1. Thanksgiving may not be a moveable feast, but it is a fluid concept. When I was a child, Grammy Field's table included turkey, sage stuffing and dressing (we distinguish between what's cooked in the bird and what's baked alongside it), riced potatoes, gravy, squash, big boiled onions (not on my plate, though), mixed sweet pickles (loved those pickled onions and the pickled cauliflower), a gelatin salad that often featured raspberries and walnuts, coleslaw, celery sticks, rolls, and, for dessert, a variety of pies. My mother and her four sisters all contributed. Grammy was WCTU, so the men went out for a nip in the barn.

Now, at my parents' house, we have turkey and stuffing, mashed potatoes, gravy, squash, green beans for my brother-in-law, canned pearl onions in Campbell's cream of mushroom soup for my husband (on my plate, too), cranberry jelly, a gelatin salad that includes cottage cheese and horseradish and is much tastier than it sounds, coleslaw, black olives, rolls, and apple and pumpkin pie. HH and I brought wine. Because my mother, sister and I are the only three cooks, the menu is more a matter of who likes what and who can eat what than it is of who brings what. But it's still Thanksgiving.

2. What jeannineatkins described as "a day between" is working out well. No shopping for me, but a quiet house and a chance to work with deliberation. Also, to do a bit of pure pleasure reading (remember what that was?).

3. I've been giving a lot of thought to my writing life lately, perhaps because it has felt like there wasn't much of one. Over the next few weeks, I'll be making some changes. Stay tuned.

4. Registration opens soon for the next Novel Writing Retreat at Vermont College of Fine Arts. This is Sarah Aronson and Cindy Faughnan's sixth such event and they are The Best! This year, E. Lockhart and Uma Krishnaswami are the featured novelists and Nancy Mercado of Roaring Brook is the featured editor. This is a terrific opportunity to meet other writers, hear from professionals, and spend some time working on your own. The date is March 19-21. For more information you can email sarah.n.aronson at gmail dot com.

5. Snow is in the forecast. I'm no downhill skier, but I welcome it all the same. As the dark days descend, I am reminded of the Native American tradition of telling stories in the dark of winter. It's time for me to do the same.

If you think this image is a bit retro, you're right.

For many years, HH has fondly recalled the Pilgrims and the turkey his mother used to decorate the table at Thanksgiving. Toward the end of The Great Sorting I was clearing a cupboard full of vases and decorative planters. One container was a heavy leaded crystal oval bowl with deep, deeply ribbed like an acorn squash. Because it was heavy, I didn't want to lift it down until I knew it was empty. Tentatively--because you never knew what you might touch--I reached my hand over the side. Whatever it contained was hard--to my great relief--and I picked pulled it out. It was the boy. Remembering my husband's recollections, I reached again. The girl. Was the set going to be completed--not something I could count on in the house of 3, 5, and 7 glasses. I reached again. The turkey! All were in good shape.

I took them out to the garage, where I could hear HH.
"Look what I found."

"I remember those!"

"Shall we keep them?"

They will join my mother-in-law's creamed onions (canned onions, cream of mushroom soup--I know, not local, not slow, but HH's favorite) in our family Thanksgiving tradition, along with my mother's homemade stuffing (cooked inside the bird! thank you very much), and the story of the Thanksgiving we had pre-fried chicken instead of turkey (the grocery store apologized nicely with a standing rib roast on Friday, but lack of turkey made for a lackluster holiday far from family).

When it comes to being thankful, this year, being done with The Great Sorting tops my list.

However you feast tomorrow, may it be filled with family, friends, and your own treasured traditions!

This clip about a new iPhone app that provides picture books is interesting:

http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=5670175n

What struck me most were the contrasting poses. When the preschooler is engaged with the iPhone app, he's upright and in an "I'm playing" posture. At the very end, when he's with the book in a parent's lap, he's leaning back, relaxed.

There are two very different things going on here. Which is fine.

I would be most concerned if the second ever goes away. Because I think that lap time, that relaxed pose, is important. And I wonder how much of preschooler's love of books has to do with hearing the parent's voice and feeling the vibrations that voice makes, both in the parent's body and in the child's own--and if the parent is their mother, if there isn't some connection between the voice of the reading parent and what the child experienced in utero. Whatever it is, it's the physical closeness of reading a book with a real person that, IMHO, helps young children fall in love with reading.

Also, as someone posted on the New England SCBWI listserv--what happens when the preschooler wants to share the story with Goldie Fish in the family acquarium?

There's such a difference between a regular Saturday and a vacation Saturday, even when the vacation will be spent at home. I'm starting to feel like I might actually someday be caught up at home.

I made seven pints of applesauce with the last of the drops. That's almost the end of the preserving for the year. I have some blackberries in the freezer, thanks to Sis. Sometime in the next three days, they will become jelly. Then I'll be able to clean the freezer and order a quarter of beef to fill it.

I also baked a mince pie--HH and I are the only ones in the family who enjoy it, so it's our pre-Thanksgiving treat. For mincemeat lovers who lives in northern Vermont or adjoining New York, Claire's Country Garden makes the best homemade green tomato mincemeat. Seriously. It's tangy and sweet and spicey all at the same time.

The recovery from The Great Sorting continues. I boxed photos today, ones that will be turned into Christmas cards this year, as well as some that we will use for general birthday and greeting cards for years to come. All gleaned from the dozen or so flats of photos HH sorted:





(Seeing is believing.)

I also looked through a First Lieutenant's field bag, circa 1944-1945. There's something eerie about reading "SNAFU" when it was a new coinage, not to mention seeing "Secret" maps of the Dutch-German border.

As much as there truly was an overwhelming amount of stuff to sort, there are some things I am so glad weren't tossed out decades ago.

Finally, in the interest of moving one box out of my house, I scanned some photos for a non-profit I'm serve in, so they'll be available for the website. Now the originals, in their box, can go to the designated archives--about a year after I had hoped to have them there.

How does Shaun Tan do it?!

Here's his story of Eric, the foreign exchange student, as posted in The Guardian. It made me want to email some of the Rotary Exchange host families I know. But it's Friday and I'm beat. So I'm posting it here instead. This sort of consciousness-altering experience has to be shared.

Because calling it catch up day would be too ordinary.

Tests corrected. Group project for class finally, finally, finally printed to pdf (about a month later than I had expected). Lunch. Mail. I've been LJ-surfing while I wait for an editor (magazine-type) to call. But, time to stop procrastinating and --dare I say it--tackle one of my own projects.

In an excuse from a student: "I wasn't in class today because my roommate may have swine flu. She's sick and one of her co-workers was diagnosed with swine flu. So I'm staying away from public places until I know whether I need to see a doctor and nip it in the butt."

I like it. Don't you?

I am so impressed with the thoughtfulness of the comments to my previous post on The Future of the Book that I had to continue the conversation further.


lurban's point that books will exist as objects for children, as they do now, underscores the importance of real (as opposed to virtual) play for young children. Children need hands-on experience with the physical world, which is one of the reasons elementary school teachers use "manipulatives" to teach math concepts. Books also stimulate the imagination in a way that, for reasons I have yet to figure out, screens do not. patty1943's "non-reader grandson" confirms for me that this is not an either-or situation ( I'm not really sure he can be called a non-reader if he loves that book, maybe just not an avid reader).

All the comments have one thing in common--the book will continue. I have to agree. That is what happens. One form doesn't fully replace another, as jongibbs noted. If you think about it, the broadsheets that were common in the 17th Century (and earlier?) are still with us--as posters. Even though the college where I teach is fully networked and classes must all have some sort of on-line presence (minimally, the syllabus must be posted), the bathrooms are still plastered with posters and announcements, most of them put up by student groups.

Although I don't have one, I can see where e-readers would be useful, especially if you travel a great deal or are able (as I am not) to take public transportation to work. Like audio books, they have their place. I can even see myself owning one someday. All the same, I'm not going to get rid of my personal library, because my library is not the collection of books I have read. Instead, it is the collection of books I have read and decided I would want to read and re-read and dog-ear and underline and otherwise make part of my life. These are the books I pull off the shelf and flip open at the very page I want (or really close to it). These physical books have associations--the Wallace Stevens I bought for class in graduate school, the novels of Barbara Kingsolver that blew me away the first time I read them, the Pride and Prejudice that I have read so often the binding is now breaking, which reminds me of the year I spent in Vienna as well as the many times I have moved it. The novels of Georgette Heyer, doyenne of Regency romance writers, that I turn to when I'm sick or need comfort--this one almost a replacement collection for the ones I sold when I thought I needed more shelf space and could spare them (I obviously couldn't).

So, I'd break it down like this--for books as commodities, consumables in the sense of one-read and basta, e-readers make perfect sense. But for books as objects, repositories, re-usable resources of the mind, physical books will continue on.

What do you all think? Do you own e-readers? What do you use them for? Do you still buy books? If so, what kind and why?
Inquiring minds want to know.

Last night, at a writing-related meeting, the topic of the future of the book came up.

I have seen the future and there are no ink-and-paper books in it, said one person. And no book stores.

I'm not so sure about that. I'm really happy to have all kinds of information, especially factual, available in electronic form, but I think and believe that there will continue to be a place for physical books. Moreover, I think it is essential for children's development that they experience physical books. Books offer tactile, sensual experience. They offer babies control they don't have in very many parts of their life--the baby decides when to turn the page, to turn back the page, to chew the book, to stare and touch, and wear it as a hat or step on it. To drop the book and go back to it later for immediate return to wherever. A real object in a real world, in other words.

What do you think? Are e-books going to replace ink-and-paper children's books completely?

Twenty years ago this evening I was a relatively new mother, walking my colicky baby around the livingroom until it was late enough in the day for a warm bath to take effect.

Tears streamed down my cheeks.

They weren't because I was tired, or wished the colicky period would pass.

They were tears of joy, because the Germans had broken through the Berlin Wall.

I had seen the Wall. I had been on both sides of it. I had seen the ruins that remained in the East. Important reminders about not repeating the past, they also spoke of a lack of resources.

I had been under the Wall, riding the subway from West to West by passing underneath the East, where armed guards stood in the shadows of closed subway stops, stops marked with their original signs--Alexanderplatz, Unter den Linden, Potsdamer Platz.

I had gone through Checkpoint Charlie. I had seen the border guard pause as he compared my companion's passport photo with her face, the tension only broken when she explained the difference in hairstyle as a Dauerwelle (permanent), and then his quick flash of smile, as much for the ease of her German (not English) as anything else, I suspect.

The Wall, and the government that erected it, have left their scars, as did the war--even if the ruins have all finally been cleared. 

Today, though, as I did 20 years ago, I find myself with tears on my cheeks, because of the power of people, when they work for good, and because, at least in one part of the world, a whole generation has grown up not knowing what it means to live in a divided country.

There's more to say, but I won't. Instead, I'll quote Robert Frost: "Something there is that doesn't like a wall."

I've got candy, but that's it for this house this Halloween. No cornstalks, no jack o'lanterns, no bats, no shrieks in the night. (We're still playing catch up after The Great Sorting.)

But I'm feeling a bit nostalgic.

You see, my parents got married on Halloween (long story), and so, many years, we'd be enjoying a candlelit steak dinner at home while the trick-or-treaters knocked on the door. As Oldest Daughter, I was the one who answered, and the looks on their faces, as they peeped past me into the dining room were always priceless. You would have thought we were the Adams Family. (BD, imagine Grandma and Grampa as Gomez and Morticia.


Ok. Now. That's enough laughing.)

And, with BD in Galway, I'm also remembering the first Halloween costume she chose for herself, in preschool, when she came home in late September and announced, "I'm going to be a sunflower for Halloween." Thank goodness for tissue paper and fabric scraps, and a month of planning time.

  --Not the best scan, but it gives you the idea.

Now, time to can applesauce.

Even if I wrote science fiction, I still wouldn't be Douglas Adams--for any number of reasons, but today best of all for the way I am unable to say, "I love deadlines. I love the sound they make as they go whizzing by."

I'm more of a "deadlines concentrate the mind" sort of person. Today's results: A draft of a completed draft of a 1200 word feature I began yesterday for a magazine (due Friday), 500 words on a local German dinner fundraiser, and 775 words on the local American Legion post for an upcoming newspaper with a focus on Veteran's day, both due tomorrow.

That's a lot of words for me, an amount I am never able to accomplish for fiction. I wonder why that is. Someday maybe I'll figure the secret out.

In case you're wondering why I'm ahead of deadlines--I've got another big one next week and I need to do some research for that one, but can only keep so many stories in my mind at one time. (Almost wrote in the air, there, definitely a sign I should stop for supper.)

But while I'm off enjoying leftover chicken a la king, tell me what deadlines do to you. Do you panic, do you ignore them, do you find a way to fake them out? Share your secrets.

I'll never--oh, come on, of course I'll tell. That's what LJ's all about, finding people who share your fears and dreams and neuroses.

Thanks to jongibbsfor starting this train of thought:

If I ruled the world:

1) Everyone would "walk on the left, drive on the right," as they were intended to from the beginning.

2) Cyclists would obey traffic signals like the vehicles they are, and, when traveling in a group, they'd also ride single file, not two or three abreast in the driving lane, even when they're on a country road.

3) People would once again bring only homebaked goods to a bake sale. Store-bought fools no one.

4) We'd have a national spring cleaning day--say the 2nd Saturday in April--when we'd all clear out our closets and cupboards. That would mean there would be no Great Sorting, but I'd be willing to live with that.

5) Weeks would be 8 days long, so we could have a day to get caught up after the work week and still have a two-day weekend.

6) Toilet seats would automatically lower after a five-minute interval. You know what I'm talking about!

7) Every village would have a cafe with wi-fi.

8) No one would talk-and-block in the grocery store--talking on their cell phone while pushing their cart and otherwise being generally oblivious to those around them.

9) Grocery stores (or supermarkets, which are no longer so super) would not block what were once aisles wide enough for two carts to pass with special bump-out displays, thereby rendering the aisles not wide enough for two carts to pass.

10) Refrigerators, pantries and cupboards would magically restock themselves once a week. Or. Grocery lists would magically write themselves and take themselves to the store to shop.



That's all I've got. How about you?

So here's the question of the week.

When did cheesy become the adjective du jour?

I ask because it seems to be reasonably popular among my college students, who are juniors and seniors. It seems to be disparaging, although sometimes mildly so, as in "That's cheesy, but it's ok."

I'm wondering if it's rhyming slang, as in "rhymes with sleazy,"--[edited to add] although the students don't seem to use it the way I would--cheap and easy/sleazy. With them, it's more that someone or something is predictable, cliche, possibly non-ironic? It's the migration in meaning that has me puzzled.

When I heard the sad news about Norma Fox Mazer, an image flashed into my mind.

We were all gathered at what is now Vermont College of Fine Arts for one of the absolutely splendid novel writing retreats organized by saraharonson and cfaughnan Norma Fox Mazer was one of the guest authors that year. I still remember how closely we all listened as she gave her craft talk, and when she spoke of the upstate New York landscape, she made it real for everyone, not only those who knew the area.

She was a powerful writer, with a stature for greater than her physical self. Although she will be sorely missed, she leaves a powerful legacy.

Home's Best

I think it's been about 10 months since I had a "normal" Saturday. (I can't say "we," because HH had to go to a workshop today). It was very strange--in a completely good way--to be able to move through the house tidying up and stopping for a cup of tea every so often, without feeling like I needed to rush, rush, rush because next weekend we'd be back at The Great Sorting. I sorted out BD's room so I had space to put the clothes while I was making the switch from summer to winter clothes. After being cold most of this week,  I finally got out the wool sweaters and turtlenecks, and put the shorts (that I wore very little this summer) and T-shirts back into the trunks.

I spent a couple hours in the garden,  pulling the weeds and I took down the bean trellis. I also wondered why I had bothered with a garden this summer. (We kept thinking TGS would be over.)

Now it's time to make some cornbread to go with the chili that simmered all afternoon, and put my feet up.

Tomorrow, off to my parent's for my father's 83rd birthday.

Next weekend--there's nothing on the calendar!

Last weekend was the Burlington Book Festival. This weekend was the League of Vermont Writers annual fall meeting. We held it at the Bishop Booth Conference Center, which looks like this on a sunny day:



Today was not sunny. It was cool and rainy and gray unless you were where you could see the foliage, which burned with all the colors of the fire HH started after I arrived home.

But it was a great meeting, because of the speakers:

Jim DeFilippi, who decided to put all his novels on line for free, and told us why. You'll find his work at http://jimdefilippi.com/ .

Joe Citro, Vermont's master of all things that go bump in the night, and possibly in the daytime as well. Joe shared the ups and downs of his publishing career, which is headed back up the publishing roller coaster, with the appearance of his latest: The Vermont Monster Guide.

David Weinstock, a poet, copy writer, and marvelous teacher, who led us in a workshop to make our writing stronger. A sampling of David's poetry is here, and his blog is here, although it hasn't been updated in a while. One of the exercises he asked us to do was to break the rules as often as possible. Since I have no problem breaking many of the writing rules (split infinitives, prepositions at the ends of sentences, sentence fragments, using "I", using contractions), I chose to try to break the "show, don't tell" rule. That one was tough and I can't say I succeeded. But now I'm thinking about why it is that that rule, of all the rules, is so difficult, especially since it is one I learned more recently than school.

What made it great? We learned and we laughed.  Educare et delectare--The old dead Latin dudes knew a thing or two for sure, I'm going to try to keep this in mind, even as I break more of the Latin-based "rules" for writing in English, those ones that we all learned in school.

The latest entry in my occasional series of Book Trialer reviews is for Janet Lawler's Tyrannoclaus






The illustrations that are shared tell you so much--this book brings together Christmas and dinosaurs (what a brilliant concept!), is mellow and reassuring in tone,. My favorite shows the sweatered dinosaur sleeping on his back.
The narrator's mellow voice keeps the same tone as the illustration and tells you a lot about the intended audience: This is a read-aloud picturebook, one meant for preschoolers. A different voice quoting from the book itself adds variety and fun, and lets you know this book rhymes. Finally, the book trailer length--less than two minutes--is what you'd want for preschoolers, their parents, and teachers.

kellyrfinemanposted the Radcliffe Top 100, italicizing those she's read and using boldface on those that have been banned somewhere. It seems like a great idea to me.

1. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
2. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
3. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
4. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
5. The Color Purple by Alice Walker
6. Ulysses by James Joyce
7. Beloved by Toni Morrison
8. The Lord of the Flies by William Golding
9. 1984 by George Orwell
10. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
11. Lolita by Vladmir Nabokov
12. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
13. Charlotte's Web by E. B. White
14. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
15. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
16. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
17. Animal Farm by George Orwell
18. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
19. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
20. A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
21. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
22. Winnie-the-Pooh by A. A. Milne
23. Their Eyes are Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
24. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
25. Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
26. Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
27. Native Son by Richard Wright
28. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
29. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
30. For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
31. On the Road by Jack Kerouac
32. The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
33. The Call of the Wild by Jack London
34. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
35. Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
36. Go Tell it on the Mountain by James Baldwin
37. The World According to Garp by John Irving
38. All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren
39. A Room with a View by E. M. Forster
40. The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien
41. Schindler's List by Thomas Keneally
42. The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
43. The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
44. Finnegans Wake by James Joyce
45. The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
46. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
47. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum
48. Lady Chatterley's Lover by D. H. Lawrence
49. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
50. The Awakening by Kate Chopin
51. My Antonia by Willa Cather
52. Howards End by E. M. Forster
53. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
54. Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger
55. The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
56. Jazz by Toni Morrison
57. Sophie's Choice by William Styron
58. Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner
59. A Passage to India by E. M. Forster
60. Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton
61. A Good Man Is Hard to Find by Flannery O'Connor
62. Tender Is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
63. Orlando by Virginia Woolf
64. Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence
65. Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe
66. Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
67. A Separate Peace by John Knowles
68. Light in August by William Faulkner
69. The Wings of the Dove by Henry James
70. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
71. Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
72. A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
73. Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs
74. Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
75. Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence
76. Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe
77. In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway
78. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein
79. The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett
80. The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer
81. Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
82. White Noise by Don DeLillo
83. O Pioneers! by Willa Cather
84. Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller
85. The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells
86. Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad
87. The Bostonians by Henry James
88. An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
89. Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather
90. The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
91. This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald
92. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
93. The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles
94. Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis
95. Kim by Rudyard Kipling
96. The Beautiful and the Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald
97. Rabbit, Run by John Updike
98. Where Angels Fear to Tread by E. M. Forster
99. Main Street by Sinclair Lewis
100. Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie

Some, like Brideshead Revisited, I've started to read but couldn't get into, and some are just not for me at a certain moment. Which brings me to a point made at the panel discussion at the Burlington Book Festival. Children are very good at deciding when something isn't right for them. Chances are, if they want to read something, it's what they need to be reading for whatever reason. 

Book Festivals are great, especially when they aren't that far from where you live.

Here's what I got to do as a volunteer at the Burlington Book Festival this weekend:

1) Hear the marvelous Rita Dove read from her latest work, Sonata Mulattica. The work itself was amazing, but by being there for the reading, I got to hear her talk about the process, and about closing herself in while she worked to find the right voice, not too formal, not too contemporary, for this work of poetry about people and events of the nineteenth century. (Friday)

2) Hear jbknowles, lurban, kmessner, tanyaleestone, and julieberrygive a panel on children's writing and their process. The audience had great questions, too. Plus, I picked up some autographed copies to add to my collection. (One of the drawbacks of book festivals--how do I fit the books I bought onto already full shelves? Eeek!) (Saturday)
 
3) Hear two up-and-coming poets: Chris Lawless and Jillian Towles. Chris is a recent Champlain College grad with a voice and a presence that should certainly go far. Jillian is in her second year at Champlain and already up to giving a public reading of material that shows real mastery. (Sunday)

4) Hear and see an evocative presentation by Daniel Lusk, who has written poetry about the underwater world of Lake Champlain and combined it with  music and video footage and stills for a unique and evocative presentation. (Sunday)

Maybe it was just being surrounded with all this poetry, but at a certain point this afternoon I found myself reaching for the pad and pen, because I had an idea for a poem and also a title for a picture book that will give me the spine to hang the rest of the book on. I hope.


Thanks to both kmessnerand patesdenfor plugging the League of Vermont Writers and the Leagues July 2010 Conference!

It was lovely to come home through the rain and falling colored leaves to a hot spaghetti supper and a fire in the woodstove. HH knows how to treat a tired writer.