Have you ever flown like Superman? I had a blast writing a guest post on Dia Calhoun’s excellent 7:30 Bells blog.
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Author Archives: mewsrules
Does Having a Bigger House Make You a Better Person?
I have in the past blogged about our attitude towards the poor. This post is about our attitude towards the rich.
Several months ago I met a couple for the first time. Their son had asked my daughter to the prom and I immediately checked out their family through mutual friends. The entire family got rave reviews. When I met the parents I was not disappointed. This was a funny, educated, and socially active couple who volunteered extensively in the community. Exactly the type whose son you might reluctantly agree wouldn’t necessary be a bad person for your daughter to know (still getting used to the whole dating thing here).
The couple asked us over to their house to see the prom “afterparty” setup. At a joint driveway I was confused as to which house had which number. To the right was a small log cabin, in front of me was what we call in our area a “McMansion.” I began walking toward the McMansion when the couple called to me from the back door of the log cabin.
It was about twenty minutes later, as we were in the house talking, that I realized I was disappointed with their house. As soon as I was aware of this feeling I was mortified by my unreasonable reaction. These were two people who had given more back to the community than my husband or I could ever hope to. I won’t even get into the list of their son’s accomplishments. Yet somewhere in the back of my head parasitical thoughts were judging this excellent family based on the size of their home.
Meeting this family made me face my unhealthy attitude towards the rich. Somewhere along the line I have begun to equate wealth with accomplishment and character.
A certain narrow type of accomplishment does create wealth. Most great accomplishments have nothing to do with money. I’m thinking of pastors and teachers here, and also volunteer coaches and food bank workers.
What’s more, character and wealth have no direct causal relationship. There is plenty of historical proof and religious cautions that the opposite may be true.
I was shocked that I had to remind myself of this basic fact of life: your value as a person is determined by how many people you help and influence in a positive way. Period.
Where was I getting this insane idea that I could equate someone’s character to the size of their house?
Societies, just like books, have themes. If you look at almost any TV show or listen to the radio you see an orchestrated worship of wealth and the rich in this country. I thought I had avoided it, but we humans are pack animals. We pay attention to the attitudes and actions of others and then, even subconsciously, try to fit in.
I am very nervous about discussing this ugly pro-wealth bias that has nested in my head. It is embarrassing and reveals a shallowness that I’d rather not publically disclose.
But I have to discuss this because, unfortunately, I’m not alone.
Our failure to feed children in this country is intrinsically linked to our acceptance of the growing gap between rich and poor.
We are confusing what really matters — character and accomplishment — with wealth. This has allowed unscrupulous individuals to hijack our country. They siphon money from schools, eliminate living-wage jobs, and bankrupt social programs, all to feed the insatiable appetite of the rich.
Twice in the past two years we have cut food stamps, a lifeline not only for children but also for the elderly.
How could we be so stupid?
I can only hope that my daughter’s prom date and his family don’t think less of my daughter because her mother is a ditz.
On September 11th, Write About a Peaceful World
Several years ago the theme of the Highlights Fiction Contest was to write a story set in the future. I’ve always enjoyed entering this contest, and sat down to write my sci fi short story for young children.
The page stayed empty. Not for a few minutes, or hours, as sometimes happens. The page stayed empty for days. I thought of several dystopian story lines, but nothing suitable for very young readers.
It was a few years after 9/11, but I discovered that the hope I had always held for the future (I’m a huge Star Trek fan) was gone. It took me several days to calm my fears and find in my heart a story that envisioned our grandchildren and great-grandchildren living happily in a peaceful world. The story had conflict, of course, but not the dark images which had haunted my mind since the moment the towers fell and continued well into our generation’s endless wars.
Since that time I’ve stretched the ‘hope’ section of my brain by spending ten minutes each September 11th envisioning peace. What would our lives look like without war? What would be on the news? What games would our children play?
If we imagine what peace looks, smells, feels, sounds and tastes like, we’ll know how to get there from here.
You don’t need to be a “writer” to participate. Ignore grammar, spelling, all of those boogeyman that slow down even the most accomplished writers. Lock your editor in a drawer (internal, not the one at your publisher). Set a timer for ten minutes. Pick up a pen or sit at your keyboard. Dream.
If you like, you can post your writing in the comments section here on my blog, or go to the event page on Facebook.
Risk, Broken Bones, and Writing
In early June my son and his friend, both college students, were skateboarding on a Friday night in Portland. They chose a street that each thought the other had gone down before. As they picked up speed both realized they were in trouble. My son’s friend purposely headed into a wall of blackberry brambles. His was a good decision.
My son thought he could slow or stop. He came to a few minutes later with a broken collarbone and trouble speaking. His concussion cleared enough for him to ask his friend to call 911. His friend’s phone was shattered and the friend flagged down a passing motorist. My son spent the night on a gurney in the hallway of the emergency room. He said that being in the hallway was a good thing. People were dying in the rooms.
A week after the crash, my son had his third orthopedic surgery in four years. (#1 a collision off of a snowboard jump. #2 a fall while bouldering.) My son is doing well now. His full recovery from the accident was faster than mine.
I spoke to my son about his general risk assessment skills. So did his professor (my son was working in a lab for the summer). So did most of his friends. Even for the 20ish crowd, three sporting accidents requiring surgery seemed extreme.
Here’s the strange thing: part of me was envious of my son and his broken collarbone. (I can publicly admit this because none of my children read my blog.)
It’s been an incredible year for Maddi’s Fridge. It’s been a tough year for my writing.
I have been slow, tentative, and reluctant to take the risks necessary submit finished picture books to editors and polish my current novel. My inability to take chances is pulling me under like quicksand.
I know that some of you will say “Unknown steep hill, skateboard, that’s a risk. But what’s going to happen to you? Is your laptop going to fall on your big toe?”
You are right. I am under no physical threat. Emotional fears, though, cause their own damage. Fear of losing self-respect though failure, fear of ridicule (you wrote what????) and fear of rejection can paralyze even someone with a few accomplishments under her bra strap.
Then I look at my son who stands at the top of a steep hill with a thin piece of wood, four wheels, no helmet, and is excited and happy to see what happens next. My son is modeling behavior for me.
I don’t want to be as physically adventurous. I do want to emulate his excitement and the willingness to leap.
For the record: I am not advocating that you or any member of my family skateboard, skydive, etc. But I’m beginning to realize that extreme sports are so popular because they show you both the joys and risks all in the same moment. You overcome your fears and the reward (or occasionally, the punishment) is immediate.
You will not find me standing on a steep Portland hill with a skateboard in my hands. Hopefully, you will find me rebuilding my excitement and enthusiasm for writing. If I can rediscover that passion, I know I will leap
And yes, all thanks to my son.
A Girl from the ‘Dummy Class’ Wrote an ILA Award Winner
Maddi’s Fridge has just won the International Literacy Association’s Children’s and Young Adults’ Book Award for Primary Fiction.
A picture book is a collaborative effort. In addition to myself, Maddi’s Fridge is the result of the hard work and exceptional talents of illustrator Vin Vogel and our editor, Shari Dash Greenspan.
The ILA award is especially meaningful to me because I did not learn how to read until late in 3rd grade.
I vividly remember the day that my 3rd grade teacher discovered I’d been faking reading. She yelled at me that I was lazy. Over the next few days she got quieter, which was dangerous. She decided that something was wrong with me.
I knew my alphabet forward and backwards. I could easily sound out words and could read out loud like the other kids in class. But when I read, the words didn’t connect to form any meaning.
Rabbit horrible laughed widget coffee.
Imagine that everyone in the world except for you reads the above words and gets a clear and meaningful sentence. I could not read and get meaning. Even words that I knew became gibberish in my head and sentences never came together.
My 3rd grade teacher kicked me out of her class and transferred me to the ‘dummy class.’
The five of us sat in a row at the front of a large empty classroom. We didn’t have a teacher; we had a district employee. My fellow classmates and I were given worksheets and math problems that looked like they came from 1st grade. Before I had been removed from my class I was in advanced math. Now I was adding single digits.
Our vocabulary words were single-syllable. Our texts were Dick and Jane type mimeographs that made me despise books and reading even more.
A tubby boy with freckles and messy blond hair, who I’d seen on the playground but never talked to, leaned towards me. “You don’t belong in the dummy class. You’re smart.”
During recess my close friends commiserated with me for the first few days, but the rest of my former classmates drifted to other parts of the playground. No one played with the kids from the dummy class.
Fortunately for me, my mother was a Tiger Mom long before the term existed. She wanted my 3rd grade teacher to tutor me. I refused. I suspect the teacher refused too. By now I hated that woman. My mother then asked a friend of the family who taught kindergarten to tutor me after school. I agreed. I’d loved kindergarten and kindergarten teachers: no reading and lots of art projects.
I don’t remember how long I was in the dummy class, maybe a few weeks or months. It was long enough for all of my former friends to start snubbing me on the playground.
I do remember the day that my mother busted me out. I was making progress with my tutor, and Mom struck some sort of deal with my 3rd grade teacher. On a Friday the district employee announced to the five of us that I was being moved back to regular classes. The tubby kid with freckles and messy blond hair told me “I knew you were better than we were.”
Even as an eight-year-old I paused and looked back at him as we filed out of class. He hadn’t struck me as particularly stupid. I remember wondering what it would be like to be stuck in the dummy class forever.
I left the class thinking that I would play with my new friends at recess, but over the next week or so I drifted back to my original friends and classmates.
When people fantasize about time travel they often talk about stopping an assassination or, conversely, assassinating a bad guy, etc.
I’d go back to my elementary school dummy class. I’d give the tubby kid and every kid in there a hug and tell them that no one is a dummy. That children learn at different speeds and that the speed we learn at is natural and right for us.
Time travel is not possible, but our world has changed for the better. The over 300,000 members of the International Literacy Association are performing little miracles every day as they guide reluctant readers into the transformative world of books.
I thank them with all of my heart for this wonderful award.
I can only hope that the fellow members of my dummy class somehow made it into the world of books. I know they had help. My mom went back to school and got her teaching credential. She became one of the first special education teachers our district ever hired.
What if the Poor Aren’t Stupid?
Every once and a while a nice person will come up to me and tell me about the time they volunteered with or helped the poor. Then they will lean towards me and explain why 40% of the kids in Washington State are on full or partial lunch subsidies and why 50% of the kids in the United States are being raised in poverty. “It’s the parents. If only the parents would:
Get a job.
Work harder.
____________ (Put your answer here.)”
The inference is that the poor must be stupid because there are so many ways to not be poor.
My father’s generation had a totally different take on poverty. “There but for the grace of God go I.” I heard my father say these words when he gave to charity. He said them when he talked about someone in our small town who was having a particularly rough year. He even said these words when he gave a job to a convicted murderer who had served his time. Both of my parents made a point of showing me that those I saw struggling were not that different from myself.
Somehow, over the years since I was a child, Americans as a community have lost the ability to see ourselves in the most unfortunate amongst us.
Here’s what I know about being poor.
Poverty is sometimes temporary. A setback in a job, the expense of caring for young children, a divorce, or a sick relative can all set a family back. How many people have you met who’ve lost their house because of medical bills? I’ve met several.
Poverty is also sometimes a way of life, even for those who work 40, 50, or 60 hours a week. Wages are so low in some places, and costs so high, that it impossible to survive without help. Those I know who are struggling to provide for their children work longer hours than I do for less pay.
But here’s the kicker: The poor give a larger percentage of their income to charity than the rich.*
The poor know what it feels like to live on the edge of the abyss. A mother who has struggled in the past to feed her children will pick up an extra can while while shopping to drop off at the food bank. She knows that poverty and hardship can suddenly hit smart hard-working men and women. She knows in her heart that “there but for the grace of God go I.”
The well-off in this country no longer see themselves as being like everyone else. They are convinced that if you are poor you have some fatal flaw.
So where does this condemnation of the poor come from? My belief is that it comes from fear. It is so much easier to believe that the poor are stupid than that the poor are just like like you and me. If the poor are just like you and me, then we could end up one day not being able to feed our children. There but for the grace of God we would be.
Previous generations of Americans looked poverty straight in the face, recognized it as a problem that we all shared. Medicare, Social Security, Head Start and other social programs were put into place to try to lift up everyone. If you did stumble, if disaster struck, you didn’t have far to fall.
This philosophy helped us become one of the most prosperous countries in the world.
Our generation? We turn our heads away, thinking if we don’t acknowledge the problem it will never affect us. Year by year, the prospects for our children grow dimmer and more and more hungry children show up in our schools.
We can turn this around. Next time you see someone by the side of the road with a sign up, try it. Say to yourself: “There but for the grace of God go I.”
*In 2011, the wealthiest Americans—those with earnings in the top 20 percent—contributed on average 1.3 percent of their income to charity. By comparison, Americans at the base of the income pyramid—those in the bottom 20 percent—donated 3.2 percent of their income. — The Atlantic Monthly
Humbled — Maddi’s Fridge Wins a 2015 Christopher Award
So you’re writing a story and the protagonist wins an award. She gets up on stage — maybe you have her trip on the stairs for humor’s sake or to break up the pacing — and then she begins her big speech. The only thing she can blurt out is, “I’m totally humbled by this award.”
This is first draft stuff, where clichés rule. You need to cut that dialog and have the protagonist thank her cat (hmm, that might be cliché too) or, I don’t know, do jumping jacks. Anything but say the overused “humbled.”
Maddi’s Fridge has won a 2015 Christopher Award in the Books for Young People category.
The only word that I can think of, even a week later, is…humbled.
Humbled because I don’t know where my friend Liz, whose empty refrigerator was the tear in my heart that began this story, ended up in adulthood.
Humbled because the manuscript for Maddi’s Fridge somehow landed in exactly the right place: the talented and competent hands of my editor, Shari Dash Greenspan at Flashlight Press.
Humbled by the incredibly fun and beautiful illustrations drawn by Vin Vogel.
Humbled by all of the great books published in 2014 that also “affirm the highest values of the human spirit.” They are out there lighting the darkness. Find them.
Especially humbled by all of the volunteers in food banks across the United States. No one is throwing them a party or giving them a medal. They lug heavy boxes and sometimes search nearly empty shelves. They hold hope in their hearts while working to feed hungry kids and the elderly. They help families that have no where else to turn.
While clichés may not work in literature, in the real world some still have deep meaning. (“Hearts of gold” comes to mind when I think of the volunteers at food banks.)
I’m totally humbled by this award.
If you’d like to help your friends and neighbors who might have empty refrigerators, here’s a link to Feeding America.
Visit me on Library Lions this week
I’m a guest on Janet Lee Carey’s blog, Library Lions this week. Please hop over as I roar for libraries and librarians!
Janet is the author of The Double Life of Zoe Flynn and In the Time of the Dragon Moon, among other great books.
The Blog Bullshit Meter
What I want to talk about is over-revising your writing.
Oh. Even at my desk in the Seattle area I can hear shouts from New York agents and editors: “Nooooooo! Polish your woooork!”
Ignore them. Some of us perseverate on manuscripts that we need to release. This is a real problem for me. I’ll sit on a project, anything from a picture book to a novel, and only reluctantly send it out because I know it’s not perfect.
I’ll share my favorite quote here on perfectionism:
“Perfectionism is an ugly thing, all stiff and rigid with pursed lips and beady little eyes. No one likes perfectionism. It comes from a stingy, mean-spirited place and serves no purpose except to make us feel terrible about ourselves and anything we create….Perfectionism would have God recast every sunset and chide Mother Nature for her choice of colors. If everything were left up to perfectionism, nothing would exist.” — Judy Reeves
And even though I’ve read this quote to all of my students, my revisions get to the point where I am not longer polishing my imagery or strengthening my characters. I am creating a different story. And this one I will also find fault with.
The only reason I pushed to get Maddi’s Fridge published was that I read it in front of 70 people and they ALL loved it. That’s a really bad precedent. How often am I going to get 70 people in one room to approve of a manuscript?
Logically I know that I should let go. Illogically I continue to write and rewrite the same stories.
Last week, though, my blog told me to stop messing around. Not in so many words. I was revising a post, “A Shout-Out for the Girl Scouts” that I’d been working on for six weeks. Yes. A blog post. Yes. Six weeks. And no, I still wasn’t happy with the shape of my writing.
Anyway, I noticed the number of revisions to the right of my WordPress page. At that point, it said 16 revisions. 400 words. 16 revisions.
If I believed that the afterlife came with a computer, or at least a pen and paper, maybe I could go on revising for that perfect story. But there’s a huge problem. Perfectionism doesn’t lead to perfect. Reworking and rewriting a piece can lead to stilted, dead language, and moribund characters. If you don’t allow yourself to stretch and make mistakes as an artist, you don’t progress.
What to do? Dot. Dot. Dot. If you’re looking for an answer to this problem, you’re reading the wrong blog.
One thing I will commit to: fewer revisions before I hit “publish” on my blog posts. This is good practice for me and the bullshit meter is sitting there keeping track, reminding me to let go. (Posted with only 6 7 revisions.)
The quote above is from Judy Reeves, “A Creative Writer’s Kit.”
A Shout-Out for the Girl Scouts
They are in front of every store this weekend, but good cookies are just a tip of the iceberg.
In January I got to read Maddi’s Fridge to a local Brownie and Daisy troop. They were about to launch a food drive for their school’s food pantry.
I spoke to them about how Maddi’s Fridge was based on something that happened to me. After reading Maddi’s Fridge I asked the girls, about 20 of them, to write or draw their own stories. It could be about something that happened, or it could be fiction. These were pretty young kids, but for the next twenty minutes the room was absolutely silent as they created stories.
Some were drawing their stories, some writing, all were pouring their hearts out onto a page. And yes, there were talking cat stories. And even though there have been thousands of talking cat stories (one or two of them my own), each writer was bringing her own hopes and experiences to the story, making it unique.
Kids need a safe place to feel valued and know their stories are important. The Girl Scouts provides that place. Their Girl Scout Law, said at the beginning of the meeting, almost brought tears to my eyes.
Visiting this group of Brownies and Daisies was a great moment and I cherish it.
And then, of course, I kicked myself.
When my son James was much younger (he’s in college now), he was a Cub Scout and I was a den mother (do they still use that term?). At the time, the Boy Scouts of America strengthened their policy of denying membership to boys who were gay and questioning. And even though my children identify as straight, I didn’t want them to belong to a group that excluded children because of who they were. We finished the year and left scouting.
I assumed, without checking, that the Girl Scouts had the same policy. When my daughter asked to become a Girl Scout, I said no. That decision was not one of my finer moments as a parent. Girl Scouts are incredibly inclusive.
Oh well. I suppose this is why grandparents are so brilliant. They know firsthand the mistakes to avoid.
If you have a young daughter and have not considered joining the Girl Scouts, please do. They will help you in molding a strong, independent, and self-confident member of our society.
And the group of Daisies and Brownies I visited? They collected 1,621 items during their food drive. Theirs are the small powerful hands that will shape our future world. Wouldn’t it be great if all girls could join them?
Mew's Rules 