Showing posts sorted by relevance for query come to earth. Sort by date Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query come to earth. Sort by date Show all posts

8/6/21

Ladybug Nominee


If You Come to Earth
by Sophie Blackall (Chronicle Books, 2020)

If you come to Earth, there are a few things you need to know... We live in all kinds of places. In all kinds of homes. In all kinds of families. Each of us is different. But all of us are amazing. And, together, we share one beautiful planet. Inspired by the thousands of children she has met during her travels around the world in support of UNICEF and Save the Children, Sophie Blackall has created a glorious guide to our home planet. Far more than a simple compendium, it is a call for us to take care of both Earth and each other.

About Sophie Blackall

Sophie Blackall has illustrated many books, including the Ivy + Bean series, and Ruby's Wish. She has twice won the Caldecott medal. Originally from Australia, Sophie now specks half her time in Brooklyn, NY and half her time on planes and boats and trains, trying to see as much of our world as she can. Her web site is https://www.sophieblackall.com

Activities & Links

This is one of ten titles nominated for the 2021 Ladybug Picture Book Award.
We will be posting information about a different nominee each Friday throughout the summer and will issue a pdf voters guide featuring all ten titles at Labor Day.

5/28/18

Book of the Week (5/28/2018)

Summer Hours at the Robbers Library: A Novel by Sue Halpern (New York : Harper Perennial, 2018).

From journalist and author Sue Halpern comes a wry, observant look at contemporary life and its refugees.  Halpern’s novel is an unforgettable tale of family…the kind you come from and the kind you create.

People are drawn to libraries for all kinds of reasons. Most come for the books themselves, of course; some come to borrow companionship. For head librarian Kit, the public library in Riverton, New Hampshire, offers what she craves most: peace. Here, no one expects Kit to talk about the calamitous events that catapulted her out of what she thought was a settled, suburban life. She can simply submerge herself in her beloved books and try to forget her problems.
But that changes when fifteen-year-old, home-schooled Sunny gets arrested for shoplifting a dictionary. The judge throws the book at Sunny—literally—assigning her to do community service at the library for the summer. Bright, curious, and eager to connect with someone other than her off-the-grid hippie parents, Sunny coaxes Kit out of her self-imposed isolation. They’re joined by Rusty, a Wall Street high-flyer suddenly crashed to earth.

In this little library that has become the heart of this small town, Kit, Sunny, and Rusty are drawn to each other, and to a cast of other offbeat regulars. As they come to terms with how their lives have unraveled, they also discover how they might knit them together again and finally reclaim their stories. --Author's website

3/18/15

Q&A: Terry Farish


Terry Farish
(photo by
Ty Paterson)
There are a lot of wonderful writers living in our state. As the Director of the NH Center for the Book  I get the opportunity to talk to many of them. This interview series of Q&As with New Hampshire authors here on Book Notes lets me share that experience a bit with my blog readers. 

If someone hasn't read your work yet, where should they start?
I invite you to read The Good Braider.  It is a novel in verse for adults and young adults that follows the life of a young girl who escapes war in Sudan, flees with her mother to Cairo, and together they resettle in Portland, Maine. Writing The Good Braider became the focus of my life for many years as I listened to and recorded oral histories with refugees in Maine. The book guided my writing path and opened doors for me to continue telling the stories of new Americans and the extraordinary dance among cultures that newcomers - over generations - learn. And about long-time Americans who see U.S. culture ever changing. 

When did you first think of yourself as a writer?
I can't say when I became one.  It's just my life. My writing students and I have had conversations about whether they should choose to be a writer. Writers have a hunger to reveal, or be a witness to, or interpret life, and we just do it out of necessity. I have a room in the top of my house where I go before the sun's up on my lucky days.  And I immerse myself in the fictional world I'm working on.  Writing is a meditation.  The business of writing is something else and requires me to leave my upstairs room and be a sort of business person.

How did you end up living in NH?
I first came to New Hampshire when I married an air force officer with a fighter wing at Pease Air Force Base; my first job here was at the Rochester Public Library, an old Carnegie library where I worked with people who awed me and introduced me to NH, and I learned how to mend the bindings of old novels which I liked doing. 

Where do you like to write?
I can write absolutely anywhere. I love writing on airplanes and buses and trains and have sorted out difficult tangles in writing when I'm in motion. In fact a lot of my writing happens when I'm walking. I take scenes I'm working on into the woods with me and my dog, and I come home with dialogue and details I hadn’t known.  My favorite place to compose is my upstairs room in the early, early morning as the light comes.

How important is place in your writing?
My characters are shaped by place.  But I might change the word place to include culture because there are so many cultures in a place.  People are shaped by the cultures they call home, whether it be the culture of fishermen on the NH Seacoast or a community of women who braid hair while around them there is war.  They carry the places of their lives with them and the places become a part of who they are.   And sometimes people are shaped by the yearning for places they have left. One South Sudanese friend told me about her homesickness for a place at war. She said,  "Home is home. Of course I miss home." She missed the smell of the earth by the Nile.

What do you do when you aren't writing?
I'm also a yoga teacher in Portsmouth.  I'm very interested in yoga poses as a metaphor for states of mind we seek to cultivate in ourselves.  I find yoga to be a good practice linking the physical body with writing since ideas begin in the body.

What’s the best piece of advice (writing or otherwise) you were ever given?
What you need is already within you.

What books do you love and what about them speaks to you?
I love so many, many books and am seduced over and over again. This is the best book! No, this is the best book I have ever read!  I go back always to the nobility of the characters in The Old Man and the Sea.  Hemingway breaks my heart again and again when I return to the old man and the boy who wants to fish. I see the book as perfection of language and am drawn in my own work to the precision of Hemingway's words. Another master is Edwidge Danticat who shows us the hearts and hungers of the Haitian people with her exquisite voice.  I would almost use the word sacred when I read Danticat. I keep William Staffford's poems close by.
 
What are you working on now?
I am just finishing a book about a 17-year old girl, Sofie, who is the daughter of a NH fisherman and a Cambodian mother, called Either the Beginning or the End of the World.  It's a story of first love when she meets a soldier returned from Afghanistan. When she tries to understand his war trauma, for the first time in her life she begins to comprehend her mother who was a child survivor of the Pol Pot regime.  Her love for the soldier is the beginning of her grasp of her own identity as both a daughter of her father's New Hampshire Seacoast and of her mother's war.  The title is from a poem by Carolyn Forché "Ourselves or Nothing." The novel is set on the New Hampshire Seacoast and Carolrhoda Lab will publish it in fall, 2015.


You can learn more about Terry Farish and her work at http://terryfarish.com
and at  http://goodbraider.com.  Follow her on Twitter @TerryFarish





8/21/13

Q&A: Howard Mansfield



There are a lot of wonderful writers living in our state. As the Director of the NH Center for the Book  I get the opportunity to talk to many of them. This interview series of Q&As with New Hampshire authors here on Book Notes lets me share that experience a bit with my blog readers.  This month we visit with Howard Mansfield.

If someone hasn't read your work yet, where should they start?
     I would suggest The Bones of the Earth. It’s book about landmarks of the most ordinary kind – sticks and stones, water and trees. It’s about how we know we are home. Like most of my books it is set in New Hampshire, with the exception of an essay exploring of the wonderful mythology of the Washington Elm, which stood in Cambridge, Mass.

When did you first think of yourself as a writer?
     Well, here’s a typical answer: Around 4th grade. Before that I wanted to be Thomas Edison, or an astrophysicist. I was fascinated by astronomy. I had my older brother write for a brochure, “Your Career in Astrophysics.” That brochure changed my life. I can still picture it -- dark brown with black and white photos of men – yes, all men – standing in front of blackboards filled with equations. These guys were grownups but they still had to do math homework! And no one was looking through a telescope. I moved on.

How did you end up living in NH?
     We had a good friend who had reported for The Monadnock Ledger. We were living New Jersey where my wife, Sy Montgomery, was a reporter for a Gannett newspaper. She was leaving, so we could live anywhere. Our friend said we should move to the Monadnock region. It’s beautiful, she said, and the rent is cheap.
     She was – to steal a line from Faulkner -- wrong about the facts but right about the truth. Great place to live, but not cheap. We arrived in the midst of the 1984 boom and found a place to rent only after pleading with the landlord that we were worthy.

Where do you like to write?
     The Chicken Shack. By a stroke of extraordinary good luck our house has a separate studio which was long ago a hen house.  In the morning, tea in hand, I walk down past our barn to a place with no phone, no email, and only the books that I need for what I’m writing.

How important is place in your writing?
     Very important. Let me tell you about my first night in New Hampshire back in 1984. We had convinced the landlord to rent us a little carriage house on the Main St. of a small town.  I arrived first and unpacked our things. My first evening, I took a walk around town. There was a small historical society in an old brick schoolhouse smaller than a two-car garage, which was open only in the summer. Inside it was musty-cool, and as disheveled as an attic.
     I looked at the items on the shelves. The labels were hand-written in perfect, faded, script: “This tassel formed a part of the decorations of the funeral car which carried the remains of the late President Lincoln….”
     The late President Lincoln.
     I snapped to attention. Here was a glimpse of a community in the act of remembering. Here was a community creating its history, choosing the stories it would tell about itself, choosing its ancestors, marking out monuments and holidays – choosing who gets to enter the memory house.
     Next items on the shelf: Hardtack sent home from the Civil War, a drum that may have been used in the Revolution, the parson’s sermon on hearing of the death of Washington: “Know thee not that there is a prince and a great man fall this day in Israel.” And on it went in that small space.
     Memory is a defining characteristic of New England.
     I walked out into the twilight a little bit changed. I had studied American history in college, but I didn’t move to New Hampshire to write about it. At the time I was writing for some architecture and design magazines in New York.
     I kept looking around at town meetings and Franklin Pierce and Mt. Monadnock, and several years later published my first New Hampshire book, In the Memory House.
More summers on ponds and ridge lines, more traveling locally, and other books have followed: The Same Ax, Twice; The Bones of the Earth; Turn and Jump; Dwelling in Possibility, and an anthology I edited about the Monadnock region: Where the Mountain Stands Alone.        
     So although I never planned it, I’m still doing what I did my first night in New Hampshire -- walking around, looking at this place, talking to people, and puzzling over and enjoying this craggy corner of New England.

What do you do when you aren't writing?
     Hike, kayak, visit friends and family, keep the place up, and await my instructions from our Border Collie, Sally. She’s supposed to be a “working dog,” but she has us working for her.
           
What's the best piece of advice (writing or otherwise) you were ever given?
      Go ahead and fail. In college my friends and I read E. B. White. His impressive collected essays had just been published. We admired his work; it set a high standard. One day my best friend came back from the library where he had been reading about the essayist and told me that White had spent time researching a story about the United Nations when it was new, but he had set it aside.
     That was a small revelation. Even E. B. White had started stories he didn’t finish. It’s an important lesson. If you’re going to follow your curiosity there will be many dead ends and wrong turns, but that’s all part of exploring the world.

What books do you love and what about them speaks to you?
     A brief illustration is probably better than a list of books. There is a moment in one of Raymond Carver’s late short stories, “A Small, Good Thing.”  Scotty, a child nearing his birthday, suddenly falls seriously ill. His parents begin waiting in the hospital room with him. Hours become days. Doctors come and go. The little boy is in a coma.  The mother walks over to the window. “She stood at the window with her hands gripping the sill, and knew in her heart that they were into something now, something hard. She was afraid, and her teeth began to chatter until she tightened her jaws. She saw a big car stop in front of the hospital and someone, a woman in a long coat, get into the car. She wished she were that woman and somebody, anybody, was driving her away from here to somewhere else, a place where she would find Scotty waiting for her when she stepped out of the car, ready to say Mom and let her gather him in her arms.”
     Great books are like this scene. They take us deep into a moment and they look out on a world that is changed and unchanging.

What are you working on now?
     A new book to be published September 2013: Dwelling in Possibility. It is a search for the ordinary qualities that make some houses a home, and some public places welcoming. What qualities are missing in our homes? How can we regain them?

What do you want to share that I neglected to ask about?
      As a writer, I rely on, and I am grateful for, Interlibrary Loan (ILL). I am not affiliated with any institution. Through the library in our town, Hancock, I am connected to thousands of libraries. 
     In 2011 there was legislator in the New Hampshire House who thought that ILL was superfluous. He was not reelected and ILL still stands. But these things have a way of coming around again and again, so I wish the legislature would understand two things about this vital service: 1. It is commerce. Writing is my profession. 2. It is culture. I have written seven books that are about New Hampshire.  I’ll have to be immodest here in the interest of stressing what these books have meant to readers. My books have been part of NHPR’s Granite State Reads program and part of the NH Writer Series that is broadcast on NHPTV from UNH. All that’s just a quick way to say that these books are part of New Hampshire’s culture – and these books couldn’t be written without Interlibrary Loan.
Here’s the last thing I wish that the legislature would understand about ILL: It works. It’s not broken so…. Everyone knows how that phrase concludes.