Crossover (Newbery winner) by Kwame Alexander and am still in a quandary about “best” that leaves me grateful that I was not on the committee. I would still be debating with myself while the other members restlessly urged me to make a choice. (Just for the record, I do not qualify so you need not worry that I will ever be making this decision.) Evidently, ALA committees share my love for both books. The Coretta Scott King Award Committee made Brown Girl Dreaming the winner with The Crossover receiving an honor award.

What I found in both books:
•    Beautiful easily read verse
•    An engaging story
•    A family laced with tension, conflict, and love

What I found in Brown Girl Dreaming:
•    A literary style
•    A memoir that feels like fiction

What I found in The Crossover:
•    A basketball writing style (really – the poetry often bounces and sometimes slam dunks)
•    A novel that feels like reality

So, which is better? It probably depends on whether the reader is a classic bookworm or a sports fan. In any case, I’m leaving this decision alone while I read the third book in the Newbery triumvirate, El Deafo by Cece Bell, a memoir in graphic novel style. Very different from the other two, I’ll let you know if it lives up to its Newbery companions.

Mind Change

On this date many years ago, my parents slipped off and got married. Not quite as exotic as it sounds. Everybody knew Berton and Virginia were engaged. They were twenty-six and almost twenty-five, respectively. Daddy’s parents were dead. Mama didn’t want her mother, who was in poor health, to struggle with a formal wedding. They did ask my grandfather if he’d like to go into town with them, but he declined the invitation.

They were married in their pastor’s living room with his wife as their witness. Returning to Papaw’s farm, they were met by Mama’s eight-year-old sister who figured out what they had done and ran to tell Papaw, “You’ve got a new son-in-law and a preacher, too!”

Papaw’s response was, “If I’d known that was what you were going to do, I’d have gone with you.”

It was the end of a courtship that got off to a rocky start. Several years before, Daddy visited his cousins in the little community of Sturgis, Mississippi and accompanied them to church on Sunday morning. He told his cousins over lunch that he’d met the woman he was going to marry. Mama told her family she’d met the ugliest boy she’d ever seen.

Some of their differences might prove that opposites do indeed attract. He came from a family for whom a “dysfunctional” definition was kind. She came from a nuclear and extended family that might be more in your business than you wanted but coalesced around each other at the end of the day. He grew up in a small town with home on the top floor over his father’s bottom floor barber shop. She grew up on the family farm, homesteaded several generations before. He thought a nickel in your pocket was for spending. She wouldn’t part with a frivolous dime until all necessary, useful, and altruistic needs were filled. But they shared a commitment to his ministry in rural Mississippi churches; a love for people in general and four daughters, their spouses, and offspring in particular; and a love for telling stories – including the one of their dissimilar impressions at their first meeting.

The marriage would last until his death almost forty-five years later. She smoothed some of his rough edges with social graces, and he taught her to see the funny side of whatever life handed them. On this day some seventy-eight years later, I am equally glad that she changed her mind after her initial impression and that he never did.

Book Quartet

I filled a big bag with books and my credit card with charges during the recent Kaigler Book Festival – twice! Grandchildren’s birthdays are taken care of for a while. I’ll share my finds of books good enough for grandparents and grandchildren from time to time via this blog in case some of you are looking.

I’ll start with the quartet for the youngest set. At two and a half and one and a half, they’re not old enough to read my blog and spoil the surprise. [The older ones may not read my blog, but let’s just say it’s possible. I’ll blog about those books and why they were chosen when their birthdays come.]

These four of the Ezra Jack Keats Award Winners made it into one of those bags.

The two on the left will go in the stash to wait since they feature children who are a bit older. How do I keep up with this? There’s a list in the stash.

• ·         Hana Hashimoto, Sixth Violin by Chieri UeGaki, illustrated by Qin Leng (EJK New Writer Honor Award): Children will enjoy the relationships as Hana practices for her first recital with older brothers who tease and memories of a grandfather far away in Japan encouraging her beginning music. Both grandparents and grandchildren will enjoy the twist at the end that makes it right.
• ·         Edda written and illustrated by Adam Auerbach (EJK Honor Book): Edda, from the magical land of the Valkyries, must make adjustments when she starts to school in the land of Earth. Vaguely familiar problems will strike home to kindergarten or first grade earthlings. This is a read together book for those first days of school.

I may not be able to hold out for the two on the right until a small-for-his-age grandson has his next birthday. In both, the little people win the day!

• ·         Shh! I Have a Plan written and illustrated by Chris Haughton (EJK Award Winner): Four friends start out shushing the smallest one’s greetings to an exquisite bird. They have a plan, quickly understood by preschoolers watching the nets as one try after the other to catch the bird is thwarted. Both the adult and small readers will get a laugh from the little one’s triumph – probably more than once as the story is read again and again.
• ·         Little Elliot, Big City, written and illustrated by Mike Curato (EJK Honor Book): The irony of an elephant too small to reach things will not be lost on people short enough to empathize with him. The pictures and story work together in a delightful way to show what happens when Elliot is able to befriend someone even smaller than himself and how they work together – making it a perfect book for a little guy.

To paraphrase a title, Shh! I have a secret. Don’t tell my grandchildren what they’re getting for their birthdays. I wouldn’t want them to guess that I had bought them books.

Listening

I didn’t hear the call, but I may not have been listening. I think my husband heard it soon after he heard the insistent invitation from Uncle Sam to join the Army. Al carried the thought with him during a whole career that one day he would come home. Home for him had an address with “MS” before the zip code. Whatever the cause, as we neared retirement, the call to return home to Mississippi brought urgency in his conversations. I didn’t hear it.

I remembered his coaxing yesterday as I drove through the streets of Hattiesburg and out the rural Lamar County road to the library. This Mississippi world seemed to be a veritable canopy of every conceivable shade of green banked against a deep blue sky with puffy white clouds. I headed home, knowing my back yard had the same spread of oak, sweet gum, pine, hickory nut, and more, interspersed with privet hedge filling the neighborhood with a sweet aroma – and let me not forget the magnolia bursting into bloom out front. Place is important to writers, and I couldn’t imagine another I’d rather call mine.

I’ve wondered in these fourteen years since we returned to our home state why he heard that call, and I didn’t. I’ve come up with a couple of theories. Perhaps it was because his roots were deeper than mine from having lived his first twenty-four years in the same house. My address, like his, had always ended with “MS” before the zip code, but I’d lived in at least fifteen houses in various locations in the northeast corner of the state. My roots were shallow.

The other reason may have been that I have loved each place we lived. Looking back, each seems to have been the right place at the right time for our stage of life and the ages of our children. Six states and three countries outside the US have been home for the time designated by the Army. I worried little about which two letters came before the zip code or if there was an APO address instead.

But yesterday, it occurred to me to be grateful that Al made me listen until I heard the call and its chorus “Hattiesburg . . . Hattiesburg . . . Hattiesburg.” My shallow roots have taken hold in this Mississippi clay and burrowed deep. My hearing has also improved. I can hear my porch swing’s invitation to come with my book and savor the green and the sweet aroma. This time I need no coaxing to answer.

Goes Without Sayin'

The information on the back of the bill from the lawn service tickled my funny bone.

“WILD ONION/GARLIC WAS FOUND IN YOUR LAWN. This weed is difficult to control. . . Weeds were found. . . ”

Some statements are foregone conclusions and don’t need to be said:
•    The lengthiest miles of a journey are the last fifteen.
•    Santa Claus wears a beard.
•    Our daughter dislikes cockroaches.
•    Squirrels can outsmart any idea or contraption humans devise to keep them out of bird feeders.
•    Hummingbirds will fight over the feeder even though there are plenty of drinking slots to go around.
•    At any writing conference, a presenter will say, “Show, don’t tell.”
•    Weeds were found.

Really, now. This is South Mississippi. It is springtime! I could have told the lawn service the wild onions were also in my flower beds where they know all kinds of tricks. After I dig up entire bulbs with my trusty spade, more appear in their place or pop up somewhere nearby.

Truthfully, these are not the only weeds in my flower beds. I’ve had a busy spring filled with book events, and the beds have been neglected. Multiple weeds have burst into bloom. My calendar appears to finally have time to get after them this week. In the meantime, I’m hoping my neighbors across the street take them for flowers. 

Edible Book Festival

Celebration of National Library Week took a tasty turn with the Edible Book Festival at the University of Southern Mississippi’s Cook Library this week. Librarians, students, and patrons turned out appetizing (well, mostly) takes on favorite books. With honor to the old saw that a picture is worth a thousand words, this blog will major on entry pictures of winners and one participant (me).

Winner of Most Creative was Claire Thompson’s “Moveable Feast or The Pun Also Rises.”

  Winner of Best in Show was “The Walking Dead” by J J Crawley and Amanda Myers.

 Winner of “Most Nutritious” was Rachel Calhoun’s “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.”

 My entry, which comes as no surprise to anyone who knows me, was “The Snowy Day.”

My creation did not win a prize, but I think I can speak for all participants and observers that the event was great fun and demonstrated just how creative book people can be.

Beware This Book!

As is my custom, I picked up a new book and headed to bed, thinking I would read until sleep called. Better than sleeping pills, this practice almost always induces a good night’s sleep. Be forewarned – not with this book.

I’d seen periodic enticements on Kimberly Willis Holt’s Facebook page about her upcoming middle grade novel Dear Hank Williams to be released tomorrow (April 14). The title alone filled me with anticipation so I was thrilled to get an autographed advance reader’s copy in the mail. Since I'm a one-book-at-a-time reader and had a couple of must-read-now books ahead of it, it had to wait. Now the time had come, and I was eager.

The book, a series of pen pal letters from Tate P. Ellerbee of Rippling Creek in Rapides Parish, Louisiana to her idol Hank Williams, let me know right away that the effect would not be soporific. (I’ve been looking for an excuse to use that word.) I laughed out loud twice before I finished the first letter. Soon I was having arguments with myself that involved one more chapter versus the need to wake up the next morning.

The story, set in 1948 in the parish next to Vernon Parish where I lived for nineteen years, has entertaining characters that ring true to their time and place. I wondered early about Tate’s reliability as she tells Hank her story in the letters. I felt Tate’s hero worship and Mrs. Kipler’s frustration as the teacher whose pen pal project goes awry. I knew Tate’s relatives and neighbors but had called them by different names. The ending took me by surprise and made me want to go back and reread Tate’s letters with the truth in mind.

In the author’s note, Kimberly says a trip back to her grandfather’s house when she thought she’d lost her love for writing brought her to this book. I’m glad she went. You will be, too, and so will any middle grade school girl for whom you buy the book. Just don’t expect it to help you sleep.

Coming Soon - National Library Week

I’ve been mistaken for a librarian several times – really! Since next week is National Library Week, I’ll admit I take the error as a compliment. Many of my friends and my favorite daughter are librarians.

To celebrate the week, I’m remembering some libraries I’ve known. As kids, my sisters and I were thrilled to see the approach of the bookmobile. Truthfully, the selection wasn’t large, and I completed reading my choices and often my sisters’ long before it returned. When life was good, the books were worth repeat readings.

In the tiny rural high school I attended, study hall for one period every day met in the approximately 100 square foot library. With no librarian, my English teacher drew study hall duty and made it her business to hand me books, especially selected for my reading pleasure. As you might guess, there were no new books, just well-worn classics. I was soon a Bronte-Austen-Dickens fan.

My children fared better with well-stocked post libraries wherever Uncle Sam decided was home. The weekly library trip with preschoolers gave them time to test out which books were coming home and allowed me a few minutes to make my own choices while they were busy.

Their favorite school librarian kept the latest titles in stock and plied my children and my students, since I taught in the same school, with both old and new books that fit the personalities of her readers. The coveted reward for good behavior or test scores in that school was extra time in the library.

Small wonder that I find myself a member of two Friends of the Library groups – one at my community Oak Grove Public Library and the other at The University of Southern Mississippi Libraries. Nor is it a surprise that I have sought out an annual book festival where I rub elbows with librarians from all over the country.

I like a Ray Bradbury quote passed along in a Facebook post by poet Rebecca Kai Dotlich,  “When I graduated from high school . . . I couldn’t go to college, so I went to the library three days a week for ten years.” It evidently worked for him. And if you should mistake me for a librarian, that’s quite all right.

Before and After

Workshops put on by Highlights Foundation in the Pocono Mountains promise and deliver expert advice, beautiful surroundings, excellent food, and quiet writing time. Sometimes, there’s a surprise as well, like the one that turned up at our August 2014 Carolyn Yoder Alumni Workshop.

Our editor/instructor Carolyn used the galley of Like a River by Kathy Cannon Wiechman as an example of forthcoming works published by Calkins Creek. The next morning, one of the attendees brought a copy of an entry in her cabin’s guestbook – written by Kathy in March 2011 BEFORE she had a published book. One of her back-to-back workshops was “Life in the Spotlight” with Peter Jacobi.

Her comment about the workshop reads in part, “It seems as though I’ve put the cart before the horse. When an opportunity comes along to fill your cart with valuable stuff, sometimes you just have to do it and hope you’ll get that horse soon. Or maybe I’ll have to buy a mule.”

Four years and one month later, almost to the day, we get to AFTER. Like a River has a release date of April 7. I’ve read that galley of an intriguing novel of two Union soldiers who should not be in the Army – Leander who is underage and Polly (AKA Paul) who manages to keep it secret that she is a girl. Kathy takes the reader through hunger and thirst, death, and Andersonville Prison compelling the reader for “just one more chapter” in hopes of finding some relief for Leander and Polly/Paul. The satisfying conclusion leaves the reader thinking of where they proceed from here, not quite wanting to let them go.

I’d say Kathy doesn’t need to buy that mule. She already has a thoroughbred heading into the home stretch of the Derby.

Is It Here Yet?

The last day of the Fay B. Kaigler Book Festival of 2014 brought feelings of fatigue and regret. The fatigue came from three days of twelve or so hours packed with adoration of books for children and young adults, their writers and illustrators, and their pushers (AKA librarians). The book festival staff, aided and abetted by the de Grummond Children’s Literature Collection and the Ezra Jack Keats Foundation, put on a party! The regret came from having to wait a whole year for the next one, with the Medallion recipient for the this year already named. (Paul Zelinsky.)  

Like a kid with a birthday, I tried to relish all the memories and not start counting time at least until the new year rolled around. In January, after all, I was down to a three month wait, and the new brochure had turned up in my mailbox with the first listing of special guest authors and illustrators. For the next few months, additions appeared on the email list, Facebook, and other publications. They included a few personal friends, a number of authors and illustrators whose work I’ve taught or admired, and some new ones I’ve been anxious to read. Toward the end of the wait, the winners of the Ezra Jack Keats New Writer and New Illustrator Awards that will be presented at the festival were named. By now I began counting weeks and days!

As I am writing this blog, I’m ready. The festival begins at 9 AM on April 8. My list of books to buy for autographing is complete, at least until I hear the speakers which always entices me to add some more. My car is filled with gas to transport festival guests from their hotels to the Thad Cochran Center. I’ve moved up in this bookish world. For five years, I was an “attendee” before I graduated to “volunteer.” My new title, recently assigned by the Assistant Curator of the de Grummond Collection just before my fourteen festival, is “Unofficial Official de Grummond Ambassador.”  I’ll take it.

By now, it’s too late to register on line but you can register on site. If you love children’s literature old and new, I’ll borrow a line from Robert Frost and say, “You come, too.” You can learn all about it at www.usm.edu/childrens-book-festival. Well, not quite all. The site doesn’t begin to tell about all the friends you’ll make and see on returning years nor just how much fun you’re going to have.

Coleen Salley – children’s literature professor, writer, and loveable character – summed it up nicely in an interview. “When my friends go on vacation, they go to places like Palm Springs or Acapulco. I come to Hattiesburg!”

As I post this blog, I think I’m close enough to be edging in on the “Is it here yet?” question. I have five days, two hours, and forty-one minutes before the fun begins.

Justice?

If writing is the heads on the coin of my life, purposeful reading has to be tails. Some of my significant reasons for reading are:
•    To learn my craft
•    To keep up with children’s and young adult literature
•    To see and understand people and cultures that are not my own
•    To see models of good writing – and why other writing does not work, at least for me
•    To be informed about issues
•    To question my own opinions
•    To be inspired

Truthfully, I enjoy all of these much like I enjoy a good pot roast with potatoes and carrots. But now and then one needs a bit of dessert.

On a recent spring day with a gentle breeze and my porch swing beckoning, I spent the afternoon with Justice for Sara by Erica Spindler – a bit of key lime pie, if you will. Katherine McCall returns to her hometown after ten years away to find her sister’s killer and to clear her own name in the minds of the public, although she had been acquitted for the murder. I thought the book was every bit as good and of as little value as that pie.

Ironically, the next book in my stack was Until You Are Dead Dead Dead by Jim Bradshaw and Danielle Miller, a nonfiction book published by University Press of Mississippi. Properly outraged by the murder of six members of the Earll family in 1902 in Louisiana, community opinion supported what appears in hindsight to have been a rushed judgment on insufficient evidence by a jury, selected because they believed in capital punishment, who may have had their minds made up before the case went to trial. Protesting his innocence until the end, Ed Batson was hanged on August 14, 1903. Looking back, people have called it a classical case of circumstantial evidence or a case of mistaken identity. Some have sung the ballad of more than thirty-five verses that arose from the story.

It seems I ate dessert first, but both books have me thinking of the unreliability of public opinion, especially in the midst of justifiable outrage, and of our continuing need for real justice – not just for the fictional Sara. Fallible decisions are hard to take back after the hanging is done.

Watch Out!

Yanking the wheelbarrow full of pinecones and sweet gum balls to a stop, I adjusted my aim before I dumped it into the bank of garden debris. Right in the middle of the pile I’d made of prunings, weeds, and dead flowers, a daffodil poked up its royal yellow head.

As one who sees herself in Shakespeare’s quote from As You Like It and
    “Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
    Sermons in stones, and good in everything,”
I knew there was an analogy here.

I skipped the cliché of “Bloom where you are planted” since the likelihood that this bulb was planted hardly existed. Most likely, it had come in a previous wheelbarrow load, accidentally pulled up with some weeds on a previous spring.

Instead, I thought of children living in circumstances much like that mess of rubbish. I saw them too often in my classroom, but like that daffodil, they were determined to bloom no matter what. Their rubbish might be dealing with poverty, a dysfunctional family, substance abuse, or parents who cared but spent so much energy trying to make ends meet there was little left for their children. I called those determined children “survivors.”

In a perfect world, all children would add their own beauty to a mixture like an English country garden – larkspurs, daffodils, roses, ornamental grasses, forget-me-nots. They would have adequate sunshine and water and admiration for their beauty. This is not a perfect world.

In this imperfection, I also thought of those who adjust the aim of their wheelbarrows so they don’t add to the debris and those who take the time to clear the biggest area possible for those children to bloom and grow or who find a way to transplant the bulb to a better place – the teachers, social workers, foster and adoptive parents, and those who just know how to be a friend.

If you’ve adjusted your wheelbarrow for a child or children who needed you, even if it was just to ply them with milk and cookies, this blog and this daffodil is for you. Thanks!

Inside the O'Briens

To know or not to know? This question about Huntington’s Disease is at the center of the novel Inside the O’Briens by Lisa Genova [release date April 7]. With genetic markers that forewarn of its inevitable onset, this lethal neurodegenerative disease, passed along from parent to child at a rate of 50%, has no treatment or cure.

This novel follows Joe O’Brien’s escalating symptoms with his loss of job, personality, and dignity. His four grown children struggle, not only with seeing their strong father figure deteriorate before their eyes, but with the quandary of deciding if they want to know whether they carry the gene and its ultimate death sentence. As his symptoms increase, Joe reevaluates the image of his mother as someone whose alcoholism led to her being locked up with her two children abandoned. The reader is way ahead of him in figuring out that she did not drink herself to death as everyone said, but was a victim of Huntington’s Disease.

The disease lays a heavy hand on Rosie, the devout Catholic wife and mother, trying to hold her family together, and creates a crisis for oldest son JJ and his wife Colleen when her pregnancy announcement coincides with Joe’s diagnosis followed by JJ’s positive test for the gene. Second son Patrick, who has been freeloading off his parents for some time avoids dealing with the problem but behaves in ways that are symptomatic of the disease. Dancer daughter Meghan tests positive for the gene, but copes by throwing herself into getting all she can from her art before it becomes too late.

The central figure is the youngest daughter Katie who struggles with the decision of whether or not she wants to know. She copes by writing quotations on her walls with a Sharpie and gives her father a reason for going on as she tells him, “We’re going to learn how to live or die with HD from you, Dad.”  

The story pulls the reader in to the accurately portrayed disease, but even more to the relationships of its people. One of the most touching moments was Joe’s realization as he lurches down the hallway with Rosie that the “best anyone can hope for in life was someone you love to stagger through the hard times with.”

The characters drew me in and I pondered the question with each – to know or not to know? I think I’ll add Still Alice to my reading list, Lisa’s previous book that became a motion picture. It’s Alzheimer’s Disease has a strong thread in my own heritage. Would I want to know? Truthfully, I am no closer to an answer than when I began. 

Clerihew Contest

Some competitions, especially those with athletic intent, have me eliminated before they start. However, when A-Word-a-Day explained the Clerihew Contest, I could immediately feel an entry coming on.

AWAD is the longest running daily feed to my computer, going back at least fifteen years. I love the words they post each day with the derivations and examples. The words for last week were types of poems, and subscribers were invited to submit samples for a contest that ran during the week with winners to be chosen in each category. The list included clerihew, epigram, cento, limerick, and doggerel. Only one brought out the contestant in me.

The first day’s poem was a clerihew, named for the writer who originated it, Edmund Clerihew Bentley (1875-1956). The earliest documented use was 1928. The AWAD definition was: noun: A humorous, pseudo-biographical verse of four lines of uneven length, with the rhyming scheme AABB, and the first line containing the name of the subject.

When the weekly summary AWAD Issue 663 came out over the weekend, declaring more than a thousand entries, there was one winner and eleven honorable mentions on the page. Mine was not there – but don’t quit yet. There was a sentence between the winner and those honorable mentions that said, “Read on for honorable mentions below (and more on our website)” with a link. Naturally, I followed the link, and there was my clerihew. Well, not exactly there at the top, but number forty-two down the list.

Now I could tell you how to navigate the trail to find my clerihew in the proverbial haystack, but I’ll save you the trouble and put it here:

Author Illustrator Ezra Jack Keats,
With collage and paint forming his beats,
Received a Caldecott Medal on his way
For his picture book The Snowy Day.

I included the explanation, “Coincidentally, the subject of this clerihew would have been 99 years old on March 11. He broke a boundary in children’s literature by writing the first full color picture book to feature a Black child as the protagonist – The Snowy Day.”

You may be curious about what I get for my honorable mention. The answer is – a story for my blog.