Blog Promotion

I do a lot of thinking about marketing in my field of education, so I love this stance on blogs. Interested in learning more about how to promote your blog? Go on over to Motherread and read the suggestions she made in a recent presentation at the Kidlitosphere Conference. As I continue to explore blogging, here’s one of her suggestions I’m working on:
A Particular Niche: Children’s literature is already a tight topic area, but you’ll stand out if you have a niche. Think about what unique perspective you have to bring to the table.

Blogs for Books

Check this great resource compiled by Esme Raji Codell over at Planet Esme! A list of blogs about books and reading put together after her attendance at THE KIDLITOSPHERE CONFERENCE which was an opportunity for book-loving cyberspace folks to come together and figure ways to best share information on the art of book-sharing online through blogs, podcasts and more. More about this event over at Planet Esme.
Mother Reader
http://www.motherreader.com/
Big A Little A
http://kidslitinformation.blogspot.com/
Just One More Book
http://www.justonemorebook.com
Jen Robinson’s Book Page
http://jkrbooks.typepad.com
What Adrienne Thinks About That
http://www.watat.com
A Chair, A Fireplace and a Tea Cozy
http://yzocaet.blogspot.com/
Book Buds
http://dadtalk.typepad.com
Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast
http://blaine.org/sevenimpossiblethings/
Wizards Wireless
http://wizardswireless.blogspot.com/
A Year of Reading
http://readingyear.blogspot.com/
The Edge of the Forest
http://www.theedgeoftheforest.com/
Booktopia
http://booktopia.blogspot.com/
Tweendom
http://tweendom.blogspot.com/
The Miss Rumphius Effect
http://missrumphiuseffect.blogspot.com/
A Fuse #8 Production
http://www.schoollibraryjournal.com/blog/1790000379.html
PixiePalace.com
http://www.pixiepalace.com/
Jacket Flap
http://jacketflap.com/
Three Silly Chicks
http://threesillychicks.com/
Chicken Spaghetti
http://chickenspaghetti.typepad.com
Purled Pouches and Things Unstrung
http://purledpouches.blogspot.com
The PlanetEsme Plan
www.planetesme.blogspot.com

Happy Reading and commenting!

A new look!

I’m trying out a new look here at my blog!  I’ve spent more time than one can imagine exploring the different presentation options.  There always seems to be a choice to be made between format and function.

Blog Day

What better day than today–Blog Day–to return to blogging after my summer hiatus. I really did as I hoped by pulling my nose out of the computer this summer. I dug my hands into some dirt, spent time in personal reflection with some good old fashion pen to paper journaling and reconnected with friends by writing real letters. I love the power of blogging–collaborative learning and reflective writing, but I needed this break.

Blog Day asks that we visit 5 new blogs and post comments especially seeking out those bloggers with different view points, attitudes and cultures. So, the adventure begins . . .

I’ll begin by visiting Editorial Anonymous which isn’t completely a different view point for me, but if I start searching randomly for a blog I’ll be on the computer all day. This summer I’ve been trying to secure an agent for my middle grade nove, so anything to do with the business side of writing is of interest to me right now. What caught my eye here is the conversation going on about what a publisher’s marketing of a book really looks like.

From here I followed a link from this blog to Book by It’s Cover. This blog highlights all the books the blogger notices and collects. The design of the blog is beautiful. I especially enjoyed looking at the Moleskin pages under the heading of Handmade books. I’ve run into these out there in the blogging world before; artists post their moleskin pages of art up on Flikr. I love the opportunity to peek inside notebooks whether they be filled with words, doodles or art!

Off to a new realm by following a link on Book by It’s Cover, I ventured into Cartoon Brew. I mean, who wouldn’t follow that link?! Here I was introduced to Dutch animator and illustrator Fons Schiedon and his fascinating animated short called Teen Facts–Hormones which implements a great split screen technology. Check it out! Just yesterday, my son came home from his first day of high school at the school I used to teach at and showed me how he had the same book as Andy Cahill, one of my former students. My kids have seen his animated shorts, which as a high school student were amazing and I’ve always predicted that he’ll be winning awards someday. He used to write about his process and come up with ideas in his open journal for my english class. No website yet. Hmmm.

Off to Animation Podcast where it was fascinating to read in Notes about the animation creation process and think about its connections to the writing process. The podcasts here are really fascinating as well and extremely well done. Anyone interested in learning through modeling about podcasts should think about visiting this blog. Great podcast voice, as well.

And finally because I have friends and colleagues exploring more ways to use stopmotion and claymation with kids in their classrooms, I take you to AnimateClay which highlights lots of films and was the only place I could get to easily from this blog. And there’s no place to post a comment. Since I’m 2 hours into this project (see, I’m a slow navigator and get pulled into the blogger muck and can’t get out!) I’ll bring you to the folks over at TechStories. Check out their ABC Project in Digital Storytelling. I hadn’t seen “O is for Oliphaunt” yet by Peter Kittle and I enjoyed following his own learning, reading and creation process through this story.  Enjoy!

And I’m done!  Off to my real job.

Crick Hollow Day 4

Memoir

What memories do the following images call up for you?

• A favorite pair of shoes
• Seeing a place for the first time
• Re-visiting a familiar place
• Someone’s hand
• Toes
• Dinner table
• Something you weren’t supposed to see

Choose one of these memories to write about. Then, consider the following uses of memoir writing:

• Create a memoir poem, repeating the opening phrase: “I remember . . . “
• Use your memory in a piece of fiction writing. How does it change when given to a character?
• Write a series of non-fiction memory pieces around a theme such as, “Letting go.”

Incident by Countee Cullen (1903-1946)

Once riding in old Baltimore,
Heart-filled, head-filled with glee,
I saw a Baltimorean
Keep looking straight at me.

Now I was eight and very small,
And he was no whit bigger,
And so I smiled, but he poked out
His tongue, and called me, “Nigger.”

I saw the whole of Baltimore
From May until December:
Of all the things that happened there
That’s all that I remember.

Books of the day: Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy by Gary Schmidt
In Print! 40 Cool Publishing Projects for Kids by Joe RhatiganIncludes a great resource on places to publish your writing.

Website of the day:
http://www.potluckmagazine.org/

Potluck receives nearly 600 submissions each issue and our editors read and respond to each one. Those writers or artists not published, receive a personal letter along with a critique of their work that is constructive, instructive, and positive!

Crick Hollow Day 3

“Write with no one looking over your shoulder. Don’t try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It’s the one and only thing you have to offer.”
Barbara Kingsolver

Writing into the Day

Our word for warm up writing today at camp was “window.” Here’s what I wrote.

“The view from Bula Mae’s porch was Jes’s window to the world of Sweet Hollow. She thought back to those first days sitting on the edge of the porch, dangling her legs off the side thinking how quiet Sweet Hollow was. Now, half way through the summer, longer than she ever imagined she’d be here, Jes had learned that Sweet Hollow was as vibrant as any place she’d been—it just took listening in a different way.”

Writing with Each Other’s Words

Today we all wrote 3 nouns and 3 phrases down on paper and put them into 2 piles. Then we each chose 3 from each pile and used these to inspire our writing.

Revision Strategy: Drawing Out Our Stories

Draw out your story in picture frames as if a comic strip. Then add dialogue or thought bubbles as a way to imagine more in your story. See what main pieces of your plot you choose to represent in pictures. What new details do you discover when you draw your story? Are there symbols or images that emerge?

Poem of the Day

Child on Top of a Greenhouse by Theodore Roethke

The wind billowing out the seat of my britches,
My feet crackling splinters of glass and dried putty,
The half-grown chrysanthemums staring up like accusers,
Up through the streaked glass, flashing with sunlight,
A few white clouds all rushing eastward,
A line of elms plunging and tossing like horses,
And everyone, everyone pointing up and shouting!

Book Suggestion of the Day:
The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick

Blog Suggestion of the Day:
For book suggestions and reviews visit Esme Raji Codell’s (Sahara Special) blog at http://planetesme.blogspot.com/

Writing Camp of the Day:
Looking for another place to write this summer? Interested in turning your writing into movies with Clay Animation, check out this camp by the Western Mass. Writing Project
http://www.umass.edu/wmwp/programs/final_clay_camp_flier.pdf

Crick Hollow Day 2

Today at Crick Hollow Writing Retreat for Kids, I read this excerpt from Barbara Kingsolver’s Small Wonders:

In the slender shoulders of the myrtle tree outside my kitchen window, a
hummingbird built her nest. It was in April, the sexiest month, season of
bud-burst and courtship displays, though I was at the sink washing breakfast
dishes and missing the party, or so you might think. Then my eye caught a
flicker of motion outside, and there she was, hovering uncertainly. She held
in the tip of her beak a wisp of wadded spiderweb so tiny I wasn’t even sure
it was there, until she carefully smoodged it onto the branch. She vanished
then, but in less than a minute she was back with another tiny white tuft
that she stuck on top of the first. For more than an hour she returned again
and again, increasingly confident of her mission, building up by
infinitesimal degrees a whitish lump on the branch – and leaving me plumb in
awe of the supply of spiderwebbing on the face of the land.

I stayed at my post, washing everything I could find, while my friend did
her own housework out there. When the lump had grown big enough – when some
genetic trigger in her small brain said, “Now, that will do” – she stopped
gathering and sat down on her little tuffet, waggling her wings and tiny
rounded underbelly to shape the blob into a cup that would easily have fit
inside my cupped hand. Then she hovered up to inspect it from this side and
that, settled and waddled with greater fervor, hovered and appraised some
more, and dashed off again. She began now to return with fine filaments of
shredded bark, which she wove into the webbing along with some dry leaflets
and a slap-dab or two of lichen pressed onto the outside for curb appeal.
When she had made of all this a perfect, symmetrical cup, she did the most
surprising thing of all: She sat on it, stretched herself forward, extended
the unbelievable length of her tongue, and licked her new nest in a long
upward stroke from bottom to rim. Then she rotated herself a minute degree,
leaned forward, and licked again. I watched her go all the way around,
licking the entire nest in a slow rotation that took ten minutes to complete
and ended precisely back at her starting point. Passed down from hummingbird
great-grandmothers immemorial, a spectacular genetic map in her mind had
instructed her at every step, from snipping out with her beak the first
spiderweb tuft to laying down whatever salivary secretion was needed to
accrete and finalize her essential creation. Then, suddenly, that was that.
Her busy urgency vanished, and she settled in for the long stillness of
laying and incubation.

Then, I sent them out to the yard to observe and write about nature.  We talked briefly about looking closely and seeing the things we may never have noticed before.  We talked about how we can apply this to characters that we are writing about by bringing the reader in close to details about the character that might be easy to miss or how we can slow our action down to have our character look closely at something or how our close observation of things can inform the setting that we create in our writing.

Here’s the poem we read today: Water Snake by Mary Oliver

Water Snake

I saw him

in a dry place

on a hot day,

a traveler

making his way

from one pond

to another,

and he lifted up

his chary face

and looked at me

with his gravel eyes,

and the feather of his tongue

shot in and out

of his otherwise clamped mouth,

and I stopped on the path

to give him room,

and he went past me

with his head high,

loathing me, I think,

for my long legs,

my poor body, like a post,

my many fingers,

for he didn’t linger

but, toughing the other side of the path,

he headed, in long lunges and quick heaves,

straight to the nearest basin

of sweet black water and weeds,

and solitude—

like an old sword

that suddenly picked itself up and went off,

swinging, swinging

through the green leaves.

The kids talked about how the narrator’s perspective changed about the snake from feeling like it “loathed” her for her body to seeing the snake as a powerful, graceful sword once in its preferred environment.

Crick Hollow Writing Retreat for Kids

This week marks year three for Crick Hollow Writing Retreat for Kids that I run every summer.  I have several students, 4-7^th grade, returning for their third summer, and some new ones.  This is a place for kids to come and grow as writers!  We focus a lot on the power and strength we get from writing in a community–so we write, and read, and talk and play!  Our writing voices become stronger and more powerful!

Crick Hollow is the name of the street that Jes lives on in my middle grade novel, Sweet Blueberry Pie! which is currently off being considered by an agent!  Woohoo!  Crick Hollow is also a place found in JR Tolkien’s novels.  It also aptly describes this magical space on which my house sits–tucked in its own little hollow with the constant rhythm and power of its own little creek that runs deep within the earth below us.

Yesterday, we focused on character development using an activity my 12 year old daughter created.  She is CIT for camp this year, and quite honestly, I’d be lost without her!

Here’s the activity. 

1. Reach into a bag of objects and choose one.  Without pulling it out of the bag, try to guess what it is.  Take a few minutes to write about it.  Then, take the objects out of the bag and see if you can identify your object.
2. Choose one of the objects and answer the following questions:  Who owns this object and why?  What is it used for and how?  How does this character feel about this object?  Where will the character keep the object and why?  What will happen to the object:  Will the character keep the object, give it away, lose it?
3. Write!  Think about how often in novels we meet a character and then learn something new about the character or begin to see the character in a new way. 

We ended the day with a poem by Naomi Shihab Nye (not sure why the poem keeps insisting on double spacing itself).

The Song

From somewhere

a calm musical note arrives.

You balance it on your tongue,

a simple ripe grape,

till your whole body glistens.

In the space between breaths

you apply it to any would

and the wound heals.

Soon the nights will lengthen,

you will lean into the year

humming like a saw.

You will fill the lamps with kerosene,

knowing somewhere a line breaks,

a city goes black,

people dig for candles in the bottom drawer.

You will be ready.  You will use the song like a match.

It will fill your rooms

opening rooms of its own

so you sing, I did not know

my house was this large.

We picked out words we liked: balance, single, glistens, breaths, kerosene.  Then we marveled at the sounds they made—all those “s” sounds creating the sense of song themselves.  Then one young girl said, “I really like the phrase, “You will use the song like a match.”  And another said, “I like, ‘opening rooms of its own.’”

Then, I asked, “What do you make of those last two lines, ‘so you sing, I did not know

My house was this large.’”  In my own adult writing group, Bear Mountain Writers, we talked about those last lines.  Folks wondered about the comma between sing and I.  Is the poet saying she sings “I did not know my house was this large”?  Then why no quotation marks?  Or does she sing and think—I did not know my house was this large.  Then, why a comma? 

The girls at my writing retreat didn’t have a problem with this.  Instead, one of them simply said, “The song, like the match, opens rooms of its own.  Without the song the house does not seem so large.”  Wow!  I understood the poem in a way among these young writers that I couldn’t understand it among the adult writers.  What do we women have to learn from these young girls?  Writing with these young voices opens up new rooms in my own writing.

Dirt

Time to pull my fingers off the keyboard and dig into some fine dirt. The moist dank touch of dirt always grounds me. I’m wondering how I can create a greater sense of balance to my life. I’m torn between falling into the deep wide world of the web where learning and connecting to others abound and digging in to the earth where nourishment, quiet, and meditation take root. Dirt–there’s just something so basic and uncomplicated about the word.

Storytelling

My National Writing Project colleagues are engaging in a shared digital storytelling venture. They’ve divided up the alphabet and are creating digital stories based on these letters. You can hear Kevin explain this joint venture, The ABC Collaborative Movie Project, on Voice Threads. And check out Kevin’s contribution to the project on the letter “Z.”

While exploring these creations on the Tech Stories blog, I ran into this video of Ira Glass talking about storytelling. Kevin suggested that it might help them as they create their Alphabet Stories. It’s actually quite interesting to listen to because he talks about how telling a story for radio or TV is quite different than what we were all taught telling a story was in our H.S. English classes.

He suggests, there are two basics–the anecdote (a sequence of actions) and a reflection. I couldn’t help thinking that there are some similarities there to blogging. Blogging quite often is a sequence of thoughts, that build on each other, often spurred from another’s thinking on their blog or (like this blog entry, my thinking spurred on by listening to Ira Glass’s thinking that I stumbled upon through Kevin’s thinking) with reflection. I’d like to suggest that the best blogging entries include both as well! A good story, built on a sequence of thoughts, followed by reflection. Not just the thinking. Not just the reflection.

I’m ready to go out and buy a mini portable video camera and jump into this exciting world of digital storytelling. Although, as you’ll notice when you view some of the other Letter movies, digital storytelling can be done with still pictures as well. These folks have links to some great tutorials. So, come along! And check out these links and kid digital stories at Lakeland Schools, WOW! My favorite is The Phone Call on the Streetside Stories link. Now, that’s some kinda voice!