In the last post I addressed the importance of readers making personal connections, engaging with the characters and emotions in a story. When I posted the FAQ page a while back I recognized some of my own connections. One question was asked again recently and I found myself exploring more ways this fictional story mirrors my memories, experiences, and family tales. Here’s what I first wrote: FAQ: Did you base Mari’s family on your own? I’m not Norwegian and wasn’t alive during World War II. In most details, my life and family were quite different from Mari’s. But in the most important ways, it was the same. I’m a middle child of four: three girls and one boy. I grew up in more of…
A Middle-Grade Historical Novel of Norway, a War, a Girl, and an Elkhound
Archive for February, 2014
In the classroom my goal is to help students become partners with the author. I stress the value of noticing voice, word choice, setting, and details. I encourage and model connecting text with our own lives and the larger world. I insist that the “best readers” aren’t ones who can reach the last page first or read the most words per minute, although fluency is an essential tool. Just as speed kills on the road, it can kill the beauty, depth, and nuance in reading. And in life. Carl Honore` speaks to that lifestyle in this TED talk: In Praise of Slowness. These days, few if any classrooms emphasize slowing down. In fact, the opposite is demanded, right along side the demands for arbitrary and high…
Ta-Da!! Even in large font, bold, with color, Ta-Da sounds pretty wimpy, doesn’t it? Words aren’t adequate, so Ta-Da will have to do. I viewed preliminary sketches, various tweaks, early stage paintings. Each increased my excitement, stage by stage. The same artist did the covers for the PLANK ROAD stories, historical fiction set in Racine, Wisconsin. (I love them – the stories and the covers – and urge you to check them out on their web page here: http://plankroad.wordpress.com.) Crickhollow’s Facebook Page also posted a “Coming Soon” page (here). See for yourself why words failed me when I saw the finished work on the cover for ODIN’S PROMISE. Wordsmiths out there, what should I have said?
This may appear to be a rambling train of thought, but hang in there, okay? Many years ago my sister married a serviceman (Air Force, not milk delivery), and found herself boarding a plane to join him in Guam. She was in her last trimester of pregnancy, waddling off to the other side of the world, a whole day away (on the clock and in transport) from the hometown she’d lived in until that day. It can’t have been easy, especially before the internet and Skype made round-the-world virtual visits possible. In fact, she could only speak to us at home via crackly HAM radio-phone patches, and even that occurred rarely. Despite geckos climbing the living room walls, (before insurance commercials made them…