Road Trip

Raina Telgemeir (r.) at SLJ's Day of Dialog with
(l.-r.) Lois Ehlert, Chris Raschka and Peter Sís

Raina Telgemeier's new graphic novel Sisters is the road trip from Smile that "only gets a passing mention," the author told the audience at School Library Journal's Day of Dialog this past spring.

Telgemeier joked that only after publishing her first book, Smile, did she learn that "you're not supposed to write [an autobiography] unless you've done something." But her books--Sisters and Smile, and also Drama, aimed at slightly older readers--serve as excellent examples for kids who either think they have nothing to write about or are asked to write their autobiography for school. Telgemeier finds the humor and vulnerability in seemingly everyday experiences: a wish for a baby sister that (when finally fulfilled) can have its drawbacks, a parent losing his or her job, and a family vacation.

Her approach, a mix of visual and verbal storytelling, clearly indicates what's fantasy or flashback--or even wishful thinking (when her father loses his job and she would really like a hug). Telgemeier zeroes in on a road trip and also takes that experience as a way to magnify the family dynamics--as traveling and staying in confined spaces will--using it as the jumping off place for flashbacks that add complexity to present events, and fantasy sequences to reflect her characters' changing emotional states.

Her books also let readers know that the more details they can add to their writing, the more universal their experiences feel to readers of their own writing. Telgemeier says, "I tell very personal specific stories, thinking this doesn't happen to anyone else, and then the letters come." 

Living and Creating

Interior from The Scraps Book

One of the things children will appreciate most about Lois Ehlert's The Scraps Book: Notes from a Colorful Life is the way she draws a correlation between her life and her art. Her ideas come from everywhere (asparagus hunting, a cat, a change of seasons) and her materials can be anything (paints, crayons, seeds, crabapples, fabric swatches). 

Even Ehlert's picture of the work table her father set up for her in her childhood home shares a striking resemblance to the workspace she uses today. Children will see that their own photos, paintings, and fabric scraps can contribute to a collage about family, home and pets. 

Study for Chicka Chicka Boom Boom

The author-artist also shows children precisely which book included which collage or composition, leading to an organic scavenger hunt of sorts, to check out her many picture books and to witness the varied approaches and styles she's used to illustrate her stories (and the stories of others, such as Chicka Chicka Boom Boom). 

Her collections of model fish and words and art supplies reveal a passion for what she does and may well inspire children to build their own. Lois Ehlert shows that a childhood passion can become a lifelong joy.

Filling in the Gaps

Marilyn Nelson

Poetry, as a form, invites readers to make meaning between the lines. Marilyn Nelson takes this a step further with her memoir How I Discovered Poetry. The poems begin when "the Speaker" (as Nelson refers to the child narrator in an author's note) is just four years old. As she matures, through the course of the book, to age 14, she comprehends more.

But in the 1950s, an era when injustice prevails, even adults are at a loss to understand the inequalities in evidence in American society. These gaps in understanding serve a dual purpose, as a child tries to grasp how the world works, and also the deeper challenge of coming to terms with the aspects that defy understanding.

In a conversation we had for an interview in School Library Journal's Curriculum Connections, Nelson said she was inspired by her friend Inge Pedersen, who’s a poet and novelist in Denmark. "She published a memoir of her girlhood in the 1930s, when Denmark was occupied by the Nazis," explained Nelson. "She told me that each of her short stories shows a gap in a child’s understanding of the world around her. I address the same sort of ‘gaps’ in these poems."

In the poem "Bomb Drill," a hydrogen bomb becomes "the hide drajen bomb." Ducking under their desks to hide from "drajen bombs" in school causes a six-year-old Marilyn to imagine that "maybe drajens would turn into butter/ if they ran really fast around a tree," just like the tigers in Little Black Sambo.

Nelson also bridges gaps of a different nature. She spoke of having a more inclusive world view than her mother did. She remembers wanting everyone to be in her family, as they drove through Kansas, through "miles and miles of nothing" on Route 66, captured in "Pick a Name." "I wanted to write postcards to people, telling them God loves them: 'I love you. [Signed] God.' That’s all I could think about. In a way it’s that plea in the book’s final poem, 'Thirteen-Year-Old American Negro Girl': 'Give me a message I can give the world.' "

By the final poem, Nelson has filled in many of the gaps, the greatest being her own identity--a calling as a poet.

Emotional Honesty

Liu and Martinez with their daughter

Wife-and-husband team Na Liu and Andrés Vera Martínez reveal remarkable emotional honesty in Little White Duck. Because young Na, called Da Qin (or "Big Piano") by her family, is so young and unguarded, her expressions are raw.

When Chairman Mao dies, she cries in response to her parents' sorrow rather than because of any attachment she herself felt to China's famous leader. Yet through Martinez's illustrations, readers who know nothing of Mao's impact on China can see what an influence Mao had by the banners, the murals, and Da Qin's recounting of how Mao's policies helped her working-class mother get the surgeries she needed to recover from paralysis caused by polio.

Da Qin's youth ensures that there's no political slant here. We see through her eyes the poverty in her grandmother's rural town; we hear from her mother about times when there was literally nothing to eat. It's a portrayal of a people ravaged by poverty, even though Da Qin's family makes enough to feed and house them comfortably. We also see how content Da Qin is in her family life, how close she is to her parents and her sister. She thinks it's perfectly normal to brush your teeth with an outdoor spigot.

Da Qin's mother tells the girls how difficult life can be for many people, but Da Qin sees this for herself when she goes with her father to visit his mother in a rural area. The children have never felt anything as soft as the little white velvet duck sewn onto Da Qin's coat. She wants to be generous even as she sees that they are soiling her white patch.

A mural of Chairman Mao in Little White Duck

It's an instinctive act of kindness. Of her childhood home, Na Liu explained in an interview with me that she was part of a “transitional generation—a generation caught in between one way of life and another, between the old and the new.”