Poetry Friday Interview--Jeannine Atkins' Finding Wonders

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Howdy, Campers, and Happy Poetry Friday!

Lucky Campers--you're in for two treats: 1) you get to meet my talented friend, author and poet Jeannine Atkins,

Author and poet Jeannine Atkins writes: "History shows me what changes as well as what stays the same."
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AND 2) you have a chance to enter TeachingAuthors' book giveaway of Jeannine's delicious verse novel, Finding Wonders--Three Girls Who Changed Science, which has received starred reviews (see below for info on the giveaway)!

Jeannine Atkins first came to my attention when I fell in love with her inspiring picture book, Mary Anning and the Sea Dragon, illustrated by Michael Dooling (Farrar, Straus and Giroux 1999). Wow, I thought--a young girl did that? Yes she did indeed. In fact, Jeannine writes on her website: "Almost every morning I write on my window seat about strong girls and women who have made historical contributions to science or the arts."

Boy, she's not kidding. She's written countless award-winning books about them--and here's her latest jewel, which came out this September:

“Inspirational and informative, Atkins shows how pursuing one’s passion for science, math, or any field considered nontraditional is worth the risk.” (Kirkus Reviews)

Finding Wonders--Three Girls Who Changed Science (Atheneum Books for Young Readers) is a lush book in three acts about three girls, their interests, and intimate details of the historical periods which shaped them. They were Maria Sibylla Merian (metamorphosis), Mary Anning (fossils), and Maria Mitchell (the night sky). As Irene Latham wrote when the book first came out, "It's another beautiful verse novel about real women, in the spirit of her much acclaimed and beloved-by-me Borrowed Names. Jeannine knows these girls, and by the end of the book, the reader does, too."

Click on Jeannine's website and her blog for more juicy details, as well as Irene's post for three sample poems.

And so, without further delay, let's say hello to Jeannine...thanks for coming into our living room today, Jeannine! How did you become a TeachingAuthor? 

Back when I was in college, I decided to become a teacher because I loved reading. I kind of forgot that I was shy, until I stood in front of a room full of wiggly seventh graders and realized I’d better say something. Thankfully, those students had good hearts and I muddled through, but for an introvert like me, my present job is a better fit. The hours fly by as graduate students in the MFA program at Simmons and I discuss the shapes and tone of novels and poems, looking for bits to pluck and adapt for our own creations.

What would you suggest for young adults to help them develop the shapes and tones of their own writing?

Keeping a journal isn’t magic, but I’ve found that writing every day, even for ten minutes, helps me stay open to inspiration. And by that I mean writing for myself, that first, important reader, who often needs to be reminded to be kind. It’s wonderful to read extraordinary books, as long as you keep yourself from measuring your writing against what you find on printed pages.

Everyone has a voice worth hearing. Listening to your own words as you let your hands move without judgment is a great way to find out if that voice is marked by humor, solemnity, long sentences or short lines, anger, joy, or any combination of these.

Okay since you brought up anger and joy or some combination of these, here's a question out of left field: tell us about your mother.

Ouch. I often ask students to boldly face their entire experience, so it’s good to be reminded of how tough looking back can be. My mom never seemed to want to be one. I looked for mothers who hadn’t checked out in books like Little Women, and also found the sense of being seen that I craved in teachers. Becoming a mother of a daughter showed me how warm and strong that bond can be. I’ve sometimes wondered if my mother would have been happier during another era. The question of how girls and women respond to a sometimes unwelcoming world is one that has driven much of my work.

I love that last line--how succinctly you've described the theme that drives you, Jeannine.

Do you have any suggestions for teachers on how they might use one of your books in the classroom?

Oh, I’m full of suggestions! I think one of the best ways to respond to reading a poem is by writing one of your own. After reading a poem in Finding Wonders: Three Girls Who Changed Science, students might cite one of the small animals, fossils, or stars found in the book, then might celebrate it by writing their own ode. Maybe rocks or plants can be studied, at least in photos, then students can ask a question about it. Suddenly, they are scientists! And they can be poets, too, asking: What would you say if you could speak?

Ah...Mask Poems of Science--there's your next book! Or maybe, I am a Rock? Wait a minute, I think Paul Simon already wrote that one...

Getting back to business, is there something you do to celebrate finishing a book, sending off a book, getting an acceptance or getting a great review?

Writing is one word that holds a lot of parts. I’m usually in the midst of starting another book when I’ve finished one, sending out several things for publication, steadying myself from rejections, when I get good news. It would probably be smart to do more than whirl a little around the kitchen or tell the dog or grin at my computer, but really the writing life is one of ups and downs and getting back to work. Which makes me feel like a very lucky writer. Though now that you mentioned celebration, I’ll add that I’m never opposed to cake.

What kind?

I tend to like pound cakes or coffee cakes, maybe with fruit.

from either morguefile.com or pixabay.com...I don't remember which

And here's one more new book for us to celebrate with a sweet slice: your next book of verse history, which will be out in January 2017, is called Stone Mirrors: The Sculpture and Silence of Edmonia Lewis. And it's already gotten starred reviews in Booklist and Kirkus--congratulations, Jeannine and thank you for stopping by!

Campers, here's your own delicious slice from Finding Wonders:

Playing Planets
from Finding Wonders--Three Girls Who Changed Science, by Jeannine Atkins

Schoolmasters don’t make much money, so Father earns more

by walking around the island to take measurements for maps

that mark shorelines and shoals. Maria suspects he also asks

relatives for news of Andrew, who disappeared last week.



While Father is gone from his schoolroom, Maria arranges

primers, chalk, and slates. Taking out the wooden spheres

to give an astronomy lesson, she remembers Father holding

the largest ball, bringing the Sun to their parlor.

The children ran around him like orbiting planets, taking turns

as Saturn, Mars, Neptune, Mercury, Venus, Jupiter, and Uranus.

Holding a baby, Mother was Earth.



Maria loves how planets take measured places in the sky,

but also hold mysteries. Once, she wished she could be a comet,

soaring close to the sun to be seen,

appearing as if from nowhere

among the whirls of sisters and brothers,

her father steady in the center.

poem and photos © 2016 Jeannine Atkins. All rights reserved

Jeannine Atkins holding her newest book, Finding Wonders--Three Girls Who Changed Science, which includes the story of Mary Anning
(also told in her picture book, Mary Anning and the Sea Dragon)

And now, Campers, here's your chance to win your own copy personally autographed copy of Finding Wonders ~

Join us in our celebrating Finding Wonders--Three Girls Who Changed Science! Enter our giveaway for an autographed copy!

Use the Rafflecopter widget below to enter to win an autographed giveaway copy of Finding Wonders. You may enter via 1, 2, or all 3 options. 

If you choose option 2, you MUST leave a comment on TODAY'S blog post below or on our TeachingAuthors Facebook page. If you haven't already "liked" our Facebook page, please do so today! 

(If you prefer, you may submit your comment via email to: teachingauthors [at] gmail [dot] com.)

Email subscribers: if you received this post via email, you can click on the Rafflecopter link at the end of this message to access the entry form.

Note: if you submit your comments via email or Facebook, YOU MUST STILL ENTER THE DRAWING VIA THE WIDGET BELOW
The giveaway ends December 16 and is open to U.S. residents only. 

P.S. If you've never entered a Rafflecopter giveaway, here's info on how to enter a Rafflecopter giveaway and the difference between signing in with Facebook vs. with an email address. 

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Poetry Friday is at Wee Words for Wee Ones today...thanks, Bridget!

Posted with wonder (and a little help from Eli and Monkey), April Halprin Wayland

1 Way to Write Poetry: Rhyming Patterns-- A Wednesday Writing Workout!

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Howdy, Campers!

Before we begin, I wanted tell you happy news!  In my last post, we talked about poetry and science. Today, just before I pushed "publish" on this post, I got some terrific news! I just learned that my poem,"Can Our Eyes Fool Our Taste Buds?" from The Poetry Friday Anthology for Science is on Science Friday's website! And Susan Blackaby's poem about Scientific Inquiry, from the same anthology, is also on the site. I'm thrilled for both of us!

Okay...now we can begin.

Welcome to another TeachingAuthors' WWW, aka:

Today we're going back to a post from 2010--revised, renewed and reborn for Poetry Month 2016:

Birthdays. Earth Day.  Poetry Month. Poetry Friday.  The world turns. Patterns rise to the surface.  We lean towards structure: forks, spoons, knives separated by dividers; children lined up by height; blouses arranged by color. 

Mom could count on me to put her pencils, rubber bands and paper clips in order.  My marbles grouped themselves into marble villages. Plastic dinosaurs, which my sister and I got from a junk shop (all for a dime!), quickly found families.

Something beautiful happens in my brain when a word goes “click,” fitting into a poetic pattern.

So, today, in honor of the patterns of our lives, let’s play with patterns.  I’ll take you on the behind-the-scenes tour on how I wrote the poem below...and then you'll have a chance to play with your own patterns.

I've been thinking back to 2009, and how I almost told my potential blogmates, “Thank you for inviting me to join your blog, but I’m waaaay too busy to take on another project.”

That's when the hands of five authors reached out to me, all the way on the West Coast, and how, for some reason, I reached back.  THANK GOODNESS!  I wanted to catch this “thank goodness” feeling in a poem.

I began goofing off, thinking of trees, of leaping across the country, across cyberspace.  A first line and then a second line came to me:

What does it mean to have made this leap?
To swing from tree to tree to you?

Suddenly I was in a jungle.  So I wrote (still playing, not sure where this was going):

To find, in the midst of the jungle a few
friends who are smart and kind and true?

I put them together: 

What does it mean to have made this leap?
To swing from tree to tree to you?
To find, in the midst of the jungle a few
Friends who are smart and kind and true?

I saw the beginning of a pattern. Can you see it, too?

The last three lines rhyme.  The first line doesn’t.  But it needed more.  So I decided to write a few four-line stanzas in which the first line of each stanza rhymes with the first line of the other stanzas, and in which the last three lines of each stanza rhyme with each other.

To put it another way, if each letter stands for a different end rhyme, my first stanza looked like is:
A
B
B
B

Or, to conserve space, A,B,B,B.  What would the next stanza be?  I decided it would be A,C,C,C.  And the next?  A,D,D,D. 

Then I began scouring my rhyming dictionary for earthy words that had enough relevant rhymes to support this pattern.

Here’s my list.  Sorry it's so long...but I did promise a back-stage tour:

Bird, heard, nerd, word, absurd, blackbird, songbird, hummingbird, overheard, blurred, purred, stirred,  
Blog, bog, slog, jog, dialogue, travelogue
Book, brook, look, took, shook, overlook,
Branch, blanch,
Creek, beak, peek, seek, week, critique, sneak, tweak, speak, tweet, cheek, meek, geek, weak, mystique, speak,
Deep, sweep, heap, cheep, sleep, reap, steep,
Dirt, alert, convert, divert, expert, insert, unhurt, blurt, assert, revert, introvert, extrovert,
Earth, birth, worth, unearth,
Fellow, hello, mellow,
Green, clean, keen, queen, scene, caffeine, sixteen, routine,
Grow, so, flow, glow, slow, so, ago, tiptoe, zero, volcano, studio, afterglow, bravissimo,
Leaf, …
Leap, deep, sleep, upkeep, reap, keep,
Learn, discern, earn, turn, concern, return,
Old, gold, enfold, bold, hold, retold, told, uphold, thousandfold,
Post, boast, west coast, most, almost, hitching post,
Readers, pleaders, feeder,
Sing, bing, wing, swing, anything, bring, spring, full swing, ring, thing,
Six, politics, mix,
Teacher, creature, preacher, feature,
Teaching, reaching, screeching, beseeching
Thrive, I’ve, hive, alive, arrive, survived, test-drive,
Tree, si, bee, free, gee, key, me, see, we, forsee, agree, esprit, community, disagree, history, courtesy, anthology,
Tweet, feet, seat, beat, sweet, athlete, bleat, complete, greet
Twig, big, sprig, gig, brillig, dig,
World, unfurled, twirled, pearl, girl,
Read, freed, lead, she’d, we’d, exceed, proceed, succeed, head, need, speed, bleed, plead, concede, misread, feed, greed, seed, weed, stampede,
Write, fright, might, night, quite, right, in spite, excite, goodnight, handwrite, polite, tonight, twilight, unite, parasite, oversight, watertight, 

I chose my words and began to play.  Here’s the result:

This is me, accepting the invitation to join TeachingAuthors
photo credit: morguefile.com

BLOG-I-VERSE-A-TREE
by April Halprin Wayland

How does it feel to cross over this creek,
to fly from tree to tree to you?
To find, in the midst of the jungle a few
readers discerning, kind and true?

How does it feel, week after week,
to water a seed, nearly seven years old?
To watch its young, green leaves unfold
as it gives me back a thousand fold?

I feel I’m Bird, just opening her beak,
at the top of a tree, on the first day of Spring,
easily found on Google or Bing,
joining five friends to Tweet, to sing!revised poem © 2016 April Halprin Wayland. All rights reserved

                                                   Here's your WRITING WORKOUT:

1) Brainstorm a topic.  (If you need help thinking of a topic, search our posts for the word brainstorming. For example: scroll down to the Writing Workout on Carmela’s post. )

2) Find a rhyming dictionary in the library or work with one online, such as RhymeZone.http://www.rhymezone.com/  List words which fit your dog, your garden, or whatever you’ve decided to write about.

3) Now play with stanzas in this pattern:
A,B,B,B. 
A,C,C,C.  
A,D,D,D.  

(Ha ha. ADDD indeed!)

If you can’t fit your ideas into that pattern, look for a poem you like, figure out its pattern and imitate it.  Or create your own pattern.  

5) Play!  Remember to breathe!  And write with joy.

drawings © 2010 April Halprin Wayland. All rights reserved

Posted with love by April Halprin Wayland and her faithful crew

Science Poems. Poetry Month. Poetry Friday. Oh, My!

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Howdy Campers!

1) Today is the first day of National Poetry Month, which is celebrating its 20th anniversary!
2) Today I'm sharing "a treasury of the greatest science poetry for children ever written"!
and
3) Today is Poetry Friday! (a poem by Steven Withrow and the link to Poetry Friday are both below.)

Lions and tigers and bears--oh, my!

HAPPY National Poetry Month (held in a month near and dear to my heart)! I'm celebrating by climbing a tree and singing praises for Janet Wong and Sylvia Vardell's marvelous new anthology, The Poetry of Science: The Poetry Friday Anthology for Science for KIDS. (Full disclosure: TeachingAuthor Esther Hershenhorn and I both have poems in this book...as do a TON of poets in the kidlitosphere. Poets, give us a shout out if you're in this anthology!)

News Flash...Janet just sent me the whole list of poets...ready? The 78 poets in The Poetry Friday Anthology for Science are (can you say all their names in one big breath?):

Joy Acey, Alma Flor Ada, Linda Ashman, Jeannine Atkins, Carmen Bernier-Grand, Robyn Hood Black, Susan Blackaby, Susan Taylor Brown, Joseph Bruchac, Leslie Bulion, Stephanie Calmenson, F. Isabel Campoy, James Carter, Kate Coombs, Cynthia Cotten, Kristy Dempsey, Graham Denton, Rebecca Kai Dotlich, Shirley Smith Duke, Margarita Engle, Douglas Florian, Betsy Franco, Carole Gerber, Charles Ghigna, Joan Bransfield Graham, Mary Lee Hahn, Avis Harley, David L. Harrison, Terry Webb Harshman, Juanita Havill, Esther Hershenhorn, Mary Ann Hoberman, Sara Holbrook, Patricia Hubbell, Jacqueline Jules, Bobbi Katz, X.J. Kennedy, Julie Larios, Irene Latham, Renée M. LaTulippe, Debbie Levy, J. Patrick Lewis, George Ella Lyon, Guadalupe Garcia McCall, Heidi Mordhorst, Marilyn Nelson, Kenn Nesbitt, Lesléa Newman, Eric Ode, Linda Sue Park, Ann Whitford Paul, Greg Pincus, Mary Quattlebaum, Heidi Bee Roemer, Michael J. Rosen, Deborah Ruddell, Laura Purdie Salas, Michael Salinger, Glenn Schroeder, Joyce Sidman, Buffy Silverman, Marilyn Singer, Ken Slesarik, Eileen Spinelli, Anastasia Suen, Susan Marie Swanson, Carmen Tafolla, Holly Thompson, Amy Ludwig VanDerwater, Lee Wardlaw, Charles Waters, April Halprin Wayland, Carole Boston Weatherford, Steven Withrow, Allan Wolf, Virginia Euwer Wolff, Janet Wong, and Jane Yolen.

218 Poems from the Teacher Edition + 30 Fun Bonus Poems =
A Whole Lot of Science Learning

Co-editor, publisher, author, and poet Janet Wong, who has been appointed to the NCTE Commission on Literature, the NCTE Award for Excellence in Children’s Poetry committee, and the IRA Notable Books for a Global Society committee, and her partner in crime, co-editor, professor, best-selling author, former chair of the NCTE Poetry Award committee and consultant to the Poetry Foundation, Sylvia Vardell write:

Teachers and parents asked us to make a Children's Edition of THE POETRY FRIDAY ANTHOLOGY FOR SCIENCE (Teacher Edition) with the poems grouped by theme--all the Ecosystems poems together, Lab Safety poems together, Math poems together, etc. (instead of grouped by grade level). So we did, and this is it--with 30 more poems than the Teacher Edition! Kids always ask me, "What is your favorite (of your own) books?" For now I have to answer: THIS ONE! Maybe because this one is the brand-new baby, or maybe because I think the illustrations by Frank Ramspott and Bug Wang really fit the text perfectly. I hope you agree!

Well, the National Science Teachers Association sure agrees. Here's what they say about the teacher's edition: "This is a treasury of the greatest science poetry for children ever written, with a twist—it can be used to ignite the spirit of students in a different, out of the box way. ” (NSTA Recommends)

If you were Janet and Sylvia, wouldn't you swoon when you read that review?

Poems in this book are grouped into 24 themes such as “Push and Pull,” “Ecosystems,” “Lab Safety,” “Computers,” and “The Math of Science.”

Use this link to get your paperback copy, and this link to get it as an ebook. I am in love with this anthology. It's so much fun to read. And apparently I'm not the only one...

Janet and Sylvia write:

Ben Franklin loved the poem about him—thank you for your poem “Discovery," X.J. Kennedy! In fact, he loved the whole book and got very excited when we gave him a copy—so excited that he handed his phone to a security guard, asking him to take a photo with his phone, too.  

When I flipped through to find a poem I wanted to share I ended up with a list numbering a million gazillion favorite poems. I finally threw my hands up in the air, closed my eyes and threw a dart into my list.

The dart hit Steven Withrow's marvelous poem. 

Steven, will you please introduce your poem?

Sure! Science, I've learned from working for many years with scientists and medical researchers as a journalist and editor, is a kind of poetry. To communicate science is to use the language of metaphor and symbol, as well as persuasive sound and rhetoric, and it's no surprise that many scientists also write poems.

When talking with children about poetry, I often bring in concepts and images from science. A metaphor is not an equivalence, but a suggestion of likeness, of linkage. As Robert Frost wrote in an essay for The Atlantic Monthly in 1946, “There are many other things I have found myself saying about poetry, but the chiefest of these is that it is metaphor, saying one thing and meaning another, saying one thing in terms of another, the pleasure of ulteriority.”

"What Makes a Turbine Turn" was inspired by the massive wind turbines being constructed close to my house in New England. I hope my turbine poem captures a hint of this pleasurable otherness.

from Morguefile.com

What Makes a Turbine Turn
by Steven Withrow

The formless force
that waggles a flag
and shapes a ghost
from a plastic bag

and levitates
a dragon kite
and wrestles with
the trees at night

is named the same
as that airy motion
which blusters over
field and ocean

and charges up
electric motors
with each revolving
round of rotors.

When next you see
a three-armed beast
who might be facing
north-northeast

don’t worry if
you feel thin-skinned.
“It’s just my pinwheel,”
says the wind.

Copyright © 2016 Steven Withrow. From the book The Poetry Friday Anthology for Science. Pomelo Books. Reprinted by permission of the author.

Wow. The thing that strikes me about this poem is that I see how wind moves...and I am moved, too. Thank you, Steven!

Campers, if you were to write a children's poem about something in science, what topic would you choose? And don't forget: if your work is in this anthology, let us know!

Thank you, dear Amy at The Poem Farm, for hosting PF today!

posted poetically by April Halprin Wayland...with help from Eli, Snot, and Sheldon ~

"Just the Facts, M'am"--fiction vs non-fiction on Poetry Friday

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Howdy, Campers, and Happy Poetry Friday! (the link to this week's PF host is below.)

First: welcome, welcome to our newest TeachingAuthor, Carla!  I am in awe of your writer's journey, Carla, because when I learned that we would be discussing non-fiction, my legs trembled and my palms grew cold and damp.  Unlike you and Mary Ann, in her wonderful first salvo on this topic, I am not, by nature, a researcher.  I am NOT a "Just the facts, M'am."

Jack Webb as Joe Friday in Dragnet, from Wikipedia

But... is this really true?

Well...I DO tell my students that real details bring fiction to life, and have them listen to the following short audioclip from StoryCorps.  Talk about bringing a subject to life! The details Laura Greenberg shares with her daughter are priceless--not to mention hilarious.

Still, I struggled to write poems for The Poetry Friday Anthology for Science (Pomelo Books).  By "struggled" I mean I read science articles and wrote tons of stinky poems about rocks, astronauts, materials science, the expiration dates on seed packages,electricity, science experiments...and on and on and on.

But...I dread gettting facts wrong--my worst nightmare. (Confession: writing these blog posts scares the bejeebers out of me.)

In fiction, I can fly my fairy-self to Planet Bodiddley and make up all the materials science by myself.  But if I have to convey facts?  And then somehow bake them into a tasty poetry pie?  I get tied up in knots.  My writing becomes stiff as a board.  I'm afraid of...

But finally I stumbled on this fascinating fact, in a review of The Big Thirst by Charles Fishman:"The water coming out of your kitchen tap is four billion years old and might well have been sipped by a Tyrannosaurus rex."

Wow. Think of the water you drink.  Think of the water you take a BATH in!!!! Ten versions of "Space Bathtub" later (with considerable coaching from the ever-patient anthologists, Janet Wong and Sylvia Vardell) this fact became a poem for kindergartners:

OLD WATER
by April Halprin Wayland

I am having a soak in the tub.
Mom is giving my neck a strong scrub.

Water sloshes against the sides.
H2O's seeping into my eyes.

The wet stuff running down my face?
She says it came from outer space!

The water washing between my toes
was born a billion years ago.

from The Poetry Friday Anthology for Science
(c) 2014 April Halprin Wayland, all rights reserved

If you're a K-5th grade teacher, this science/poetry anthology is so immediately useful, you'll cry with relief when you open it. Trust me. For details, and to watch under-two minute videos of poets (Bobbi Katz, Kristy Dempsey, Mary Lee Hahn, Susan Blackaby, Buffy Silverman, Linda Sue Park and me) reciting our science poems from this anthology, go to Renee LaTulippe's No Water River.  Again, trust me. (A little foreshadowing: Pomelo Books' newest anthology, Celebrations! comes just in time for Poetry Month this year--stay tuned!)

Here's a terrific vimeo of "Old Water" produced by Christopher Alello:

And thank you, Linda Baie, fabulous friend of TeachingAuthors, for hosting Poetry Friday today!

posted safely and scientifically by April Halprin Wayland wearing safety goggles