Ubi Caritas

CCBC Choices List 2008

THIS JUST IN ... How To Be A Baby, By Me, The Big Sister has just been named a 2008 best of the year.

From the CCBC web site.
“The Cooperative Children’s Book Center (CCBC) is a unique examination, study and research library of the School of Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The CCBC’s noncirculating collections include current, retrospective and historical books published for children and young adults. . . . A vital gathering place for books, ideas and expertise, the CCBC is committed to identifying excellent literature for children and adolescents and bringing this literature to the attention of those adults who have an academic, professional or career interest in connecting young readers with books.”

So there.

right and nearly right

"The difference between the right and the nearly right word is the same as that between lightning and the lightning bug."

Mark Twain

tinkering til your eyes pop out

Robert Lowell (1917-1977) said "[poetry must] be tinkered with and recast until one's eyes pop out of one's head."

He also said, "Almost the whole problem of writing poetry is to bring it back to what you really feel, and that takes an awful lot of maneuvering. You may feel the doorknob more strongly than some big personal event, and the doorknob will open into something you can use as your own."

Picture books I think are a form of poetry. At least if they're good they are. If you do it right, then remove a single word and it won't work anymore. Or change the order, and the rhythm is thrown off. Or swap a word and the emotional impact vanishes.

And just like a poem, behind a picture book that looks simple, lie many drafts. And eyes that are popping out! One thing I know: you have to work hard to make it look simple.

After the 15th revision, though, the challenge, as with a poem, is to constantly be "bringing it back to what you really feel"—not what the editor wants, not what "sounds good", not what someone else did before—but what is true, the place where your heart pounds, the reason you put pen to paper in the first place.

Spinky Sulks: story time

As an extra special treat, why not stop doing whatever it is you're doing, sit back and listen to an excerpt from a story written by one of the greatest children's picture book writers read to you by one of the greatest actors. Spinky Sulks by William Steig, read by Meryl Streep.

Buy book here.

where to stand

Ansel Adams (1902-1984) said, "A good photograph is knowing where to stand."

As a boy he loved to hike around Golden Gate Park and along Lobos Creek, or out to Baker Beach - a boy who didn't care so much for school, who wanted to become a concert pianist. But when he was 14, his parents gave him a Kodak Brownie camera, and that same summer he saw Yosemite for the first time. He went back every year from then until he died at 81.

Maybe that quote could apply to stories, too. Knowing where to stand: knowing whose story it is, whose telling it and getting that all important "voice".

books worth reading

"No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally (and often far more) worth reading at the age of fifty—except, of course, books of information. The only imaginative works we ought to grow out of are those which it would have been better not to have read at all."

—C.S. Lewis

Christianity Today reviews The Jesus Storybook Bible!

... and it's a rave! Jago and I are leaping and dancing and singing.

"The Jesus Storybook Bible is as charming as it is theological" CHRISTIANITY TODAY

read the full review here.

click here to see a cool slide show of The Fall, taken from the book.

and here's an excerpt:
"The Jesus Storybook Bible: Every Story Whispers His Name disproves the adage that you can't judge a book by its cover. Jago's award-winning cover art is a foretaste of the whimsically insightful and richly colored drawings that await you on every one of the book's 351 pages. The illustrations alone are worth the price of the book....

Jago the illustrator, and Sally Lloyd-Jones the author, are a good pair. She brings the same creativity and sense of humor to her telling of the Bible's stories....

But Lloyd-Jones's writing isn't cutesy. She has a grasp of the profound. How does one explain to a child the agony of Jesus in Gethsemane, and his prayer of surrender to his Father? Lloyd-Jones does it as well as any biblical commentator....

The title and subtitle are even better than the book's delightful illustrations and narrative—because they provide, in one deft stroke, the interpretive key that unlocks the meaning of the whole Bible. The Jesus Storybook Bible says it all: The Scriptures are not merely a collection of stories designed to teach moral lessons. As Jesus explained to the men walking the road to Emmaus on Resurrection Sunday, the whole Bible is about Jesus. In the words of the subtitle, every story whispers his name....Lloyd-Jones manages to show again and again the presence of Christ in all the Old Testament Scriptures, and the presence of the Old Testament Scriptures in the life of Christ."