Come join me for a cup of tea

Image: Marie Claire Maison

Are you a green tea drinker? Earl Grey? Chai? Or are you a plain old PG Tips kind of a person? Something in an Oolong? Strictly herbal and no caffeine? Rooibos with lots of honey?

Are you in need of some serious tea guidance? An assortment of free tea? Or perhaps commentary on the production of Pu-erh tea in French?

Warm crumpets and lemon curd with that? Krispy Kreme doughnuts? A huge bowl of tortilla chips with mango lime salsa?

(Or just bring me an f*ing cup of coffee and quit your yapping.)

Whatever your pleasure, come join me here in this lovely space my friend Maria found for me. A virtual cozy nook for inviting my virtual friends over.

(I tried to convince Maria that she has a knack for this kind of design psychoanalysis, but as you can see from her fantastic blog, she has other fish to fry.)

I was feeling guilty about my near-hourly desire for a cup of tea. Is it fall? Am I mildly depressed and looking for comfort? Is it distraction from the big re-write?

Then I found Scientific Evidence to give me the requisite justification to indulge my yearning. Three to five cups is what it takes to keep kidney stones at bay, reduce heart disease and cancer risk, and become a mellow happy person. I wasn't drinking enough was the problem.

And besides, imagine the teapots and cups!

Image: Insani-tea Blog

So please, come pick your drink of choice out of one of those several dozen apothecary drawers in my pretend kitchen. (I bet there's really good hot chocolate in there too). Let's avoid the re-write together for an hour, shall we?

A dog will be by shortly demanding you fetch for him.

A breeze will come up and knock the remaining leaves from the trees.

If we're lucky, our children will be engrossed in something non-lethal in the other room.

Then it'll be lunch time.

Fish tacos sound okay? Followed by a fat slice of pumpkin pie.

You name it; you can serve yourself anything in Florence's fictional kitchen.

(This is where I come clean: while my middle name is Catherine -- hence Cate's Folly who is the writer persona I hide behind -- my friends know me as Florence.)

I cannot sit and chat with you,

the way I'd like to do.

So brew yourself a cup of tea,

I'll think of you, you think of me.

-- Anonymous

Every Child A Reader

Every Child a Reader is the title of a new book by Helene Coffin, published by Scholastic.

It’s a month-by-month curriculum for how to teach beginning reading to kids using poems.

This isn’t a book about how to get kids to read poetry. It’s a book about how to give kids a multi-sensory, participatory, and enthralling journey into the land of reading and writing using poems as the doorway.

It’s not just teaching kids to read and write, either; it’s showing them how to fall in love with reading and writing. And it’s helping them find their own voices in the process.

Helene Coffin has been a teacher for more than twenty-five years and is now teaching kindergarten at the Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL), a demonstration K-8 school in Edgecomb, Maine. Helene is one of those people who gives off sparks. Even in a Maine winter, I bet you would get warm standing near her.

I visited her school a couple of weeks ago and can say unequivocally, CTL is a house of miracles. I’m crushed that I don’t get to do elementary school all over again and go there. And did I mention, it's in Maine:

The forty poems Helene chose as the basis for the curriculum in her book are both delightful and strategic.

“You’ve got to find the poems that an individual child will connect to and then they are off and running," she told me. This is what she calls the "just-right poem" and it won’t be the same for every kid.

Helene’s book maps a September-June curriculum, so she starts with a poem about a child’s first day at kindergarten:

First Day of School

I wonder
if my drawing
will be as good as theirs
I wonder
if they’ll like me
or just be full of stares
I wonder
if my teacher
will look like Mom or Gram
I wonder
if my puppy
will wonder
where I am!

-- Aileen Fisher

This poem gives the kids a chance to talk about their starting-school anxieties as well as share information about their families. By the time the lesson moves on to things like “voice-print matching,” Helene has established her class as a place where readers talk about their fears and loves.

Another poem she uses to introduce kids to delicious words:

Apple Joys

Twirling the star-shaped stem
Biting into the ruddy globe
Sliding out the satin seeds

-- Eve Merriam

Helene doesn’t shy away from “hard” words like satin or ruddy. She brings in photos of ruddy faces and pieces of satin cloth for the children to touch. She pulls out apples so kids can twirl the stems, can slide out their own satin seeds.

Helene shows her kids how to savor words. She also talks about writing techniques -- star-shaped stem, satin seeds. She has a classroom of five year-olds who recognize alliteration when they see it.

Each poem has a couple of lessons built around it, always with hooks to pull the kids into the poem and make personal connections to it, as well as a bunch of ways to interact physically with the poem and with each other.

In a poem about colors, kids hold up colored strips of paper every time they hear the word for that color read out loud in the poem. They cut poems apart into individual words and then put them back together. The kids make notebooks with their own copies of all the poems which they illustrate. And she has lots of activities that pair kids who “get” the lesson with ones who need a little more time.

I’m not even close in describing the richness of her curriculum, so please just go get the book.

 For working with older elementary and middle school kids, Nancie Atwell (CTL's founder and still a teacher there) has written books describing “the workshop method" she uses. I recommend starting with The Reading Zone: How to Help Kids Become Skilled, Passionate, Habitual, Critical Readers.

Nancie's twenty-plus-year experience is that if you give kids the individual and collective space to read, access to lots of good books, and the right to choose what to read (and what to put down), kids will become voluminous and smart readers -- not to mention good thinkers.  You can see a list of CTL students' favorite books, by age and gender here.

This is not a “finish all the vegetables on your plate or you can’t get up from the table” approach to reading. This is a "so many books, so little time” approach.

In the writing part of the workshop, kids choose what to write about and in what genre; they are encouraged to write for real-world audiences -- and are frequently published; and they are given time in class to write, re-write, consult each other, and give up on projects and start others. Very much like how writers in the real world do.

Teachers are also writers, alongside their students. And they open their own writing process up to their kids by composing and re-writing in front of them (using overheads). Any of you who have seen writing and editing done live at writer's conferences know how valuable this kind of getting-in-the-head of the writer or editor can be. It's not a role your traditional language arts teacher plays.

While the workshop approach sounds very open, the actual workshop method is meticulously planned and methodically tested. Nancie's book In the Middle: New Understandings About Writing, Reading, and Learning is both a detailed curriculum guide and a revolutionary treatise about returning the inherent joy to learning.

I'm not a teacher so I never thought two books about literacy curriculum for kids would change my life. But Helene's Every Child a Reader and Nancie's In the Middle are changing how I see the world -- not just as an interested parent, but as a writer and reader myself. Their books have profound lessons for all of us about how we learn best, at any age.

Helene and Nancie's school is no fancy prep school with exclusive entrance requirements. It teaches the whole range of regular kids and tuition is heavily subsidized by the school. While it’s not a big public school -- but a tiny private one -- there are nonetheless learnings that could be applied to any public school setting.

CTL runs a teacher internship program -- participant teachers have come from 36 states as well as from Canada, Equador, England, and India to learn how to adopt CTL's approach to their schools back home. (They also teach math, science, art, and history and have other fabulous teachers...but that for another post).

If I won the lottery I'd want to buy Helene Coffin and Nancie Atwell's books for every parent and teacher of elementary and middle-school kids and send all the teachers who want to through CTL's internship program. For now I'll have to settle for singing their praises. 

There must be other small miracles going on in education all around the country. If there are schooling books or actual schools that have inspired you, will you please let us know about them in the comments section?

Oddball Sources of Inspiration, Part 4: NEWS

*HALLOWEEN CONTEST AND GIVEAWAY AT END OF POST*

Let’s not pretend, shall we? Getting story ideas from the news is not so oddball. It’s right up there with dreams and childhood in the writer’s pantheon of muses.

But here’s the thing. It struck me last night while reading David Hunter Shaw’s post about “the basterd” of writer’s block over at :Writer’s Den that my obsession with cataloging sources of inspiration is really a way of lighting candles at the alter of the vengeful god of writer’s block (GOWB).

If you do not pay tribute at his altar, GOWB will curse you with a thousand empty pages. He will scoop out your brain and hang it out to dry. He will seduce you into hours of Star Trek reruns. He will plug a Twitter feed directly into your brain stem Matrix-style and before you know it, weeks will have passed. And everything you ever wrote will seem like a very long bad joke.

Is writer’s block real? Is it more about loss of faith than absence of ideas or words? Whatever the source, I think the best way to avoid the wrath of GOWB is to outrun him with your fingers. Just keep arranging strings of letters into images.

If you can’t face the work-in-progress today, then write lyrics for a self-pitying pop country western song, compose a quatrain, dash off text for a picture book (make it rhyme badly, use anthropomorphized animals, do it as an alphabet book, use lots of alliteration, and email it to that agent who hasn’t responded to you).

As David says:

I find that I don’t actually lack for ideas. My problem is when I stop writing for any length of time; I get rusty. The old finger/brain symbiosis dries up. I get afraid to put words down. I start feeling like I never wrote before.

These “oddball sources of inspiration” -- whether they are misheard snippets from the radio, portraits of strange characters at your local museum, or the things that scare the crap out of you at 3 in the morning -- are all just ways to keep the fingers moving across the keyboard.

So, please join me in lighting another candle to the GOWB...

Some news stories that have the whiff of fiction material:

You remember last August when that guy wandered out of Discovery Park in Seattle with $600 in his sock and no idea who he was?

This story made my hair stand on end. I thought:
What if he were from another planet?
What if he were a kid and not a grownup?

We interrupt this post with a breaking news coincidence: CNN just reported a teenage girl showed up in NYC with near total amnesia. How strange that her few memories include lines from a fantasy novel. 

What if he had kids?
What if it were a hoax?

Rebecca Stead, author of the outstanding When You Reach Me was apparently inspired by a similar news story only she asked herself “what if he were from another time?”

Rebecca Stead in an interview (well worth reading whole thing):

The “big idea” behind the book was sparked by a newspaper article about a man who walked up to a policeman and said that he had no idea who he was or why he was there.  All he could remember was that his wife, Penny, and their two daughters had been in a terrible accident and needed help.  But the police could find no evidence of any kind of accident. They circulated his photo around the country and eventually he was claimed by Penny, who did exist, who was in perfect health, but who was his fiancée, not his wife.  No kids, no accident.   I thought to myself, what if he knows something we don’t?  That’s the kind of thing that gives me chills.

Speaking of hoaxes, what about the recent Balloon Boy Hoax:
Edgar Allan Poe pulled a similar stunt -- but with more innocent motivations -- back in 1844.

The balloon boy's parents apparently did it in the hopes of landing a reality TV gig. A fairly mundane -- if revolting -- motivation. What if they had some more tangled plot in mind? What if you told the story from the child’s point of view and he figures out a way to get back at his parents for their insane narcissism?

What other hoaxes out of the news might lead to good fiction?

What if, for example, a governor disappeared for a week when everyone thought he was hiking on the Appalachian trail and it turns out he went....to Pluto to help save a tiny alien race from freezing to death? (I know, wishful thinking)

Or in a more sinister vein, what if a white woman drowns her kids and blames an African American man?

What if you told that story from the point of view of one of the children after their death? Is this a horrible thing to do, by the way, to build a story on evil and suffering? Or is that part of what writers do -- to illuminate the horrific and heart-breaking so we can understand it at a deeper level than media spectacle? What do you say?

*THE CONTEST*

Headline: Man Builds Machine to Cure His Own Cancer

His machine (no, not that one over there) evidently injects metal into the man’s cancer cells and cooks the cancer to death.

What kind of fiction might this news story spark? 

Offer up your ideas in the comments section.

Deadline is Halloween. By end of day November 1 we’ll vote on our favorite story idea sparked by this news headline. The winner will get a $25 gift certificate at Powells, Amazon, iTunes, or other respectable retailer of choice.

Thank you to Bonnie Adamson for directing me to the Rebecca Stead interview and for her and Greg Pincus' tireless work as hosts of #kidlitchat every Tues night on Twitter at 9pm ET.

(more steampunk contraptions like the one above here)

Oddball Sources of Inspiration, Part 3: Misunderstanding

I'm driving around half-listening to someone on NPR reviewing the YA book Waiting for You by Susane Colasanti. What I hear is “it’s about a girl who hears an internal radio show hosted mysteriously by someone who turns out to be from her school." I think, “Whoa, cool idea; this girl’s got a radio program broadcasting in her head, only she doesn't know who's running it.” 

Great premise for a creepy neurological sci fi story -- why didn’t I think of that? It takes me about fifteen seconds to realize I did think of it because I misunderstood the reviewer. I gather the story is really about a girl dating the cheating bad boy when the nice boy next door is giving her love through an internet radio program she listens to. Oh well.

But that little misunderstanding got my motor running and for the last couple of months I’ve been pondering in the crevices of my day the potential fruitfulness of the telephone game and other opportunities for willful misunderstanding.

Here’s one suggested by my favorite writer of short-shorts, Bruce Holland Rogers. 

He reads a poem in a foreign language -- ideally one that at least has familiar syntax -- and then asks himself: 

“If I understood this language, what would this line mean?” 

It’s a kind of hallucinatory jazz translation process he uses to kick-start his imagination to stir up story ideas. (More here about that poem fragment above.)

When I was five or six I used to propel myself around our boring suburban L.A. ranch house on some kind of wheely cart we had. It was high enough off the ground that I could lie on it and hang my head off the back. Pushing with my feet I’d navigate down hallways and through rooms with an upside-down view of familiar terrain. I still remember how mind-blowingly alien I could make home feel.

That’s the trick too, isn’t it? To use something familiar enough that we have associations to draw on but then twist it enough so that the associations can unmoor themselves from the background we take for granted.

Here’s another one that my friend Maria, a fantastically talented designer and blogger, just posted on her Vintage Simple blog.

A classic home reno scene: she and her husband are taking the folding door off the hall closet. The door falls back and slams into the thermostat on the opposite wall and rips it clear off....revealing this lovely patch of vintage wallpaper under layers of paint.

Maria and the many people of good taste who comment on her blog said “Wow, gorgeous, what a delight!” (or words to that effect) while the first place my head went was “Holy crap, what else could be hiding back there?” 

What if the thermostat isn’t connected to the furnace at all but runs some other thing in the house? What if it’s a fake Twilight Zone-like thermostat and something else controls the furnace? What if they'd found something besides pretty wallpaper behind the thermostat -- maybe a small length of rope protruding from the wall and leading...? (The fact my head moves so fast into to these weird dark places is why Maria’s house is gorgeous and mine is, ahem, dog kennelish).

You know how if you squint your eyes things go all blurry and the vase on the shelf looks like a man's head? And the radiator looks frankly sinister. 

So try squinting your ears next time you listen to the radio. Or not reading too close to the text. Or doing the equivalent of squinting your brain by imagining what would happen if you took this very familiar situation you’re in right now and bent it a little. Try out some willful misunderstaning and see where it leads you. 

It’s like daydreaming with yeast to get the process going.

Or like trying to make sense of your dream the next morning. A way to project new and potential meanings onto things hazily seen. What was that hallway? Where did it lead? What was that person trying to say to me? Why did that lone boot left under the table seem so ominous/heart-breaking/comic?

Of course there's always Twitter, our metastasizing collective unconscious (or is it Id or Ego?), rich with opportunities for willful misunderstanding.

The challenge: to approach the raw material of daily life as if it were mysterious as a dream -- where the familiar is unpredictable and untrustworthy. And therefore full of possibility. 

Gone to Pluto

I may be scarce for the next week because of a trip to Pluto to conduct research for my almost-finished mid-grade sci fi comedy called GAS FOR PLUTO.

If you know anything about the planet formerly known as Pluto, don't hold back in the comments section. Anything I should watch out for while I'm there? Special things I should pack?

A little about GAS FOR PLUTO in the meantime:

Eleven year-old Jack discovers a cricketing fluffball under his bed while cleaning his room and is launched on an interstellar rescue mission. The fluffball is Phth na Patoon, an ambassador from Pluto who was supposed to land at the United Nations in New York rather than under some kid’s bed in Berkeley, California.

The Plinta -- tiny alpaca-like creatures that provide wool to keep Phth's people warm in their sub-zero climate -- have stopped reproducing. War breaks out among the pacifist Plutenarians over dwindling supplies of the wool. Phth comes to Earth to transport global-warming gasses to Pluto to raise the temperature there.

Phth persuades Jack to help her; Jack enlists his genius non-girlfriend Cleo on an adventure that takes them to New York City and then to Pluto. While on Pluto, they face down Plinta rustlers, flee mysterious explosions in the planet’s organic layer, explore quantum fields that make universal music, and experience the vileness of thermal leeches. Back on Earth, Mr. Billman, CEO of Chem-Leak Inc. plots to eliminate Jack, Phth, and Cleo because they threaten his plan to buy up CO2 emissions to use in his secret not-so-clean manufacturing process.

One reader called this story "Horton Hears a Who meets Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy."

I've spent a lot of time in Berkeley and New York, so now you understand why I need to take this research trip to Pluto.

Here are a couple of scenes from the story:

“I think I can get us to New York and have you back by supper,” Phth says. “I’ve never done transit with something quite your size, but there’s a fair chance it will still work.”

I’m not thrilled about a quote, unquote, fair chance being the only thing between me and getting home for supper. But I feel kind of bad about shouting at her before. I mean, nice work to pick an argument with an actual alien life form within five minutes of meeting it.

“What I need from you, Jack,” she says, “is some way to get your leaders’ attention. Otherwise, my people will be swept into the dustpan of history.”

Or maybe just a dustpan, I think, looking at her fluffball physique. I keep my mouth shut though. See, I’m learning.

She obviously needs somebody’s help. But why me? Why couldn’t she have landed under…and here my head wanders too far…under my Dad’s bed? Okay, so Dad’s not exactly available. In fact, he’s dead. 

I know I can be pretty blunt about that. I was two when he died and I really don’t remember him. But I feel like I know him pretty well from Mom’s stories. He was an astrophysicist so of course he would know just what to do with Phth Na Patoon. But here I am, son of two brilliant scientists, and I can’t find my way out of a fifth-grade science fair project, much less get world leaders to help this puny Plutenarian ambassador and her whole civilization.

“Hello, Jack? Are you with me? Pluuuutooooo to Jaaaaaack,” Phth calls as if from a long way away. It takes me a second to remember where I am and another second to realize that bad humor on Pluto is the same as bad humor on Earth. I find that oddly comforting. 

 “Um.” I say. “D’you mind if I go get something to eat?” I turn to go to the kitchen and then it occurs to me she might be hungry too. Whatever it is people from Pluto eat. “Can I, like, get you something?”

 “Lovely idea, thank you. I think on your planet you call them cucumbers?” she says. “Always best to make a plan on a full stomach.”

It turns out I make these great bacon, Miracle Whip, cucumber sandwiches with the crust cut off. So I offer to make her one. 

 “That sounds grand,” she says. “But please hold the smoked pig fat. And the sandwich part. I definitely need a miracle, but maybe on the side?”

Later, Jack tries to get his best friend Cleo to come with him and Phth to New York:

As soon as I close the door behind me, Phth says from my pocket: “Jack, it’s 1pm in this zone of your Earth time which means 4pm in the time zone of New York City. While I’d love to meet your friend, I think we’d better dash on to the United Nations.”

“Huh?” I say. “Oh, no worries. Cleo’s just around the corner. She’ll brain me if I ditch our skate session.”

I look down to see Phth in my pocket tapping furiously at her hand gizmo.

“Your particular sub-dialect is baffling, but I gather this won’t take but a minute?”

“Hang on,” I say, setting my board down.

 I drop off the curb, snake down the street, hop back up the curb at the corner, veer right, jump over two cracked ledges in the sidewalk, and ramp off one that’s facing the other way, catch some air, and land just in time to pivot up Cleo’s walkway and skid to a stop.

 Cleo lives exactly eight houses from me: three down my block, five down hers. Well, actually that’s seven houses because I was counting the corner one twice. I hate math.

 “Was that quite necessary?” comes Phth’s annoyed voice from my pocket.

 I don’t know why I was trying to show off for an extra-terrestrial who obviously is way ahead of us in terms of getting around fast.

Cleo’s front door opens before I can knock.

 “Two minutes late, Flame-O,” Cleo says bursting out the door with her board in hand. “Let’s go.” She stomps right past me to the sidewalk, long dark braid flicking like an angry rattlesnake.

 I’ll just come out and say it. Cleo’s a control freak. It’s part of a whole package, though. She calls it her “just once more” philosophy, as in, just once more until you have it perfect. It seems to work for her. Like her skateboard stunts blow all the other kids out of the park. So I try to overlook her obsession with being on time.

 You see, Cleo is the only thing that stands between me and complete banishment to the kingdom of Dork.

 I guess we’ve been in the same class since kindergarten, but I didn’t notice her until she rode by our house Christmas morning three years ago. She was hard to miss, going about a thousand miles an hour dressed in a full-on princess costume, gown hiked up as she crouched on her skateboard, her pink cape flying behind her. I was in my driveway just trying to stand on my brand-new skateboard without falling over.

 Cleo traded in the princess gown for baggy jeans and black Chuck Taylors somewhere back there, but she still wears her hair in one long braid down her back. And the weenie, she’s also like three inches taller than me.

 “Yoo-hooo, Jackster, buddy? You there?” she says, tapping out a frantic rhythm on their metal mailbox.

 “Sorry, yeah. I’m here.” I say, coming after her. “And I’ve got something to show you. I mean someone, well, I guess…”

 “Spit it out, already. We don’t have all day.”

 “No, indeed we don’t.” Phth's voice rises from my pocket.

 Cleo leans down and squints at the front of my shirt. “How’re you doing that?” she says.

 “Jack, dear, get me out of here so I can meet your friend properly.”

 I reach in and bring Phth out and lift her up to Cleo on my open palm. Cleo takes her hand off the mailbox and steps closer. I look up and down the street like we’re in the middle of a drug deal or something.

 “Miss Cleo, my name is Phth na Patoon and I am an interplanetary ambassador from Pluto.”

 “Very funny,” says Cleo, straightening up. “You order that out of the back of one of your comic books?”

 “No, Cleo, listen…”

 “And jeez, how lame. Everyone knows Pluto isn’t a planet anymore,” she says and drops her board to the sidewalk and steps on. “That must be some seriously old merchandise you’ve got there.”

 Phth turns and looks up at me from her spot on my palm. “I see your point that we may have a little trouble at the United Nations.” And then, “I confess while I am nearing on four years, I’ve never been called ‘seriously old merchandise.’”

 “How’s it do the, like, spontaneous conversation? That’s pretty cool,” Cleo says. And then she kicks her board up into her hand without moving anything but the tip of her foot and three of her fingers. As if to say, “but I’m way cooler.”

 “That’s what I’m trying to tell you. She’s not a toy. She’s for real. I found her under my bed but she needs to be at the United Nations like right now or all her people are going to die of frostbite and she wants to beam me up or whatever to New York to help get her to the right people, and…”

 “Whoa, whoa. Whoa. Slow down, would you?” Cleo says. “This isn’t some kind of trick is it, Jack?” She never uses my real name. “Because if it is, I won’t teach you another board stunt as long as you live, which might not be very long if you’re yanking my chain.”

 “I swear. She’s the real deal. I was coming to tell you I couldn’t go to the park today because I’m gonna go see if I can get her some help.” I say. “And, I thought I’d see if maybe you wanted to come.”

“Oh, well, wait just a minute,” Phth says. “I’m sure your girlfriend would be most helpful but…”

 “Not girlfriend.” Cleo and I say in unison. We’re so used to being hassled at school about our non-status that we hardly even work up an attitude when people say that anymore.

 “The point is,” Phth continues, “that I barely have the capacity to carry Jack in transit. Bringing one more is out of the question.” She taps into her hand gizmo. Cleo and I lean in closer to see. A series of squeaky sounds come from her hand, a blue light blinks on and off. Phth shakes her head. “Ninety-two Earthling pounds. You’re even five pounds heavier than Jack here. I mean, give or take a presec.”

 “Oh. My. God.” Cleo says and then she drops her board in a most not-cool way. Especially since the edge of it nails the base of my big toe. My holey-toed sneaks don’t exactly provide much protection from flying boards.

 “Owwww!” I grab my foot with both hands, dropping Phth and my board. The board clanks onto the sidewalk and rolls a few feet. Phth drifts down slowly like, well, dandelion fluff. Cleo snags her out of the air and goes right on talking as if she hasn’t just crushed my toe. A good thing too since my eyes are all watery.

 “You’re serious!” Cleo says, holding Phth up close to her face. “You’re really from outer space?”

 “I really am. And just at the moment your friend Jack and I must get going or I won’t be from anywhere soon.”

 “But how’d you know how much I weigh?”

 “Would you permit me to explain later?” Phth says. “Jack, we really must be going. In fact, Cleo, it would be most kind of you to direct us to a quiet place where our sudden disappearance won’t be noticed.”

 I follow Phth’s gaze across the street and see the curtains moving in Mrs. Mindlebrandt’s front window. Home alone all day and never misses a thing.

 Cleo returns Phth to me and I leave her in my open palm while I limp behind Cleo around the side of her house. Her backyard’s an overgrown jungle so no chance anyone will see us there.

 I can feel my toe all hot and swelling-up inside my shoe. No blood is leaking out but the pain is making me feel puke-ish. I’m starting to think this trip to New York is a really bad idea.

 Phth coughs.At least I think that’s what that little gagging sound coming out of her is.

 “I’ll call you?” I say to Cleo, making the universal thumb and pinky to side of head motion.

 “It was a pleasure to meet you, dear,” says Phth to Cleo.

 “Likewise?” she says, like she’s not so sure. “Sorry about your foot, Flame-O.”

 “That’s cool,” I say, as if it is. “It’s not like it’s broken or anything,” I say, as if it’s not. 

“Take a deep breath, Jack,” says Phth. Then she mumbles into that little gizmo buried in her furry glove and my skateboard date with Cleo is history.

Oddball Sources of Inspiration, Part 2: Paintings

Looking for ways to add juice and spark to your characters? Or to create one from whole cloth? Try looking at some canvas, preferably one with paint on it.

Rachael Gardner is a painter, most recently of portraits, primarily of men. And she wants us to tell stories about them.

Rachael refuses to provide any biographical information about her subjects precisely because she wants us to fasten our own imaginings onto her paintings, to cook up lives and loves for the people she paints.

“I want the viewer to have a relationship with my portraits,” she says. “We're more likely to project our own ideas onto something if we aren’t told what to think about it. What makes someone say ‘he is handsome’ or ‘he's a criminal’? Was it the lighting, his clothes, or is there something in your experience that evokes that response?”

Rachael finds her subjects on the street, among her circle of friends and family, but mostly in pictures. “A face speaks to me,” she says. “Sometimes it’s as simple as a wrinkle or a color I see. I try to capture what drew me to paint that person in the first place, usually something very superficial.”

She titles her paintings accordingly: Tattooed, Black Shirt, Cigarette, Girls (that's the order they appear here). It's as if she’s saying, “Look, I’ll give you the surface details, but you have to come up with the rest.”

“I’m always gratified when a group of people gather around my paintings and speculate about the life of the person whose portrait it is,” she says.

Rachael’s paintings are particularly rich for someone like me who is learning to deepen the characters in my stories. Her work leaves intentional gaps, ones we are asked to fill in with our own words. But they also provide starting places, which those of us acquainted with the blank page, are often grateful for.

Other kinds of paintings can also serve to help stir our unconscious into writing. Think of mining a stilllife or landscape painting for ideas about setting and mood, how to describe a storm coming in, the view a character has through their window, the texture of an old table, the bend of an arthritic hand around a coffee mug.

Even abstract paintings can be used to spark a feeling or tone that might shape how you write a scene or help you get a rung deeper on your main character (what would she say about this painting?).

Try wandering into your local museum (or over to Rachael's website) with a question about your current work in progress, a hitch in the plot, a puzzle about one of your characters, and see if some paintings call you over and have something to say to you about your story.

Digital illustration by Stephanie Williams

Optional writing assignment: Write a couple of paragraphs about who's in one of Rachael's portraits. Or tell us what's happening in that house in Stephanie's illustration above. (I wrote a whole YA novel about that image: first part here.)

If you'll email me your imaginings from these images, I'd be delighted to post them next to the paintings (including others you find on Rachael's website), along with any info about you that you’d like included.

And yes, Rachael's paintings are for sale! And Stephanie is the very talented woman who designed and engineered this blog as well as the one with my story on it -- drop me an email if you'd like to find out about her design work.

WANTED: Books for Kids with Autism Spectrum Disorders

My cousin Jean has a nine-year-old son with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD). She’s spent the last seven years working with a platoon of talented speech therapists and special ed teachers to develop a home-school curriculum for her son. Along the way, she’s acquired the equivalent of several advanced degrees on the challenges of teaching kids with an assortment of learning disabilities that are poorly understood and massively underfunded.

She has some interesting things to say about the gaping-hole need for a children’s literature that meets the needs of kids with ASDs. 

A caveat
Jean is quick to say that her experience (and what she’s learned from other parents, conferences and experts) shouldn’t be taken as a universal statement about what all kids with ASDs need with respect to books. 

I’m betting, though, that a lot of what she has to say will be of interest to writers, educators, publishers, and parents who are interested in the specific literacy needs of some kids on the autism spectrum.

Please weigh in here those of you with direct experience with kids with ASDs. And for those of you who are writers or illustrators interested in exploring how your work might better meet the needs of these kids, please drop your questions off in the comments section and we’ll see if we can get them answered!

And by all means, if you work for a publisher that is interested in publishing books for kids with ASDs, please say so!

You may think it’s simple, but it’s not: 

The trouble with most picture books and early readers

A few factors make these really tough for kids with ASDs. For example, picture books often have illustrations that have a lot more going on than what is in the text (whereas kids with ASDs often need the illustrations to clarify the text). They have complex sentences and figurative language, and often the main idea of the book is pretty abstract as well.

Take for example Eric Carle’s books. While his collages are beautiful, they are hard for those with visual processing disorders to interpret. And the text in Carle’s books can be deceptively confusing. Polar Bear, Polar Bear, What Do You Hear? uses a shifting point of view (“What do you hear?” is one voice; “I hear a...” is another voice) that can be inaccessible to kids who are just learning to match words to images. 

Even a simple book like The Rainbow Fish by Marcus Pfister contains complicated psychological motivations -- pride and envy -- that may be lost on some kids with ASDs.

What kinds of books can be made to work?

Jean says her ideal picture book has:

• Sentences that are both complete and simple (subject, verb, object) 
  
• Language that is literal 
  
• Content that is concrete 
  
• Illustrations that do not distract from the meaning of the words 

“The gold standard in terms of illustration,” says Jean “are the Kipper books by Mick Inkpen. The text is sometimes too layered, but the illustrations are very clear. The only thing that’s in the picture is the thing in the text: if Kipper’s flying a kite, the only thing in the picture is him and a kite." (Another parent recommends books that work with his ASD child here.) 

"But," she says, "in an ideal world the characters would not be talking animals. I don’t want to read any more books to him where animals talk and wear clothes. At this point he knows animals don’t talk and wear clothes.” 

Cynthia Rylant’s Henry & Mudge books and Mr. Putter & Tabby books are also workable, though Jean says she often leaves out some of the sentences or phrases when she’s reading them to her son. 

Some vintage kids’ books like the Billy and Blaze series by C.W. Anderson are also good for simple, declarative sentences, direct story-telling, and clear illustrations. 

A lot of the best subject/verb/object books are the early phonics readers, Jean says, “you know, the ones you find on the bottom shelf of supermarkets.” But the phonics books sacrifice story for word sound and so are filled with sentences like “Jack had a cat who slept on his lap” in order to teach the short ‘a’ sound. Which is fine for teaching phonics but doesn’t make very engrossing story-telling.

For ESL Students Too: My friend Susie says “This was something we worked through a lot during my brief ESL career. Some of the issues are different, but the need to find “older” content with simpler language and good picture cues is one ESL teachers struggle with too."

What we really need

Now that her son is nine, Jean wants him to have longer books with more interesting stories and protagonists that are her son’s age, but the chapter books for his age group often have:

• way too much text 
  
• tons of abstract content 
  
• topics that are beyond her son’s experience  
  
• no illustrations to help understand the text 

Jean says, “I’m always looking for a story that’s structured like a classic three-act novel with a beginning, middle and end, but with sentences written subject, verb, object and where none of the sentences involve abstractions or things that require background knowledge, and illustrations that just refer to actions in the picture.”

She has searched relentlessly for plots that address situations that her son would relate to from daily life, such as:

• A boy’s dog steals his shoe and runs out the garden gate. 
  
• Annabelle goes to get cupcakes at the store but they’re all gone and she’s mad and then goes home and makes cupcakes. 
  
• You try to walk your dog, but the dog pulls too hard on the leash.  
  
• Stories about camping, interacting with teachers, going on vacation, or having guests stay at your house. 

An aside: There is a large and always growing library of stories written to conform to the Social Stories (TM) model suggested by Carol Gray. These stories are indispensable tools for children and adults with cognitive disabilities of all kinds and degrees to learn about particular social situations and events, especially what the reader should expect in an upcoming situation, and what will be expected of him or her. But these books are not meant to be a replacement for narrative stories with plots and characters.

Talk about self-publishing

With so few options available for her growing son, Jean went and made some books herself. “With iPhoto on the Mac, I can make books that are retrospectives of my son’s activities: 'I went to the zoo with Mom. I rode on the camel.'"

“But we need third-person stories like other kids read: ‘Jake wants X, but he can’t get it because of Y; then he figures out Z and gets what he wants.' Because I’m not an illustrator," Jean says, "I can’t make these stories myself."

Jean is looking for an illustrator who she can hand twenty sentences to and ask them to draw the same character in twenty different simple scenes. (Anyone know an illustrator looking to build a portfolio and up for doing a batch of simple illustrations for a reasonable price?)

Why Stories Matter

One of the theories about autism spectrum disorders is that they impair your capacity for autobiography -- the ability to tell stories about your own life. “A lot of learning requires this filing cabinet in your head where you sort your experiences, things that were positive and negative, things that relate to each other, and then you continually file and learn and evaluate current experiences based on your past ones,” says Jean.

The idea is that literature immerses us in other people’s stories which then helps us see our own life as a story. For kids with ASDs, being able to read stories can help them organize and learn from their own experiences -- to become authors of their own lives.

Nancie Atwell, who started the school in Maine I’m obsessed with and wrote my favorite book about teaching kids to love reading (The Reading Zone), says that frequent, voluminous, and pleasurable reading is the most important ingredient in a child’s education. If that’s the case, children with ASDs need way more books on the shelves -- and by their beds -- that are accessible to them.