Francelia Butler--Leading Figure In Bringing Recognition To The Field Of Children's Literature

In days of old, the male dominated academic world often viewed children's literature as inferior, in part because it was taught primarily in library science and education programs, and those fields were seen as belonging to women. Francelia Butler, a professor at the University of Connecticut from the mid-sixties to the early nineties, was instrumental in bringing children's literature into its own academic discipline. In addition to her many years of teaching, Butler founded Children’s Literature Journal,  helped to form the children’s literature division of the Modern Language Association, and was a founding director of the Children's Literature Association, which appears to sponsor a Francelia Butler Lecture. She also began a festival that would eventually become Peace First. 

Additionally, Butler wrote 40 versions of her autobiography, The Melted Refrigerator. One of those versions has been edited by Norman Stevens, UConn Libraries Director Emeritus, and Jessica Fontaine, a Hollins University graduate student in children's literature. The Melted Refrigerator was released on April 28th, the 100th anniversary of Butler's birth.

I have mentioned Francelia Butler here before. I didn't know her, but I did work in UConn's College of Extended and Continuing Education (which may not exist anymore) while she was still teaching in the regular academic program. I was there the semester she brought Margaret Hamilton to campus. I was aware of the great popularity of her children's literature course. I also picked up on some of the struggle she faced at various times.

Several years ago, I stopped using the terms "kidlit" and "kiddie lit" in the text of my blog (It still appears in the masthead for the sake of continuity, but I'm wondering just how important that is.) because of Francelia Butler. A blogger friend pointed out the history of the term and how it was used to limit women and children's lit because children's lit was considered part of the world of women. This, of course, reminded me of my history walking the same campus Francelia Butler walked, at the same time, in fact, that she was walking it.

Using the terms "kidlit" and "kiddie lit" is liking using the word "girl" for an adult woman. People who came before me worked hard so that I could be taken seriously. I shouldn't throw that away.

Needless to say, I was very interested to hear about the publication of The Melted Refrigerator. Happy birthday, Professor Butler.

June Connecticut Children's Literature Calendar

We have three multi-author events in Connecticut in June.

Sat., June 1, Wendell Minor, Hickory Stick Bookshop, Washington Depot, Signing, 1 to 3 PM

Sat., June 1, Lisa Greenwald, R.J. Julia Booksellers, Madison, 4:00 PM

Thurs., June 6, Tommy Greenwald and Lauren Tarsis, Barnes & Noble, Westport, Panel discussion, 6:00 PM

Thurs., June 6, J.C. Phillipps, Lucy Robbins Welles Library, Newington,  Writing and Publishing Kidlit (For adults), 7 PM

Sat., June 8, Dawn Metcalf, Tolland Public Library, Tolland,  Speaking on The Wild, Wonderful World of Writing Young Adult Literature. Registration required, 11 AM

Sat. June 8, J. C. Phillipps, Lucy Robbins Welles Library, Newington,  Monkey Ono Party (For kids), 1 PM

Tues., June 11, Annabel Monaghan, Westport Public Library, Westport, Speaking , 7:30 PM

Sat., June 15, Christina Cody, Sheila Adams, Lisa Saunders, Cassandra Giovanni, MJ Allaire, Bank Square Books, Mystic, 11 AM

Sun., June 16, Anna Banks, Leigh Bardugo, Jessica Brody, Emmy Laybourne, and Gennifer Albin, R.J. Julia Booksellers, Madison, Fierce Reads Tour, 4:00 PM 

Thurs., June 20, Henry Winkler, One Big Summer Night, Connecticut Convention Center, Hartford, Fundraiser for Hartford Public Library, ticketed event, 5:30 PM

Sun., June 23, Catherine A. Welch, Southbury Public Library, Southbury, Local Author Open House, 2PM to 4 PM

Leigh Bardugo and Emmy Laybourne, who are part of the Fierce Reads Tour at R.J. Julia on June 16th, both have books reviewed in the May/June Horn Book.

Finally, note that in the sidebar to the left we now have a link to the Connecticut Children's Lit Calendar. That link will bring you back to the CCLC so you can easily access it any time. It will no longer be buried in a month of blog posts.

Time Management Tuesday: Developing Some More Discipline

Last week's TMT post on discipline included the following:

"McGonigal even explains why meditating helps with self-control and attention, something I've been hearing about for years, though no one felt a need to explain why it would work. Meditating, it appears, develops the prefrontal cortex, the portion of the brain that deals with impulse control. Good impulse control helps people stay on task with goals. Find meditation difficult because your mind keeps wandering and you have to keep bringing it back to the breath? That's actually good, according to McGonigal. The effort to do that develops the brain just as physical effort develops muscles."

Later in the week, I happened to find an Aug., 2012 Yoga Journal open to Everybody's Meditating--Why Aren't You? somewhere in the house. I think on my desk, but I thought I'd been keeping it cleaner so I don't know how that could be. At any rate, this article related to a 28-day meditation training event similar to the Boost Your Willpower thing we all did this past January. (We did all do it, right?) Given what I'd just learned from reading The Willpower Instinct, this seemed as if the Universe was sending me a message. I find the Universe to usually be on the attack, but this is one of its more benign offerings, so I'm going to run with it.

So yesterday,  I started using YJ's Meditation Invitation to try to develop the ol' prefrontal cortex, hoping to become more disciplined and less likely to give in to the impulse to go on-line and see what's happening with Angelina Jolie. It appears that you can still sign up for the daily e-mails at the Meditation Invitation site, even though the program is from last year, because I did this morning and received a response.  However, you can also just follow the link to How To Sit to get to each week's videos and guided meditations.

Now, I'm feeling sort of goal-driven over this project, and I'm wondering if you're supposed to do that with meditation. So, we'll have to see how that goes.

Regarding the first week's guided meditation--If you have any experience with meditation at all, you might find it annoying to have someone chattering while you're trying to keep your mind on your breath. However, I'm a big believer in maintaining the mind of the beginner. We may find that the next few weeks' guidance will be different, and this intro week will make sense in relation to the others.

So I've had two days of meditation, each time a little under ten minutes. I wonder how things are going with my prefrontal cortex.

Weekend Links

We're into little bears here, so I was interested in this list of top 10 bear picture books at The Guardian.

Every time I pass on something here like Beware of Book Blurbs (Salon), I fear that I will one day have an agent or editor who will insist that I have to find some poor soul who will provide me with one. And yet I continue to pass them on.

The idea of a writing retreat is very attractive to me. I mean the kind where you really do live sort of like a monk for a while, not taking classes and networking, just writing and perhaps meeting in a critique group once or twice. (I would be willing to eat meals with the other writers. And not in silence. There's a limit to how far I'll carry the monk analogy.) I've never been to a retreat of this sort because of the time and expense involved. Plus, since I am alone in my house all day several days a week,  I get the feeling that the people around me view all my work days as a writing retreat. Given all that back story, you can understand why I had to read Planning Your Own Writing Retreat at Write It Sideways.

I've actually read three of Flavorwire's 25 Greatest Essay Collections of All Time.

I collect Twitter articles because I'm headin' there. Yes. I've made the decision to go over to Twitter because that's the social platform that makes all the difference. Plus, I read recently that writers should have 7 ways for readers to find them, and right now I have only 6. And they still can't find me. So, seriously, Twitter will make all the difference, right? Another back story that explains why I'm sending you to The Top Ten Most Prolific Authors On Twitter. Shoot. Looking at those slides has impressed upon me that I need a Twitter handle. I knew that, but I didn't know that. What I hadn't realized was that I'd also need a Twitter profile. Now I must angst over whether to go simple, direct, and straight to the point (Margaret Atwood) or reach for something endearing (Ian Rankin).

It's been a long time since I've posted anything here about Alloy and book packaging. According to Gwenda Bond in Pack(ag)ing It Up, Amazon has a licensing agreement with Alloy so it can publish fanfiction written around the worlds of books Alloy packages. Bond says she found the response to the Amazon/Alloy deal interesting because of "how few people immediately recognized these are all packaged properties. I have seen a lot of worry about the authors who created these characters getting money, and how the rights worked, and etc. etc. and I am reminded once again that lots of people--even savvy industry types--don't realize how prevalent packaging is in YA (and probably elsewhere too--I am most familiar with YA and so that's what I'm talking about here)." Her point is that for some of the series involved there isn't an author who will be impacted because the books are written by multiple people or that some of these authors are working for hire, so they don't have the some contractual intellectual property rights that other writers do. Read Bond's post. Gwenda will explain it all to you.

The Weekend Writer: Hunting For Your Story With Theme

If a story is something that happens to somebody and its significance, which is how I define it, theme is a big part of the significance. It helps give a "so what" to the tale.

It's not unusual to hear writers say that they don't give much thought to theme until after they've finished a project. That was certainly the case with me in the early days. However, theme is particularly important in children's and YA writing because theme is part of what defines a children's/YA story versus an adult story. Simply having a child or teenage character does not automatically make a work one for children or teenagers. Even building a book around an experience a child/teenager could be expected to be part of doesn't automatically make it a children's/YA story.

For instance, a story about  child/YA protagonists observing their parents' divorce with a theme relating to the impact of a family breaking up on children can end up being a children's/YA book. A story about child/YA protagonists observing their parents divorce with a theme relating to the impact of a family breaking up on an adult, married couple is almost certainly going to be an adult book. Two similar situations can  end up being two very different books simply because of the theme.

How can theme help find a story? It probably shouldn't be the first element of fiction to be developed. If you have a situation and you've given some thought to characters and setting and from whom's point of view the story will be told, you can start thinking about the significance of  the whole mess in order to generate some more material. The more material you have, the more likely your story will appear.

Try to avoid thinking of theme as one word. As a general rule, with one word you're thinking of a topic, not a theme. "Love," for instance, is a topic. "The destructive nature of love," "the healing nature of love," "love as a redeeming force" could all function as themes. "Love," all by itself, doesn't give a writer much to work with. It's a very static thought. "The destructive nature of love" is far more dynamic. The energy in a dynamically stated theme helps move the story forward all by itself. Will someone be destroyed by love or will someone destroy someone else because of love? Writers starting out with either of those themes know something immediately about what will happen in their stories.

Connecticut Literary News

First off, the Connecticut Center for the Book is back. I didn't know it was gone, but according to an April Hartford Courant article, after four years with the Hartford Public Library, ending in 2011, it is now with Connecticut Humanities. While at the Hartford Public Library, the Connecticut Center for the book sponsored the Connecticut Book Awards. Right now Connecticut Humanities is rethinking an award. "Book awards are fraught with challenges," according to Amanada Roy, program officer for Public Humanities Programs for Connecticut Humanities told the Courant. "We need to recognize great work going on in Connecticut, but no matter how careful [the process], picking a winner is tough." She goes on to say, "We want to shine a light in the best way and make it as meaningful to authors seeking recognition as singling out just one."

Though the original hardcover edition of Saving the Planet & Stuff was a finalist for the Connecticut Book Award back in 2004, I have to say that I think moving away from an award to doing something that can support many Connecticut writers could be a very good thing, especially since the Connecticut Center for the Book, part of a nationwide program connected to the Library of Congress, is supposed to promote reading as well as writing. My understanding is that running awards can be expensive and time consuming. Perhaps that kind of energy could be spread around to benefit more people, whether writers or not.

In other news, Walter Wick, who is very much associated with Hartford in these parts, has a new Can You See What I See? book out this spring. He's profiled in the Hartford Courant's Walter Wick's World.

Reduce This

Kelly at Stacked posted today on The Reductive Approach to YA. By this she means reducing all of YA to a few titles while discussing the field, always referring back to those few books when describing the whole genre. Stacked appears to be another blog that won't let me post comments, so I'm going to respond to it here.

Kelly was inspired by a recent New York Times review by A. J. Jacobs of Winger by Andrew Smith. In the review, Jacobs gives over the first three paragraphs to discussing John Green and "GreenLit," which he claims is the most popular of the "young adult genres." I'm not sure if he's correct about that, but that's not Kelly's point. Her point is that "Reducing an entire genre to one person's books as a source of comparison is limiting and reductive of the nuances, the depth, and the range of voices that exist within it." Before all discussion of YA was reduced to John Green, it was reduced to The Hunger Games. Before that it was reduced to Twilight.

I think where we see this kind of reduction happening most often is in articles and reviews written by people outside YA. By people like A.J. Jacobs, for instance, who wrote the very review under discussion. A. J. Jacobs is a legitimate, pretty well-known author. (I've heard of him, anyway.) But he writes adult nonfiction of the George Plimpton, "participatory" journalism type. I may be being reductive by comparing his type of writing to George Plimpton, but what I mean to say is that Jacobs doesn't write YA fiction, which was what he was reviewing. People who review a type of writing that they don't work with themselves don't have much of a context for their judgements. If they want to do a compare and/or contrast thing, their breadth of knowledge upon which to draw may be pretty narrow. Thus they have to reduce everything to the one big selling book or author they know. There is a certain logic at work here.

When I finished reading the Winger review, I wondered why the NYT didn't get someone from within YA to review that book. Someone, say, like John Green?

It's Like An Archaeological Dig

I am working on a project that I've tried starting twice before. This goes back to at least 2005. The book involves some research, which is where I started both times in the past. I collected a lot of stuff each time I tried to get started and continued collecting things off an on even when I wasn't working on the job.

Everything went into a box. You know, because that seemed like a tidy and efficient thing to do.

Well, these last two weeks I've been pulling things out of the box (which we will call the Egypt Box), one or two at a time, and going through them. There were notes, some National Geographics, some Discover magazines, a New Yorker. There was a metal pencil case in the shape of a mummy case that once belonged to one of my kids. Oh, wait! There are two of them! Nearly unused! Clearly, neither kid liked them much.There's an unopened DVD.

I didn't sort through the box in this most recent work effort. I just took things off the top. This afternoon I found books. Two of them. I bought books for this project.

I don't know what else is in the Egypt Box because now I don't want to know ahead of time. I want to just keep pulling one surprise out after another, as I come to them.

Time Management Tuesday: Seeking Discipline

Early on in my time management study I became interested in discipline, how becoming disciplined can help us manage time. (It probably would help us manage just about everything else in our lives, but I only discuss time management at this blog.) What I didn't do when I was mulling over discipline was carefully define it. That is always a mistake in my experience. Discipline, as it turns out, involves training and maintaining behavior through control. That is a disturbing idea if you're applying it to others. Personally, I love it when applying it to myself. I love the whole idea of training. I'm shakier on the control part, as in self-control, but, hey, that's something I can train for, right?

Which brings us to The Willpower Instinct: How Self-control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Do To Get More Of It by Kelly McGonigal. I mentioned McGonigal's name so frequently in the Situational Time Management Workshop I led earlier this month that I finally suggested we could use the name as the basis of a drinking game. The fact that I would even think of such a thing indicates that I need a whole lot more discipline and self-control.

McGonigal never actually writes about time management. She writes about goals of all kinds, especially those involving changing behavior, and using willpower to achieve them. Well, managing time is both goal and behavior.  There are a number of things she has to say that can apply to managing time, particularly for writers.

A few examples:

• People who are distracted have poor impulse control and are less likely to be able to stay on long-term goals. Many writers work out of their homes and have trouble maintaining a strong barrier between their professional and personal lives. Personal life distractions undermine our ability to stay on task.
• Thinking in terms of being "good" or "bad" relating to a goal undermines willpower. For instance, having been "good" and accomplishing a great deal this morning can be used as justification for being "bad" and not working this afternoon.
• We tend to think of the future as a wonderful place where we will accomplish great things. Thus, believing we'll feel more like working tomorrow or will get a lot done tomorrow justifies taking today off.
• Willpower failures and successes are contagious. A strong argument for writers' groups and group writing projects like NaNoWriMo.
• Giving in to the What-the-Hell-Effect when experiencing setbacks. We  actually lose valuable work time when that happens.

McGonigal even explains why meditating helps with self-control and attention, something I've been hearing about for years, though no one felt a need to explain why it would work. Meditating, it appears, develops the prefrontal cortex, the portion of the brain that deals with impulse control. Good impulse control helps people stay on task with goals. Find meditation difficult because your mind keeps wandering and you have to keep bringing it back to the breath? That's actually good, according to McGonigal. The effort to do that develops the brain just as physical effort develops muscles.

This book has masses of material that can be applied to managing writing time, even though it's not about managing writing time at all. It's a marvelous aid for those of us who are interested in training for self-control.

Brushing Up On Plotting For The May Days Project

My May Days project involves coming up with an outline for a book I've been thinking about writing for, maybe, ten years. I got started with research and a few notes twice. But with my last few writing projects, I've been trying to get away from the organic writer thing and do more pre-writing plotting. So that's what's happening this month with this latest shot at this book.

Sometime before I wrote my last, for the time being, unpublished book, I invested in a copy of Plot & Structure by James Scott Bell. As a result, I've been very interested in plots starting with a disturbance to the main character's world, which he writes about. I really don't care for the give-characters-a-problem thing that I've heard so much about, but a disturbance to their world makes perfect sense to me. In fact, that's how almost all my books began before I'd even heard anything about disturbing a world. Disturbing people may come naturally to me.

Needless to say, that's how my May Days project is starting, with a disturbance.

Looking at my Plot & Structure notes this morning, I saw that Bell talks about plot patterns. I have three significant characters, and I'm going to try to give each one of them a different pattern, which is more or less their goal. For instance, one character's plot pattern/goal is revenge, the second's is a quest, and the third's is what Bell calls "one apart"--a loner who is forced to act.

Now, sometime in the past I found the following story structure plan at a website called Storyfix. It involves thinking of your plot as having four parts with a mid-point.

Part 1. Set up.

Part 2. Collecting information. Either the author, or the protagonist  Some people will talk about complications at this point in a story, but as an organic writer, that leaves me wondering “What complications? Where am I supposed to get those?” Sending my character out to collect more information about what’s happening to her or her world, makes more sense to me and it’s phrased dynamically.

Mid-point—Plot twist or maybe moment where protagonist changes

Part 3. Protagonist uses information

Part 4. Ending

I like this structure because it is so simple. And it tells me what to do. And it is a structure, not a formula, like the give-your-character-something-to-want-and-then-keep-it-from-her thing that I have also heard a lot of in the past.

So this is what I'm working on this month with my May Days project.