Laura's Bookshelf: PAPER WISHES

Happy Poetry Friday. We are Broadway bound this week!

The *STAR*
of this week's Poetry Friday production
is Tricia at The Miss Rumphius Effect.

One of the best parts about being a debut novelist has been connecting with other children's and YA authors in the class of 2016. We’ve had a great time sharing each other’s Advanced Reader’s Copies (ARCs). Among my favorite books so far is the historical middle grade novel PAPER WISHES, by Lois Sepahban.

PAPER WISHES is available for pre-order.

“What does a historical middle grade novel have to do with Broadway?” you may ask. I shall reveal all.

I read Lois’s book in September. It is the story of Manami, whose family is forced to relocate to a Japanese internment camp during World War II. Manami focuses much of her grief on the loss of her dog, Yujiin, whom she feels guilty about leaving behind. The dusty camp and prison-like living conditions physically and psychologically cause Manami to stop speaking. 

I found this character’s spare first-person voice to be poetic and deeply moving -- her halting inner monologue reflects Manami’s reluctance to speak out loud about her pain and fears. PAPER WISHES is a beautiful book about a dark period in American history.

Not long after I finished PAPER WISHES, my friend and fellow musical theater lover Timanda Wertz and I had tickets to see a new musical in New York City. ALLEGIANCE is about ... a Japanese American family that is relocated to a World War II era internment camp. 

I have been following this show’s journey to Broadway for several years. It is the creative brainchild of actor George Takei, whose family was relocated to an internment camp when he was five. (Read about it in this NY Times article.) Takei is one of the stars of the show.

What serendipity to have Lois' wonderful book fresh in my mind when Timanda and I went to see this play. I nearly flipped out: the first big number is about writing wishes on slips of paper and releasing them into the wind! There were so many echoes between Manami’s story and this big Broadway musical: the connection to family, people making gardens and growing their own food in the camps, and how baseball became an outlet for young people there.

We had a great trip to New York, I finally met my editor and, for the first time in my life, I waited outside the backstage door for autographs.

PAPER WISHES is available in January. Here is the blurb from Goodreads:

A moving debut novel about a girl whose family is relocated to a Japanese internment camp during World War II--and the dog she has to leave behind.

Ten-year-old Manami did not realize how peaceful her family's life on Bainbridge Island was until the day it all changed. It's 1942, after the attack on Pearl Harbor, and Manami and her family are Japanese American, which means that the government says they must leave their home by the sea and join other Japanese Americans at a prison camp in the desert. Manami is sad to go, but even worse is that they are going to have to give her dog, Yujiin, to a neighbor to take care of. Manami decides to sneak Yujiin under her coat, but she is caught and forced to abandon him. She is devastated but clings to the hope that somehow Yujiin will find his way to the camp and make her family whole again. It isn't until she finds a way to let go of her guilt that Manami can accept all that has happened to her family. 

PAPER WISHES is a middle grade novel, appropriate for third grade through middle school. Younger children may enjoy it as a read aloud. Either way, be prepared to answer a lot of questions.

In this time, when our country is debating the definition of citizenship and whether we have enough empathy for war victims to provide them refuge, PAPER WISHES is an important book to read with children.

Who will like it?

• History buffs.
• Readers who are interested in (or living) bi-cultural or first generation experiences.
• Kids who will recognize the strong bond Manami has with her grandfather.
• Groups who want a safe platform for discussing a complicated moral issue like xenophobia.

What will readers learn about?

• What it was like to live in a Japanese internment camp. 
• How to cope with loss, grief, and racism.
• Hope is possible, even in the most difficult circumstances.

The poem I'm pairing with PAPER WISHES isn’t officially a poem. Instead, here are the opening lines from the song “Gaman,” which is featured in ALLEGIANCE.

“Gaman” from Allegiance

Words and Music by Jay Kuo

Gaman is a word to be spoken and heard

In this place where each face tells a story of pain.

Gaman we must say as we get through each day

We will bear any nightmare with a simple refrain.

Gaman. Gaman. Sturdy and sure. Keep faith and endure.

Gaman. Gaman. Hold your head high. Carry on. Gaman.

Learn more about the Japanese word “Gaman,” and listen to amazing Lea Salonga singing the song (<3 and="" has="" history.="" in="" insights="" into="" lea="" moment="" musical="" nbsp="" o:p="" salonga="" she="" some="" the="" this="" u.s.="" video.="" wonderful="">

Summer Reads: Chapter & Verse (The Book of the Maidservant)

It's Poetry Friday. The leaves aren't falling yet in Maryland. Here at Author Amok, we are still enjoying some late-summer reading. Poetry Friday regular Tabatha Yeats-Lonske is here to share her Chapter and Verse selection.

I'm also guest-posting this week. You can find my Today's Little Ditty rant against rhyme (at least in the elementary classroom) at Michelle H. Barnes' blog.

This week's host is
Renee LaTulippe
at No Water River!

Tabatha's pairing of a novel and poem is the ninth post in a series called "Summer Reads: Chapter and Verse." Guest bloggers and I have matched books we read this summer with a poem that complements the novel.

So far, we've paired:

THE GIRLS AT THE KINGFISHER CLUB (Historical YA)

with Edna St. Vincent Millay's "First Fig"

DARIUS & TWIG (Contemporary Urban YA)

with Gwendolyn Brooks' "We Real Cool"

STARGIRL (Contemporary YA)

with Eileen Spinelli's, "Poem for a Bully" and "Advice to Rapunzel"

Shared by guest blogger Janet Wong

THE IMPOSSIBLE KNIFE OF MEMORY (Contemporary YA)

with W.M. Rivera's "The You That's Left"

THE COLDEST GIRL IN COLDTOWN (YA Urban Fantasy)

with Sarah Beasley's "Grief Puppet"

WALK TWO MOONS (Classic contemporary MG)

with blackberry poems by Galway Kinnell, Sylvia Plath, and Crescent Dragonwagon

ENTHUSIASM (YA Romance)

with Elizabeth Barrett Browning's "Sonnet III"
Shared by guest blogger Kathy MacMillan

WE WERE LIARS (YA Suspense)

with Margaret Atwood's "This Is a Photograph of Me"

Welcome back to Author Amok, Tabatha!

Tabatha reading with Penelopeep
(Peep for short).

My match-up pairs the poem "Listen" by Barbara Crooker with MG historical fiction The Book of the Maidservant by Rebecca Barnhouse. The Book of the Maidservant traces the journey of Johanna, servant to holy woman Dame Margery Kempe, as they travel from England to Rome in the 1400s. (Read a review here.)

Note: Dame Margery Kemp was a real person. You can read about her at the Online Reference Book (ORB) for Medieval Studies.

Available at ABE Books.

You can see how tough life is for servants, how easy it would be to give up, but Johanna never does. When she finally finds a field of blankness before her, she takes advantage of it. And as much trouble as other people can be, one of the toughest things Johanna has to do is make peace with is herself. Like the moon, though, people get the chance to bloom again.

The poem: 

Listen,

I want to tell you something. This morning
is bright after all the steady rain, and every iris,
peony, rose, opens its mouth, rejoicing.
I want to say, wake up, open your eyes, there’s
a snow-covered road ahead, a field of blankness,
a sheet of paper, an empty screen. Even
the smallest insects are singing, vibrating
their entire bodies, tiny violins of longing
and desire. We were made for song.
I can’t tell you what prayer is, but I can take
the breath of the meadow into my mouth,
and I can release it for the leaves’ green need.
I want to tell you your life is a blue coal, a slice
of orange in the mouth, cut hay in the nostrils.
The cardinals’ red song dances in your blood.
Look, every month the moon blossoms
into a peony, then shrinks to a sliver of garlic.
And then it blooms again.

Barbara Crooker, from Line Dance

I read this poem on Poetry Friday blogger's Margaret Simon's blog, Reflections on the Teche. 

Here's the link for author Rebecca Barnhouse's website: http://www.rebeccabarnhouse.com/book-of-the-maidservant.html

Tabatha is enamored of words and fascinated with the world. Her blog The Opposite of Indifference showcases her love for art, music, and poetry. She is working on a project involving another of her interests, botanical medicine. Her book about Holocaust survivors has just been released as a Kindle edition. 

Tabatha, I have some favorite books set in the same time period: CATHERINE, CALLED BIRDY by Karen Cushman and Kevin Crossley-Holland’s MG series that begins with THE SEEING STONE. Thanks for recommending THE BOOK OF THE MAIDSERVANT. I'm looking forward to reading it.

Readers, I am proud to say that Barbara Crooker—isn’t the poem Tabatha shared beautiful?—has published work in the journal I edit, Little Patuxent Review. Crooker's poem “Rufous-Sided Towhee” appeared in our science-themed issue. We are reading submissions *right now* for an issue about food. Please send your poems through Submittable, but be sure to read LPR’s guidelines first. 

To get an idea of the work we publish, check out LPR's YouTube channel, where you will see contributors reading their work. The deadline is November 1. The Food issue will go on sale in January.

Do you have an idea for Summer Reads: Chapter and Verse? I'm still looking for guest bloggers. The series will continue until summer ends on Monday, September 22. For more information, find a full explanation of this series and a sample Chapter and Verse pairing at this post.

5 Questions for Margarita Engle

Writerly Friends, I am counting the hours until April 1. National Poetry Month begins tomorrow. All month, we will be talking about "Source Poems," pieces of writing that we carry with us, or that shift or thinking in a significant way.

I can think of no better lead-in to our month of guest bloggers on this topic than a conversation with Margarita Engle.

Margarita is an award-winning author of twelve books for children. Many of these are works of historical fiction, written in verse. Margarita's great source is the history of the Caribbean Island and Central America. Her website is: www.margaritaengle.com

Last week saw the publication of Margarita's latest middle grade novel, Silver People. Silver People covers ten years in the Serpent Cut, where laborers from around the Caribbean and Americas constructed the Panama Canal.

Buy it at Petunia's Place independent bookstore.

I knew little about this period in U. S. and Pan-American history. Silver People has significantly shifted my thinking about the Panama Canal, which celebrates its centennial this August.

Five Questions for Margarita Engle

Author Amok: How did you conduct your research, finding such pockets in the story of the Panama Canal as the ocean voyage that brought job-seeking islanders to the work site and the use of child labor? (Mateo, your protagonist, is a fourteen-year-old Cuban--too young to work--but the man in charge “believes” Mateo’s lie that he is Spanish and 20.)

Margarita Engle: It was really difficult to narrow the characters down to just a few, because research revealed such a vast wealth of information, and unlike so many other historical topics, even a vast wealth of first person diaries, interviews, and memoirs.  I wanted to speak in the voices of several countries, so I chose the Cuban voice of Mateo, because Cuba is so familiar to me.  Since Jamaica was one of the largest groups of laborers, and it’s so close to Cuba, I included Henry.  I was fascinated by the image of Mateo and Henry never meeting until they leave their own islands.  The local girl [Anita] and the Puerto Rican naturalist [Augusto] are voices that I could hear very easily, but when I tried to add a Spanish anarchist, it got too complex.  Portraying the politics of Europe was just too much.  I had to leave some aspects of this enormous story for other authors to tell.  I hope that the Canal’s 2014 centennial will stimulate an interest in various stories told from unique points of view.  I can’t wait to read something written by a Panamanian, a Jamaican, a Barbadian, a Spaniard…

Thousands of lives were lost during the canal's construction.
Silver People describes a mudslide that buries the laborers alive.
Source: Fine Art America

Amok: Racism and segregation are a big part of the Panama Canal’s story. There is a scene in a hospital when a newly arrived American welfare worker says:

As soon as Americans arrive in Panama

Even northerners begin to act

Like southerners

I take that to mean racial segregation was an accepted way of life at the work site. In fact, the title Silver People refers to dark-skinned workers being paid in silver, while light-skinned Europeans and Americans were paid in gold. Would you speak about some of the racial and economic disparities you write about it your book? How were you able to communicate this struggle through your characters?

Engle: So many of the American engineers, steam shovel drivers, and their families had never been to the tropics.  They were stunned by the heat, mud, malaria, and yellow fever.  Hearing unfamiliar languages, and seeing so many people from so many countries, many of them wrote diaries and letters that were blatantly racist.  Maybe they would have been the same way at home, if there had been a racially mixed population in Iowa or Kansas. Tragically, the U.S. government’s official policies made racism seem acceptable.  The Silver-Gold payroll system was sheer, undisguised apartheid.  The one shocking image that was most vivid to me was not housing or payday, but lunchtime.  Americans ate in comfortable dining tents with tablecloths.  Spaniards sat on the railroad tracks.  Jamaicans had to stand up.  I read an excerpt from an African-American preacher’s diary.  He said the segregation he’d seen in Panama was far more extreme than Jim Crow in the southern U.S.

Much of the digging was done by hand.
Source: 6 Stories from the 7 Continents

Amok: Early on in the book, Mateo talks about missing Cuba and the home he was so eager to leave. I thought this was a nice moment of self-awareness. As a children’s author, how do you show a young character’s increasing self-awareness over the course of a novel? Does using a historical event as your setting make writing Mateo’s coming-of-age story (we see him grow from fourteen to twenty-four in Silver People) easier or more difficult?

Engle: It was extremely difficult to age a character that much in the space of just a couple of hundred pages of free verse, but that’s how long the height of the U.S. canal-digging effort lasted.  I wanted him to witness the start, and the end. 

Silver men carrying dynamite.
Source: The Silver People Heritage

Amok: Silver People has an ensemble cast. In addition to Mateo, we meet several historical figures, as well as Mateo’s friends: Anita, a local orphan who is raised by an island woman and is her apprentice herbalist; Henry, a Jamaican who is angry about the injustices workers are experiencing; Augusto, the visiting naturalist who takes Mateo as his apprentice. Several times, the book steps away from its human cast. We hear poems in the voices of howler monkeys, poison dark frogs, even Panama’s trees. What made you decide to include the voices of the forest in your book?

Engle: I wanted this book to be my personal love letter to tropical rain forests.  The Panama Canal was the first engineering project of its size, the first to destroy an immense tract of wilderness.  I wanted to see it from many points of view, including the forest itself, and all the creatures that depend on trees.  Perhaps this occurred to me partly because I was trained as a scientist, and I’ve always loved to explore.  Some of my plant collecting trips, when I still worked as a botanist and agronomist, were in central America, where I encountered descendants of silver people who were kind to me.  [from Wikipedia: “Agronomy is the science and technology of producing and using plants for food, fuel, fiber, and land reclamation. Agronomy encompasses work in the areas of plant genetics, plant physiology, meteorology, and soil science.”] They lived in remote jungles, completely dependent on local resources.  All over the world, rain forests are now being destroyed at a frightening rate.  I hope young people who read Silver People will want to become protectors of the plants and animals who speak to them from those pages.

Howler monkeys
Source: The Guardian

Amok: The Panama Canal is considered, by some, to be the eighth wonder of the world. Yet tens of thousands of lives were lost in the effort and—as we have seen—working conditions for most were deplorable. Why do you think this is an important story to share with young readers? How did you balance the darkness of the canal’s history with a sense of hope for Mateo and his friends?

Engle: I’m surprised that so many adults who go on luxury cruises through the Panama Canal have no concept of the history.  They’ve seen the famous photo of Teddy Roosevelt posed on a steam shovel, wearing a “Panama” hat that was actually made in Ecuador, but they don’t know that most of the real work was done by Caribbean islanders with shovels.  Neither do the teenagers who order all sorts of “stuff” online, never realizing that before being “shipped overnight,” all that stuff had to be moved slowly, on a container ship from Asia, through the Panama Canal.  Globalization began in 1914, not with the invention of the Internet.  August, 2014 is the centennial.  I hope the laborers whose contribution was not acknowledged during the 1915 Panama Pacific Exposition, will finally be honored now, through this story.  I know that sounds like an enormous goal for one book, but it was an enormous historical event.

I loved how you made this big story personal in the form of Mateo, his growing relationship with Anita, and how he finds a hodge-podge family in Henry and Augusto. By the end of the novel, we've seen Mateo survive the physical and emotional horrors of digging the canal. He has matured into an intelligent, caring young man who shares his love of the natural world with Anita, his new bride.

Migration of Blue Morpho butterflies.

If you're like me, you'll finish Silver People wanting to learn more about the Panama Canal. Check out PBS's "Then & Now: The Panama Canal" on The American Experience.

You might also like Margarita's other novels in verse. One of my favorites is The Lightning Dreamer: Cuba's Greatest Abolitionist.

Thanks for sharing your
books with us, Margarita!

Margarita Engle is the Cuban-American author of The Surrender Tree, which received the first Newbery Honor ever awarded to a Latino/a.  Her young adult verse novels have also received multiple Pura Belpré Awards and Honors, as well as three Américas Awards, the Claudia Lewis Poetry Award, a Lee Bennett Hopkins Honor, and the Jane Addams Peace Award, among others.

Margarita’s newest verse novel is Silver People, Voices From the Panama Canal.

Books for younger children include Mountain Dog, Summer Birds, When You Wander, and Tiny Rabbit’s Big Wish.

Margarita lives in central California, where she enjoys hiding in the forest to help train her husband’s wilderness search and rescue dogs. www.margaritaengle.com

5 Questions for Jeannine Atkins (Part 2)

More of my interview with author Jeannine Atkins about her book Borrowed Names: Poems about Laura Ingalls Wilder, Madam C.J. Walker, Marie Curie and Their Daughters. Part 1 is here.

Jeannine and I have discussed the first two sections of the book, poems about Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder, and Madam C.J. Walker and her daughter A'Lelia. The third portion explores the relationship between Marie Curie and her daughter Irene.

4. In the Marie Curie and Irene Joliot-Curie section, there is a poem called “Between Gardens.” Irene is both fascinated by “the pale blue glow from bowls of crystals” and jealous of the attention her parents give their experiments.

How did you plan this series of poems to show Irene’s shift from resentment of her parents’ work, to becoming a Nobel Laureate for her own scientific work? I’m wondering about plotting with poetry.

The plotting with poetry was fun, as I began with that structure – here’s a daughter who won the same amazing award bestowed upon her mother – and wondered how she got there.

In Irène’s letters to her absent mother, her need for her reads like a scientific fact that she expresses clearly and directly. It’s a different tactic than the more typically feminine one her younger sister chooses, hoping to bring loved ones closer not by stating facts but through charm, clothing, music, and kindness bordering on self-sacrifice. As a child, Irène did resent her mother’s distance, but she never blamed her work. 

In “Without School Bells,” I wrote about how Irène needs “to comprehend the laws of radiance, reflection, refraction./Every question and answer binds her/ to the one world her mother loves.”

So she became closer to, or maybe sought to understand, her mother through the science. Irene is the only daughter in your book with a sister. It's interesting how Curie's daughters (pictured with Curie below) used different coping skills to handle their mother's focus on her work.

5. How has working on this book – and now, seeing how readers respond to it – enriched you as a poet and writer? What did you learn in the process?

It’s opened up a world to me, and I’m grateful for every reader who’s found something in my words. I still tend to think of myself as more of a story-teller than a poet, and of course these poems are held together with narrative arcs. 

The imagery and pace of poetry, the way I could choose over and over where to begin and end a section, and let that hold some power, seemed the best way to tell the stories of these women’s lives, leaving small clues about how they connected while taking their own particular courses. I like the process of building up, then taking away. Sorting through all the details of a life to find ones that seem to truly speak. Looking for, and making, patterns from the small things that might be found on a kitchen table or a porch.

Now I’m working hard – trimming, trimming, trimming, looking for the essential words that will show an era when writing began. I’m showing the surfaces of a different language, clothing, vehicles, religion, and politics, and drawing connections through the same sky and similar hearts.


It's quite an achievement. I also appreciate that you did not force comparisons between the three mother-daughter pairings. Instead, the reader creates his or her own threads of understanding among these three distinct stories.


Jeannine, thanks again for visiting. It's been great talking poetry with you!
 

Poetry Friday: 5 Questions for Jeannine Atkins (Part 1)

Have you adjusted to summer yet? My kids have been off school for just over a week. Our little annoyances with one another (like my 13-year-old constantly pestering for more XBox time) seem more annoying at the beginning of summer. Then we learn to cope with the shift in our relationships and settle into summer-normal.

I'm thinking about parent-child relationships today because author and Poetry Friday blogger Jeannine Atkins is visiting. Hi, Jeannine!

Jeannine's book, Borrowed Names: Poems about Laura Ingalls Wilder, Madam C.J. Walker, Marie Curie and Their Daughters is a trio of historical relationship studies -- all in verse. Look at the *display bling* Borrowed Names had at ALA last weekend.

That's a rainbow of stars!

Jeannine discovered that all three famous women she profiles were born in the same year -- and all three had daughters who influenced their own professional lives. So Jeannine began a journey of research, writing and finally a wonderful book (2010, Henry Holt). I can't wait until my daughter (now 10) is old enough to read and discuss Borrowed Names.

1. You wrote a blog post for the journal Hunger Mountain  about beginning this book project in prose, then shifting to poetry. How did poetic form open up these mother-daughter stories for you?

I love the way that line breaks in poetry can emphasize words in the cutting way we’ve practiced as half-grown daughters, letting phrases turn sharp as an angle of an eyebrow, the spin of a turning back. And as a mother of a teen, I grew practiced in editing, thinking: Is this a thought I need to say? Moving the stories to poetry added some of silence’s tension, the way it does in a conversation, especially one between people who love each other, but also often crave a space away.

Believe me, this is also true for mothers and half-grown sons. I like the point about the tensions poetry can create with the silence of line breaks and spaces between stanzas. It's a way of listening to the poem's voice.

2. When you went back to Laura Ingalls Wilder’s books, what did you find there that felt poetic? How did her (and daughter Rose’s) writing style inform your poems about them?

I love the Little House books, but they feel more sturdy to me than spare as they move through the premise that people can and do go on… and on. Which has its own thrill, but it’s not so poetic. The connections and distance between the novels and the lives they were based on most inspired me, just as the difference between Louisa May Alcott’s real life and the somewhat idealized Little Women moved me to write a novel for middle readers called Becoming Little Women.

I was surprised to learn from your book how involved Rose was in the writing of her mother's books. There must be some interesting surprises for Alcott fans in Becoming Little Women.

3. One of my favorite poems in the book is “Pieces” – about Madam C.J. Walker and her daughter A’Lelia. The poem asks how A’Lelia can “bear to be the girl/ who demands so much giving up” from her mother. The adolescent daughter seems to be criticizing how she treats her mother, but is unable to stop herself. That feels very modern.

Can you talk about blending historical facts with moments like this – where we could be talking about a mother and daughter of 2010? How did writing poems help you weave together history and the rawness of these women’s relationships?

It’s always a question about how much of the present to bring to the past, but I tend to believe that while people may have dressed differently, read differently, and sat on different furniture, there’s more that remains the same than has changed.

Reading books written in the nineteenth century, we find more sentimentality about the mother- daughter relationship, as well, of course, about much else, such as the true labor of child-bearing or the difficulties of marriage. Good manners are more present in depictions of family life, and some habits must have gone deep. Daughters probably did feel a keener sense of dependency on mothers who might be their midwives or at least likelier to be neighbors.

But the daughters in this book came of age on the cusp of modern period. Virginia Woolf wrote, “On or about December 1910 human character changed.” Of course her tone is slightly arch, but the daughters in Borrowed Names lived through a time when the first world war brought enormous fear and tragedy, the suffrage movement and fights for civil rights were strengthened, definitions of what makes good art and music widened, and science was becoming increasingly rooted in worlds visible only to specialists. These daughters were going to live in quite different worlds than the ones their mothers had grown up in, and there were bound to be struggles as they found their places alone and together.

That's a good point about the daughters being aware they would inhabit different worlds than their mothers. A'Lelia Walker and Irene Joliot-Curie must have been particularly attuned to this, because they saw their mothers creating some of the changes you mention -- civil and women's rights, entrepreneurship, scientific progress.

More of my interview with Jeannine later today. While you're waiting for Part 2, check out more Poetry Friday offerings at Amy's blog, The Poem Farm. Or , go directly to Jeannine's awesome blog.