Speech by Deborah Wiles:
Good Morning to you all! I bring greetings from Atlanta, Georgia, where the honeysuckle blooms with abandon and the redbuds are about to pop! I write fiction that takes place in the American South, where I grew up a child of kudzu, moon pies, cemeteries, and revival hymns (WAS I washed in the blood? I didn't know!)
I write about what I knew first, because, as Patricia MacLachlan tells us, "What you know first stays with you."
It's such a pleasure to be with you this morning. Thank you for inviting me, and thank you so much to the children's book award committee for recognizing EACH LITTLE BIRD THAT SINGS. I am delighted, honored, and humbled by this validationÖ and I'm particularly grateful I could be here today because I have been longing to share with you a story.
You are honoring my fiction today. I want to honor you for teaching me how to honor my children and myself. I became a mother in 1971, when I was 18-years-old. By the time I was 21, I had two children and very little else. I was on my own for a variety of reasons, removed from home and family, and I had no idea how to be a mother. But I had grown up reading and I knew how to find the public library, even if I had to walk to it.
I moved a lot in those days, and I got a library card in every place we lived. Books became models as I learned basic skills I needed to know in order to become an adult: how to clean an oven, plant a garden and can the tomatoes, sew a shirt, bake macaroni and cheese, wash laundry by hand and hang it properly on a homemade clothesline.
But there were precious few books in the library at that time that could teach me how to care for my children.
I had received Dr. Spock's BABY AND CHILD CARE in the hospital almost at the same moment that a nurse, frustrated that I could not diaper my newborn daughter, said, "Didn't you take ANY course on how to care for a baby?" No, I didn't know there were such things, just as I didn't know there were childbirth classes (THAT was a long day!).
So I read Dr. Spock, and I read a book a door-to-door salesman gave me when he saw I couldn't afford it, a book called THE MOTHER'S ENCYCLOPEDIA, which described all the horrific diseases my children could become infected with:
I was overwhelmed. But slowly I figured it out. And I so wanted -- while I was figuring it out and working as a timekeeper in a construction trailer in Washington, D.C., picking up my children each evening after their ten-hour stint in day care -- I so longed for us to find some levity in life. I did my best, and yet I was certain I was ruining these children.
And then I found a book in the library that changed my life: THE PLEASURE OF THEIR COMPANY: HOW TO HAVE MORE FUN WITH YOUR CHILDREN by The Bank Street College.
This was my introduction to Bank Street. In the pages of this book I found treasure after treasure: listening, reflecting back, and labeling with children -- sky watching, growing things together, teaching a respect for all life -- understanding emotional adjustments, the value of the ridiculous, how to have fun with music, language, and reading aloud.
What a discovery. So many of the things I was already doing with my children, this book validated. So many things I didn't do or understand, this book mapped ñ modeled -- for me. The book became a Bible and I wore it out when I was eventually able to purchase my own copy.
Eventually life became sweeter, hard again, sweeter, very hard, wonderful, and it will be hard again.
Isn't that just the way it is?
This is what Uncle Edisto tries to tell Comfort in LITTLE BIRD; Comfort doesn't want to hear it. Neither did I. Like Comfort, I didn't want life to strut into my heart with all its messy glory -- but it did, and it continues to.
I have always needed models -- a voice calling to me from outside my wilderness -- to see me through, to show me how, to teach me. More than anything, books have been actual, physical models for me. And they have helped me learn to tell my story.
In 1986 I was writing essays about home and family and had begun to see them published. I had checked out every volume on writing that was on my local library shelves, and I had purchased two shelves full of used college textbooks about writing. I read every one of them from cover to cover.
When my son Zachary was born ten years after my eldest child and I began reading to him, I was amazed to see how picture books had changed. When I read the first page of Cynthia Rylant's newly published WHEN I WAS YOUNG IN THE MOUNTAINS, I knew I had found another model. All those essays I had written ñ THIS was what I had been trying to touch.
And so I began again, carting home baskets of picture books from the library, typing their texts, studying them just as carefully as I'd studied the directions for how to bake a turkey or listen to my child. This is how I learned.
This is when the rejections started! And they continued until 1996 when Liz Van Doren at Harcourt Brace called me about a manuscript I'd sent in over the transom, called WE ALL BE JOVIE AND THAT'S THE TRUTH: "I wake up feeling like the bubbles in an RC Cola! All fizzed up and ready to pop!"
JOVIE eventually turned into LOVE, RUBY LAVENDER, and LITTLE BIRD, too. I began to use my Mississippi childhood as a framework to talk about the feelings that mattered to me, for what I learned as I gained years and perspective was that we universally want the same things: To love and be loved. To be safe. To achieve something, to DO something with our lives, to matter. To be seen -- to belong.
All my fiction is about these themes. How do we love one another? What matters? What matters most? What constitutes a family? And how do the choices we make determine who we become? EACH LITTLE BIRD THAT SINGS grew directly out of a time of choices. LITTLE BIRD is about loss, death, grief, resilience, faith, and moral choices. (It is also about gossip, funeral home handkerchiefs, a good dog, a tall rock, and chicken and potato chip casserole.)
I began writing LITTLE BIRD in 2003 because I couldn't write anything else. I was wrestling with real deaths ñ the death of my 23-year marriage, the death of my mother, the death of my father, the death of day-to-day motherhood as the youngest of my four children grew up, and the death of my homeplace, as I knew I would be moving from the home I'd lived in for 25 years. Even my dog died.
So much loss.
By this time I had been teaching writing in the classroom for many years, using children's literature as models to teach all the conventions of good writing. As you know, children want to tell their stories, whether they dance them, sing them, paint them, draw them or write them. They want to tell us about love and loss, friendships and family, betrayal and redemption. It's so important to them to try to figure out this life, to discover their place in it, to belong, to be seen -- to matter.
As I worked with children and their stories during this hard time, I learned from them that I was not alone, that bad things happen to good people, that friendships die, that sometimes pets don't come home, and that we can count on love from the most odd and unexpected places, from a cousin we think we cannot stand, or a brother who suddenly wants so much to help, even from a friend who has previously betrayed us. When I wrote LITTLE BIRD, these children's stories were in my heart as well, and I wanted to honor them. Here onto the page came Peach, Tidings, Declaration, and wonderful, noble Dismay, Funeral Dog Extraordinaire.
I'm so happy to be able to honor in a public forum the good folks at Harcourt Brace with whom I have worked for ten years now. They have championed my quirky stories with the eccentric names and earnest plots and silly sidebars and have helped put my stories into the hands of readers. My editor, Liz Van Doren, deserves lots of credit for bringing LITTLE BIRD -- and me -- to life during a time when my life was so tempestuous.
I had been trying for two years to finish a novel under contract to Harcourt and had just admitted to Liz, in 2003, that I was not going to be able to do it, that survival was taking up all my time. Liz said to me, "you are forgetting you are a writer. A writer writes. I want you to put this book aside, sit at your desk, and answer this question: what can I write?" I promised her I would.
And, as I sat there thinking about all that loss, I typed "I come from a family with a lot of dead people," for that was certainly true. Who was this voice? I immediately gave her a name, Comfort, for I needed a lot of comfort. And when I looked up several hours later, I had three chapters of a story that began pouring out of me, detailing death, grief, abandonment -- and chicken and potato chip casserole. I sent those chapters to Liz on email that very day. "This is what I can write," I said. Within hours she sent me a two word message: Keep Going.
Thank you, Liz. You have been a model of patience, persistence, and faithfulness.
When I found out LITTLE BIRD had won the Josette Frank award, I went immediately to the Bank Street website to read the particulars: This award for fiction honors a book or books of outstanding literary merit in which children or young people deal in a positive and realistic way with difficulties in their world and grow emotionally and morally.
I have had to grow emotionally and morally. I hope I am still growing. Long ago you invested in me and my stories, and you didn't even know it... Or did you?
I thank you for this meaningful award -- it takes my breath away to receive it -- and I want to honor YOU for the good work you continue to do, and for publishing a book that helped me to help my children and myself.
Thank you so much.
Speech by Pamela S. Turner:
There is a well-known Japanese print artist named Shigeki Kuroda who creates images of bicyclists carrying umbrellas in the rain. He repeats his theme using different backdrops and different color palettes, yet over and over again, across many hundreds of prints, are those bicycles, umbrellas, and raindrops. I used to think this was very eccentric. What was the point? Doesn't Kuroda ever get bored with this singular theme? Then I began writing, and soon I noticed I was doing exactly the same thing. What I find myself wanting to write about, over and over, is the hunger in the human heart for communion with the animal kingdom.
I think this desire for connection is very strong when we're young. Children want to bond with animals. It seems natural and possible. To children the human-animal divide is quite fuzzy. You don't have to convince a child that their dog has feelings or their cat can talk in kitty-language. Exotic animals are endlessly fascinating, too. I suppose there are children out there who don't like visiting the zoo, but personally I have never met one.
An adult might ask: Why are animals so interesting to us? I could give you a Darwinian answer about how we co-evolved with other species, and the need to pay close attention to all the wild things we ate, or were eaten by, is hard-wired into us. That need molded us into what we are; in other words, animals helped make us human. Children, however, wouldn't think of asking why animals are interesting; they just are.
In writing "Gorilla Doctors," I hoped to tap into children?s natural fascination with animals. I wanted to show how interest and empathy, bonded with science, can help save species being pushed toward extinction. I also wanted to point out that we ourselves are inescapably linked, not just emotionally, but also biologically and environmentally to other animals. Gorillas are particularly good at delivering this message. When you look into the chocolaty eyes of a massive silverback, you know two things. First: he's the greater great ape. Second: he's near-human. Eight million years may have passed since our last common ancestor, but it seems like yesterday.
"Gorilla Doctors" tells the story of the veterinarians and epidemiologists of the Mountain Gorilla Veterinary Project. These scientists go right into the forest to care for sick or injured gorillas, often working in the pouring rain on the sides of jungle-covered volcanoes. They also care for baby gorillas orphaned by poachers. But to me the most interesting part of their mission are their efforts to keep the mountain gorillas from dying of human diseases. Everyone knows that people can get diseases from animals--rabies, avian flu, West Nile virus, the list goes on and on--but hardly anyone considers that the reserve must be true, as well.
I often visit bookstores and schools to talk to children about "Gorilla Doctors." There is always a moment when fascination, empathy, science, and the kinship between humans and gorillas all congeal. That moment is when I show a photograph of a miserable-looking gorilla with a runny nose, and I tell the children, "Gorillas and humans are very close biologically--so close that if you sneezed on a gorilla, she could get your cold." It's like a GE commercial. You can just see the light bulbs turning on.
Now, this is the point in the speech where I should say that that moment when those bulbs light over the children's heads makes all the hours in the UC Berkeley Biosciences Library, all that time bouncing around in the back of a Land Rover on red dirt roads in Rwanda and Uganda, and all those miles of hiking through the forest to find the gorillas worth all the effort. But to be honest, I adore tracking down obscure facts in obscure journals, I love Africa more than anyplace else on Earth, and being huddled in a bamboo thicket next to a gorilla is my idea of a peak experience. For giving me the blissful opportunity to research and write "Gorilla Doctors," I'd like to thank my former editor at Houghton Mifflin, Hannah Rodgers. I'd also like to thank my current editor, Erica Zappy, for her support.
I am so very grateful that the Bank Street College of Education has found "Gorilla Doctors" worthy of an award given for inspiring young readers. I certainly can't take credit for making children interested in animals; they already are interested. I can't take credit for making children empathize with animals, either; children already have empathy. I do hope I've encouraged children to combine scientific knowledge with their interest and empathy. I hope the result will be children better equipped to share this world respectfully, humbly, and lovingly with the rest of the animal kingdom. Thank you.
Speech by Paul B. Janeczko:
[read in Paul Janeczko's absence by Liz Bicknell, editor of A Kick in the Head]
While many people picture writers sitting around in their pjs and slippers while they sip herbal tea and wax poetic, I want you to know that that is not the case with me. At least, not this morning. Understand that, as Liz is reading these remarks, I would like you to picture me as I am right now.
I am sitting at my desk dressed in a natty three-piece charcoal gray suit, with a red-and-blue-striped power tie, impeccably knotted on a blue Oxford cloth shirt with a button down collar. With that picture firmly fixed in your mind, I will begin.
I want to thank you for choosing to give the Claudia Lewis Award to A Kick in the Head. The collection is truly a creative team effort as well as an exercise in trust. Readers see Raschka and Janeczko on the cover of the book and think that it is the work of two men with hard-to-pronounce last names. Which, of course, it is. But there are more people on the creative team that made the book what it is. For one thing, my true collaborators are the poets whose work I have included in the collection.
Without their work, as they say, the book would not have been possible. Beyond those people, there are?all the fabulously creative people at Candlewick--like the Brit reading this script--who had a hand in designing and producing the book. And then, of course, there is the artistic genius of Chris Raschka. Whenever I make an author visit, one student will usually ask if I work closely with Chris. I tell the questioner, "No, I don't." After all, what could Chris possibly learn from someone whose painting skill reached its zenith in 1957 with a paint-by-number rendering of the Liberty Bell. When a book runs the table of starred reviews, as our two books have done, it is not an accident. It is the product of a creative team.
What I once again discovered when I was working on A Kick in the Head was how important trust is to a creative project. Liz trusts me to deliver a stack of poems that will speak to young readers. I trust Liz to find the perfect illustrator for my collection. I also trust her to engage in a sincere give-and-take with me about the content, arrangement, and shape of the collection. And, of course, we both trust Chris to work his magic and deliver illustrations that enhance the poems rather detract from them.
When the book is released to reviewers, I am always curious to see what they say. A review or an award does not affect the quality of a book, of course. But a good review or an award like the Claudia Lewis Award will get the book noticed by other adult readers, teachers and librarians, who will alert their constituents to the book. Finally, it is the kids' turn to give the book a read. When that happens, my book is where it belongs, where I wanted it to be from the moment I got the idea for it: in the hands of a young boy or girl. They slowly turn the pages, captivated by the words and the illustrations.
The Claudia Lewis Award is important to me because of where it comes from. It comes from people dedicated to the education of children. It comes from people who continue to battle heroically to keep their classrooms from becoming little more than assembly lines that prepare students for the multiple-choice, game-show questions of a state test. It comes from people whose eyes are wide open to the possibilities of literature. This award not only recognizes our book, it also recognizes poetry. It also recognizes the creative team that helped A Kick in the Head fire imaginations with its colors, shapes, and words. Finally, it recognizes the value of an anthology and the craft of an anthologist. I am deeply grateful and I thank you.
I could say more, but my tie is beginning to chafe and my slacks may be irreparably wrinkled, so I'd better end. Besides, now it's time for my pjs and slippers. Now it's time to get back to work.
Speech by Chris Rashcka:
Before today, when I heard the name Bank Street College, three things came to mind. First, I thought of Margaret Wise Brown. Upon my arrival in New York City many years, seventeen years, ago, with the beginnings of an inkling in my mind that I would like to be an illustrator of books for children, or perhaps even a writer of them as well, I would walk down to the Donnell Library Children's Room and read about the great writers and artists of the 20s and 30s on up to the 60s. I looked at Roger Duvoisin, I gazed lovingly at Ludwig Bemelmans, and I read Margaret Wise Brown. I used to go for one afternoon every two weeks, generally on a Thursday. In the midst of my studies one day, engrossed in the book, Lion, by William Pene Du Bois, a sturdy Librarian suddenly loomed over my shoulder and she wanted to know what I was doing and asked me to leave as this room was strictly reserved for the study of children's literature. She was under the impression, apparently, that anyone who looked as I did then, possibly with rather long hair, perhaps in a leather jacket, could not possibly be interested in this sacred subject. It was, I believe, the overwhelming presence in that room of the spirit of Beatrix Potter which colored her view as to who could and who could not appreciate the literature.
But this is a digression.
Nevertheless it was there that I became completely charmed by Margaret Wise Brown, her work and herself; instructed by her careful yet adventuresome note-taking in observation of the students at the Bank Street School and inspired by the revolutionary texts that are the fruits of her study. In emulation of this approach, I promptly signed up as a volunteer in the education department of the American Museum of Natural History, hoping that with my ear thus close to the ground of children, I might find similar benefit.
The second thing, a memory, in this case, that comes to my mind when I hear the words Bank Street College concerns crayfish and my wife, not necessarily in that order. My wife, Lydie, at around the time that I was being asked to leave libraries, was laboring mightily to earn her Master's Degree in Education here. I should mention immediately, she liked her time here more than any other of her learning days, although she was forever overwhelmed with work, or swamped, as in the case of the crayfish. It was a terribly hot summer. We had no air-conditioning. The point where I enter the story, after the crayfish, came during the completion of Lydie's paper, OBSERVATION OF THE CRAYFISH, which was being painstakingly and maddeningly prepared on a malfunctioning electric typewriter, so malfunctioning in fact, that on a steamy July night I was charged with doing something, so I nobly marched out into the steaming night of reeking pavement and sweaty stock boys and returned triumphantly with a Smith Corona Word Processing Electric Typewriter with a magnificent 4 line display screen, dubbed ever after, Mr. Smith.
My wife was pleased.
The crayfish was observed. And the Bank Street College Masters Degree paper was written.
Finally, when I hear the words Bank Street College, I think of Beth Puffer, and the Bank Street College Book Store; Beth, who has been so quietly and steadily supportive of me and my work for the last decade, at least. It is a continuing happiness for me to see Beth's smiling face most times I visit the store, and a thrill every time, when I see my own pastel drawing of Arlene Sardine hanging proudly, stalwartly and encouragingly on the Bank Street College Book Store upstairs bathroom door.
And now today, I have one more memory to associate with Bank Street College with this wonderful award for which I am truly grateful.
Thank you all, very, very much.