TOM
ANGLEBERGER’S APPROACH TO HUMOR AND MIDDLE SCHOOL ANGST
Tom
Angleberger grew up in a storytelling home. His parents told and retold
stories, embellishing them until they became hilarious, larger-than-life tall
tales. Angleberger learned, he said, “That’s how you communicate.” As he
explained, “You get these stories and you polish them up and you make them
funny.”
This
method has served Angleberger well. Today he is a prolific author, best known
for his bestselling Origami Yoda series. He is also the author
of several other series, including the Quikpick Papers, Rocket
and Groot and Inspector Flytrap. His juvenile fiction includes as well Fuzzy, Horton Halfpott and Fake
Mustache, and among
his picture books are McToad Mows Tiny Island and Crankee
Doodle.
Angleberger’s books are
full of his trademark silliness and humor. “I’m not necessarily all
that creative,” he has said. "I’m more of a puzzle putter together. I take
all these little puzzle pieces—Yoda, middle school problems, Cheetos—and I fuss
and fuss with them until I fit them together.”
He also draws on what he
calls his “Superpower,” his experience with Asperger’s syndrome, especially
when writing about middle school. “Obsessions, neuroses, echolalia, awkward
social interations,” he elaborated, “those are what my books are made of.”
After studying art at the College of William and Mary and spending years as a reporter for the Roanoke Times, Angleberger is now a full-time children’s book writer. He and his wife, author and illustrator Cece Bell, live in Christiansburg, Va. On Thursday, September 14, Tom Angleberger will speak to the Guild about his offbeat, imaginative work.
After studying art at the College of William and Mary and spending years as a reporter for the Roanoke Times, Angleberger is now a full-time children’s book writer. He and his wife, author and illustrator Cece Bell, live in Christiansburg, Va. On Thursday, September 14, Tom Angleberger will speak to the Guild about his offbeat, imaginative work.
Date: Thursday, September 14
1025 Fifth Street NW (at K Street)
Menu: All choices $25 ($26 when paid online via PayPal)
Menu: All choices $25 ($26 when paid online via PayPal)
:: CHOICE OF SANDWICH (all sandwiches served with a salad of baby greens and house-made kettle chips) ::
• Falafel sandwich (vegetarian/vegan) with house-made hummus, cucumbers, lettuce, tomato and onion on whole-wheat pita, served with tahini sauce (vegan without tahini sauce)
• Honey-roasted turkey sandwich with Havarti cheese, Dijonnaise, lettuce, tomato and onion on wheat bread
• Grilled-chicken panini with chipotle mayo, caramelized onions, pepper jack, lettuce and tomato on ciabatta
IN THIS ISSUE:
1. Revisiting the Guild's Partnership with the House of Sweden
2. Reading Partners: Nurturing Literacy
3. A Note from Past President Kem Knapp Sawyer
4. Jonathan Bean's Insights into Illustration
5. Member News
6. "Quick Links"
TEN YEARS LATER...
RECALLING THE GUILD'S COLLABORATION WITH THE HOUSE OF SWEDEN
by Karen Leggett
On September 29, 2007—just 10 years
ago this month—Pippi Longstocking (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pippi_Longstocking)
met Lucy Rose (http://www.katykellyauthor.com/meet-lucy-rose.html) at the House of Sweden. It all began when
Sweden opened a brand new embassy overlooking the Potomac River in Georgetown.
The elegant House of Sweden was celebrated with great fanfare that included
several months of children’s events and a collaboration with our own Children’s
Book Guild.
“Every child in Sweden knows Astrid Lindgren and her books,
and we wanted to introduce them to more American children,” said Joran
Bjallerstedt, then minister of the Swedish Embassy, to Mary Quattlebaum, who
wrote about the embassy’s project for The
Washington Post (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/27/AR2007092700567.html). Katy
Kelly, 2017-18 Guild president and author of the Lucy Rose series, was invited
to read from her own books while young American visitors learned about Pippi
Longstocking. Lucy and Pippi were both spirited, adventurous girls who lived not-boring lives, Pippi with her funny
shoes and superhuman strength and Lucy with her red cowboy boots and a
grandmother who said she was a handful.
Just a few weeks later, in November 2007, Katherine Paterson
addressed an overflow crowd at the House of Sweden to celebrate the hundredth
birthday of Astrid Lindgren. Katherine had won the 2006 Astrid Lindgren
Memorial Award (http://www.alma.se/en/), becoming
the first American author to do so. (This is the largest financial award in the
world for children’s literature, which Katherine noted at the time is funded by
Swedish taxpayers, and is not an endowment.) Katherine told the gathering,
“Children’s books are vital nourishment on the path to becoming fully human.” Author
Johanna Hurwitz, whose biography of Lindgren was published in 1989, also
addressed the celebration and wrote about meeting Lindgren for the Guild
website https://childrensbookguild.org/other-activities/johanna-hurwitz-presentation:
“The day following my visit to [Lindgren’s] home, I
discovered a set of ten postage stamps each featuring a different character
from her books. Modestly, she didn't even mention them to me.”
ONE TUTOR. ONE CHILD. INFINITE POSSIBILITIES.
by Laura Krauss Melmed
This is the motto of Reading Partners, an organization I’ve
been volunteering with for the past three years. My weekly sessions with first grade students at
Whittier Education Campus have been meaningful and filled with the joy of
seeing a student’s hard work pay off in finding the key to literacy.
Reading Partners engages communities in providing students
with proven, individualized reading support. The goal of the program is to have students reading at grade level by
fourth grade; research shows that students who accomplish this have a greater
opportunity to succeed in school and in life. Reading Partners is currently in 14 metropolitan
areas across the United States, including Washington and Baltimore. There are 20 Reading Partners centers in DC
schools.
Volunteers are trained to work with students one-on-one for
45-minute sessions, usually once or twice a week. Tutors guide students through a structured, research-based curriculum. On average, Reading Partners students more
than double their rate of learning while in the program. In 2016-17, 95 percent of Reading
Partners' K-2 students mastered the foundational reading skills needed to read at
grade level. Ninety percent of students met or exceeded their end-of-year literacy growth goal.
As authors, illustrators and others deeply involved with
children’s books, we know the importance of learning to read in securing a
child’s future. Children who go through the
Reading Partners program become not only capable readers, but enthusiastic ones
as well. Please consider helping a child
achieve this success. For more
information or to volunteer, go to www.readingpartners.org,
or contact me if you have questions.
Some organizations speak of passing the torch. Sometimes it's a pink flamingo. The Children's Book Guild does neither—we pass along a chicken. Our mascot looks more like a colorful rooster, and it sat on my bookshelf for the last year.
See you in September!
Past President
JONATHAN BEAN'S EMBRACING STYLE
by J. H. Diehl
“Embraced is how the readers of Jonathan’s books often feel,” said Alison Morris in her introduction of illustrator Jonathan Bean, the Guild’s June speaker at Busboys & Poets. She cited, for example, the apple-pie comfort conjured by the warm palette Bean created for his 2008 Ezra Jack Keats Award winner, The Apple Pie that Papa Baked, with text by Lauren Thompson.
Bean spoke to the Guild in meticulous detail about visual
literacy, “the way that we can look at an image and talk about an image.” When
people talk about style, he said, “they’re really talking about the form an
illustration takes.” In other words, he explained, they are referring to the
sum of the image’s formal elements: color, gradation, composition, line, edge,
shape and repetition. He led the audience through a revealing series of slides
of his illustrations to examine the effects produced on the page by the
multiple choices he makes to create a mood or underscore a feeling. Bean also
described how he works with Pantone colors and makes the separations himself,
layering them to achieve his final effect. The process, he said, “forces me to
think very clearly about what I’m doing with the color.”
Bean’s style has sometimes been compared to the work of
mid-20th-century illustrators Wanda Gag and Virginia Lee Burton,
whom he acknowledged as influences. A pivotal moment in his development as
artist occurred during his junior year of college, he said, when he illustrated
the graveyard scene from the beginning of Dickens’s Great Expectations. Bean drew the gravestones vertically; his
professor pointed out that the image would feel more oppressive if the stones
leaned in. In that moment, Bean said, he understood how drawings on a page
could affect people’s feelings.
In another series of slides, he took the audience through
his thought process for illustrating a book about moving to a new home. Bean
said he “struggled for a while about how to create the sense of time in
transitions and how to communicate a sense of busyness and hectic-ness”—until
he developed a way to layer transparent drawings, inspired by movie images, “one
dissolving into the next, to give a sense of ‘and then this led to that.’” For a different project with a similar theme,
“the challenge was to find how to represent a father and young girl moving to a
gritty urban environment to make a new life for their family: how to find the
right shapes to convey the energy of the city and the passage of the characters
through time.”
Bean credited the positive experiences of his childhood in
Pennsylvania as a boon to his career as an illustrator. “I have a feeling for a
good, loving home. I spent a lot of time observing this one place.” Indeed, Bean’s slide-by-slide presentation showcased his
talent for close observation of people and places, and his tremendous ability
to translate both human emotions and the natural world into the formal elements
of illustration. Of the warm effect he created for the lyrical, folktale-like
text of The Apple Pie that Papa Baked,
for instance, Bean said, “The rhyme is about things coming back and returning,”
so he “used curvilinear shapes that are always returning…I had this sudden
realization that the world should actually be in the shape of a pie.”
By the end of his talk, the audience was ready to follow the lines of Bean’s fascinating explications further–and at least some of us were in the mood for pie.
By the end of his talk, the audience was ready to follow the lines of Bean’s fascinating explications further–and at least some of us were in the mood for pie.
MEMBER NEWS
JOAN WAITES's new book, An Artist's Night Before Christmas, will be released on September 6 by Pelican Publishers.
SALLY DAVIES's artwork will be featured on MPT (Maryland Public Television) this fall, on season six of Artworks, in the segment "Pop-Up Exhibits." The program will highlight the paintings from Sally's solo exhibit "Global Views: Light & Shadow, Paintings by Sally Davies" at the Torpedo Factory. Notes Sally, "Artist are featured on the Artworks special segment by invitation only, so I feel very honored."
CYNTHIA GRADY is the new poetry editor for SCBWI's Bulletin. Says Cynthia, "[SCBWI Executive Director] Lin Oliver was eavesdropping on a conversation within a Facebook poetry group, and we were discussing whether SCBWI supports poets enough. A week later I had an email asking if I'd be willing to take over the poetry submissions. So of course I said 'YES!'"
JACQUELINE JULES is excited to announce the publication of Drop by Drop: A Story of Rabbi Akiva (Kar-Ben Publishers). This picture book recalls the struggles of the famous Rabbi Akiva, who learned to read at age 40. Akiva's story demonstrates how complicated subjects can be tackled in small pieces over time. Little by little, like water carving through a stone, we can achieve any goal. For more information about the book, see the post "A Model of Learning" on the Kar-Ben blog: https://karbenbooks.blogspot.com/2017/07/a-model-of-learning-drop-by-drop-story.html.
LAURA GEHL's newst book, Koala Challah, released in August from Kar-Ben. Kirkus called the book, which tells the story of a little koala trying to find her place in the family--and persisting, "warm-spirited family holiday togetherness."
GARETH HIND's Poe: Stories and Poems was released on August 1. It has received positive reviews from Kirkus and the Wall Street Journal, and a starred review from School Library Journal. Gareth enjoyed an excellent launch event at Takoma Park Library, and he has more events scheduled around the area. For the latest information see http://www.garethhinds.com/
MICHELLE Y. GREEN attended SCWBI's regional meeting in August with her 93-year old mother, Willie Pearl Mahone Young, and sister, Adrienne Young-Battle. She spoke about the Tuskegee Airman Project (www.highflight.org) and sold her book A Strong Right Arm: The Story of Mamie Peanut Johnson. With her was talented children's book illustrator Johnny Ray Moore. Her marketing director, William E. Holmes, was unable to attend. In other news, Michelle's kidney function is now up to 40 percent, and the kidney transplant is definitely off the table.
LEZLIE EVANS's new book, Finding Christmas, illustrated by Yee Von Chan and published by Albert Whitman, will be officially released October 1. Hare, Mouse and Squirrel are putting the finishing touches on their holiday preparations when an unexpected turn of events helps them discover that the best gifts are not always wrapped. Lezlie looks forward to reading this story, along with a couple of others, at the Washington Post's booth at the National Book Festival on September 2.
LULU DELACRE is thrilled with the release of Us, in Progress: Short Stories About Young Latinos, on August 29. Notes Lulu, "Since 2007 I’ve been working on and off on this collection of stories that tackle a range of issues close to my heart, mostly inspired by articles that have appeared in the news. I’m grateful for the warm critical reception it’s having, including two starred reviews, from Booklist and Kirkus. I look forward to sharing and signing the book during the Washington Post's storytime at the National Book Festival on September 2!"
The National Network of State Teachers of the Year has assembled a helpful "Social Justice Book List": http://www.nnstoy.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/NNSTOY-Social-Justice-Book-List.pdf
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NOTE ABOUT THE CHILDREN'S BOOK GUILD NEWS: Would you rather print your newsletter than read it online? Current and past issues are now available for printing on the Guild's website at http://www.childrensbookguild.org/guild-newsletters. Look for the "Newsletter" tab on the left side of the Guild website. There is also a "Printer Friendly Version" link on the top left-hand side of this blog.
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LITERARY EVENTS SPONSORED BY POLITICS AND PROSE: The literary calendar at Politics and Prose lists many upcoming programs that may be of interest to Children's Book Guild members: http://www.politics-prose.com/events. Laura Elliott will be among September's featured authors.
And remember, Politics & Prose is the bookstore at the 5th and K Streets location of Busboys & Poets. Politics & Prose plans to have copies of our featured speakers' books available for purchase at this location on meeting dates whenever possible.
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