National Poetry Month: April Halprin Wayland Introduces Us to RhymeWeaver

Poetry Friday is party time in the TechnoVerse! Today's guest DJ is children's poet April Halprin Wayland, who blogs at Teaching Authors.

(What is the TechnoVerse? Read a description here.)

April's got some RhymeWeaver on her poetry turntable. I'll let her start this party off on the right track:

Okay, Campers…say you want to write a book in rhyme.  But there's just one problem:
you're a teeny tiny bit fuzzy about poetic meter and rhyme.  As in: HUH?

So…where to start?

You might start with the RhymeWeaver website www.RhymeWeaver.com

which claims that it will explain "some fairly complicated stuff in a really simple way."

…A massive understatement. 

I asked Rhyme Weaver's birth mother, author Lane Fredrickson, to meet me here for a chat.

Thanks for stopping by, Lane!  What compelled you to share your knowledge about poetry in this way?

The children’s writing community is one of the kindest, safest places to experiment with your creativity. But I felt like the rhyme and meter rules were muddled in that community.  There were a lot of question marks and none of us really knew the answers, so the conclusion was “Don’t write in Rhyme!” 

But a lot of children’s writers still feel compelled to do it. 

Academia is the vault where the rules are kept and I went to school looking for answers. When I finished my BA in English, I felt like I could explain rhyme and meter differently than I had ever seen it done. 

I have a strong background in developmental psychology.  Experimental psychologists study how people learn and grow, they research cognition and neural encoding.  I know that images augment learning so I wanted my site to be image based.  I wanted to work from the bottom up and make every component part of a system.  Depicting a concept as a system augments neural encoding and ultimately how thoroughly we understand integrated ideas.

STOMP slip.

Who designed your site?

I designed and built RhymeWeaver myself. I designed the simple graphics myself, but bought the illustrations from Shutterstock.  A professional graphic artist at DigitalCrayon.com designed the home page. 

What was the most difficult part?

Organizing the content.  I had all this information that I thought was relevant, but there was no blueprint for how to present it and I needed it to be integrated, a system. 

For example, I have never actually heard anyone break down meter into three constituent components: stressed and unstressed syllables, metrical feet, and metrical lines.  I learned it backwards, myself, by examining different meters, but I don’t think that’s the best way. 

I also had never heard anyone specify that all rhymes must contain a parallel stressed syllable.  It was hard to decide if that particular fact belonged under rhyme or meter.  But I needed to integrate the relevance of meter to rhyme.

Tell us about your first book (and congratulations!)

Watch Your Tongue,Cecily Beasley, illustrated by Jon Davis, (Sterling) is a cautionary tale.  It’s about a girl with poor manners who suddenly realizes that her behavior can be hurtful. 

I wanted to write about a less-than-perfect kid because I wasn’t exactly a parent’s dream when I was little.  I always loved books where the kid was kind of naughty, but still loved and still good at heart.  I was pretty much Max of The Wild Things, except I was a girl, which is why Cecily had to be a girl.  Boys-will-be-boys is a totally unfair rationalization.

And finally, quick! What are three of your favorite-sounding words? 
(I blindly stole this question from PF blogger Robyn Hood Black)

Parsnip (probably because it sounds like its getting cut off just as it's getting started), Hrothgar (from Beowulf because it sounds like you're coughing it up as you're saying it)

and gorgonzola.  No reason.

April Halprin Wayland’s books include Scholastic's Best Seller, ToRabbittown a free-verse picture book, Knopf's It'sNot My Turn To Look For Grandma! (recommended on PBS's "Storytime"), the Sydney Taylor Gold Award-winner New Year at the Pier, and the multi-award-winning Girl ComingIn For A Landing—an illustrated novel in poems for teens (Knopf).  Her CD/MP3 of stories and poems (http://www.aprilwayland.com/books-cds/cd-17-poems-and-5-stories/ ) won the National Parenting Publications Gold Medal for storytelling; her poetry appears in numerous anthologies, and she's a seven-time recipient of SCBWI'S Magazine Merit Award for Poetry.  April has taught in over 400 schools across America, in England, Italy, Germany, France and Poland.  She blogs with five other children's authors who also teach writing on TeachingAuthors.com is a founding member The Children's Authors Network and has been an instructor with the Writers’ Program of UCLA Extension for over a decade. Her website? www.AprilWayland.com  where you'll discover she's ½ author, ½ poet, ½ not good at fractions.

I'm taking a break for the weekend to attend Baltimore's CityLit Festival. Monday, another Poetry Friday regular is joining us in the TechnoVerse. Amy LV of the Poem Farm is going to tell us about SoundCloud and Pinterest.

Our Poetry Friday host is Diane Mayr. Stop by her blog, Random Noodling, for more poetry posts. And come back here on April 23, when Diane takes over the TechnoVerse!