A Nation's Strength

Don’t forget, award-winning author, poet, teacher and mentor Ann Whitford Paul has revised and expanded her 2009 go-to hands-on guide on writing picture books, aptly named WRITING PICTURE BOOKS!Writer’s Digest releases this 2018 edition November 13. You can win a free copy in our Book Giveaway! Be sure to check the entry details at the end of Esther’s post!


For these weeks leading up to Thanksgiving, we at Teacher’s Authors continue our tradition of giving thanks. This week, I give thanks to our most fundamental characteristic that defines our American way: we have a voice in our destiny. As Michael Waldman, president of the Brennan Center for Justice (New York University) suggests, the American democracy “remains a living, breathing idea, a work in progress…American democracy is not perfect, but it is perfectible. For all of us… America is not just an actuality but a potentiality, too.” This week, don’t forget to use your voice, your right to have a say in what defines us as a people and a society.

Meanwhile, I found a wonderful resource in teaching civic education to help students build their basic civic knowledge and understand their role as active citizens. Civics in Literature  is a production between the National Constitution Center and the Rendell Center for Citizenship.We the Civics Kids offers a selection of lessons and activities that enable students to find their voice and work as a change agent in their community!



A Nation's Strength
What makes a nation's pillars high
And its foundations strong?
What makes it mighty to defy
The foes that round it throng?

It is not gold. Its kingdoms grand
Go down in battle shock;
Its shafts are laid on sinking sand,
Not on abiding rock.

Is it the sword? Ask the red dust
Of empires passed away;
The blood has turned their stones to rust,
Their glory to decay.

And is it pride? Ah, that bright crown
Has seemed to nations sweet;
But God has struck its luster down
In ashes at his feet.

Not gold but only men can make
A people great and strong;
Men who for truth and honor's sake
Stand fast and suffer long.

Brave men who work while others sleep,
Who dare while others fly...
They build a nation's pillars deep
And lift them to the sky.

-- by William Ralph Emerson. Born in 1833, Emerson was an architect and  the second cousin to Ralph Waldo Emerson. "A Nation's Strength" first appeared in Our Little Kings and Queens at Home and at School (Louis Benham & Co., 1891). This poem is in the public domain.

"I will tell you that we are not powerless... Every single one of us has something that, if done in numbers too big to tamper with, cannot be suppressed and cannot be denied.” -Oprah Winfrey

Bobbi Miller

Jella Lepman: Children's Books for the World

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Howdy Campers! Happy Poetry Friday! Today's poem and the link to PF is below.

It's time once again for TeachingAuthors' annual...

Mary Ann began our series giving thanks to the best teacher ever; Carla thanked her favorite teachers; Carmela thanked her history teacher; Bobbi thanked the many teachers who appeared in her life throughout this difficult year. It's my turn to thank someone.

Who Was Jella Lepman And Why Am I Giving Thanks To Her?

This year I'm thanking a different kind of teacher: Jella Lepman, whose memoir, A Bridge of Children's Books, which I've just finished, has inspired me to rise up from my couch of despair and continue fighting for what's right, no matter the obstacles.

Here are some adjectives which describe this visionary librarian/teacher/leader:

Tenacious. Purposeful. Unfaltering. Dogged. Unwavering. Ambitious. Generous. Unstoppable. I could go on and on. Campers--if you are flagging, if you need inspiration, run, don't walk to pick up her memoir, A Bridge of Children's Books.

'This is the story of a remarkable woman and an important document in the history of international children's literature' -- Inis Magazine
.

From Amazon:

"The remarkable story of Jella Lepman, who, having left Germany to escape the Nazi regime in the 1930s, chose to return in the aftermath of the Second World War, as 'Adviser on the Cultural and Educational Needs of Women and Children in the American Zone'. She soon decided that what Germany's war-ravaged children needed was to see a world of the imagination, beyond their landscape of bombed-out buildings and military vehicles. Battling with bureaucracy and meeting with generals and statesmen, including Eleanor Roosevelt, she founded the International Youth Library, filling a huge void in the lives of Germany's children with books from all corners of the world. The IYL included a children's art studio, story- and play-writing classes, readings, foreign language classes, and the foundation of the Young People's United Nations. In 1951 Jella Lepman founded the International Board on Books for Young People (IBBY), dedicated to promoting international understanding through children's books. This is a story of tireless courage and conviction in the face of desolation and cynicism."

Note, Campers, that the International Board on Books for Young People (IBBY) has been called "one of the most influential children's literature organizations in the world." (And the good news is that there's a United States national section we can join!)

The International Youth Library,
the world's largest library
for international children's and youth literature,
was founded in 1949 by Jella Lepman.

Check out this quick PowerPoint about Jella created by Canadian Laura A. Thompson, PhD in 2011.

I also owe thanks to Janet Wong and Sylvia Vardell who introduced me to USBBY during this summer's ILA conference in Orlando, opening my eyes and heart to the world of international children's literature. And thanks, too, to Junko Yokota for pressing this book into my hands and urging me to read it. Reading how Jella climbed over obstacles to accomplish so much has lifted me up and changed my life.

Here's today's poem:

ONE WARM LIGHT
by April Halprin Wayland

she is one warm light

through this wet, winter night

just one woman

just one human

climbing chunks of bombed-out buildings

she is steady, she is feisty

.

and her goals 

are grand and mighty
.

no one says that she is cautious

skirting senseless rules and bosses

just one woman

just one human

she is one warm light

through this wet, winter night

poem (c) 2017 April Halprin Wayland

Thank you, Jella Lepman.

And thank you, Jane, who's hosting Poetry Friday on her Raincity Librarian blog.

posted by April Halprin Wayland, coming off the couch of despair and bouncing into the light

For all Good Things

Teaching Authors continue our annual Three Weeks of Thanks-Giving series, remembering a teacher who inspired us. I would offer that everyone becomes a teacher, that person who inspires and supports, given the right moment and lesson that needs to be learned. It does sound a lot like Zen, but it’s also life at its best. And sometimes, worse.

I have often written about the power of stories. Stories make up the oldest invitation to the human experience. We have told our stories for over 100,000 years. Not every culture has developed codified laws or written language, but every culture in the history of the world has created myths, legends, fables, and folk tales.

Stories fill us with life’s possibilities, courage and hope. We are the product of all the stories we have heard and lived. Every dynamic character we’ve met along the way becomes intrinsic in our own story. Every plot a revelation to our journey.

And stories show us the way to be more than what we are. They tells us what it means to be human. No perfect by no means.

But Human.

Of course, to any daunting question posed, and any challenge faced, we learn there is no right or wrong answer, nor right or wrong way of moving forward. In the end, it is a lesson about how we see ourselves. Only when we take ownership of our learning does our story grow.

This has been a wretched year for me, after losing my job, then my beloved home, then my health insurance. I’ve had many lessons to learn. But I have also been blessed with many teachers who have inspired and supported me through this challenge. Even when I’ve been a royal pain in the pill.

For Eric, who after all these many, many, many, many years, continues to be my Master Guru.

For Monica, who has shared with me most graciously the poetics of her wisdom and story.

For Cynthia, fellow traveler and companion of space and time and everything wibbly wobbly.

For Bonny, for all things good and right in the world.

For Vera, for all things teddy bears and hugs.

For Harold Underdown and Eileen Robinson, who offered me entry to their wonderful online class, “Revise and Reimagine Your Novel or Chapter Book Webinar.” It has kept my head in the game.

And, for all the Teaching Authors, who are the best of teachers.

Thank you. 

Bobbi Miller 

Thanks, Mr. Duffy!

I've enjoyed reading both Carla and Mary Ann's posts for our annual Three Weeks of Thanks-Giving series.

As I pondered who I wanted to thank this year, I realized that as much as I enjoyed my English classes over the years, the teacher who had the most impact on my writing was actually a history teacher. Mr. Robert Duffy was my teacher for Advanced Placement United States History my senior year in high school. It was a challenging class, and he required us to write several papers. Mr. Duffy didn't always agree with the stance I took in those papers, but his comments were always insightful and encouraging. I recall thinking that he took me seriously as a writer and that meant the world to me.

Years later, when rejections made me doubt my writing ability, I'd pull out those papers (which I saved and still have) and consoled myself by re-reading Mr. Duffy's praise of my work.

For this post, I pulled out my high school yearbook and found the note he wrote in it:

"Best wishes--your papers were a pleasure
(some sounded like me)."

Even after all these years, I'm encouraged by Mr. Duffy's words. I hope I can have a similar impact on my students. Thank you, Mr. Duffy!

Thanks, also, to everyone who entered our giveaway of Pet Crazy, and congratulations to our THREE winners:

Tanya C, Linda B, Danielle H 

Don't forget, today is Poetry Friday. This week's roundup is over at Jama's Alphabet Soup.

Remember, always Write with Joy!
Carmela

Thanking My Teachers

Our Three Weeks of Thanks-giving for a teacher that inspired us brought back a lot of memories.  I went to a small school, which means there was only one teacher per subject.  And unless they quit and were replaced, we had the same teachers every year.  That is a good thing, if you had a great teacher.  It is not a good thing, if the teacher was not so great.   

Without naming a name here, I can tell you I had a math teacher that could really DO math.  But she could not explain to me how to do it.  So I don’t feel as though I learned much about math.  Surely it had nothing to do with the fact that I hated math and looked upon a word problem as if it was the very essence of all things evil.  Yet, somehow I learned enough math to get into and succeed when I went to school of Radiologic Technology-which I found out to my dismay-would require lots of math.  

I have a theory that people are either “numbers” people or “words” people.  I’m a “words” person.  

From the day I arrived on the planet I loved books, so English and Literature class was a good fit for me.  But aside from that natural bent, I had two excellent English teachers.  I can still remember the excitement Miss Jordan generated in class for Roman mythology.  When Miss Jordan left, Mrs. Thurmond took her place.  Her passion for literature showed through every day, in my memories I can still hear her reading poetry to us.  It was also in her class when I delivered my first “speech.”  No one in the room would have ever guessed that I would become a public speaker and book author. 

A great teacher rains down what they know over their students.  The lucky ones absorb some of that rain to germinate the seeds of future writers…

and maybe even mathematicians.  

Carla Killough McClafferty


Click here to find out how to enter to win the book Pet Crazy.

Three Weeks of Thanks-Giving; Thanks to the best teacher ever

We're b-a-a-a-ck!  It's Three Weeks of Thanks-Giving time, again. This is the time of year we give thanks for the teachers/writers who have influenced or encouraged us.

I've been blessed with many terrific teachers over the years. Today, I am giving thanks to a teacher whose class I did not attend, at least not in the traditional sense. And, unless he has been keeping a secret from me for the past 40-something years, he is not a writer. However, he is a dynamic teacher who, unknowingly, encouraged me to become a writer of historical fiction.

Coach Don Todd taught American history in the same 7-12 Tennessee school where I was librarian (excuse me: media specialist). I don't know about the rest of the country, but in the South, coaches teach social studies. Every single social studies/history teacher I had from grades 7-12 was a male coach. All of them with something more important to do than actually teach. My coaches were forever in their office (located at the other end of the school)making phone calls, leaving us to our own devices.

If the coach was actually in the classroom, the "teaching" went something like this:

"Y'all open your books to chapter six and answer the questions at the end of sections A and B."

With that, the good coach would rear back in his chair, plop his feet on the desk and flap open the sports section of the newspaper. Soon, the sports page would gently rise and fall in time to Coach's snoring.

Coach Todd was a totally different species of coach.

He taught! 

I had the privilege of observing him when his classes came to the library for research. I watched in wonder as kids, who were scraping bottom in the rest of their subjects, scrambled around in hot pursuit of information on say...The Robber Barons, and did any of them compare to the Kings of Wall Street in the 1980's? How did he get these students so fired up about Andrew Carnegie and Cornelius Vanderbilt?

"You got to fox them, Miss Rodman," he'd say with a wink. "You got to make them want to know more."

To Coach, history was not a bunch of facts and figures to be regurgitated on a multiple choice test. It was an always-exiting-never-ending narrative of our country. He made those historical figures real people, adding information that was not in the text book. They had wives and kids and problems and human failings. Their lives had beginnings and middles and ends, their stories woven into the lives of those who came before and after.  He may not have known it, but Coach Todd was one of the best storytellers I've ever heard. In his hands, American history was as enthralling as any miniseries.

It was Coach who gave me the idea to write historical fiction. As much as I loved writing, and reading historical fiction, it had never occurred to me to write it myself.

Coach (and most of the rest of the faculty) knew that my dad was a FBI agent.  Only Coach did the math and realized that Dad worked on the Mississippi Burning case, and that I was a ten-year-old witness to a lot of grizzly civil rights history. In the 1980's, the modern civil rights era, as covered in the American history texts, consisted of exactly two paragraphs  (Martin Luther King, Jr and Rosa Parks. The end.)  To supplement that unit, Coach started asking me to talk to his classes about growing up in Mississippi in the 60's.

"Why?" I puzzled. "Who wants to hear about my childhood?"

"Because you lived through history, Miss Rodman," he said. "It isn't all in the books. History comes from the people who were there, who lived it. And that would be you."

Once I started talking to his classes, I understood. What seemed every day, and not notable to me, was fascinating and sometimes unbelievable to Coach Todd's classes. The "everyday" indignities of the Jim Crow South were so outrageous that the students often accused me of "making up a story." I wish I had been, but no. Things were just that bad.

I assumed that the students, mostly Tennessee born and raised, would know something of the recent past.  But they didn't. Unpleasant history has a way of sinking into the swamp of time unless someone hauls it back to light and forces folks to look at it. That was what Coach did...and I got to help.

It was the students' questions, that made me realize that, yes, I did live through some pretty incredible times. Times that as far as I knew, were not written from the POV of an FBI agent's daughter. Maybe I should be the one to write that story. Twenty years later, I got around to writing that book, and lucky for me, someone actually wanted to publish Yankee Girl.

One of the best days of my life was when Coach Todd invited my dad (then long retired from the Bureau) to talk to his classes about some of his Mississippi cases, especially those dealing with the Ku Klux Klan (which was almost all of them.) I was reminded of that day again last week.

My dad passed away in September.  I was sorting through his files, looking for "necessary documents." However, Dad's habit of note taking during FBI interviews spilled over into his everyday life. He kept notes and documents on everything. If he ever threw anything away on paper, I don't know what it would've been. He was a hoarder, but a tidy hoarder...everything cataloged and filed away in his ten file cabinets. Along with the receipt for the furniture my parents bought for their first house (1950) and the maintenance manual for their 1963 Chrysler, I found the notes for Dad's talk with Coach Todd's classes.  Good times, good memories. (Thank you for the invitation Coach...you have no idea how much that day meant to Dad.)

Coach was the first to make me realize that history isn't just Stuff that Happens to Important People. Sometimes history is the not-so-important people who are observing, or participating in their own small way. This is a lesson I've passed on to my own writing students.

"Well, yeah," my students protest, "but your family is interesting. Your parents were codebreakers and your dad was an FBI agent and..."  I tell them to listen to their parents and grandparents when they reminisce. I have had students whose "boring" families escaped from war, survived the Holocaust, outlasted Hurricane Katrina. History is story. Your story. And only you can write your story. The best lesson I learned, from the teacher I never had.

Thank you, Coach Todd.

One more thing we can be thankful for: book giveaways! Our current giveaway is Pet Crazy: A Poetry Friday Power Book by Sylvia Wardell and Janet Wong, which features the work of TA April Halprin Wayland. For details and a chance to enter click here.

Posted by Mary Ann Rodman

Wrapping Up 3 Weeks of Thanks-Giving with a Tribute to Katherine Paterson and a Grateful Poem

Happy day after Thanksgiving and Poetry Friday! You'll find a poem at the end of this post and the link to this week's roundup. Below that, you'll also see a link to our current giveaway

While others may be enjoying Thanksgiving leftovers or Black Friday shopping, I'm pleased to wrap up our Three Weeks of Thanks-Giving with a tribute to one of my favorite authors, Katherine Paterson.

I didn't discover Katherine Paterson's work until I became interested in writing for young readers. She's probably best known for her 1978-Newbery winning Bridge to Terabithia, a novel I first read in August, 1995. I found the book moving, but it was Paterson's 1981 Newbery winner, Jacob Have I Loved, which I read the following month, that really touched me as both a reader and an aspiring writer. I wrote this of Jacob in my book reading log: "When I finished it, I immediately thought, 'I’d love to write a book that moved other people the way Jacob moved me.'"

But of all of Paterson's novels, The Great Gilly Hopkins has influenced me most as a writer. I first heard of it in 1996, at the Highlights Writers’ Workshop in Chautauqua, New York, when editor and author Patricia Lee Gauch discussed Gilly in a lecture on characterization. I read The Great Gilly Hopkins shortly after returning from the conference and was amazed at how Paterson was able to make me love a character who really wasn't that likeable. As I wrote in my reading log: "You empathize with Gilly, in spite of, or maybe because of, her brashness. You know she’s hurting and you want her to find happiness." The novel became one of my all-time favorites.

Years later, when I went to Vermont College to work on an MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults, Gilly became my "mentor text." My first adviser in the program, Marion Dane Bauer, suggested I take a paperback copy of a book I admired and highlight "backstory" in one color and "sensory details" in another. When I tried this exercise on The Great Gilly Hopkins  I was amazed to discover that Paterson incorporated backstory throughout the novel, even in the last chapters. Before that, I'd assumed you had to include every bit of pertinent character history in the first few chapters.

 highlighted interior of my copy of The Great Gilly Hopkins  

My paperback copy of The Great Gilly Hopkins is getting rather ragged looking, so when Paterson offered a giveaway of the new edition on her Facebook page, I entered right away. The giveaway was to celebrate the release of a movie version of Gilly. Lucky me, I won the book and a bookmark highlighting the movie's cast!

My NEW autographed copy and bookmark!

Our Not for Kids Only book club, sponsored by Anderson's Bookshop, recently re-read The Great Gilly Hopkins. I was surprised that I loved the novel as much as ever, and was happy to introduce it to several members. We'd planned a field trip to see the movie, but by then it was no longer playing. I look forward to watching it as soon as I'm able.

I had the pleasure of hearing Katherine Paterson give a visiting lecture while I was at Vermont College. She struck me as a humble, hardworking writer. In her lecture, she encouraged us to “write out of who you are, not who you think the reader might be.” I still strive to follow that advice in my writing.

In researching Paterson's work for this post, I discovered her beautiful book Giving Thanks: Poems, Prayers, and Praise Songs of Thanksgiving, illustrated by Pamela Dalton. You can read a lovely review of it at Kid Lit Reviews. In honor of Poetry Friday, I'd like to share a Ralph Waldo Emerson poem from the book that is still appropriate on this day after Thanksgiving.

        Thanksgiving

        For each new morning with its light,
        For rest and shelter of the night,
        For health and food,
        For love and friends,
        For everything Thy goodness sends.

        by Ralph Waldo Emerson (1883-1882)
from Giving Thanks: Poems, Prayers, and Praise Songs of Thanksgiving, © 2013 by Katherine Paterson, illustrated by Pamela Dalton

And I'm grateful for Katherine Paterson and her wonderful contributions to literature for young people.

This week's Poetry Friday roundup is at Carol's Corner. Before you head over there, be sure to enter our current giveaway if you haven't already done so. You could win a 2-book set of great historical fiction by Sandy Brehl.

Don't forget to Write with Joy!
Carmela