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Monthly Archives: August 2009
Little House on the Prairie
Interesting article last week (I think- the sedimentary record of incoming magazines is fallible) in the New Yorker on Rose Wilder Lane, daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder. She was a drunk, a divorcee, a rotten but prolific journalist, and a hardcore founding libertarian. She is thought by some scholars to have written all the Little House books, and she definitely helped shape the writing of the series.
I haven’t read the books since I was a little girl, but they remain very popular- and I was naively surprised to find out that Little House is a contentious title for its portrayal of Native Americans. I hadn’t given the books any serious thought since third grade.
The Hidden Adult by Perry Nodelman is a new book that attempts to tease apart the agenda and messages embedded in writing in English for children. Why do people write books for children? What kinds of things are children allowed/encouraged/forced to read about? Authors are part of their culture and they tend to reinforce the values of that culture, especially when they are writing for kids.
Children’s book authors HATE this idea. A lot of them have the most preposterous reasons why they write for kids and they seem to believe in some magical muse that comes and generates characters and story lines for children that are too pure for the kind of academic and psychological scrutiny Nodelman pursues. There are also plenty of “scholars” that engage in criticism of texts they have not read based on the presumed bias of the author, policing the shelves for what is appropriate for children. I imagine this goes on with adult literature as well.
I like finding out the foibles and motivations of authors- but after six and a half years I still have no idea what to tell parents when they ask me what is appropriate for their child of a certain age. I see these shelves of books seething with adult psychology, fictionalized biography to put James Frey to shame, hagiography, religion, hate, daddy and mommy issues, gender minefields, beautiful artwork, prose by committee and market forces and ask the child, “Well, what sort of things do you like to read about?”
Posted in book review
Tagged children's literature, libraries, little house on the prairie, perry nodelman
Plotting
I read that this would help me achieve my goals: breaking them into sticky note sized pieces. We’ll see.
Would you like to know what they are?
- book
- travel show (get paid for museum club)
- movie
Imaginary doctors agree: just writing down what you want to happen makes it many times more likely that it will occur.
Hope Brings a Turtle: Part Three
Hope brings a turtle in a tiny box.
She’d spent hours folding turtle after turtle
from sheets of wrapping paper.
The one she is carrying was the smallest one she could make.
This turtle is like my love, she thinks. Not small,
I know my love will grow or shrink to fit any space.
The space she is giving this turtle is the size of the
part of her thumb above the knuckle.
Lake Tashmoo Earrings
No kiss is sweeter than a surprise package in the mail. Jenny is an artist.
Hope Brings A Turtle: Part One
I am sorting my old papers and finding some good writing
Hope brought a turtle down to the neighbor’s pond.
“That’s it, Snappy, Dad says you’ll be happy here.”
She started crying, two knees in the mud. Snappy headed for the water, unperturbed. Instead of going home, Hope spied on the neighbors. There was a woman on the porch, hunched over a notebook, writing and drinking out of a coffee mug and smoking, with two feet up on the porch rail. Remembering Snappy, Hope sobbed in the bushes at the edge of the neighbors’ lawn.
Her father had told her that the turtle would eat up the huge and filthy family of goldfish that had bred from the pair he had suggested she release there last summer. It was a manmade pond, fed by a spring but lined with plastic. The first summer after it was built, a hundred thousand baby frogs had beached themselves on the steaming black pond liner and created a crusty film of brown frog jerky. Hope bellied her way, sniffling, to a forsythia bush with a better view of the woman on the porch. It was a bright, breezy summer day and the neighbors’ grass was cut short and well tended. No sticks, no bare patches.
Posted in novel
