Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast

This week, I’m re-reading Thomas Lynch’s The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade, a National Book Award finalist, published back in 1997. Lynch is an essayist and poet, but he also—as the first chapter’s opening line tells us—buries a couple hundred of his townspeople every year. Yes, he’s the funeral director for the small Michigan town in which he lives — or at least he was back in ‘97.

It’s a moving, life-affirming collection of essays, despite how it all might sound. As I started re-reading the book the other day, my eye was drawn to an excerpt from Jane Kenyon’s stunning poem, “Notes from the Other Side,” which Lynch uses to open the book. Then, I looked up the poem in its entirety, and I was blown away. Beautiful.

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I’m shining a spotlight today on someone who is not new to children’s lit but who has just released the first title he’s both written and illustrated. And that would be Jason Chin. You may have read about Redwoods (Flashpoint, March 2009) in Betsy Bird’s early-June review (”you have kids that think non-fiction is dull as dishwater? Meet the cure”); in the Horn Book (”the book is…a contagious celebration of the relationship between information and imagination, the pure joy of learning”); in Booklist (”the first book Chin has written as well as illustrated is a real eye-opener”); in Kirkus (”an inventive, eye-opening adventure”); in School Library Journal (”this remarkable picture book delivers a mix of fantasy and fiction through beautifully detailed watercolors”); or Publisher’s Weekly (”Playing with the notion of just how immersive a book can be, illustrator Chin…makes his authorial debut with a clever exploration of coast redwoods”). Most of those are starred reviews, I might add. I hope, however, that you have actually read it — and not just read about it. And that’s because it’s every bit as good as the reviewers say.

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Anyone else seen Salvatore Rubbino’s A Walk in New York and wanna share in my enthusiasm for this book? You know what I love most about this one, all about a young boy’s first visit to Manhattan with his father? The cheer in the book practically drips from the pages: The young boy, in all his excitement to see the big city, exudes a joy that is infectious. “I can tell who the visitors are,” he says in this first-person narrative: “{W}e’re the ones who keep stopping to look up!”

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Jules: Happy Sunday to all, and welcome to 7-Imp’s 7 Kicks #121, featuring illustrator Tony Persiani and author Chris Barton, who has—in the past—joined us for some kickin’ here on a few Sundays (Chris, that is). It’s a pleasure today to have both Tony and Chris here to say a few words and show us some art from their new title, The Day-Glo Brothers: The True Story of Bob and Joe Switzer’s Bright Ideas and Brand-New Colors, to be released by Charlesbridge in July. The Day-Glo Brothers, which is both the author’s and illustrator’s picture book debut, tells the story of Joe and Bob Switzer, who were born at the turn of the last century, who were opposites in many ways, and who—”by accident”—invented totally new fluorescent colors: Fire Orange and other glowing reds, yellows, greens, and more, which they came to call “Day-Glo” colors.

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Funny thing happened this week: I (along with MANY other people, including everyone I work with) was informed that, due to one person’s negligence and another person’s wickedness, our sensitive personal data has been released into the ether. Like, the kind of data you steal someone’s identity with. On our employer’s covering-their-asses advice, I immediately placed one of those fraud alert thingys on my credit info and checked out my credit report. So far, so good. But it’s still very scary; and as I keep hearing from other people, if anything does happen with my credit, the damage could be permanent. Evil-data-thieves may get to change identities like they’re changing underwear, but as a law-abiding citizen I’m apparently stuck with mine for life.

This is certainly the most concrete reason I’ve had for wishing that weren’t true, but it’s not the first time I’ve wanted to be able to start all over and wake up in a different life. Wouldn’t it be great to be an unknown quantity, a blank slate? Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to escape from myself for a while, to fly under everyone’s radar — including my own — and be really truly free?

Do you think that’s something like what Emily Dickinson was feeling when she wrote this? If anyone knew about the perks of anonymity, and the desire to escape a pigeonholed life, I’d say it was her. Here’s #204:

I’m Nobody! Who are you?
Are you – Nobody – too?
Then there’s a pair of us?
Don’t tell! they’d advertise – you know!

How dreary – to be – Somebody!
How public – like a Frog –
To tell one’s name – the livelong June –
To an admiring Bog!

Today’s Poetry Friday Round-up is being hosted by the lovely lady who started the whole thing in the first place: Kelly Herold, at her new-ish blog Crossover. Thanks, Kelly!

I’m in one of my let’s-shine-the-spotlight-on-a-new-author/illustrator moods today, so I invited newcomer Johanna Wright over. I’m taken with her debut picture book, The Secret Circus (Roaring Brook Press, March 2009). You know how when you were a kid and the notion of miniature, underground, secret worlds was just about the coolest thing ever? Yes? Or was it just me?

Well, The Secret Circus is all about a world so shh-shh-secret that only the mice can find it. And it’s in sparkly Paris, no less, so it’s even better. A tiny circus. With tiny acrobats. Mice acrobats. Who tame big ol’ cats. In fact, that’s the spread opening this post, “the scariest page in The Secret Circus,” Johanna told me. “The mouse audience looks quite worried.”

Here they are eating their giant popcorn, which Johanna says she’d also like to do:

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This is author/illustrator Jan Thomas with her Public Relations Officer and Security Chief. She’s here with her canine staff today to chat over breakfast with what I’ll call the Jan Thomas Appreciation Society. And that would be Yours Truly and two of the country’s best children’s librarians (all hyperbole—which regular readers know I’m guilty of—aside), Adrienne Furness of What Adrienne Thinks About That and Betsy Bird over at A Fuse #8 Production. Adrienne has written posts like “My Profound Love of Books by Jan Thomas”; Betsy has written reviews like this in which she’s declared things like, “All right. That’s it. I can’t take it anymore. Could we please please PLEASE just get it over with and declare Jan Thomas some kind of national treasure / picture book genius?” and “Thomas has that rare gift for synthesizing a book down to its most essential parts”; and I’ve posted about Jan’s work a bit as well—having turned into such a big fan of her titles, thanks to Adrienne—but the 7-Imp Jan-Thomas sightings are hardly tantamount to my fan-dom. So, I decided I wanted to shine the spotlight on her, too. And when I—lucky me—snagged her for an interview, I asked Adrienne and Betsy if they’d like to contribute some questions and/or say a bit about their own ardent devotion to Jan’s books.

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Jules: Welcome to our weekly meeting ground for taking some time to reflect on Seven(ish) Exceptionally Fabulous, Beautiful, Interesting, Hilarious, or Otherwise Positive Noteworthy Things from the past week, whether book-related or not, that happened to you.

And Happy Father’s Day to all our papa-readers out there!

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Just when I thought that, for once, I’d chosen a poem written for adults, I inadvertently chose one this week that, evidently, has been adopted by the children’s poetry world as well.

This comes from British poet Brian Patten. It was first published in Love Poems (Flamingo/HarperCollins, 1990) and intended for an adult readership, though Patten has written children’s poetry as well.

I love this short, outstretched hand of a poem. I don’t want to go on too much about what it means to me, as I think a great deal of its appeal is its ability to invite the reader in, leaving room for many interpretations. I called it an outstretched hand, but it can also be a dare. An accusation. A wink. And so much more. Enjoy.

“I’ve found a small dragon in the woodshed.
Think it must have come from deep inside a forest
because it’s damp and green and leaves
are still reflecting in its eyes.

I fed it on many things, tried grass,
the roots of stars, hazel-nut and dandelion,
but it stared up at me as if to say, I need
food you can’t provide…”

You can read the rest here.

Today’s Poetry Friday round-up is being hosted by Carol at Carol’s Corner.

Illustrator Pamela Zagarenski is here this morning for a breakfast chat. Together, she and poet Joyce Sidman created one of my favorite picture books thus far this year—if not my very favorite—Red Sings From Treetops, released by Houghton Mifflin in April. You can read a bit more about it here — in a short post I did early this month. Red Sings is a poetry collection that brilliantly, in more ways than one, celebrates colors as you’ve never quite seen them celebrated before.

Pamela’s delicate and inventive mixed-media illustrations have been seen in two previous poetry collections — Maxine Kumin’s Mites to Mastodons: A Book of Animal Poems from 2006, as well as 2007’s This is Just to Say: Poems of Apology and Forgiveness, also by Joyce Sidman (”her skill as a poet accessible to young people is unmatched,” wrote School Library Journal about Sidman), and both released by Houghton Mifflin.

Since Pamela sent over one hundred images for this interview (I never really counted the images in the Dave McKean interview, but this might rival it), I’m going to get right to it, and we can find out what’s next for her and why she talks to her paintings (which I get. I really do.) For breakfast this morning, she’s having lots and lots of tea. “I get up really early (4:30-5:00),” she told me, “to paint, sketch, work on my computer. I have one, two, and sometimes three really big cups of tea, preferably with lots and lots of almond milk. I just love tea — always have! I don’t get hungry until later in the morning, but when I do, I like fruit, nuts, and raisins and brown rice or quinoa.”

Let’s get the basics from Pamela while we wait for our tea to steep, and I thank her for stopping by. And ESPECIALLY for the whole heapin’ ton of beautiful art.

{Note: I’m not going to put titles under each illustration, for different reasons, but The Really Eager and Curious can right-click on the images themselves—and then go to “properties”—to at least see JPEG names, as basically sent to me by Pamela and which are often the illustration titles as well. Also note that some of these images are details of larger illustrations. Most of these illustrations are hyperlinked to larger versions, too, so click the image itself to see in more detail.}

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