Give Comics a Chance!

I’m a late bloomer when it comes to comics.

It was not until I got into publishing and heard Seymour Simon, the esteemed nonfiction writer for children, and Avi, the Newbery medalist, and, more recently, Jennifer Holm (a Newbery Honor author and also a co-creator of the Babymouse graphic novels series with her artist brother Matthew) all talk about how they became readers because of comic books that I started to give comics more credence.

I may be biased, but I believe that it was Art Spiegelman’s MAUS—his memoir of the Holocaust rendered as a graphic novel that won a special Pulitzer Prize—that finally won the form widespread respect among American adults. Even though Spiegelman and his wife, Françoise Mouly, who is the art editor of the New Yorker, had been creating and editing groundbreaking comics in their publication RAW, their approach to featuring such a haunting and horrifying topic as the extermination of Jews during WWII in such an original way captured the imagination and attention of readers with even the most conservative definition of “the book.”

I suppose I’m making the case to you, the adult reader, so that you will consider accepting the idea of the young people in your life reading comics. I believe that comics are unique in their appeal to kids who don’t perceive themselves as readers. Because of their highly visual presentation, comics offer readers a myriad of additional clues about what's happening on the page, comics can more easily introduce the idea of sarcasm and wit (by creating a joke in the interplay between text and pictures), and they can begin to build a sense of confidence in readers who experience a mastery of what they are reading, often for the first time.

Adventures in Cartooning is a terrific book for many reasons, not least of which it demonstrates how easy a medium it is to work in but also how hard it is to be really good at comics. As with so many disciplines, we learn how hard they are to master when we begin to work on them ourselves. I had a new appreciation for ballet dancers after I took ballet lessons. I still listen in awe to Van Cliburn because even after 10 years of piano study, I never came close to the way he translated his passion and mastery to the keyboard.

In the coming weeks and months, you’ll be hearing more about comics here, but in the meantime, here are some tips and titles from Mark Siegel, a wonderful author-artist in his own right. He started a comics imprint where he publishes high-quality books like Adventures in Cartooning, and his Web site offers a kind of syllabus in helping the novice get started with comics.

So let’s give comics a chance! They can turn our young people into readers, and give them more opportunities to explore their own artistic side.

BlogTalkRadio: Books for Teens

I am honored to be a guest of Eric Komoroff and the Community of Unity on the Youth Empowered BlogTalkRadio show on Monday, 08/03/09 at 6 pm. In an effort to provide an easy reference for some of the resources we'll be discussing, I've listed many of the authors and books I plan to mention below. Our conversation will touch on these possible points:

1. Why read?

Walter Dean Myers gave a keynote speech at IRA (the International Reading Association) some years ago, and I vividly remember two points he made:

A. It used to be that if you had a strong back, you could work. That’s no longer true. You have to read in order to be employed.
B. Myers does a lot of volunteer work in prisons, teaching inmates to read. He made the point that in Japan, prisoners are not released until they can read.

2. How do we get kids to read?

A. Jean Carlos Artiles, interviewed on this program on July 20, talked about “feeling alone.”
One of the great benefits of reading is that you discover other people who feel the way you do, who confront the same situations you do.
J.C. Artiles also advised parents, “You’re not raising yourselves, you’re raising your children.” To that end, it’s important to point kids to strong sources for books – local libraries, many of which have teen programs; bookstores, many of which invite teens to blog about new books and teen events; and not to “require reading,” but rather point them toward books they might enjoy. And then let them do their own discovering. Ultimately, they will enjoy most the books they discover for themselves (even if you're the one who initially points them out).

B. Jon Scieszka, National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature, offers these excellent tips, which I believe are appropriate for parents of kids from birth through the teenage years:

--Expand your definition of reading beyond fiction and novels. Lots of kids love to read non-fiction, humor, comic strips, magazines, illustrated stories, audio recordings, and websites. It’s all reading. It’s all a good way to become a reader.

--Let kids choose reading that interests them. It may not be the reading you like, but making the choice is important to kids.

--Be a good reading role model. Talk to your kids about how you choose what you read. Share your reading likes and dislikes. Let kids see you reading.

--Try not to demonize TV, computer games, and new technologies. These media do compete for kids’ time, but they are not the “bad guy.” Help kids become media literate. Show them how different media tell stories in different ways.

--Think global. Act local. There are all kinds of good people and worthy groups working to help kids read. Teachers, librarians, and booksellers are a wonderful resource. Ask them for book recommendations. Many of them already have programs in place for teens, teen volunteers, teen bloggers, a chance to write book recommendations.

3. Now that they're reading, which books have value?
All books have value, in the sense that it’s important to permit teens to explore books, try different titles, series books, magazines, comics, nonfiction, photo essays. It really goes along with what Jon Scieszka said (above) about letting kids “choose reading that interests them.” For teens, it’s often about reading what your peers are reading, so the more you can encourage your teen to get involved at your local bookstore or library where they can meet up with other kids who enjoy reading, the better. Your local librarian and bookseller are great sources for new books, too.

4. What does "reading level" mean and should we care?
I’m not a fan of “reading levels.” I understand the impulse to be able to easily categorize books into grade levels and thus make recommendations, but I find reading levels terribly misleading. There are books written on a “fifth-grade level” that have very mature themes, and there are books written at a higher grade level on accessible topics of great interest to kids who will stretch to read more challenging books because they’re passionate about the subject matter. So I think it’s really important to listen to teens talk about what interests them, and guide them to resources and titles that cover subjects and themes they’d enjoy.

5. What are some good sources for finding books?

I’ve culled my favorites in the list 20 Classic YA Books, a mix of recent and established books for teens, on my Twenty by Jenny Web site.

And here are some terrific additional resources:

2009 Best Books for Young Adults / ALA (American Library Association)

Quick Picks for Reluctant Young Adult Readers / ALA

Graphic Novels recommended by First Second Books

Many authors who write for teens also have Web sites and blogs. Encourage them to Google their favorite authors and see if they can find out more about the authors and their books.

And if the teen in your life is interested in writing, I highly recommend SmithTeens:
http://www.smithteens.com/
SmithTeens is an online community of teen writers who are publishing six-word memoirs online. The first published collection -- in book form -- of the online community’s work will be published in September, I Can’t Keep My Own Secrets. The site is curated by professional editors, so there is no inappropriate content on the site, and teens can connect immediately with other teens who are interested in the same things they are.

I hope these are helpful suggestions, and that you'll tune in to BlogTalkRadio (which will be available even after the show airs) if you'd like to hear the full discussion with Eric Komoroff.

Permission to Play

William Carlos Williams’ ability both to run a full-time medical practice and also to devote daily time to his writing is one of the things I admire most about him. The other, of course, is the quality of his writing, his ability to see and describe the exquisite details in everyday things. The movements of a bird outside his window, the taste of a sweet plum from the icebox, the clangs, siren, howls and rumbling wheels of a red fire truck. When I read A River of Words, I realized that those two characteristics—his talent for balancing work and creativity, and also for noticing and describing his experience—probably both stem from the many hours he spent walking beside the banks of the Passaic River.

During my first year of teaching elementary school in New York City in the late 1980s, I was shocked to learn about “play dates.” Parents called each other to schedule a “date” for their children to play together. I guess that makes sense, I thought. New York is a big city and you have to plan for transportation, and you certainly have to know where your child is. But I thought of my own carefree afternoons growing up in Dearborn (and later Kalamazoo), Michigan. Our neighborhood was much like the setting in Gran Torino, little lots close together—you could practically call out the window and get a game of kickball together. A bunch of us would walk back from school together at age 6 and 7, maybe stop home to change clothes and grab a snack, but then we’d meet in the front yard with our bikes or bats and balls. The afternoons seemed to stretch delightfully endlessly to dinnertime. There was a spontaneity to our play that seems harder to tap into today.

Many of my friends have preserved that for their children. But they’ve had to work at not scheduling their children's time too tightly, allowing them room to play in the yard or go to the neighborhood park. They’ve had to limit the lessons and practices and time in front of the TV or computer. Even as adults it’s sometimes hard to give ourselves permission to “procrastinate now,” as Ellen DeGeneres advises. My friend Elmera often says, “I constantly have to remind myself that I’m a human being, not a human doing.”

William Carlos Williams, by his example, shows us there’s room for both doing and being.

Monkey See, Monkey Do

Here on Lake Michigan, where I’m spending the week with five nieces and nephews under the age of eight, you can already see peer pressure at work.

If seven-year-old Hale is doing something, you can bet his cousin, six-year-old Tiger, wants to be doing it, too. And Ryan, Hale’s six-year-old sister, certainly does not want to be left out. Maggie (Tiger’s sister), who will turn two in October, speaks in complete sentences, while Charlotte (Hale and Ryan’s sister), who turned two in May, saves her energy for key words like “bottle,” “Mama,” “Dada,” “Giggy” (for Grandma), and “mine.” Both Maggie and Charlotte are good at identifying what is “mine.”

Maggie and Charlotte can also identify when they have a dirty diaper, the first step in potty training. Of course, the key step is being able to identify when you need to go before you actually go. They’re not quite at that point yet, but it likely won’t be long.

I know parents who, once their child can identify their need to go, stay at home for an entire day (usually a weekend day) with the toddler, diapers off, and essentially teach them how to indicate when they have the urge so that the parents can quickly help the child get to the potty. The child repeats the experience in succession enough to understand the necessary steps and it soon becomes a habit that they can initiate on their own. Other parents take a more gradual approach and wait until the child can communicate when he or she has to go and also can consistently get to the bathroom before they go. The child then graduates to pull-ups and might wear a diaper only at night, moving gradually to “big girl” or “big boy” underpants.

Whatever the approach, it’s helpful for toddlers to have a book like No More Diapers for Ducky! that depicts other youngsters going through the same experience they are going through. The best thing about Ducky is that it shows one child teaching another child by example.

Once You Learn How, You Never Forget

The beauty of Sarah Dessen’s analogy of bike-riding in Along for the Ride is that—up to this summer—Auden West has accomplished everything by thinking it through, and often, as Eli puts it, “overthinking.” But there is no way to intellectually master riding a bike, you have to just do it. The fact that Auden would, at age 18, be willing to learn to ride says more about her open-mindedness, and her willingness to change, than just about anything else could.

Everyone in my neighborhood knew how to ride a bike by age five. It was the way kids got to their friends’ houses, met up at the A&W on South Westnedge for hot dogs and root beer, and traveled to the baseball diamond. When we moved to Kalamazoo, Mich., I was seven. And I did not know how to ride a bike.

On the 4th of July, my Uncle Chris came to visit us in our new home. (He is my father’s brother, four years younger than my dad.) Uncle Chris probably learned of my dilemma in a conversation that went something like this:

“What are you doing inside? It’s a beautiful day. Why don’t you go ride your bike?”
Barely audible, I might have said, “I don’t know how.”
“What?” (booming voice) “You don’t know how to ride a bike? Well today you’re going to learn.”

Uncle Chris removed the training wheels from my bike and, just as Dessen describes Auden’s experience with Maggie as her “buddy,” he held onto the bike and ran alongside me, and then let go, “Keep pedaling!” he’d shout. Yes, I fell a number of times. But each time my uncle would say, “Let’s try again,” and I’d mount the bike and off we’d go, with him running alongside (“Keep pedaling!”). We did this again and again until, suddenly, I didn’t fall. I kept going. I pedaled and pedaled all the way to the end of our street and then turned right, and, aided by gravity, swiftly flew down a steep hill on a dead end street. I can still feel the wind rushing through my shoulder-length hair with the breakaway speed of it. And, because I did not yet know how to stop, I came to a soft landing smack in the middle of the Parker family’s peonies. They were very nice about it. The best part was, I now knew how to ride a bike. (I just had to practice braking.)

How sympathetic perfect Auden seems as she tries to convince Eli, a competitive stunt biker, that she’s pretty sure she learned how to ride when she was six. He knows there is no gray area. You either know how or you don’t. Once you do, your body intuitively shifts to stay upright, adjusting a little to the left or right, forward or backward, to maintain that balance. It’s not something you think about.

But Auden is willing to learn. As Adam, another biker in Dessen’s novel puts it, “What defines you isn’t how many times you crash, but the number of times you get back on the bike.” Once she masters the bike, we know Auden will be just fine.

The Pleasures of Rereading

One of the things I like best about Rebecca Stead’s novel When You Reach Me is the way the heroine, Mira, loves A Wrinkle in Time. The way she carries it around with her wherever she goes, and the way the book is like an old friend to her. It made me think about the pleasures of rereading books and why we do it. If we’ve already read the book, and we know what’s going to happen, why bother reading it again? It’s precisely because we do know what’s going to happen that we bother. We return to certain books again and again because we know they are reliable and dependable and will always be there for us, and events will unfold just the way we remembered them. Or if we’re really lucky, they begin to mean different things to us at different times—just like longtime friends do. The longer we know them, the more we discover. The bond deepens.

I do not know how many times I have read The Little Prince, but each time he has come through for me. When I was small, he was a traveler in a great adventure who came home, where he was happiest of all. As I grew older, he was the hero in a love story—between the Little Prince and his rose, beloved to him, unique in all the world because of his care for and devotion to his rose. Then the subplot between the Little Prince and the fox came to the fore, as I began to consider what the word “tame” meant in the context of their connection, and the complexity and trust involved. More recently, it has had a tinge of all these things, but mostly it has helped me see the importance of being at home where you are.

Rereading also teaches us to be better writers. A famous story goes that when someone once asked Ernest Hemingway how to become a writer, his advice was, “Read Anna Karenina. Read Anna Karenina. Read Anna Karenina.” Just as good painters often begin by imitating the masters, reading the masters can help us improve as writers.

Finally, it's my belief that reading and rereading makes us better people. Books allow us to enter other worlds. They offer us other points of view, help us to see another side—often of ourselves.

Planting Seeds with My Father

Peter Brown’s The Curious Garden took me right back to my own first experiences with soil and seeds. My father is the gardener in our family. He is also a jock—quarterback on his high school football team, captain of the basketball team—with some pretty strongly held opinions on what’s manly and what’s not. So, as I look back, it’s pretty great that he was the one who taught my brother and me how to garden. Chip and I were probably four and eight (I’m older) when my father helped us plant seeds for the first time. It was the first full summer we spent at our new house on Lakeside Drive in Kalamazoo, Mich., and there were two symmetrical flower beds, each maybe 3' x 10' at the bottom of a steep hill (great for sledding in the winter), with a walkway between them. Dad gave Chip and me each a small section, and showed us how to plant the seeds a few inches apart, and how deep to press them into the earth. Each day, Chip and I would check on our seeds’ progress, and Dad coached us to be patient.

As a child, there is nothing quite like witnessing a seed that you’ve planted, with care and watering, growing into a flower or vegetable. It was one of the high points of teaching my second-grade science classes--that morning when the students filed in, went straight to the seeds they had carefully placed about an inch deep in the soil of a clear plastic cup (so they could watch the roots spread), and observed a furtive green tendril breaking the soil’s surface. Even though it’s one of the golden laws of nature, it can still feel like a miracle.

I don’t remember the specifics of the flowers my brother and I planted that summer as much as I remember Dad letting us into this secret world, showing us how he spent his hours weeding and watering and tending the garden. Ever after, I had newfound respect for his dedication: pruning the lilac trees outside my parents’ bedroom window, clipping the pine hedges by the front door, and cultivating the irises and lilies in the flower beds. Today, about all I can manage are three window boxes and three planters on our terrace in New York City. I have some yellow pansies and snapdragons, purple petunias, silver dust (leafy plants), and some dianthus (pictured at left) that are supposed to be annuals but are so deeply rooted in one of my planters that they’ve become perennials--with no thanks to me.

Recently, while strolling with my friend Cary past the beautifully maintained community garden that runs south from 96th Street in Manhattan’s Riverside Park, I started pointing out the impressive array of flowers the gardeners had cultivated. She asked me how I knew the names of so many of them. “My father,” I said. “He’s the gardener in our family.” I realized that he’d given me entry not only into this secret world of his, but its language, too.