Archive | August 2004

More Picture Book Authors

Aug30

These picture book authors and illustrators were born on this date:
Laurent de Brunhoff: He is the son of Jean de Brunhoff, creator of the books about Babar the elephant. Actually, though, it was Laurent’s mother who first created the story of the little elephant who leaves home to visit the city. Laurent’s father, Jean, died in 1937 when Laurent, the oldest of his three sons, was only twelve years old. Laurent grew up to become an artist and to continue the Babar saga in over thirty more books.
Virginia Lee Burton: (b.1909, d.1968) Virginia Burton is the author of Mike Mulligan and His Steamshovel and The Little House, both classic picture books. I read about her at Houghton Mifflin’s website about her work and found this autobiographical note about how she created her books.

I literally draw my books first and write the texts after – sort of “cart before the horse.” I pin the sketched pages in sequence on the walls of my studio so I can see the book as a whole. Then I make a rough dummy and then the final drawings and, when I can put it off no longer, I type out the text and paste it in the dummy. Whenever I can, I substitute picture for word.

My first thought is: how could one have a decent plot doing a book this way? However, her books definitely tell a good story. Burton won the Caldecott Award in 1954 for her book The Little House.
Donald Crews: My favorite books by this author/illustrator are Harbor, Parade, and Truck. His illustrations are bright, simple and visually appealing. Not much subtlety here, not a whole lot of story, but there’s lots of fun for the two and three year old crowd. Go here for a short article by Crews about the Ticonderoga #2 pencil, “brand new (they don’t last long) and freshly sharpened. Golden yellow (Cadmium yellow), six-sided, with yellow and green ferrule, and at one end a pink eraser.” I also like my pencils yellow and freshly sharpened.

Tasha Tudor

Aug28

Last but not least, author and illustrator Tasha Tudor celebrates her birthday today. She is 89 years old. Go here for an article on Tasha Tudor that originally appeared in Practical Homeschooling, Mary Pride’s magazine. According to her family website, Tasha Tudor is still in excellent health: “She continues to lead an independent and active life which encompasses copious artwork, gardening and greenhouse care, pets, family and friends.” If you’re not familiar with Tasha Tudor’s illustrations, all her children wear what my children choose to call “homeschool clothes,” old-fashioned clothing from the 1800’s. (We don’t really know any homeschoolers who wear these kinds of dresses, but we do know some who would like to if they could find them readily available.) Anyway, Tasha Tudor is a wonderful writer and illustrator, and she’s created a life that sounds as if it came out of storybook. She lives on a farm in rural Vermont. To read more about Tasha Tudor’s life and work, read The Private World of Tasha Tudor by Richard Brown. My favorite book by Tasha herself is A Time to Keep: The Tasha Tudor Book of Holidays.

Allen Say

Aug28

Say is a Japanese-American author who was also born on this date. He was born in Yokohama, Japan and came to the U.S. just after WWII with his father. His father enrolled him in a military school in California, and Say hated the school and the United States. He was expelled from military school after a year enabling him to explore California on his own. He began to write and illustrate children’s books while doing advertising photography for a living. His book The Bicycle Man is set in Japan immediately after World War II. In the story, two American soldiers visit a Japanese schoolyard and show the children tricks on a bicycle. Maybe this book would be a good one to distribute among American servicemen in Iraq. Then again, maybe the situations are not that analogous. The Iraquis seem to be more dangerous. Could two American servicemen visit an Iraqui school without guns (the book specifically says, “They had no guns.”) and hope to be welcomed? Would they even be allowed to do so by the U.S. and Iraqi authorities? I don’t know.
Say also won a Caldecott Award for his book Grandfather’s Journey about his own grandfather’s coming to the United States.

Phyllis Krasilovsky

Aug28

Krasilovsky is the author of several children’s picture books, but I am only familiar with our all-time favorite, The Man Who Didn’t Wash His Dishes. Read this one for a humorous answer to the kid question: “But why do we have to wash the dishes?” These titles by the same author sound interesting also.

The Man Who Cooked for Himself: “A man who lives at the edge of the woods discovers that he need not rely on the store for a supply of good things to eat.”
The Man Who Tried to Save Time: “A man drastically reorganizes his daily routines to save time, only to come to a startling realization.”
The Woman Who Saved Things: “A woman who prides herself on her extensive junk collection finds that there is no room in her home for her grandchildren to sleep.”
The Man Who Was Too Lazy to Fix Things: ‘A lazy man takes shortcuts when repairing his aging house. He pastes a broken plate back together with flour and water, wraps band-aids around a chair rung, pounds a nail with his shoe, and spreads chewing gum over a crack in the sidewalk.”
It sounds as if Krasilovsky likes to write about the pitfalls of housekeeping in a humorous vein. SInce I live the pitfalls of housekeeping in a humorous vein, I might have to get some of her other books.

He was so very, very tired after carrying everything back and putting it away that he decided that from then on he would always wash his dishes just as soon as he had finished his supper. —The Man Who Didn’t Wash His Dishes

Roger Duvoisin

Aug28

I have a plethora of authors with birthdays today to present for your reading pleasure. First, we have Roger Antoine Duvoisin, born in 1904 in Geneva, Switzerland. He attended art and music schools in Switzerland and France and eventually emigrated to the United States. Duvoisin wrote and illustrated over forty books for children, and he illustrated more than 140. He won the Caldecott Medal for his illustrations in White Snow, Bright Snow by Alvin Tresselt. Roger Duvoisin created at least two delightful characters that I know of: Petunia the silly goose and Veronica the conspicuous hippopotamus. When she travels to the city, Veronica is “gloriously conspicuous.” However, after getting way too much attention from everyone including the police, “Veronica . . .was tired of being conspicuous. One can be too conspicuous.” Conspicuous is such a fun word to introduce to little children.

Family Lives With Autism

Aug27

I found a link to this story on Bob Smietana’s blog, God-of-small-things. It’s a two part story by Josh Grossberg about a family with three boys–all three of whom are autistic. The parents’ deep faith in God and dependence on Him is what comes through in the story.

Part 1
Part 2

“Most parents are angry and frustrated,” said 42-year-old Gina. “They think their kids were a mistake. But this is the way God planned them for our family. I really believe God is using our family — as crazy as it is with three kids with autism — to make a difference in the world.”

Wow! Even better than Olympic champions who profess Christ, these are champion parents who profess Christ in the middle of confusion, discouragement, and Life. May I remember this story on days when I get discouraged with my family or my children. None of our kids is a mistake.

On the Other Side

Aug26

Voices of Civil Rights is a project sponsored by AARP, the Leadership Council on Civil Rights and the Library of Congress “to collect and preserve personal accounts of America’s struggle to fulfill the promise of equality for all.” I heard about this project on NPR today, and the news report aired the memories of an older black woman who had attended a segregated high school here in Houston. I found her recollections interesting, and somehow hearing about this lady’s experiences reminded me of my great grandmother. For better or for worse, I come from “the other side of the racial divide.” My great grandmother grew up in Comanche, Texas. My father told me (and others confirmed the story) that when my great grandmother was growing up in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s, black people were not allowed in Comanche. Even the black porters on the trains had to stay on the train when it stopped in Comanche. So my great grandmother grew up believing that Negroes, as she called them, were foreign at best, dangerous at worst. I remember my great grandmother sippping Coca-colas in the small returnable bottles and watching soap operas. She was probably about 70 years old then, back in the 1960’s, and though she had worked hard all her life, it was now her time to rest. She still cooked the meals and worked in the yard and went every Saturday to the beauty shop to get her hair fixed. And she complained, gently, about all the Negroes on TV. “Every time I turn on the TV, there’s one of those people. I just don’t understand why they have to put all those Negroes on the television.” I heard her complain and didn’t understand, and I noticed that she kept watching and quit complaining after a while. It was the first time I remember thinking about black skin and white skin and whether or not skin color made any difference. I never believed that it did, but my great grandmother sure saw a difference between black folk and white folk. I wonder if my great grandmother’s story is one of the “voices of civil rights?” All she ever did was somehow come to terms with black people invading her space via the television, and she made me think.

Either/Or

Aug24

I got this “either/or” from Thinklings. Since it’s the “literary edition,” I just had to play.

Hardback or Paperback Unless I have to pack it in my purse.
Highlight or Underline, But I never have a high lighter handy, so I usually just lose the quote.
Lewis or Tolkien That’s a really, really hard choice. Unfair.
E.B. White or A.A. Milne Pooh rocks.
T.S. Eliot or e.e. cummings Mostly because my friend Julia taught me to appreciate Eliot a long time ago.
Stephen King or Dean Koontz Neither.
Barnes & Noble or Borders No Borders nearby.
Waldenbooks or B. Dalton
Fantasy or Science Fiction
Horror or Suspense
Bookmark or Dogear
Large Print or Fine Print I’m getting old, but my $1.00 glasses from Dollar Tree are changing my life.
Hemingway or Faulkner
Fitzgerald or Steinbeck
Homer or Plato Give me the story every time.
Geoffrey Chaucer or Edmund Spenser
Pen or Pencil Or a very sharp pencil.
Looseleaf or Notepad
Alphabetize: By Author or By Title
Shelve: By Genre/Subject or All Books Together
Dustjacket: Leave it On or Take it Off
Novella or Epic
John Grisham or Scott Turrow
J.K. Rowling or Lemony Snicket Neither.
John Irving or John Updike Neither.
Salman Rushdie or Don Delillo Neither.
Fiction or Non-fiction
Historical Biography or Historical Romance
Reading Pace: A Few Pages per Sitting or Finish at Least a Chapter When they let me . . .
Short Story or Creative Non-fiction Essay
Blah Blah Blah or Yada Yada Yada I told you, I’m old.
“It was a dark and stormy night…” or “Once upon a time…”
Books: Buy or Borrow Until I can afford to buy.
Book Reviews or Word of Mouth