A Good Way To Work

I've been meeting once a week for over a year now with a fellow writer/illustrator. We often catch lunch together, then usually end up at my studio where we work on our picture books. Debbie is quite disciplined about sketching, developing characters, laying out a dummy, building her portfolio. My work is a little more haphazard, and yet, every week I feel our time together has helped me to check in with where I am in my work, and it helps keep my stories on the front burner.

We do a lot of sharing of books we've discovered at the library and bookstore and we attend a lot of SCBWI and other events together. I have been a lot more prepared for these events, having looked at the books that Debbie has tracked down through inter-library loan. Her discipline has inspired me to do more research and reading.

Having a working buddy is a great way to stay focused. And we help each other see the books we look at in new lights. Two heads are definitely better than one. I'm not sure this would work in a larger group, but it's certainly working for the both of us right now. In our time together I have taken a half-developed picture book idea and transformed it into a new poetry collection. It is currently out, waiting for a reading from my editor. This project was stymied for a long time and our weekly meetings really have helped me to push through the wall.

Reading Journal April 27, 2011

Harry and Hopper

By Margaret Wild

Illus. by Freya Blackwood

Feiwel & Friends, New York, 2011 first US edition

Copyright 2009 (Australia)

Illustrations are laserprint on watercolor paper with watercolor, gouache, & charcoal.

Book design by Freya Blackwood

Typeset in Caslon

32 pp not counting end papers

Gorgeous illustrations with flawless touch—sketchy charcoal and a warm, limited palette of ochres, reds, oranges, grays, blues & judicious use of green and white.

The text is very direct—almost no waste words. Good handling of passage of time. Conversational tone—“And every evening….” “But one afternoon…” Plus careful use of incomplete sentences.

Warm, comforting, and sad story of losing a dog. Only characters are the dog, the boy, and the dad.

Reading Journal April 27, 2011

It’s really hard to keep up with all my reading—I’ve been reading a lot, mostly picture books and poetry for kids. I had 26 books checked out, but then I had to return them, having renewed them all twice, without really reading them as thoroughly as I had hoped. I have the printouts from the checkout machine, so I can track them down again. Meanwhile, this is what I’ve read most recently:

Sahara Special

By Esme Raji Codell

Hyperion Books For Children, New York, 2003

Middle grade novel, 175 pages, no illustrations

Sahara Special is the story of a girl who has to repeat 5^th grade. She writes in her journal that she wants to be a writer and her teacher, new to the school, writes, “I believe you.”

I love this book. I have read it 3 times. I study it to see how Esme has developed the characters—there is no “information dump”, as Arthur Levine called it at the recent SCBWI-IL Spring Thaw. We jump right into the story and into the problem of the story (Sahara misses her father, who abandoned her and her mother) and we are drawn to Sahara immediately by her unique and compelling voice.

Sahara is called “Sahara Special” because she was required to sit in the hall with the special needs teacher the year she failed fifth grade. The way the story is told, we, the readers, know something that the other characters do not. We share the secret with Sahara, that she is really smart and articulate, which we know through her first-person narration of the story. Her descriptions and ability to draw characters, and ultimately her essay about her name reveal her to be a gifted writer. But she hides this from all her teachers and classmates. It is only Miss Pointy, the new fifth grade teacher, who does not know Sahara’s history, who makes up her mind for herself, who suspects that there are sides to Sahara which have not been revealed.

This is a warm and unsentimental school story. I loved the setting—an urban school--, Sahara’s classmates, her teachers, and her mother. And I was rooting for Sahara all the way through. Even though I have never flunked a grade and my father never left us, I felt Sahara’s emotions and I identified strongly with her at every turn. It did not hurt that I, too, wanted to become a writer. This book is worthy of a Newbery.