PW: Halloween Book has "Luscious Rhymes"

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Howdy, Campers and Happy Poetry Friday! (The link to Poetry Friday is below.)

Be sure to enter our current give-away of Carmela Martino's new novel (inspired by two amazing 18th-century sisters who were far ahead of their time, one a mathematician, the other a composer), Playing by Heart. Details on how to enter are in this post, which introduces the book. The give-away ends October 16th.

Campers--I'm overjoyed to feature one of my former students in today's TeachingAuthors "Student Success Story." 

As soon as Denise Doyen walked into my 2005 UCLA Extension Writers' Program class, "Writing the Children's Picture Book," I knew she was a force of nature. Her writing was so strong, her life energy filled with such forward motion, this gal was going somewhere! She's a perpetual student. Before my class, she'd taken classes with Ann Whitford Paul and Barney Saltzberg. After my class she fit perfectly in Barbara Bottner's critique group.  

Author and poet Denise Doyen with her newest book
photo credit: Michael Doyen

Denise's first picture book, Once Upon A Twice, drew starred reviews (Kirkus raved that it was "Undeniably arrayed in a gorgeous brocade, woven of fresh, inventive wordplay," and a member of the EB White Committee wrote, "Wonderful writing in the spirit of Lewis Carroll. Enchanting. Tickles the tongue and 'comes to life' as a read aloud."). 

And...BOO!  Just in time for Halloween, her newest stellar rhyming picture book is out, illustrated by the fabulous Eliza Wheeler, published by Chronicle Books. Filled with Denise's trademark inventive wordplay, it's earned a starred review from Publishers Weekly which said, "Luscious rhymes and an atmospheric eeriness immerse readers in a neighborhood battle." (Read the whole review here.)

So, let's meet poet and author Denise Doyen, shall we?

Welcome, Denise! We're so glad you stopped by. Could you tell us a bit about how your writing career began?

I had been a director/choreographer for children’s television at Disney. I loved creating entertainment for kids; but production hours are long and Hollywood’s a tad ruthless. I quit so I could closely raise my two sons. Later, when they got to be teenagers (that poignant, inevitable age of detachment, “Mom, drop me off a block ahead!”) I realized I missed having a professional creative outlet. My focus remained children. So, I enrolled at UCLA Extension, in “Writing for the Youth Market.” Over two years, I took in a succession of courses, primarily about picture books.

I really enjoyed your class; we made dummies, visited booksellers and children’s librarians, made fave-book lists, wrote/rewrote stories, read Bird by Bird and generally, got inspired. Great class. After UCLA, I joined SCBWI, and started attending all of its editor/agent days, writing workshops and conferences. I worked hard to make sure I really knew my stuff, then I jumped in! ...and began submitting. 

Boy, you're not kidding you jumped in, Denise. Can you talk a bit more about the critique groups, workshops, etc. you've jumped into? 

I’m in a critique group called GOYA which stands for either the Urdu word for “the suspension of belief created by a good storyteller” or an acronym for Get Off Your Ass! (and get published.) As you mentioned, I also claim a seat in Barbara Bottner’s Master Class, which is sort of a guided critique group with savvy pointers/prompts when you need them. I circled back through UCLA Extension and took novel and poetry classes to expand the scope of my writing. And I still take advanced workshops or seminars when I can find them and fit them in. I think a writer can’t help but keep learning while reading good books, editing, critiquing. But I do consciously search for new tools and shoot for keener insights. 

And how did you connect with your agent?

I went to the Big Sur Writing Workshop hosted by Andrea Brown Literary and Henry Miller Library. The wonderful writer, Meg Medina, was in my group. We synched, liked each other’s work. She rec’ed me to her agent there, Jen Rofe, and we hit it off as well. It was a kind act by a fellow writer, an example of a generous spirit that I’ve continued to find in the kidlit world. And Jen’s proven a true champion of my writing, exactly what one hopes your agent will be. 

(Campers, it's true, we are part of kidlit's generous community, and let me tell you, Denise is one of the most generous--truly.)  Denise, tell us about your new delicious new book.

It’s called The Pomegranate Witch. It’s loosely based on a childhood memory of a mysterious lady in my neighborhood. I told the anecdote to my writing group one Halloween and when I finished they said, “That’s a book!” Hunh. So, I stored that kernel of inspiration in my idea journal and started working on the story the next summer.

How did you go about writing it?

There were underlying themes I wanted to explore/expose: the fact that the hermits, loners or odd cat ladies we sometimes brush by, surely have—on closer inspection—interesting stories, depths or surprising former selves. I also wanted to show kids’ antics and imaginations back in an era of Free Play when an afternoon was full of exploring, scavenging and inventing on your own. Kids back then solved their problems without adult intervention. They learned from successive failures. They kept trying. It’s how one becomes resilient person. In the book, the gang fails time and again before they score a pomegranate—and yet they are thrilled with that singular prize ... because they really, truly earned it. (And yes, presenting those challenges is part of the Witch’s agenda.)

Because all this had a nostalgic feel and the witch and her tree, a legendary vibe – I decided on a traditional ballad form like Casey at the Bat or Paul Revere’s Ride, with their heptameter meter. It took me three months to craft the poem’s 24 stanzas--to make the rhymes unique and the cadences flow. I remember: I was working at a campus café at UCLA every morning from 8:30am – 12:30pm while my son took a pre-calculus course. He’d come out of class and I’d be so happy, “I got a line done!” And he’d be like, “Wait. You’ve been writing for four hours and you got one measly line done? And that’s good?” “Yes!” (Let’s face it: writing a rhyming picture book is a fun but grueling process.)

Then, my insightful editor at Chronicle, Taylor Norman, challenged and goaded and patiently helped me make everything more crisp and clear. It’s an interesting process, figuring out when to defend and when to bend. We worked well together, worked things out. And finally came Eliza Wheeler’s illustrations. <sigh> I was so captivated when I first saw her fantastic, charming, quirky rendition of The Pomegranate Gang! I’m still smitten. Lucky, lucky author here.

The Pomegranate Gang ~ from book, The Pomegranate Witch

I love that--"figuring out when to defend and when to bend." And it's true--writing a rhyming story can be a "fun but grueling" process. Many of our readers know this well.  And finally, Denise, what’s the One Thing You Wished You’d Known as you began your Writer’s Journey? 

Ya know, I naively started out thinking I was already a pretty good writer. But what I actually was―was a natural writer with good potential. I wish I’d gotten down to the nitty-gritty of tackling my craft at a rigorous and professional level sooner, really learning all those boring punctuation and grammar rules, not being content with an overused metaphor, etc. etc. etc. It would have made me competent and competitive years earlier.

That's a great answer--thank you for your honesty, and for stopping by for a chat. I don't want too give much away except to say that your rollicking, rhyming original story make me hungry for pomegranates!

Yum!

Now off you go, Campers, to Poetry Friday at Violet's today--
and oh, what a pumpkin-spiced feast it is!

posted with pomegranate juice stains on her shirt by April Halprin Wayland

Digging Around for Inspiration.

     Boo to you, fellow authors, on this day that salutes the scary, weird and (if you have kids) the post trick-or-treat-candy-sugar-rush.  I am probably the least qualified person to write this post, because I am not a fan of the weird, scary and (and I really don't need the candy.)

    However, there is one Halloween-associated icon that I enjoy. In fact, I find them inspirational (hence the awful punned post title, which I hope you will not take literally.)

    I love cemetaries.  Graveyards.  Tombstone towns.

    When I was a seven or eight, my teenage cousin, was told to "entertain" me.  She didn't want to entertain me; she wanted to see her boyfriend.  So she decided to use a little revulsion therapy.  She told me she was taking me to one of her favorite places.  I adored my cousin, and would have followed her anywhere. Her "favorite place" turned out to be the town cemetary, two blocks away.  If her plan had been to scare me into going home, she failed miserably.

    I fell in love with cemetaries.  That day is still one of my favorite memories of my cousin and me. (And yes, she really did, and still does, love cemetaries)

    Why would a seven-year-old like a cemetary?

     This was an old-fashioned cemetary, with a mix of tombstones, funeral statuary and mausoleums. Thanks to a mother who was phobic about funerals, I had never attended one, or been any closer to a cemetary than the back seat of the car as we passed one on the road.  So this was what happened to people's bodies after they were dead! (My Sunday School teacher had told us what happened to their souls, but was not inclined to dwell on what happened to their physical bodies.)

     What drew me was not so much the ghoulish aspect ("I am standing on dead people") but the memorial markers themselves. In the older sections, the polished granite, worn marble, moss-covered
crosses, tablets, angels, and lambs each told the story of a life, if you took the time to think about it.  Even back then I was fascinated by real stories about real people. Just reading the old- fashioned names--Narcissa, Hiram, Magda, Josiah---brought these people to life in my seven-year-old imagination.  Sunbonnets, long beards, mothers, farmers. Some of this didn't take a great deal of imagination since often the many children the mother had born were buried along side her, their names simply added to the list on her obelisk.

     I peeked in the grated doors of the mausoleums and wondered about people who were so rich and important they could rest in their own tiny marble house after they were dead. I especially wondered about the ones that had windows (who was looking at what?) But mostly I wondered about their stories.


   That first cemetary was in a tiny farming town in southern Illinois, a town in which my teenage cousin had lived most of her life. She could tell me the stories of most of these people, or at least of their present day ancestors.  To me, the child of a father who was transferred seemingly every other year, the idea that you not only were acquainted with you neighbors, but that they had stories. . . this was simply beyond comprehension. I remember going home from that graveyard (which I remember as being at the edge of the town, surrounded by corn fields) and scribbling down everything my cousin had told me, plus a few things she hadn't....my mind had taken that first plunge from fact to fiction.

   I was hooked.

     I have visited a lot of graveyards since then.  On a high school trip to Paris, a bunch of us traipsed around Pere Lachaise, looking not for Oscar Wilde or Moliere, but the then recently-deceased Jim Morrison's grafitti-and-beer-bottle-covered resting place. I've done the New Orleans cemetary tour, featuring the grave of Marie Laveau, the Voodoo Queen. (I suspect that those creepy offerings of chicken bones and rosaries, might be refreshed every so often by the people who run the cemetary tours.) In fact, one of my must sees, anywhere I go, is the oldest cemetary. Often these are only accessible by "guided tour" where you are "guided" to the most famous person interred. Me, I am usually more interested by the "nobody" buried across the way from the Famous Person.

    I could go and on about the unexpected detours I have taken to accomodate my love of old burial places and the stories I have gathered, or imagined there. In the south where I live, you find old graveyards in the most unexpected places.  The south respects history and the dead, and does not disturb it, even in the name of progress. Around the corner from my house, a fancy-fenced, family graveyard from the 1790's is surrounded on three sides by brand-new housing developments. (I do have to wonder about having a "graveyard view" from your bedroom window, as these folks doubtless do.) There is another, a few humble headstones, across the street from my daughter's skating rink, adjacent to a fire station, set back in a stand of Georgia pine.

     I realize my habit isn't everyone's cup of tea. My husband and daughter think I am morbid and weird. I don't think so at all. Maybe because I am not focusing on the death of these people that I don't know, but their lives...what they might have been, what they become in the creative crock-pot of my mind. My mind goes into overdrive. Who were these people? What were their stories? Not having these answers, I often invent them for myself.

     Sometimes they wind up in my books. In fact, my current work-in-progress comes directly from two weeks I spent with my father doing genealogy research a couple of years ago. Anyone who is interested in genealogy knows how much of that involves cemetary snooping for tombstone information.  After two weeks, some of those long-dead folks tugged at my imagination, begging me to tell their stories, even if it was one that I made up.

    I promised them I would.

Posted by Mary Ann Rodman

There is still time to enter the current Teaching Authors Blog Giveaway of The Annotated Phantom Tollbooth.  To enter, click http://www.teachingauthors.com/2011/10/50th-anniversary-q-with-leonard-marcus.html

 

Fears Into Fiction--HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

Happy Poetry Friday and happy nearly-HALLOWEEN!
Today we have THREE rather bloody poems and a lesson plan / Writing Workout!

Let’s start with a scary song! With Her Head Tucked Underneath Her Arm, written in 1934 by R. P. Weston and Bert Lee is one of my favorites. It’s about the ghost of Anne Boleyn haunting the Tower of London. Here’s a 1938 recording featuring Cyril Smith (2:25 minutes).

Now that you're in the mood, let's talk Halloween.  Here’s one of four of my limericks that are included in the fabulous how-to-teach poetry book for teachers, WRITING FUNNY BONE POEMS by Paul B. Janeczko

LIMERICK

by April Halprin Wayland

Once was a ghost dude named Dave,

Who lived at the beach in a cave

On Manhattan Beach turf

he invisibly surfed

scaring up some gigantic rad waves.

© April Halprin Wayland

* * * * * *
That’s one way to look at Halloween. But Halloween can be scary...right?  So let's try writing something scary.  I'm going to start by telling you one of my secret fears...

I’m terrified of writing something that’s mediocre. Of writing something that’s ordinary, common, average, inferior, second-rate, uninspired, amateurish, middling, undistinguished, unexceptional, unremarkable, run-of-the-mill, pedestrian, lackluster, forgettable.

(Thank you, Thesaurus—you may take a bow.)

If my fear were a monster, what would it look like?

It's a blob. A beige blob.  With blood-shot eyes. It's as big as a refrigerator and hunches on the rug blocking the window. It smells. Like a wet giraffe. It has tuna stuck between its yellowing teeth and a runny nose, and it's dropping Snickers wrappers on my clean carpet. And it JUST KNOCKED OVER MY OBAMA DOLL which was carefully balanced on top of my stuffed dog!

What do I do to this monster? What do I say to it?  Or maybe I'M the monster.  THEN what do I do?

Here are two Halloween poems that came from this weird daydream..one funny, one scary:

GO AWAY, BIG BEIGE MONSTER OF SECOND-RATE WRITING

by April Halprin Wayland

I’m pushing you out, so GO AWAY—

don't touch that chandelier!

I’m airing out my office

from the last time you were here.

You smell of ink and blood and death

and seventeen kinds of fear.

My hands still shake, my headache’s back

and now my stomach’s churning.

I will not play with you anymore.

GO HOME!

(Hooray! I’m learning!)

© April Halprin Wayland

* * * * * * * *

A WRITER ON HALLOWEEN

by April Halprin Wayland

I push open

the heavy door.
I take out the cleaver, the machete,

the switchblade, the scalpel, the penknife,

the X-acto knife.

I plunge my arm into the oily black pile of drafts

and haul one out.

And though it screams a thousand deaths,

I stab it over and over and over with the cleaver,

hacking it in two.

Then I amputate.

I sever. I cut.

I carve.  I slice.

Finally,

I mince words.

I take a breath and step back to admire my bloody work.

Then…I drop it back into the oily depths,

pack away the knives,

wipe the black spots off my desk

and leave.

I close the heavy door.

I will come back.

Tomorrow.

To do it all

again.

© April Halprin Wayland

* * * * *

Writing Workout / Lesson Plan—Fears into Fiction

For ages 7 through adult (or younger, with individual help.)

Objective: This lesson teaches beginning writers to find story and poetry ideas from their deepest darkest fears.

Instructions:

1) What are you afraid of?  Make a list of at least five things that scare you. Are you afraid of snakes? Of flying? If you’re an author, are you afraid of rejection?

2) Circle the one that scares you the most…or the one that you can’t wait to write about.

3) Make this fear into a creature.  Try to include as many of the five senses as possible--how does it sound?  How does it smell?  Maybe your fear of heights is a moldy grey vulture who hides in caves, makes snarky noises, and wears high tops…or maybe your fear of the dark is a neon green monster with sticky skin and garlicky breath that whispers evil things in your ear.

4) Write a story or a poem about this creature. You might want to speak to it or yell at it. Dialogue is fun to read aloud. Wouldn’t it be neat to YELL at your fear?  Or maybe YOU'RE the creature!

5) Share your writing with someone.

And…even though it’s Halloween…even though you’re scared…write with joy. And remember to breathe.

all drawings by April Halprin Wayland