Ruth Stone, Poet

Last night, while reading some Vermont newspapers my cousin had sent down here to another family member, I learned that Ruth Stone died in November. I have yet to read any of her work, but I'm still a bit obsessed with writers who had Vermont connections during the time I was growing up there. (I've done more than a dozen posts here about Shirley Jackson.) Ruth had a big one. For many years she lived in a town that was part of our union school system and one of her daughters was in my eighth grade math class. I don't remember her after that point, probably because, as I learned later, Ruth moved around teaching at colleges.

Her personal story is compelling. She was widowed in her forties and raised three children by herself. She published her first book of poetry in 1959, the year her husband died, but her next one didn't come out until 1971. Her major success didn't come until she was in her 80s and 90s. She won the National Book Award in 2002 and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2009.

She stayed the course, both with her work and with her family. I am impressed.

Ruth Stone's daughter, Phoebe, is the author of The Romeo and Juliet Code, published last year.

Kadir Nelson At The Eric Carle

I was catching up on reading NESCBWI newsletters yesterday and learned that from February 7 through June 10 Kadir Nelson's artwork for We Are The Ship will be on exhibit at The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art in Amherst, Massachusetts. Scroll down on the Carle's Programs & Events page, and you'll see that there will be an Opening Reception for museum members and, on February 19th, a gallery tour with Nelson, himself. (Free with museum admission!)

We Are The Ship is a beautiful book, and I am very happy Nelson's artwork will be on exhibit on March 10th, when I'll be at the Carle for a NESCBWI's event.

Time Management Tuesday: Meditation For Concentration

People who work, whether for themselves or in a more traditionally structured job, have two types of time they need to manage: Their personal time so that they can set aside time for the job and their work time so that they can get as much done as possible while they are actually supposed to be working. The four steps to higher productivity that Ellen Sussman writes about in her Nov./Dec. Poets & Writers' article deals with managing time on the job.

The first step she talks about is meditating, her prewriting preparation.

Sussman says she starts workdays with 5 or 10 minutes of meditation. She talks about wanting to quiet the noise in her brain, carry peace of mind with her to her work time, and being able to hear what the muse is saying. I suspect this is kind of squishy stuff for a lot of readers. However, the line she used that connected with me was "I want focus, undistracted thought."

Once again, I think Sussman might be on to something.

I gave meditation a shot a while back because I'd read that meditating can help with concentration. The idea was that you can use meditation to help train your mind to stay with a task. If you can keep your mind focused on something as (let's face it) uninteresting as your breath going in and out of your body or repeating one word for 5 or 10 minutes, it will be more likley to accept sticking with a more interesting task when you present it with one.

God only knows where I read that. I would have guessed Yoga Journal, because I've been reading it for years, but a search of the magazine's website didn't turn up anything that looked familiar. But this article from Science Daily describes a study of meditation's impact on the brain. One researcher summed it up by saying, "Findings like these suggest that meditation's benefits may not require extensive training to be realized, and that meditation's first benefits may be associated with increasing the ability to sustain attention."

If we can sustain our attention during our work period, we can get more done. That's managing our time.

I do think I saw an improvement in my ability to stay on task during that period while I was meditating, and last week when I went back to work after a long break, I started meditating again. I get most of my meditation technique (if you want to call it that) from my taekwondo instructor, who has instructed us on meditation off and on for years, and from yoga instructors talking classes through savasana at the end of class. As Sussman says in her article, though, you can get meditation tips all over the Internet. One of the things I've been finding happening this last go-round is that when my mind wanders from the nothingness I'm shooting for, it's often wandering to something work related. I'm sure that someone really knowledgable about meditation would say that's not a good thing. But so long as I'm not dealing with random thoughts about my extended family or the house that's falling apart around me, I'm pleased.

Okay, all you who are trying to better manage your time, have you tried meditation? Any luck with it? Does it sound like something that would be worth giving a try?

Interesting Aspects Of A Lesser Known Work

Wild Robert, which I stumbled upon at a library a few weeks ago, is one of Diana Wynne Jones books for younger readers. I have to say that I found it rather plodding, myself. It seems like an idea that could have become something much more sophisticated than what it ended up being.

However, there were a couple of aspects to the work that are interesting for someone who has read other of her books and has some superficial knowledge of a later fantasy bestseller.

First off, Wild Robert, which was originally published in 1989, provides another charming, childish, male character similiar to Howl in Howl's Moving Castle, which was published three years earlier, and even to Christopher Chant as he appears in some of the Chrestomanci books, which were published from the 1970s onward.

Secondly, in Charmed Life, originally published in 1977, Wynne Jones has figures in stained glass windows come to life and fight with one another. In Wild Robert, (published in 1989, remember) she has figures in paintings in a castle gallery do the same thing, in a much more elaborate scene.

The whole paintings-come-to-life thing was used regularly in the Harry Potter books, the first of which was published in 1997. Whether Rowling was influenced by Wynne Jones or simply hit upon the idea independently (which definitely happens), it's interesting to see two writers using the same detail in their work.

More Reader/Author Clashes

Should Authors and Agents Weigh In on Citizen Reviews?

So I am sort of following these battles.

I have to say, I like the term "citizen reviews."

Will New Legislation Include School Library Funding?

I am always a bit behind on what's going on politically, but today I saw a post at one of my listservs regarding The Elementary and Secondary Education Act and school library funding. ESEA, to my understanding, is what we used to refer to as No Child Left Behind, and it is up for reauthorization and revision.

The ALA has a page up on its site about attempts to get some funding for school libraries into the ESEA legislation. According to the ALA, an amendment that would do just that was proposed but later withdrawn while still in committee because of lack of interest from committee members. If you scroll down on the ALA page dealing with this subject, you'll see that the organization is asking people to contact their senators and representatives to support school library funding as part of the ESEA legislation.

I don't know if the average parent is aware that school libraries have a little different mandate from the public libraries we grown-ups are more familiar with. They are not redundant, providing the same service, because they are supposed to support their schools' curriculum. They are supposed to provide books to support the science program in the school--on all grade levels. The same with social studies and, of course, reading. And if a school board decides to change its science programming, the school library's holdings should change to reflect that.

Your municipal library, which is providing materials and services for preschoolers up through senior citizens, can't funnel a chunk of its budget into providing books on your state's history to support the fourth grade curriculum in your school. That's what the school library does. Conversely, the school library doesn't spend its money on cookbooks or texts on investing for retirement. That's the public library's job.

You can't just assume that the municipal library is already doing what your school library does or that it can take up the slack if funding is cut for the school libraries in your town. For a municipal library to take on all the work of the various school libraries in a community, it would need great amounts of additional funding, not just for materials, but for space.

Notice I'm not even considering the option of not funding school libraries and just forgetting about the work they do. I can't imagine why anyone would want to eliminate outside reading and research for an entire student body. Talk about a situation that would create a divide between the haves and have nots--the kids from families with money for extra educational materials would be getting a much different education than the kids from families that couldn't provide those things. Yet they would be living in the same community and attending the same school.

Haven't Americans always tried to prevent that sort of thing in our educational system?

Now Those Are Some Werewolves

I was a big fan of Martin Millar's Lonely Werewolf Girl. I just finished the sequel, Curse of the Wolf Girl. Fantastic.

There are some older teen characters in the books, so an argument can be made that there is YA appeal for that reason. And perhaps thematically you could say these werewolves are trying to make their way in a hostile world, which could have YA connection.

I love the powerful women. The moving around from character to character may take some getting used to for some readers, but the various storylines come together terrifically. Well, they come together in a bloodbath, but it is a werewolf story.

Plot Project: My mind is reeling. I can't even begin to guess.

Yeah, Speaking Of Managing Time

I've been back at work this week, which has almost seemed like vacation, because it's so different from what I've been doing these last few months. But the plan now is that on Sunday evenings I'll plan my evening work for the week, and a lot of it is family business and personal e-mailing. Wow. Who knew I had so many people in my personal life to e-mail? It's time to quit for today, and I have four more people I wanted to contact.

The blog reading? Well, I whipped through some Bookslut posts.

I'll have to see what I can plan next Sunday night.

The Next SCBWI-NE Blog Stop

Today I checked out Lupine Seeds, Linda Crotta Brennan's blog. I've actually met Linda a few times. She writes a lot of nonfiction and has published an impressive list of shorter work in magazines.

At her blog she's recently done a number of author interviews--extensive in length and accompanied by photographs. She also does her own commentary on issues in children's literature. (Linda, those recommendations for authors to limit themselves to only a few hundred words for picture books are a mystery to me, given that I'm always seeing picture books with lengthy texts on subjects of interest to people in their thirties or forties.)

I Wish I Had Time To Follow More Of This Kind Of Thing

Goodreads has never made more than a blip on my radar, because I just haven't had time to look into another on-line community. After reading YA novel readers clash with publishing establishment in The Guardian, I wish I knew more about it.

I have wondered if the publishing establishment doesn't try to use the independence of the Internet (Actually, it seems pretty obvious it does, with all the encouragement that authors take advantage of social media.), and lines like this support those thoughts: "More and more bloggers are reluctant to host the author blog tours that now swamp book sites – only to find that publishers refuse them free advance review copies of the new books they want."

Check out the Anthony McGowan review referred to in the article. Yes, indeed, he does write YA.