The Snowy Day--A Children’s Book With Black Protagonist on Exhibit

During the height of the civil rights movement, a sweet and gentle book about a black boy in a red snowsuit crunching through the snow, helped break down racial barriers. That book is now the subject of an upcoming exhibit.

Ezra Jack Keats’ beloved 1962 book, “The Snowy Day,” is credited as the first mass-market children’s storybook to feature a black protagonist — a preschooler named Peter who is joyfully exploring the snow-covered sidewalks in his New York City neighborhood.

The National Museum of American Jewish History is presenting a retrospective, “The Snowy Day and the Art of Ezra Jack Keats,” from July 19 to Oct. 20. The exhibit includes more than 70 original works, ranging from preliminary sketches to final paintings and collages.

 AP Photo/Matt Rourke

“We wanted to marry the strength of the show as an art exhibition with the significance of the book in children’s literature,” museum curator Josh Perelman said. “We really wanted the exhibit spaces to feel alive … to feel like being in a children’s book.”

The son of Jewish immigrants from Poland, Keats was born Jacob Ezra Katz in New York City’s Brooklyn borough in 1916 and grew up in poverty. Artistically gifted but unable to attend art school, he started out working as a sign painter, comic book background illustrator and Works Progress Administration muralist before creating children’s books.

“Keats drew a considerable amount on the fact that he experienced prejudice in his own life and he had a sensitivity to what it felt like to be marginalized,” Perelman said. “He also had a worldview that embraced extending that sensitivity toward other people who may feel marginalized as well.”

Peter’s world was also a reflection of Keats’ own environment, Perelman said, “the city streets where he felt comfortable, where he called home and that happened to be inhabited by working-class and poor folks and by African-American folks.”
“That’s who he felt should be in his books.
 
This isn’t ‘Eloise, he said, referring to the children’s book character who lives in Manhattan’s posh Plaza Hotel with her nanny. “It’s a very different New York City.

Awarded the prestigious Caldecott Medal in 1963, “The Snowy Day” has been published in at least 10 languages. It is on the Library of Congress’ list of “Books That Shaped America” and is rated by teacher and librarian groups as one of the all-time top children’s books.

Ezra Jack Keats

“If you look at children’s literature previous to ‘The Snowy Day,’ there are very few positive examples of publications for African-American children,” Perelman said, “and there’s a whole lot of very derogatory, stereotypical and outright racist material.”

Keats, who died in 1983, illustrated more than 85 books. In six more books after “The Snowy Day,” readers followed Peter growing up from a kindergarten-age boy to an adolescent. His race was never mentioned.

Interview with Rita Borg, Author of "Meg the Egg"

 

I am so delighted to welcome Rita Antoinette Borg to the blog today. She has a new picture book, although she is the author of several more as well. Let's have our readers get acquainted with you, Rita!
  
NS  You are from Malta, and I’ve visited there, with fond memories of the warmth of the people and the beauty of the place.  Please tell us how Malta and the US helped define you as a person and, by extension, a writer.  I find your new picture book, Meg the Egg, so charming.  Please tell us how it came about and your expectations for it.

 

RB  As a three year old, I immigrated to New York City with my family in 1966.  It was the beginning of my adventure to know and care about one of the biggest and strongest countries in the world. Malta is the complete opposite of the United States. She is a very small country in the Mediterranean Sea. Though I love my adopted country, the U.S, I know that a part of me, my roots, are in Malta.

 

People often ask me which country you love the most. Honestly, I miss the States, the land of my childhood. And it is here, in my writing, that this question is answered. Somehow, I always write about Mothers or Motherhood.
Sometimes the Mother is attacked, as in Meg the Egg; other times my books show mothers as a dominant person in a child’s life. Mothers are a special theme in my heart and in my picture books.
 
Home is another special theme. Everybody needs a home and wants to go there after a long day. I go “home” every two years or so to the U.S though I am not a citizen. However, my immediate family lives here in Malta; so with them I am home here. I am not about to leave them behind me. I feel that every immigrant and U.S citizen should see the United States as a true home and feel proud of her. If not, they should leave the country and return to the place they really call home. Like every country, the United States needs to be loved and honored by her occupants, too.
 
NS   I find your new picture book, Meg the Egg, so charming.  Please tell us how it came about and your expectations for it.
 
 RB  My youngest daughter, Meghan, was afraid to go to bed at night by herself.  She’s fifteen going on sixteen now. But the theme of Meg the Egg has been incubating in my head for quite awhile.

First, I thought of a rhyming word to go with Meg. The eggshell and its purpose came to mind. Then I took Meghan’s problem and decided Meg would be afraid to hatch. My usual mother theme came up and I decided the only way Meg would want to be brave and become motivated to hatch would be if her own mother would land into trouble. Yes, the book can be scary with Howls (a fox) but isn’t life scary, too? Snow White and the original Three Little Pigs are scary, too Children should be prepared for any eventuality; picture books help children face fear. NS  Tell us how much time you devote to writing daily and how you organize your time.  (I find that everyone wants to know this about an author!)
 
I am the worst organized person in the world. But what I do everyday makes me happy.
I write.
I visit schools for storytelling.
I am the official storyteller for a local bookshop.
I market my newest book, Meg the Egg.
I have three kids and my husband is a medical doctor.
I am studying for a B.A. Creative Writing course that last about 7 years.
I have a house to maintain.
I read a lot.
 
How do I take care of all these things? I do my best.  I wake up at about 6 o’clock in the morning and handle my emails. I love reading and mailing out emails. I wish I had more fans.
 
I write about 750 words a day in a five day week. That comes out to be 3750 words per week. Saturdays and Sundays are dedicated to my family.  I also rewrite my manuscripts and course lessons as much as I can until 2 o’clock in the afternoon when my youngest arrives from school.
 
NS   In your website, you speak of the importance of two ideals:  creativity and imagination.  Please tell us a bit about how you try to weave both of these into your writing for kids. 
 
AB  We all need a dose of these two magical words to help us through life.  Einstein is quoted to have said that Imagination is more important than intelligence.  What a genius he was! These two abstract thoughts help us in good and sad situations. They are what really make us humans. They help us see and understand and hope beyond what is reality and what could be a really boring life!  They keep us linked throughout our lives to our inner child who does not want to grow up into an adult. They keep me writing books and poetry for myself and my audience.

NS  Tell us about your other picture books and what can we expect for the future.
 
AB  My picture books are mostly about animals like hedgehogs, frogs and birds.
 I have one published bilingual book in Maltese and English: On a Lonely Tree (2000)
Another published book in Maltese translated to The Lost Sock (2011)
I also have three self published bilingual Maltese-English picture books:

                     The Frogs’ Great Escape (2003)

                      Rebecca’s Choice (2005)

                      Don’t Cross the Road, Holly (2009)

And an anthology of twelve short stories for children between 6-9 years old called Seasons. (2007)
But only Meg the Egg can be purchased on Amazon.
NS  You can be found at:
 
AB  If you have any other questions about my book or about writing in general please don’t hesitate to contact me on:
rita@ritaborg.us

website : www.ritaborg.us

and my Facebook page :www.facebook.com/RITAANTOINETTEBORG

It's been a pleasure having you visit the blog today, Rita.  All best wishes with your continued success in writing for children! 

New York, Phew York New Scratch-n-Sniff Kids' Book!

NYC is many things to many people, and it has the smells to match!  The smelly side of the city was brought to life about a month ago by author, Amber Jones.  A concierge at a Times Square hotel, she has smelled it all--and decided to wax about it in her new kids' book New York, Phew York: A Scratch-n-Sniff Adventure. 


The book features everything from the odor of a foul-smelling subway rider to the aroma of pastrami.

I think it’s an honest depiction of New York. It’s a love letter to New York.

Her illustrator, Tim Probert, completed the artwork, and she and her team of two advisers began the arduous process of trimming the book’s 62 scents down to a more manageable 23.

Jones said having accurate smells in the book was paramount, and each scent — which can be activated by lightly rubbing the paper its printed on — required multiple rounds of sniffing before it was deemed print-worthy.

For each potential smell, the printer would send Jones myriad options. For the smell of coffee, for instance, Jones had to decide between the odors of black coffee, espresso, latte or cappuccino, she recalled.
“It was really exhausting,” she said, laughing. “Smell is kind of like taste. Everyone smells something differently.”  And it was up to her to select which scent was the best and most accurate to what was found in New York.In the end, Jones said her favorite smell in the entire   book is that of exhaust, because she feels it’s one of the most accurate.

Ms. Jones reports that children all seem to love the stench of the smelly man on the subway, which, she  says, is strong enough to make a reader recoil from the glossy pages of the book.


The book is also sold on her website, as well as on Amazon.com, and she said it has completely sold out of two gift shops inside the W Hotel in Times Square.  The book has also sold out of the Rockefeller Center and Grand Central locations of Pylones, a quirky store that stocks everything from wind-up robots to an Eiffel Tower-shaped cheese grater. 
 
The reviews for the book have been positive on social media outlets and on Amazon.com.
One teacher wrote on Amazon that she had read it to her first-grade class, “and they absolutely LOVED it!It was the most requested book for read aloud this year.”

Jones is actively looking for a distributor so she can get "New York, Phew York" into more souvenir shops and major booksellers.  And she's settled on what she hopes will be the second installment in a city-themed scratch-n-sniff series: "Smell-A," for the noses of and for Los Angeles.

Goosebumps Galore--Yep, I'm Talking about R.L.Stine!

When he does school visits, the kids expect someone with fangs, wearing a cape. And he has sold more than 350 million in his Goosebumps series alone, making him at one point the bestselling children’s series author of all time. (He’s now No. 2, right behind J.K. Rowling.)

Of course, I'm speaking of R.L. Stine, kids' author who has scared (in the nicest way possible), a whole generation of children who are wanting a safe fright. He has a successful thing going, and he's sticking to it!

He begins a book with the title.  "That's the inspiration," he says. “You want to know where ideas come from—for me, they come from the title.” For instance, he was walking his dog around New York City, and he thought, Little Shop of Hamsters. It just popped into his head. He liked it, so he came up with a story to bring it to life—What can I do to make hamsters scary? OK, a boy goes into a strange pet shop. It’s all hamsters, and there’s something wrong with one of them …
“Most authors I know work backwards,” he says. “I can’t do it.”

When he was a kid growing up in suburban Columbus, Ohio, Stine’s mom had a rule: Never go up to the attic. He obeyed—but he’d lie in bed at night and wonder what horrifying things might be up there, and the monster in the attic found its way into the scary stories he and his brother had a habit of trading at night.

Eventually, he faced his fears and climbed the stairs. He was 9 years old, and no monsters were lurking about. His mom just didn’t want him going up there because the floorboards were rotting.  But he found something life changing.  He found a typewriter!

He began to write. “My parents didn’t understand it at all,” he says. “You know, some guy staying in his room typing. And my mother would say, ‘Go out and play, go outside—what’s wrong with you?’ I’d say, ‘It’s boring out there.’”
So, he’d stay in his room and create. And as the years went on, he never stopped.

“People say, ‘What advice do you have for people who want to be writers?’ I say, they don’t really need advice, they know they want to be writers, and they’re gonna do it,” he says. “Those people who know that they really want to do this and are cut out for it, they know it.”

After he graduated from Ohio State in 1965, he moved to New York City to fulfill his dreams of working for a magazine.  He was told to make up interviews with celebrities for fan magazines. So he did—he (faux-)interviewed all the greats, from The Beatles to Diana Ross, and he sharpened both his speed and his imagination in the process.

Following a short time working in the Soft Drink Industry, he was hired by Scholastic, where he’d spend the next 16 years, mastering the art of writing at different grade levels, and presiding over his kids’ humor magazine, Bananas.

His debut book, How to Be Funny, followed in 1978—under the name “Jovial Bob Stine.” He wore bunny ears to his first signing.

At a fateful lunch with Stine’s Scholastic friend, Jean Feiwel, she asked him a simple question: Have you ever thought about writing young adult horror? And she made an equally simple suggestion: Go home and write a book called, Blind Date.

“I said, ‘OK, sure, no problem,’” he recalls.

And the amazing thing is—and this is a hint at what makes Stine stand out from millions of other writers, a testament to how much of a born storyteller he truly is—he actually did it. He outlined for a month. He wrote for three. He spent a month revising. He sent it in. It came out in 1986, and became an instant bestseller.

During the writing process, he developed his trademark cliffhanger chapter structure—something he picked up in his humor career. In fact, Stine says the line between humor and horror isn’t all that distinct—horror is like a rollercoaster in which the intention is to laugh and scream simultaneously. And a cliffhanger is a lot like a punch line.

“I think after I came up with that, it was easy,” he says. “Then, it was storytelling.”

More books followed—notably his breakout series, Fear Street (the title just popped into his head, so, of course, he wrote the books to accommodate it). Novels began pouring out of him at a monthly rate.

How’d he match the demand? “Writing is the only thing that ever came easily to me,” he says. “It’s the only thing I’m really competent at. And I never had trouble. I was always confident about it; I could always sit down and write 10 pages. In those days, I could write 20 pages a day.”

He wrote the first Goosebumps book, Welcome to Dead House, in just over a week. It was released in 1992. Two more books followed, to little fanfare. And then kids found it.  Readers told readers—the best advertising an author can get.

Many books followed. T-shirts. TV shows. A Goosebumps attraction at Disney World. Overall, he attributes the series’ amazubg success to the fact that it was the first to get equal amounts of female and male readers.

“It was unbelievable for me—you just never dream of having something like that,” he says. “I don’t know if it taught me any lesson; it was just lucky, I think. The only lesson is, you gotta keep at it.”

Stine is still writing. A lot. He’s written about 100 Fear Street books and about 105 Goosebumps. He sits down at 10 a.m. and writes six days a week. He does six new Goosebumps a year, which he has described as “like a vacation,” compared to his previous output. His method?

A Goosebumps manuscript is 120 pages. He has his title. He doesn’t really do research, preferring to work off his imagination. He creates a character list and takes two to four days to outline—extensively (which he says also prevents him from getting writer’s block). The outline has dialogue, every chapter ending, and so on, up to 20 pages. And then, when he returns to the book, all the work is done. He writes 10 pages a day, does a second draft for a couple days, and turns it in. Grand total: About three weeks.

How does he pull it off  “I?’m cut out for it,” he says. “I’m cut out for working at home: I don’t get distracted, I’m very disciplined.”

When asked if he’s gotten tired from producing such a massive output for so many years, he laughs.

“No, I still enjoy it. I still look forward to it in the morning. It’s gotten harder to come up with new ideas. It’s more challenging: new kinds of scares, new chapter endings …”
Of course, while writing may seem like the only thing Stine does, he lives a normal life in his beloved New York City home, devoid of the capes and fangs some of his readers expect: He goes to the theater and opera, he walks his dog in the park, he takes vacations.

He says of Goosebumps:

 "I love it. It’s a wonderful thing. I feel so lucky. I would never resent it in any way. I’ll always be Goosebumps Author R.L. Stine. I’ll always be called that. Always.”

The Artist Who Painted a Blue Horse by Eric Carle

Picture book genius, Eric Carle, has written more than 70 picture books over a career that began more than 40 years ago.

(Please see the marvelous video of Eric Carle talking about and reading his new book at bottom of post.)

Mr. Carle was born in Syracuse, N.Y., to German immigrant parents. When Eric was 6 years old, they returned to their homeland. It was not a happy move for young Eric, who missed his life in America.

Fortunately, he developed a special connection with his high-school art teacher, Herr Krauss.  He secretly showed Eric works by painters like Picasso, Matisse and a German named Franz Marc, whose work had been banned by the Nazis. Mr. Carle has said this experience deeply affected his own artistic work.

Now, he directly references that experience and pays homage to Marc's Expressionist art in his newest book, "The Artist Who Painted a Blue Horse" (Philomel, $17.99, ages 3-6). 

Eric Carle and The Very Hungry Caterpillar

The artwork is done in Mr. Carle's trademark tissue-paper-collage style.  It is a series of images of brightly colored animals bookended with pictures of an artist, who begins the book by saying, "I am an artist and I paint."

He ends the book with the powerful word, good, when he says, "I am a good artist." Young readers, many of whom, exhibit self-confidence in their own abilities, may mirror image the artist's self-assurance.

The double-page portraits of animals, each more beautifully colored than the last, are gorgeous to behold. Of course, there's a blue horse, but there's also a pink rabbit, a green lion, a purple fox and a donkey sporting primary colored polka dots, among others.

"The Artist Who Painted a Blue Horse" will have a first printing of 300,000 copies -- a huge number for a picture book, so Philomel obviously expects Mr. Carle's latest to be another best-seller.

This blogger wishes him the best of luck with the book.  Mr. Carle validates and gives permission to each small reader to paint in his or her own way and be a good artist.

For Relunctant Readers--"The World's Most Haunted Places"

Disembodied voices, ghoulish apparitions, and a death tunnel are just some of eerie subjects readers will encounter in Matt Chandler’s new children’s book, “The World’s Most Haunted Places.”

Chandler explores supernatural phenomena both here and abroad, including hauntings in the The Borley Rectory in Essex, England, The Amityville House in New York and The Stanley Hotel in Colorado, which inspired Stephen King’s horror novel, The Shining.

The 32-page work of non-fiction is part of “The Ghost Files” book series by Capstone Press, and geared toward children ages 9 through 12.

A professional journalist, Chandler is the associate editor of the Buffalo Law Journal, the legal reporter for its sister publication, Buffalo Business First.

Despite his extensive writing background, Chandler said that creating a children’s book was quite a different experience.  He explained that one of the more challenging aspects of writing in the genre was taking an intense and somewhat terrifying subject, like hauntings and evil spirits, and making it appropriate for children. While he wanted to include what he deemed “juicy stories,” he was careful not to cross any lines.

Nevertheless, Chandler credited children for their ability to handle and process information.  “Kids today are not typical anymore,” he said. “They are much smarter and so much more dialed in than in years past.”

Chandler also made sure to employ language that would challenge young minds. The more difficult terms are highlighted within his text and included in a glossary at the book’s end.

Capstone Press’ books are specifically designed to engage students that may not be interested in or proficient at reading, Chandler explained. Photographs and fact boxes that accompany the main text help to hold readers captive.

A stipulation Chandler set for himself when writing “The World’s Most Haunted Places” was to keep his personal beliefs regarding ghosts and the supernatural out of the book. “At the book’s end, it does not tell you if ghosts are real or fake,” he said. “That’s not the point. The point is to make children reason and think for themselves.”

The Story of Charlotte's Web

One early fall morning in 1949, E.B. White walked into the barn of his farm in Maine and saw a spider web.  Then on a cold October evening, he noticed that the spider was spinning an egg sac.

White never saw the spider again.  When he had to return later that fall to New York City to his job as a regular contributor to The New Yorker magazine, White took out a razor blade and cut the egg sac out of the web. He put the sac in an empty candy box, punched some air holes in it, put the box on his bedroom bureau in New York and promptly forgot about it.

Weeks later, tiny spiders were everywhere, escaping through the air holes. White thought this was wonderful until the cleaning lady complained about the hundreds of spider webs everywhere!

Now comes a book about the real E.B. White and every one's favorite spider, Charlotte.  Michael Sims, author of The Story of Charlotte's Web, weaves a yarn of interest about the author of the best children's book ever published in the US.  This is according to a poll of librarians, teachers, publishers and authors in the trade magazine, Publisher's Weekly.

As a very old man with Alzheimer's, White liked to have his books and essays read to him. When his son, Joe, obliged, White would ask who who wrote them.  "You did, Dad," Joe answered.  White would think about this for a moment and say, 'Not bad."