Freelance Ne'er-do-well

Off to Ghana

2012-01-03T18:37:00.001-05:00

Yup. Starting way, way too early tomorrow morning, I'm going here:

Everybody asks, "Why Ghana?" I have to admit, Ghana specifically was not my idea. I had a vague notion that I wanted to go someplace in West Africa, and my friend Lisa has wanted to visit Ghana for years. The more I've learned about the country the happier I am at the choice. It's a country rich in crafts and history, a stable democracy that has done all it can to support its fellow African nations. Judging from my minimal contacts so far, Ghanaians are astonishingly generous: We have been offered help and hospitality in an open-handed fashion makes me ashamed of our Western reserve.

Lisa and I will spend a week in a village in the Volta region through a "voluntourism" organization called GlobeAware, working with local school children and being ferried around to various sites and sights, among them weaving. We'll then spend ten days traveling around the rest of the country.

Speaking of weaving, just LOOK at this cloth:

I won't be participating in this month's round of the Book Review Club. But if you want to read some great reviews, click this icon:

Click icon for more

book review blogs

@Barrie Summy

See you on the flip side!

Book Review Club: December

2011-12-07T10:33:00.001-05:00

Click icon for more
book review blogs
@Barrie Summy

This entry for the Book Review Club is utterly, completely, totally biased. Three friends of mine have books out, and I love the books to bits so I’m bloody well going to tell you about them. I’ve organized them by age: picture book through adult.

I can’t stress enough how prejudiced I am. (Got that, FCC?) One book (GOOD CAT) was even present from the author, who is in my writers group. (I bought the other two.) But I swear, if I didn’t love them I wouldn’t be writing about them at all—I’d just shut up and smile. Really. You can trust me.

Don’t forget to click the icon above for more (unbiased) Book Review Club entries!

How To Be a Good Cat
Written and illustrated by Gail Page

Bloomsbury, 2011

This is Gail Page’s third book featuring Bobo, a huge, clumsy, adorable fool based on her late lamented dog, Gimpel. The New York Times once described Bobo as “the canine Oscar Madison,” and that’s about right.

In his earlier adventures—HOW TO BE A GOOD DOG and BOBO AND THE NEW NEIGHBOR—Bobo learned how to sit and stay, and succumbed to a muffin temptation that taught him to share. This time around, Bobo is saintly (we see him sweeping the floor and dusting the cake) but beleaguered by a kitten named Bonkers.

In simple, boldly colored illustrations, he tries to apply his hard-won know-how by teaching Bonkers to sit and stay. No dice. The little menace knocks over the fish bowl, unrolls the toilet paper, and pulls down the curtains.

Fortunately, Bobo still lives with Cat, the deadpan savant who rescued him in the previous two books. Cat gives Bobo a crash course in feline behavior, and the final page finds Bobo and Bonkers sharing the one thing a dog can teach anyone: a cat nap.

As a painter and illustrator, Gail is a brilliant fool herself. Bobo and Cat live with Mrs. Birdhead, who inexplicably wears a contraption on her head that provides a home for a small bird. Bobo has the outlook and mannerisms of a real dog, but he’s always on his hind legs and enjoys a bubble bath complete with back-scrubber and rubber ducky. Bonkers is the uber-kitten, insanely cute and insanely insane.

This level of whimsy is a delight to all ages, one to a hundred and one. It even delights the curmudgeon I live with. A book can meet no greater challenge. (Click on the pictures to appreciate them larger.)

Circus Galacticus

By Deva Fagan

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011

Ever want to run away and join the circus? What if the Big Top were a spaceship, being pursued by opposing sets of intergalactic bad guys and/or bureaucrats?

When the chance presents itself to Beatrix Ling, a talented teenage gymnast whose hair has turned pink overnight, she doesn’t hesitate for a minute. Her life on earth is dreary: Her parents are dead, and she’s in a boarding school where everyone looks down on her. Among its other charms Circus Galacticus has the Ringmaster, a sequined mystery-man who insists that Trix’s pink hair proves she belongs in the Big Top.

The Ringmaster and crew are Tinkers, outcasts blessed with wildly diverse colors, shapes and skills. The Tinkers are on the lam from the militantly conformist Mandate and from an intergalactic government that has outlawed them both. Trix, whose parents entrusted her with a mysterious rock before they died, has already had a visit from one of the Mandate’s henchmen, a creep in a silver gas-mask who tried to take the rock from her.

Trix isn’t sure she’s a Tinker, but she’d sure like to belong somewhere. Her efforts to fit in among the circus’s other young adults are every bit as important to the story as the larger issues of diversity and self-determination.

Written for younger teens (Amazon has it as ages nine and up), CIRCUS GALACTICUS is Deva Fagan’s third fantasy but her first foray into science fiction. It’s heavier on the fantasy than the science, which is the way I personally like my SF, and the emphasis is on characterization. I was in Trix’s head and heart from page one, and I’m totally in love with the Ringmaster—he’s Doctor Who with humility and real sweetness.

Settle down with this book the day after Christmas. It’ll be your reward for making it through the season.

All My Dogs
By Bill Henderson
Drawings by Leslie Moore
David R. Godine, 2011

Bill Henderson is the founding publisher of the Pushcart Press and its famous Pushcart Prize. But mostly he’s a story-teller, as evidenced by this and the four memoirs that preceded it.

If you’ve read any of his previous accounts (HIS SON, HER FATHER, TOWER, SIMPLE GIFTS), you think you know Bill’s story well enough to be leery of another version. Turns out that if you want to make an old story new and fresh and charming, you simply add a dog. Or ten.

I have read three of the earlier books, and yet I couldn’t put this one down. I love dogs every bit as much as Bill Henderson does, but I’ve never paid that much attention to what they were teaching me. Bill’s chief gift is that he does pay attention.

Here, for example, is his recollection of the day in the early 50s when his dog Trixie won “Best in Show” at the elementary school pet exhibition.

She and I walked home together waving her blue ribbon, gushing in victory. (Gushing was another of Pop’s verbotens. Men of that era were supposed to be reserved.) Trixie gushed whenever she felt like it. She barked when it suited her, danced on her hind feet when asked, and charged around our house and yard possessed by her dog’s wonder of each second. She was a supreme gusher. Years later I would remember that lesson from her—it was OK to dance and wonder and gush.

I barely survived the tale of the later dogs Ellen and Rocky—I won’t tell you about it, partly because you shouldn’t know and partly because I’ll start sobbing. Each of the ten dogs Bill’s known has a tale (so to speak) of wonder or poignancy or insight. They are enriched by pencil drawings of each dog by Leslie Moore.

Read this one New Year’s Day, for solace and resolve.

EDITED TO ADD: I just realized I left out an important point (that's what I get for quitting coffee). Bill Henderson has had an extremely entertaining life--running the gamut from New York partying to religious revelation--and he tells it well. This is not an animal sob story. It's fun and funny, although also insightful.

Book Review Club: November

2011-11-02T14:41:00.000-04:00

Click icon for more
book review blogs
@Barrie Summy

Phew! Running around like a madwoman today, but now it’s time to take a deep breath and contemplate the simple joys. Don’t forget to click the icon at the top for more reviews!

Red Sled

By Lita Judge

Atheneum Books for Young Readers

November 2011

When a writer (speaking strictly hypothetically) is up to her neck in the complexities of the teen years plus magic plus mayhem, it's a blessing when something comes along that alters the perspective. For me right now, that’s RED SLED, a brand new picture book by New Hampshire writer/illustrator Lita Judge.

This book has a simple plot and practically no words. It’s a book someone has thought about, hard, and pared down to essentials. It’s beautiful.

Here’s the plot: A child in a white snowsuit and red hat trudges home for the night, leaving a red sled outside his/her cozy cabin in a white wilderness. A bear borrows the sled, and before long is plummeting downhill with a collection of friends from a moose to a mouse. Some of the animals are giddy; others are terrified. They crash gleefully at the bottom of their hill, then return the sled. Next day, puzzled by all the paw-prints, the child waits for nightfall and peeps out to see what’s happening.

On the last page, a delirious pile of animals and red-hatted kid scuds downhill into the snowy night.

The text consists of “hmm?” (twice), “whoa” (twice), and “alley oop” (once), plus a marvelous, thoughtful collection of sounds: “gadung, gadung” when the sled hits some bumps, or “ssssffft” as it glides past on a straightaway. My favorite is “fluoomp…ft,” which is the noise a pile of animals makes when crashing into some snow.

A parent would enjoy reading this aloud with sound effects, but a child also could enjoy it alone. No wonder it got starred reviews from Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, and School Library Journal.

I’m indebted to Melissa Stewart and the New England chapter of the Society for Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI) for letting me know about RED SLED. The author is recovering from an auto-immune disease (here’s her blog post on the subject), and is unable to help promote her book. So the word went out on the NESCBWI drums that others should step in. I’m happy to do so, and urge you to help spread the news any way you can. Judge’s web site is http://www.litajudge.com/, if you want more information (or a peek at her other illustrations, which you definitely should see).

This is a book to treasure regardless of circumstances. But if you’re immersed in complexities, it’s a lifeline.

Book review on the way!

2011-11-02T10:12:00.001-04:00

Hello there, book review club! Today's schedule got a bit wonky, so I won't be posting my review until early afternoon. See you then!

And another thing...

2011-10-09T09:59:00.001-04:00

Look at me, blogging again!

Blogging amidst all the kt literary jollification yesterday, I forgot to mention that Bobbie Pyron featured the dog Callie and me on her website. Very cute blog idea. Callie needed some good news, having spent much of the past three weeks in her Cone of Shame from her vet surgery.

Also, there are a couple of tidbits of good news. First, SMALL PERSONS WITH WINGS has been accepted for Scholastic Book Clubs and Book Fairs, starting this coming winter. THE UNNAMEABLES, meanwhile, is on the reading list for the Youngstown State University English Festival, which brings some 3,000 teens to campus every march to discuss the books on the list, among other activities.

I'm so pumped about this stuff.

Athleticism

2011-10-08T23:19:00.001-04:00

So, ten writers get together with their agent in a pair of cabins within spitting distance of Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado.

Here's how they spend the morning:

The photo was taken by Kate Schafer Testerman, the agent in question. Ten clients of KT Literary, including me, gathered with her this weekend to hobnob and eat and guffaw. I'm the one with her back to the camera. It may look as if I'm industriously writing, but I'm checking the weather forecast.

Actually, we did get out to the park right after the photo. We saw elk and an alluvial fan, plus a whole bunch of snow, which closed the road to the Continental Divide. I took a bunch of pictures, but can't upload them until I get home. That should be around the 19th, after I wander around Santa Fe for a while with my friend Shelly.

The elk are amazing--this time of year, they wander right into town, no regard whatsoever for humans or buildings or cars. Also saw magpies and bright blue jays, far brighter than out east.

Right now we're around the fire digesting a great Mexican dinner. It doesn't get better.

Book Review Club for October

2011-10-05T08:00:00.000-04:00

Click icon for more

book review blogs

@Barrie Summy

Gotta love a man who buys you research books. This one was one of my birthday presents from Rob, who watched me struggling to read one physics book after another (okay, actually it was only two) over the summer. This one actually was fun. Who can argue with nanobots?

Don't forget to click the icon above for more reviews!

Physics of the Future:
How Science Will Shape Our Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100
By Michio Kaku
2011, Doubleday

Michio Kaku has an entertaining life. When he can spare time from being a professor of theoretical physics at the City University of New York, he hosts a Science Channel show and two radio programs, as well as writing book after book after book trying to make the rest of us understand how modern science affects us and our future.

Researching this one, he traveled around having cool and useful experiences: Matching wits with a robot here, riding in a self-piloted sports car there. He interviewed some three hundred scientists.

The guy helped found string field theory, and yet he has the common touch. He built an atom smasher in his garage in high school, blowing out every fuse in the house whenever he turned it on. At the same time he credits Flash Gordon with awakening his interest in science and the world of the future. He quotes Einstein on one page and Data the Star Trek android on the next. He’s fun to read; one suspects he’d be even more fun as a dinner companion.

The best thing about this book is the way it’s organized. Eight chapters are devoted to individual “futures”: those of the computer, artificial intelligence, medicine, nanotechnology, energy, space travel, wealth, and humanity. Each chapter has a section on “the near future” (the present to 2030), mid-century (2030-2070), and the far future (2070-2100). This drives home the point that, in many disciplines, humanity has already planted the seeds for a Jetson-like future existence in which our houses respond to voice commands and we drive to work in self-piloted hover-cars.

It all seems so plausible. And, in places, unsettling. Take internet contact lenses, for example. Already, combat forces can train on base by putting on a helmet that projects battlefield images over the existing terrain. It’s not that much of a leap to contact lenses equipped with computer chips that would enable you to surf the net or turn on a movie just by blinking your eye.

As someone regularly called upon to swear at her computer, I can imagine nothing more unsettling. Imagine: At a business lunch with your boss, you have a glass of wine and forget how to blink right. Just as your boss is confiding top-secret corporate strategy, all of a sudden Ralph Fiennes appears before you dressed as Lord Voldemort. That’s the sort of thing that makes a person choke on her chef salad.

The book’s last chapter envisions a typical morning in 2100, from the moment when a computer program named Molly projects its friendly face on the wall screen to wake you and send you into the bathroom to brush your teeth and have your daily molecular analysis, searching for potential disease.

Will the predictions come true? Maybe not. Kaku points out that, in 1964, At&T spent $100 million perfecting a TV screen for telephones, of which they sold a grand total of a hundred. He blames the Cave Man (or Cave Woman) Principle: Our wants, needs, and desires haven’t changed in 100,000 years. If there’s a conflict between new technology and our Cave Man instincts, technology will lose.

Just as our ancestors demanded that a successful hunter provide “proof of the kill” (a hunk of dead animal), we demand hard copy instead of trusting a bunch of electrons. That’s why computers have not resulted in the much-predicted “paperless office.”

Years ago, I freelanced from an attic apartment in Providence, RI, where summertime heat and humidity can be brutal. Interviewing a corporate executive on a sweaty day, I was grateful he or she couldn’t see what I was wearing—or, more accurately, not wearing. My cave woman instincts definitely would not have embraced a picture-phone.

A self-piloted sports car, though. Cool.

A Nip in the Air

2011-09-17T15:24:00.001-04:00

It's been an exciting week at Castle Ne'er-do'well. I got a Kindle. The dog had surgery. The air is full of revving-up noises from the October 1 Bangor Book Festival. It's frikkin' freezing out, although six months ago this would have felt warm. I have tomatoes, zucchini, and blackberries in the freezer.

The Kindle is a cunnin' little thing, despite my Luddite tendencies. I got it because I'll be traveling a bit and also I'd like to read my manuscripts without sitting at the computer or manhandling a largish stack of paper on the dining room table. Supposedly you can take notes on stuff you're reading. We'll see how useful that turns out to be. But my goodness, aren't they trying hard to be clever? I was impressed right off by the fact that the USB connection nestles into the power adapter.

The dog, one Calamity Jane Booraem-Shillady, is gray around the muzzle and developing noncancerous fatty tumors in various spots (one of them unmentionable in polite society and undoing a decade of "sit" training). Thursday morning, when Rob was away canoing (naturally--heaven forbid this should happen with a full staff), I discovered that dear Callie had chewed off the bottom fifth of the tumor on her front right ankle. I disinfected it and wrapped it up, but by afternoon it was still bleeding and I was on the phone to the vet. Upshot: It was infected and growing too much.Yesterday morning, the little dear had $700 worth of surgery. Now she has a classy-looking bandage, a dazed expression, and one of those Elizabethan cone things to keep her from chewing at her stitches. Also an impoverished household.

TMI ALERT (skip this if squeamish): The little dear also has a grass-eating fetish, which would be fine if she just threw it up immediately or passed it along through like a normal dog. But no. Our choices are 1) she keeps it fermenting in her gut for three or four weeks, then throws it up at 3 a.m. on the floor at the foot of our bed, where it smells like Death on Eggs, or 2) she gets a blockage and has to visit the emergency room. When I took her in for surgery yesterday, I mentioned that she hadn't pooped for 24 hours. "Hmm," said the vet. And, sure enough, when he'd finished removing her tumor he also extracted a plug of grass from the relevant oriface. Another 24 hours and she would have been writhing in pain, so that's the silver lining to this cloudy tale. END OF TMI.

The Bangor Book Festival takes place September 30 and October 1. (The Maine Edge, an alternative paper, is interviewing the authors involved. Here's my interview.) I'll be talking about character development and doing a reading/discussion for teens with Carrie Jones. The festival will be in various venues this year, as I understand it--public library, children's museum, perhaps others. More information will be forthcoming, but definitely mark your calendar...just look at that list of authors!

I conclude with pix of my favorite season-changing event: The Blue Hill Fair, which takes place on Labor Day Weekend. I tended the county Democrats' booth in the morning and ate french fries and watched sheepdog trials and livestock shows in the afternoon. Bliss.

A couple of farm kids leave the show ring with their charges. Behind them, the judge awaits the next group.

A sheepdog drives his charges through a gate. One sheepdog (not sure it was this one) got a perfect score, which involved sending a flock of sheep through two or three gates, across a bridge, and into a pen, as well as clockwise and counter clockwise around the show ring.

What every writer (and teacher and parent and human being) loves to see.

September Book Review Club

2011-09-08T11:18:00.001-04:00

Click icon for more
book review blogs
@Barrie Summy

I’m a day late (and I’m always a dollar short, so that’s nothing new). Thanks to Labor Day and the sudden drop in summertime scheduling, I got this week thoroughly fouled up and thought yesterday was Tuesday. Today, oddly, feels like Friday, possibly because it’s raining for the third day in a row. Hmmm … curl up with a good book?

Don't forget to click the icon above for more reviews!

Wicked Appetite
By Janet Evanovich
St. Martin’s Press, 2010

There are times when only a Janet Evanovich will do, and a rainy Maine day usually is one of them. She’s written so many of her signature comedy-romance-thrillers—almost forty, at last count—that if you haven’t tripped over one of them already you will soon. And when that day comes you’d be well advised to stay right there on the floor and start reading.

Don’t start with this one, though.

It could be that I’m over-Evanoviched, so familiar with her formula that I’ve finally gone sour on her. Or maybe, as I thought when I read WICKED APPETITE a week or so ago, she’s reached the too-familiar stage when she’s so hot that nobody edits her anymore. (Not at all familiar to me, obviously. But Neil Gaiman commented a while back that editors aren’t as likely to challenge him now that he’s a hotshot, so he’s under more pressure to do his own quality-control.)

I cut my Evanovich teeth on the numbered Stephanie Plum novels, starting with ONE FOR THE MONEY. As of November, they’re up to EXPLOSIVE EIGHTEEN. It was always fun revisiting hapless New Jersey bounty-hunter Plum, her sidekick Lula the ex-hooker, her nutty Grandma Mazur, and her TWO love interests, Morelli the cop and Ranger the mysterious high-tech security consultant. The books are hysterical in places, sexy in others, with a comfortable level of nail-biting. Nevertheless, somewhere around ELEVEN ON TOP I stopped salivating and started just picking them up sporadically whenever I tripped over them. As I said, that’s easy to do—they’re everywhere.

Apparently there are a few unnumbered Stephanie Plums, with titles such as PLUM SPOOKY and PLUM LUCKY, and apparently they have a supernatural element. This book—a birthday present because it’s set in my old stomping grounds near Boston—is the start of a new series in which a couple of Stephanie’s unnumbered otherworldly friends harass a brand-new protagonist, uber-baker Lizzy Tucker. Also migrating from New Jersey is a highly intelligent monkey who keeps farting and giving people the finger.

It’s a quick read with lots of laughs and steamily delayed sexual gratification, Evanovich’s stock in trade. The supernatural plot is silly and sometimes too obviously engineered for comedy, but that I can forgive, even enjoy. The finale, however, is a wet firecracker, with the real conclusion clearly to come in later books. This is something new—as I recall, the Plum books always came to a satisfying conclusion—and struck me as cynical and slap-dash. Thinking about it now makes me sad and kind of tired.

I have to say, though, that a friend of mine read this one a few months back and saw nothing wrong with it. Maybe I am Evanoviched out. That really would be sad.

Gaaaah! Book Review!

2011-09-07T15:58:00.002-04:00

I JUST this minute realized that today's Wednesday, not Tuesday. And I was supposed to post my September book review THIS MORNING.

I am an idiot. See you tomorrow, Book Review Club. *slinks into corner, weeping.*

Science, and an Apology to Vermont

2011-09-04T15:19:00.002-04:00

Well, I suppose I feel pretty proud of myself, don't I?

Science has proven that you will suffer an extended power outage under one or more of the following circumstances: 1. You haven't showered in two days; 2. You have a sink full of dishes; 3. The bathroom is a pit of iniquity. So it was that I spent the 24 hours before Hurricane/Tropical Storm Irene showering, cleaning the bathroom, and washing every dish and teaspoon before it hit the sink. I also vacuumed.

Also, Rob moved the cars into the back yard next to the house. (To avoid this.)

I picked all the flowers in my garden, arranged some in vases, gave the rest to a neighbor.

I moved all the plants inside from the deck.

For something to do rather than fidget, I re-filled about half of the emergency water bottles in the cellar with fresh water.

As a natural and scientifically proven result, Irene moved west and whupped the tar out of Vermont. We had a little wind, less rain, and asix-hour power outage (child's play around here).

Again, I deeply apologize to the people of Vermont.

Further Scientific Fact:

If someone has planned a surprise birthday party for you, that will be the night you exercise-bike yourself into a sweat and opt not to take a shower afterwards because dinner's ready. You will also have laundry drying on racks all over the living room.

And so, two nights before I was scientifically scheduled to turn sixty, Rob leaped up in the middle of the Nightly News and said brusquely, "I'd get the laundry upstairs if I were you. That's all I'm saying." He then walked out the front door into the night. I followed, and discovered twenty-five or thirty people standing in the front yard, each holding a cupcake.

I swore in hospitable fashion and ran inside to haul the laundry racks upstairs.

Turned out Rob had hand-delivered invitations to everyone, instructing them to show up with one cupcake apiece. (So that's why the morning coffee run kept taking so long. I thought he might be having an affair.) Here's most of them:

One pair was equipped with sparklers, so Rob lighted them out on the porch.

I looked like utter crap. I was, however, very happy. Here I'm holding one of two T-shirts our neighbors Lisa and Peg made for the occasion. Rob (seen frantically unearthing snacks) is wearing the other. They say, "Our favorite small person with wings is 60."

Lisa and Peg also made cookies to top their cupcake entries, featuring a frog dressed in panoply. You have to read SMALL PERSONS WITH WINGS to understand that, ditto the fact that there are a few Tampax-shaped cookies in there.

Lisa and Peg also made this video. They do not believe in half-measures when it comes to celebrations.

Yeah, Well, It's August

2011-08-24T16:01:00.003-04:00

This isn't the worst blog hiatus I've suffered, nor will it be the last. I probably should just announce that August in Maine is a blog-free month, because it always has been and probably always will be.

As usual, the month started with the Eggemoggin Reach Regatta on the sixth. As usual, Rob and I joined our kayaking friends on Hog Island. Not at all as usual, we did not have the island to ourselves--apparently word has gotten out that this is the best possible vantage point for the race if you're not on a boat. (I suppose I shouldn't be telling you that. *Waves wand.* Obliviate!) The place was packed, although fortunately most of the invaders decided to stay down on the beach rather than joining us up on the ledge, which is less comfortable but more spectacular. (We always go for spectacular discomfort.)

Despite the (relative) crowds, it was a lovely day. The fog lifted, the breeze blew, although it came up a bit later than the race committee wanted, so the start was delayed by what was officially a half hour but felt like at least an hour. We'd already scarfed down our sandwiches and gorp and brownies--we like our spectacular discomfort to be as cholesterol-laden as possible--by the time the first boats scudded by.

We left before the race came back, mostly because the tide came up and there were people sitting where we normally would beach the kayaks. We had them (the kayaks, not the people) moored to a rock instead, so they were bouncing around and crashing a bit more than even plastic boats like to bounce around and crash.

The early departure turned out to be fortunate, because by the time we'd paddled to the other side of the island the tide had almost marooned our friends Peter and Marcia and their dog, Honey. (Well, not really marooned -- they would have been fine without us if perhaps slightly wetter.)

Peter and Marcia had beached their boat on the eastern shore of the island and trekked across to join us on the ledge. They trekked back across to find that they'd have to wade out to the boat and climb in from the rocks, which might have been a bit teetery. Rob put on his blue tights and billowing red cape and helped Peter haul the sailboat around to a rapidly diminishing spit of sand where everyone could board comfortably, then hauled them out to where the water was deep enough to start the motor.

Herewith, the photographic journal:

Peg, Lisa, Rob and a new acquaintance cool their heels on our Hog Island ledge, waiting for the race to begin. You can just barely see the fleet to-ing and fro-ing in the center distance.

At long last the race filters past, some huge motoryacht steaming along right in the middle of the fleet. We christened the yacht the SS Honeybadger, after the nervy fellow in this YouTube video. (Yes, I know, this is not the most famous or funniest version, nor is it the one we really meant. But I write kids' books and I chickened out. If you MUST find the funny voice-over one, it's in YouTube's sidebar to this one.)

Another, less honeybadgerish approach to spectating.

The daring rescue at sea: Rob hauling Peter and Marcia's sailboat around to the sandy side of a little rocky islet. Peter is out of frame, on the islet hauling on the bowline.

Under the baffled eye of Honey the dog (no relation to the badger), Marcia and Peter climb aboard ...

... and Rob hauls them out to deeper water.

I'm out of time, so the rest of August will have to wait. Meanwhile...

The writing report: I'm in this weird almost-writing-but-still-researching stage on the next book while waiting for my editorial letter on CONOR'S BANSHEE. This very day I got the idea that is starting to make the new book work, and is getting me excited about writing it. Then I went kayaking, because kayaking buddies Lisa and Peg are about to go home to Minnesota and we had to get one more in. Hey, it's August.

The knitting report: Got the yarn for a cotton-blend sweater, and it could be very cool. Before Lisa leaves, she has to translate the directions for the sleeves. And then let the torment begin.

Book Review Club: August

2011-08-03T10:46:00.003-04:00

Click icon for more
book review blogs
@Barrie Summy

Okay, this one's a little friendlier to the beach reader than my last one was. It's a hoot, plus it's old enough to be out in paperback. Don't forget to click the icon for more reviews!

The Wordy Shipmates
By Sarah Vowell
Riverhead Books, 2008

When we think somebody’s a totally repressed killjoy, we call him a Puritan. Sarah Vowell would like this to stop.

Not that the Puritans were a barrel of laughs—especially those who came to New England in the early 1600s. (You couldn’t be a comedian and still lead a religiously triggered invasion of somebody’s homeland.) But they were a lot more complicated than popular history leads us to believe.

For a start, they didn’t call themselves Puritans—other people did, mostly decades or centuries past their seventeenth century heyday. They often called themselves “the godly”—as distinct from their arch-enemies, the Catholics and, for some, the Church of England.

Also, they weren’t a homogeneous group. Some of them still belonged to the C of E but wanted to purify it. Others thought anyone who stuck with the C of E was the spawn of Satan. (Or, possibly, of satin.)

Also, they didn’t mind sex, as long as it was sanctified by marriage vows.

Sarah Vowell has made a career out of reinterpreting history through the eyes of a non-historian. A former, long-time contributing editor for the public radio show “This American Life,” she has written six books that dance from history to social commentary to travelogue. This was her fifth, and the only one I’ve read. I’ll probably let some time pass before I read another, but I’m very glad I found this one.

Vowell’s tale this time is of the Puritan colonization of New England between 1630, when the Massachusetts Bay colonists arrived, and 1692, when Salem got crazy about witches. Her chief characters are John Winthrop, the colony’s first governor, and the colony’s first major outcasts, Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson.

Williams believed in religious freedom and thought the English king had no right to give away Indian land, but unfortunately was such a wack-job that his views had no effect. His only recourse was to leave and found Rhode Island. Hutchinson, banished for making a theological left turn while female, moved her family to Rhode Island en route to New Netherland, where she and most of her family ended up dying in an Indian war.

There are no chapters in this book—it’s essentially a long essay with pauses—and Vowell regularly leaps over the centuries to link the colonists’ behavior with ours. She brings in Abu Ghraib, Ronald Reagan, even “The Brady Bunch.” Anecdotes from her own life (her Pentacostal upbringing for example) illuminate the Puritans’ story, particularly when she describes her tours of the Puritans’ stamping ground.

Just after reading about the English settlers’ truly brutal attack on a Peguot fort in 1637, we watch Vowell’s horrified seven-year-old nephew contend with a museum documentary on the subject. He has to close his eyes. “When do they have Thanksgiving?” he wants to know. This is one of many points during the book when Vowell gets emotional—sometimes admiring, usually angry. The book is strongest at those points.

This is a gutsy and illuminating approach to history, offered in a wry tone that often had me laughing out loud. I lost the sequence of events at times, but you can get that elsewhere.

That tone, however, is troublesome. Vowell can’t resist a one-liner, and her snarkiness started to get old for me halfway through the book. Since I’m usually a push-over for snark and one-liners (see the “satin” comment above), I couldn’t decide whether she was trying too hard or just needed one more close edit.

That’s why I’ll take a rest before moving on to her latest, UNFAMILIAR FISHES. It’s about the Americans in Hawaii, and I bet it’s a corker.

Dear FCC: I took this book out of the library.

IMBY*

2011-07-29T11:19:00.001-04:00

Some people were born to be hermits, and I'm turning out to be one of them. Since I quit my day job nearly eight years ago, there are entire days--in the winter, sometimes entire weeks--when I don't leave our paltry four acres. I found last winter that I'd lost all my small talk: At parties, the only way I survived was by pretending I was interviewing someone and peppering him/her with questions.

Also, my greatest pleasure is when some great thing presents itself just outside the back door. In the winter, I'm happiest when the snow's deep enough that I can step off the porch, strap on my skis, and glide off into the woods. This time of year, I'm all aquiver about berries.

When you cut down a bunch of aging spruce trees, as we regretfully did the winter before last, raspberries are the first to take advantage of the sunny patch. After that the hardwood (deciduous) trees pop up, followed by softwoods. I adore berries, and especially the raspy ones, so earlier this summer I waded into the patch behind the dahlias and ruthlessly did away with anything that wasn't going to enliven my Cheerios.

Here's the result:

The corner of wood poking up from the bottom of the photo is the deck railing, so nirvana is roughly two dozen steps from my cereal bowl.

Tomorrow's breakfast and the day after's. The raspberries are being very clever about ripening--just enough ripe at one time to eat in one day. Thus avoiding the torture of jam-making, which I hope never to experience.

Blackberries will be coming along in a couple of weeks, although not where I'm accustomed to them. The patch down by the vegetable garden has been taken over by bittersweet and needs to be razed and started over. Meanwhile, so many poor old spruce have fallen down out front that there's a prolific new patch there. I'm watching them so hungrily, waiting for the first signs of ripening, that I know I'm going to wake up one morning and find a bear got them all.

As I gathered this morning's cereal-garnish, it occurred to me that, if I were inclined to drone on and on about Life Lessons, a raspberry patch has them all. The best ones are on the oldest and scraggliest plants. New perspectives --bending over to look at the plants upside down, or turning to wade out of the patch past plants you've already harvested--reveal a treasure-trove that was hiding before. If you get greedy and go after more than you need, you always tip over your berry basket and lose half of what you already had. (Congress, take note.)

Fortunately, I hate Life Lessons.

The Writing Report: Still in research mode. I was struggling through A Brief History of Time, but then I met an actual physicist who assured me that it is, in fact, incomprehensible. Instead I went to the library and took out Brian Greene's The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality, which is much more fun. I also got Sarah Vowell's The Wordy Shipmates (about the New England Puritans), which is an absolute hoot as well as being informative.

The Knitting Report: I have to find some cotton yarn for a top-down sweater, which I have to start knitting before my friend Lisa goes home to Minnesota. If I start it without her there's a chance I'll throw the whole thing into the fire.

* A play on NIMBY , which means "not in my back yard." Around here, it usually refers to someone who loves the idea of, say, wind power, as long is it's in somebody else's neighborhood. I suspect I might be one of those, actually--I love the idea, but would hate the noise. We should put them all out at sea--it's sort of noisy out there anyway, isn't it? (Oh dear oh dear -- I bet I'm being stupid.)

Sum-sum-summer-Time

2011-07-19T14:59:00.006-04:00

Normally, Summer officially ends when our friends Linda and Michael pack up their dogs and toys and leave for Providence, RI, after a pandemonious week in a seaside cottage down the street. This year, L&M came up a month early, so we've had our climactic week and there's still a month and a half until Labor Day.

Normally, summer reaches its midpoint when I trek to Portland for lunch with my college roommates. That happened Monday, the day after Linda and Michael packed up the dogs and left. So the summer's midpoint came after its end, which is extremely confusing to the well-regulated mind.

I have reacted to this by spending today puttering. Peace of mind dictates that I get to work pronto. Time being in an upheaval, pronto apparently will not take place until tomorrow.

Highlights of the L&M week included a garden tour for Linda and me--of which she took pictures and I, being time-addled, did not--and matchstick sailboats, kits for which Michael assembled and sent up ahead so Rob and our friend Eric could make them in time for Michael's arrival. Rob was grateful that this year's boat wasn't as complicated and time-consuming as last year's, a miniature catboat with radio controls.

Also, we went to the Stonington Opera House for their annual Shakespeare in Stonington production, which this year consisted of two plays rather than one. With the usual mixed crew of Equity actors and local folk, the Opera House staged Much Ado About Nothing (with men playing Beatrice and Hero, as they would have in Shakespeare's time) and Elizabeth Rex, Timothy Findley's modern play set in Queen Elizabeth's barn the night before she caused Essex to be beheaded. Eager for distraction, she spends the night with Shakespeare's troupe of actors, who have just performed--yup--Much Ado About Nothing.

The Opera House production was in repertory, so the actor who played Beatrice in Much Ado scuttled across town to the Elizabeth Rex stage in the Historical Society's barn, where he portrayed the actor who played Beatrice. All the other parts matched, too. It was very, very cool. And since S in S loves to switch genders around (for example, the friar this year was played by the same woman who played the Duke/Friar in Measure for Measure last year) Findley's play fit like a lady's glove, men's size nine. Elizabeth, who rules England by playing a man's role, confronts Ned/Beatrice, who survives by playing women. Elizabeth is about to kill her lover. Ned's has killed him by giving him syphilis. Shakespeare's purported lover is about to die with Essex. Makes for an interesting conversation.

Usually, S in S takes place in August, but they switched it with the Jazz Festival this year. More time confusion. Tomorrow may be Thanksgiving for all I know.

Anyway, here are some pictures by Linda of the great matchstick sailboat regatta.

The gentlemen launched their boats at low tide, with Linda and me in kayaks to round up any craft that made a break for freedom. Here, I am pursuing one of Michael's two boats (the little sail in the center distance), while Rob's matchstick boat (right) makes for Linda, who's taking the picture. In the center foreground with the red sail is Rob's radio-controlled boat from last year, launched just to make things more interesting.

Ah, summertime in shallow water. Dudley and Mollie, L&M's dogs, wander around pondering mayhem while I lounge in decidedly unapproved kayak technique. My kayak is a Loon, the elastic waistband of the maritime world--very beamy and stable, with a huge cockpit that lets me free my legs for lounging and makes me less claustrophobic than a regular kayak.

The gentlemen , admired by Mollie.

And, just to humiliate us all, here are my college roommates plus one. Claudia (known to all right-thinking people as Dane) and Laura and I met at Wheaton College in 1971 (actually, I met Laura in 1970, I guess) and shared a house off campus with six other women in 1972-73. Dane and her partner Juanita live in DC, but come to Maine for a week or two every summer. About four years ago, we started meeting for lunch in Portland, which is about equidistant from Brooklin and Laura's New Hampshire home. The amazing thing is that we hardly communicate for a year, and then pick right up where we left off...the nature of old friends.

Juanita, me, Dane, and Laura after an extremely long and loud Monday lunch.

The knitting report: There is none. The secretary wishes to point out that this is not her fault, as there has been no activity since the last report. Oh wait, maybe I started a new sock. I'll have to check.

The writing report: Again none, and the secretary refuses to take responsibility. Except I did get the rough draft of CONOR'S BANSHEE spiral bound so I can give it to some kids to read. Oh, and I'm reading A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME for undisclosed research purposes having nothing to do all the other time-related aspects of the day.

Book Review Club: July

2011-07-06T12:03:00.004-04:00

Click icon for more
book review blogs
@Barrie Summy

I suppose I should suggest beach reading, something light and frothy. This book is far from that, although it is FUN so doesn't that qualify?

Don't forget to click the icon for more reviews!

Monsters of Men
By Patrick Ness
Candlewick, 2010
Young Adult

A month or so ago, away from home and requiring an immediate book, I bought THE KNIFE OF NEVER LETTING GO, the first book of Patrick Ness’s CHAOS WALKING trilogy. I’d heard about it over the past couple of years and had always kinda figured I’d read it sometime.

What. Was. I waiting for.

I finished the first book in 40 seconds flat, and casually mentioned it to our town librarian. She went online, liked what she saw, and before I could get my head together to buy the second book, THE ASK AND THE ANSWER, the whole flippin’ trilogy appeared on the YA shelf beside the circulation desk. (I love our library.)

MONSTERS OF MEN, the third and final book, just won its author the Carnegie Medal, the UK’s version of the Newbery Medal and a big, huge deal. (The first two books were short-listed.) While I have a minor bone to pick with this final book, I’m deeply happy that Ness has been honored for it.

The books are set on a planet that humans are beginning to colonize, despite the fact that it’s already home to the gentle, humanoid Spackle. (Avatarish, yes. More on that later.) The first group of humans finds immediately that something about the planet allows everyone to “hear” the thoughts in a man’s head, resulting in a cacophony quickly dubbed “Noise.”

Human women can hear the men’s Noise, but generate none of their own—a man’s thoughts and intentions are visible to everyone, and a woman’s to no one. (A friend of mine said: “And this differs from reality…how?”)

All Spackle have Noise, regardless of sex. It’s how they communicate.

Animals can communicate that way, too, although at an elementary level. Here’s how the first book begins:

The first thing you find out when yer dog learns to talk is that dogs don’t got nothing much to say. About anything.

“Need a poo, Todd.”

“Shut up, Manchee.”

“Poo. Poo, Todd.”

Ness has a wonderful time exploring the implications of Noise. Some human men become resentful and suspicious of the women, some women a tad contemptuous of the men. The lack of privacy drives some men nuts but inspires others to use Noise for personal power. Young people—who’ve known no other planet—accept Noise as the air they breathe.

The “Todd” whose dog needs a poo is just such a young person, our narrator for all of the first book and large parts of the other two. The first book follows him as he escapes his home village, called Prentisstown after its despotic Mayor, under a threat he doesn’t understand. As he flees through the woods, he meets Viola, the first female he’s ever known because Prentisstown’s women died mysteriously in his infancy. Viola is the vanguard of another wave of human settlers—she and her parents took off from the fleet on a scouting mission, and her parents were killed when their ship crash-landed. She’s already been threatened by Prentisstown’s madman minister, so she and Todd join forces, mutually suspicious.

The first book is a picaresque adventure, as Todd and Viola make their way to what they hope will be a safe haven, pursued for enigmatic reasons by the minister and, eventually, an entire army from Prentisstown. It’s also about the growing trust between Todd and Viola, and eventually their love for one another. In the second book, they are separated but still bonded, managing to survive the rival forces in yet another dictatorship.

In the third book, MONSTERS OF MEN, the humans are at war with the Spackle, who have had about enough of being subjugated and enslaved. Two factions battle within the human camp. Noise is explained, as well as the Spackle’s Zen-like relationship to it and their planet. It turns out Noise can be manipulated if a man gets it under control. We see the politics of the human factions but also among the Spackle, as narration flips from Todd to Viola to the freed Spackle slave 1017.

In this final book and as a whole, CHAOS WALKING is one boy’s coming-of age story but also a fascinating look at larger issues: why societies fester, why dictators thrive, why we conform, why we kill, why we go to war, and what will stop us. It sets up a series of almost unsolvable conundrums, in which everyone on every side has an unarguable reason to fight, and yet fighting will probably kill them all. There’s a cliffhanger about every ten pages. Don’t plan to sleep much until you finish it.

This last book does come perilously close to being just another Clueless European Colonist vs Noble Savage story, particularly because the Spackle are so psychically entwined with their planet. (They call themselves The Land.) It mostly escapes the yech factor because Noise is such an oddball concept and because the characters are so wonderfully complex and involving. Even the biggest, baddest villain has achingly sympathetic moments.

For me, the one problem with this book is the relationship between Todd and Viola. We keep being told that they will do anything to save each other, even if it means violating core ethics, and yet the bond between them is never as deeply felt as it is in the first book. This reads as an oversight rather than a deliberate plot point.

Fortunately, there’s so much going on and it’s all so much fun that the reader—this one, anyway—accepts what she’s told and gets on with it.

Grueling Grilling

2011-07-05T15:16:00.002-04:00

Every season has its tortured pleasures: Freezing the tomatoes in the fall, putting the lights on the maple tree for winter, the tax ordeal to usher in spring. For me, summer's annual Dreaded Good Time occurred yesterday, when the Brooklin Youth Corps (the summer work/self-esteem program of which I'm president) barbecued chicken for at least 350 of its neighbors and friends. This was our fifteenth attempt.

The Fourth of July barbecue has been a tradition for decades. When we moved here 27 years ago, the event was handled by the Grand Masters of public cooking: Louise and Rocky Rockwell, George and Georgene Allen, and a host of others. Not sure if there was an organization involved--they were an organization unto themselves. Many of them have moved on to the Bigger Supper now, or anyway have passed their aprons and charcoal briquettes to another generation.

When the BYC started up in 1997, the elementary school's PTF had been doing the honors but had requested relief for some reason. So we took the barbecue on--gulping, because it's such a tradition--and survived to grill another day. It's particularly harrowing in that the BYC season is but a week or two old at this point, so we're not quite the well-oiled machine we'll be in a couple more weeks.

Every year has its little jaw-clencher, usually related to the supplies order. Last year, the order came in with skinless, boneless chicken--it turned out scrumptious anyway because we have Paul Brayton the Master Griller on our team, but he almost had apoplexy worrying about it. This year, the order came in without plastic forks, and we didn't notice until a half-hour before the hoards arrived. This necessitated a frantic run down the street to the Brooklin General Store, which donated every plastic fork on the premises, including the ones they had in a drawer for their own customers.

The chief peculiarity of the event is its timing. The parade starts on the other end of town at 10 a.m., and the color guard makes it to the town green at 10:30, followed for the next half-hour by a succession of floats and antique cars and horses and bicycles and whatnot. The first year we did the barbecue, we figured nobody in their right minds would want barbecued chicken, corn, potato salad, cole slaw and watermelon before 11 a.m. Wrong. The minute people's feet hit the grass of the town green, their noses get a whiff and their mouths start watering. They walk right past the sponge toss and other kiddie games to get in line. Go figure.

We start selling at 10:30. We're sold out at noon.

Herewith, a few snapshots. Sorry I didn't get any of the parade or the other festivities. I was up to my elbows in cole slaw at the time.

The rush begins, and the brave BYCers begin an intense hour of slinging cole slaw. (The red t-shirts have "BYC--Brooklin Youth Corps" on the back, so they're advertising their services even when hunched over and weeding.)

BYC Steering Committee members Judith Fuller (foreground) and Sherry Streeter sell tickets to...

... This crowd. This is probably 10:45. Note that some people are already eating.

Steering Committee member Ann Brayton, whose husband, Paul, is our grilling genius, cuts up watermelon. Ann's kids were in the BYC years ago, and now she's serving a life sentence on the steering committee.

Our coordinator, Doug Mangels (in red, naturally) gives Paul a break at the grill. This was fairly late in the game--at the start, the entire grill is covered with chicken. I actually don't know the guy in blue who's helping Doug, but I think he was the Braytons' house-guest. That's what happens to the unwary visitor so come here at your peril. (This message brought to you by the Greater Blue Hill Chamber of Commerce.)

My one non-chicken-related photo. It's the sponge-throwing booth run by the school. I love the reaction of the girl in the left background.

After the clean-up, we went to our own neighborhood barbecue. I drank three (light) beers and ate, I think, four desserts. Fueling up for next year.

A Gardener's Moan

2011-07-01T16:55:00.002-04:00

One of these things gave rise to the other:

I took these photos in early May, when I got out the dahlia tubers that had overwintered in luxury (paper bags in Rob's studio). Last summer's perfect growing season had given the plants, and therefore the tubers, a burst of energy the likes of which I can only vaguely remember from my teen years. I ended up with 27 potted tubers, which would inevitably result in 27 potted plants, which would all require homes in the perennial garden.

Which had room for about twelve.

I've pretty much exhausted the willing recipients of dahlia plants. (My friend Kim took two or three this year, but only because she was already hooked before I admitted that her husband had previously refused them.) So, even though I had a book to finish and Places to Go later in the month, I decided, naturally, to expand the back flowerbed by roughly two-thirds. (I like to think I wouldn't have done it if I'd known I was going to be felled by the Cold that Wouldn't Die two weeks later. But we'll never know for sure, will we?)

If this had just been a matter of digging up some sod, adding compost and lime, and sticking in some dahlias, it wouldn't have been so bad. But the complication is that I've run out of sunny spots for flowerbeds, so this new bed was half-shade and unsuitable for dahlias. I had shade plants that now were in the sun because of massive tree-cutting the winter before last, plus I had newish apprentice perennials that had proved unmanageable and had been sentenced to exile in the wilderness.

So, while I finished the first round of CONOR'S BANSHEE (emailed to agent and editor yesterday, thank you very much), I also was playing perennial pinball in the garden. Dug up euphorbia and campanula, put in dahlias. Transplanted blue-flag iris, put in dahlias. Also put dahlias in their usual place, except more crowded than usual. Bought some new astilbe and astrantia (shade-lovers) and stuck them partly in the new bed but partly in the old bed. From which I transplanted violets and some other thing whose name I can't remember.

Here (below) is where it stands at the moment. The new bed is in the back, definitely a work in progress because I'm leaving lots of space for growth and the crap soil needs several more applications of compost and seaweed. The new astilbes etc (plus some old astilbes which I...er...transplanted) are in the lower left.

Hmm. This isn't sounding like as much of a horror show as it was. Did I mention that we've had a weird late bloom of black flies, coinciding with the regular bloom of mosquitoes? Ah...now I have your attention. One of the little suckers found its way under my shirt and bit me just above the naval. The rest were content to swarm around waiting for my organic bug-repellent to wear off, which it does about once an hour.

There are other seasonal miracles. A leopard's bane, which flowers in late April, burst into life today and emitted one more perfect bloom, which we hadn't even seen coming. Maybe the rapture is due after all.

Not a miracle (except in the broadest possible sense) but the peony's looking good, too. Kinda makes it all worthwhile, doesn't it?

The knitting report: We don't get television once the trees leaf out, so I'm a little less productive. But I'm on the second sock of another cotton pair, which will make FIVE total since I started. And yet I am not bored.

The writing report: Bye-bye Conor, at least for the moment. A day off, maybe two. Then I'm either starting something new or refurbishing something old. Not sure which.

The Creature Stirs and Blinks Its Bleary Eyes

2011-06-23T14:33:00.002-04:00

Yes, well. See. I've been sick. And in Chicago. And revising.

The dreaded Brooklin Cold turned out to be a real horror. Two weeks in, I had stopped sneezing and snorting but had a totally blocked ear and felt like hell. A month in, I'm finally feeling like myself, have almost stopped coughing and my blocked ear is crackling, which seems like a good sign.

I mean, Futureland or what?

A plane flight probably wasn't what the doctor ordered for the ol' ear drum, but other than that I had a great time at the Printers Row Lit Fest. Penguin's travel arrangements were perfection, the hotel was great, and Chicago, in case you've never been there, is GORGEOUS. Also very, very hot, but right now--sitting in Brooklin, Maine, in four layers plus a fleece vest--hot seems like a good thing.

In addition to skylines and the comparatively cool lakefront and Millennium Park, there were human beings. First, my fellow panelists Ilene Cooper, Brenda Ferber, Kristina Springer, and C. Alexander London, and our fearless moderator, Amy Alessio. And our audience, who stayed with us even though it was a million degrees in our tent and the fan was directed only at the panel. I love meeting fellow kidlit writers--makes me proud to be one. They are funny, sharp, heartfelt, and great at words, and their ethics are in the right place. Did I say funny? (I'm talking about you, C. Alexander London.)

After the panel, I got to hang out with some of the Marauders, , my online friends who are funny, sharp, heartfelt, and great at words. They're quite ethical, too. Meg, Sandi, and Sue came to the panel discussion with a couple of friends and Sandi's daughter, Kathryn. Sandy and Kathryn had flown in from Nashville to spend the weekend with Meg, who lives in Wisconsin, and Sue took the train from Detroit. After the panel we wandered down to the waterfront then over to Millennium Park, ducking into the art museum and a coffee shop when the clouds opened. I'd only met Meg online, and as usual it seemed as if we'd known each other for years. Which we have. It's just that we'd never met in person.

Here we are cooling off in genteel fashion at Crown Fountain (from left, Sandi, Meg, me, Sue).

Here's the correct behavior at Crown Fountain:

Since I got home I've been revising, revising, and revising. Also, Brooklin Youth Corps starts Monday and the garden needed attention. Also, I've been revising. Two days ago I plugged a massive plot hole, and was feeling very cocky about it until yesterday morning, when I discovered that filling the plot hole had created a plot chasm. Today I wiped out three days of theorizing and started over. I think I've got it this time. Or, anyway, I think that until tomorrow morning.

I told my editor I'd have this to her "the end of June." What month is this again?

Book Review Club: June

2011-06-01T03:17:00.002-04:00

Click icon for more
book review blogs
@Barrie Summy

I've been sick as three dogs for the past week and a half, a last tail-lashing by The Brooklin Cold (or plague) before it leaves town for the summer. On the plus side, I've finally made a dent in my To Be Read pile--in this case, that meant revisiting my childhood, also a good thing.

While I've got your attention, a shameless plug: If you're near Chicago Saturday, drop by the Printers Row Lit Fest, where I'll be on a panel called "Elementary, Dear Watson" at 12:30 pm on the Mash Stage. I'll join Ilene Cooper, Brenda Ferber, Kristina Springer, and C. Alexander London to talk about writing for teens.

Don't forget to click the icon for more reviews!

The Good Master
By Kate Seredy
Doubleday, 1935
Scholastic paperback, 1991

To enjoy The Good Master is to question everything you think you know about what makes a good novel for children.

For example, it’s a given these days that we keep the reader with us by increasing the dramatic tension any way we can. Make Harry Potter an orphan and set a murderous wizard after him, then kill off every father figure he’s got. Make Harry feel the deaths are at least partly his fault. Violate the reader’s trust so many times that finally the reader really, truly believes that Harry might get killed off, too.

Another given: Characters must have faults.

So here’s this book, a Newbery honoree in 1936. Its author, Kate Seredy, was born and educated in Hungary, served as a nurse in World War I, then emigrated to the U.S. in 1922 to seek work as an illustrator. She wrote The Good Master after an editor at Doubleday suggested that children might be interested in tales set in the Hungary of her childhood. It won the Newbery honor; her next book, The White Stag, won the Newbery medal in 1938. The Singing Tree, a sequel to The Good Master, won another Newbery honor in 1940. Seredy wrote nine other books and illustrated countless others before her death in 1975.

One of the author's illustrations for The Good Master

I can attest that children were interested in Seredy’s Hungarian tales, because I enjoyed them myself when I was 8 or 9. I had only vague memories of them, however, and when somebody handed me The Good Master a week or so ago, I wasn’t even sure this was the same book I’d loved as a kid. Until I googled her, I had no idea that Seredy also was the author of The Chestry Oak, which I must have taken out of the library sixteen times in fourth grade.

So I re-read The Good Master as an adult—an adult who is in the middle of revising a novel, pumping up the dramatic tension every chance I get.

I became reacquainted with Jancsi, the young son of a prosperous rancher on the Hungarian plains, and his madcap city cousin, Kate, who comes to live with his family. I revisited Jancsi’s perfect parents and their salt-of-the-earth shepherds, horsemen, and farmhands, riding out on the plains with them and listening to folk tales by the fire. We celebrated Easter. We went to a country fair. Not exactly tense.

Kate is the only major character with real flaws, and they are attractive ones: “She’s the most impossible, incredible, disobedient, headstrong little imp,” her father writes, pleading with his brother to give her some fresh air and discipline. Minutes after we meet her, she’s running off with a wagon and a team of horses.

Kate quickly settles into farm life, however. She and Jansci have a couple of adventures with rampaging horses and river currents. Kate exposes a charlatan at the fair. The major incident, a potentially stirring one, is Kate’s kidnapping by a band of stereotypically swarthy, good-for-nothing gypsies.

The original cover

We hear most of that tale from Kate herself, after the fact when she’s already been rescued. It’s a bit of a wet firecracker, causing me to spend several fruitless minutes imagining what might have been and wondering if Seredy's editor thought kids couldn't take the pressure. (She'd faint today.)

An hour later, the book ended with a couple of cloyingly sentimental “surprises” that had been telegraphed for pages. I set it down, sighed … and realized to my surprise that I was a completely satisfied, blissful reader.

Huh? How on earth did Seredy do that?

Heart, that’s how. Seredy didn’t just write this book, she felt it. So what if Jansci’s father—the “good master” of the title—has no faults. That’s how Seredy remembers men of his type. She’s not cynical about it, she’s not giving us what she thinks we want and will pay for. She’s giving us everything she’s got in her heart.

It’s interesting that the one vision that stuck with me all these years—a moment when Jansci’s father stands there getting soaked in a drought-ending rain, arm outstretched, face to heaven—turns out to be a minor incident in the book. The drought and attendant fears take up about four pages of text. But it struck me hard as a kid—I was so involved with these people that Seredy didn’t need to go on for pages to tell me how fragile their lives could be.

I was in Hungary at that moment, transported out of my eight-year-old self. That’s the power of a good book, and I guess I’ll trade it for dramatic tension any day.

If I can't have both, that is.

An Urban Sojourn

2011-05-25T13:45:00.002-04:00

Hooray for mind over matter. Rob had a terrible cold last week, and I ran around obsessively washing my hands in hopes of getting through the weekend without hacking and snorting and snuffling. I made it--the cold felled me the instant I got home Monday night. I spent yesterday in bed feeling sorry for myself, but thrilled that I hadn't sneezed all over Tatnuck Booksellers, various South Bostonians (Southies?) and my friend Larry, who gamely put me up in Cambridge even though he's madly preparing for graduation. (He administers Quincy House at Harvard.)

Health issues aside, I had a wonderful weekend. The highlight was Monday's visit to the Oliver Hazard Perry School in South Boston, where I sat in on seventh-grade classes (researching my dear Conor and his banshee) and then led workshops with some of the most delightful fourth and fifth graders I've ever met.

We did the Character Chase, an exercise in which we ask and answer 20 questions about a character, then chart his/her life so far, looking for a story. It gets very noisy, but it's a total hoot. The fourth graders' character was born in Spain and came to Boston in a shipment of garbage --who knew Spain was dumping its refuse here? He ended up being adopted and becoming a ballet dancer, so it all ended well.

The fifth graders' character almost shot his father and came down with AIDS, but they had pity on him in the end. He did jack a car, but he didn't get caught.

Here are the fourth graders:

And here are the fifth graders:

The young woman at right is holding the edited manuscript for THE UNNAMEABLES, exhibit A when talking about the importance of revision.

Speaking of which, I spent Friday and Sunday evenings chatting with South Boston natives to make sure I'm not misrepresenting Southie too badly in Conor's tale. I was suprised at the number of things I have right, but I do have some alterations to make. My major mistake is that I forgot all about busing and the school lottery (amazing for someone who lived in Boston when Louise Day Hicks was in the headlines). Everyone was very generous with time and insights, and I'm tremendously grateful to them and to Kim Simonian for organizing it all.

The original idea for the weekend, of course, was the Five Fantasy Authors appearance at Tatnuck Booksellers in Westborough. The sun came out Saturday for one friggin' day in a long stretch of clouds and rain, so we spoke to a select group. But we had a great time anyway, and got to be on hand when Dawn Metcalf caught her first sight of LUMINOUS, her debut novel. It publishes June 30, so she hadn't expected any copies to be there and in fact hadn't received any herself.

Here she is, in the first flush of romance:

And here we all are (from left: Dawn, me, Marissa Doyle, Kate Milford, Deva Fagan).

Good times, good times.

Now I just have to get over this cold before I go to Chicago the weekend after next. Nothing like a panel discussion when you're deaf as a post from cold-ridden plane flight. I now know what my Printers Row Lit Fest gig will be, by the way: I'll be in a panel discussion called "Elementary, My Dear Watson" with fellow teen-lit authors Ilene Cooper, Brenda Ferber, Kristina Springer, and C. Alexander London. We'll be at The Mash Stage (the venue devoted to teenagers) at 12:30 p.m. Saturday, June 4.If you're in the Chicago area we'd love to see you!

The Revision Report: I know what I have to do. Now it's just a matter of doing it.

The Knitting Report: You're kidding, right? But I did wear my newest cotton socks (purple!) to Boston. I felt very glamorous. (Not really. I mean, they are purple cotton and I was wearing them with sandals.)

The Sound of One Mouth Flapping

2011-05-15T17:11:00.004-04:00

I'm going to be hearing the sound of my own voice a fair amount over the next two or three weeks, not always a good thing. Fortunately, the first Sound of Ellen's Voice Event (SOEVE?) was one town over at Blue Hill Consolidated School, where the readers are brilliant.

Here they are:

They even look smart, don't they? Librarian Beth Jackson and teacher Maryanne Lewandowski host an after-school book group every spring, and this year they read THE UNNAMEABLES, mostly in its shiny new paperback edition although some had the hardcover. (That's Beth in the photo above, wearing red. Her husband used to be my dentist, until he retired. Such is life on the Blue Hill Peninsula.)

These kids were fantastic--lots and lots of varied and intelligent questions, ranging from "why a Goatman" (answer: chaos and humor) to "do you have anything to do with the cover" (answer: no, but I've been lucky with the ones I've gotten).

Maryanne even made nutcakes! (That's Goatman food.) And they served Red Keeping Fruit (apple) pie and tea, Medford's drink of choice. The mother of one of the kids made nutcakes, too. Here's Maryanne (right) dispensing the goodies:

Thanks for the good time, BHCS!

Next stop, also in Blue Hill, is the George Stevens Academy arts week. GSA is a private school that functions as a public high school for area towns, mine among them. Arts Week is a venerable and AMAZING institution--an entire week devoted to workshops taught by local artists and craftspeople. I'll be doing a writing workshop Wednesday morning: "Lightning Round for Writers," focusing on five or ten-minute exercises to get your ideas flowing and introduce you to your characters.

On Saturday (meaning May 21) I'm joining four other Inkies (fantasy authors involved in The Enchanted Inkpot blog) at Tatnuck Bookseller in Westborough, MA, to discuss "How to Build a Fantasy." Marissa Doyle, Deva Fagan, Dawn Metcalf, and Kate Milford will join me in discussing the various components of a fantasy as well as our experiences in publishing. ETA: forgot to say, it starts at 2:30 p.m. And--duh--I've added a link for the bookstore so you can get directions.

Also next weekend, I'll be hanging around South Boston doing research for CONNOR'S BANSHEE, The amazing Kim Simonian, who lives in Dorchester, has arranged drinks Friday night and Sunday dinner with various South Bostonians. Kim's the niece of Ann Logan, who's in my writers group, and obviously is a formidible organizer.

I'll spend Monday at Oliver Hazard Perry Elementary School in South Boston, sitting in on classes and eating lunch with any kids who will let me ask searching questions such as "What's your favorite candy? Do you ride a bike?" Then I'll do a couple of workshops with fourth and fifth graders.

Then I'll drive home for six hours. Then I suspect I'll crash. But not forever, because the first weekend in June I'll be doing some unspecified something at the Printers Row Lit Fest in Chicago. No word yet on when or what, but I'll post it as soon as I know.

The Knitting Report: I'm one toe away from another pair of cotton socks. This one I knitted on circular needles so the cuff looks MUCH neater. I'm going to go down a needle size for the next pair and see what happens. Life on the edge.

The Revision Report: I may be able to finish this round before I go to Boston, which would be great because that means I'll have a few built-in days off before I print it out, read it, and fine tune. At least I hope fine-tuning will be all it'll need. *shivers*

We Visit the Sunrise County

2011-05-10T18:26:00.005-04:00

On Monday, my friend Alice hijacked me for a trip Downeast to Lubec, which is as far east as you can go in the U.S. Lubec does not let you forget this fact: There are signs everywhere telling you that this is the easternmost place where you can do whatever it is that you're doing and still remain on U.S. soil. I was expecting a sign like that in the outhouse at West Quoddy Head Light, but was disappointed.

Alice pulled off a particularly skillful hijacking, since I drove. I like driving. I especially like driving Downeast, where there is practically no traffic and therefore no one to mind if you slow down and gawk. (Not the case around here, especially at Blue Hill Falls, where we regularly shake our fists at summertime visitors who slow down to 5 mph just when we are late for the dentist.) (I hasten to add that I did try to speed up or get out of the way if someone came up behind me.)

Washington County, where Lubec is located, is a large and relatively empty place, often billed as the Maine county most in need of jobs and economic development. It includes two Passamoquoddy reservations, at Pleasant Point and Indian Island, plus a University of Maine campus in Machias.

It's called the Sunrise County, but it's gorgeous even in the rain. Good thing, because yesterday couldn't decide whether to rain or rain like hell.

I'd seen tons of pictures of West Quoddy Head--many of them exactly like the one I took at right--but had never been there. It is spectacular, and I plan to return, possibly in better weather. There's an amazing trail from the lighthouse along the cliffs:

And another that takes you to a lovely little boardwalk over a bog full of pitcher plants. (Easternmost open bog in the U.S., the sign says.)

I've never seen so many pitcher plants in one place. (Click on the photo to appreciate close-up)

Eager for foreign travel, we crossed the bridge to Campobello Island, Canada. We drove past the Roosevelt homestead, but our main goal -- Alice being a foodie AND an anglophile -- was a grocery store so we could gape at all the British stuff labeled in French. Alice bought candy bars, and the guy at the register said she had to have a Coffee Crisp, which Nestle makes only in Canada. Apparently they're much in demand, because when we drove back into the U.S. and told the customs guy we'd bought candy bars but didn't open the bag, he said knowledgeably, "Oh. Coffee Crisp."

Frankly, they were a bit sweet for my taste. But they were satisfyingly crisp, so one out of two ain't bad.

Here's the bridge, with a little bit of typical Lubec next to it. (Lubec really is not thriving.)

Here's the place on Campobello which thrilled us most, discovered by mistake after we got lost heading out of the grocery store. (Well, not exactly lost. We were exploring and got turned around funny, not having a map and not understanding how the coastline worked.) Anyway, this is Head Harbor, a busy fishing port, which means the island economy doesn't rely on tourists and retirees, which is all to the good.

And here are the intrepid travelers. I'm on the West Quoddy Head trail, Alice at the lighthouse with its distinctive red stripes.

May Book Review Club

2011-05-04T10:40:00.004-04:00

Click icon for more

book review blogs

@Barrie Summy

It's spring! My eyes are itching like crazy and yesterday I met a black fly. I'm revising my first draft, alternately singing and sighing. And yet, I read. It's a sickness.

Don't forget to click the icon to find the rest of the May reviews!

Chime
By Franny Billingsley
Penguin/Dial Books for Young Readers
2011
I had no intention of ever reviewing this book, nor do I have any business reviewing it now. Franny Billingsley and I have the same editor, the miraculous Kathy Dawson at Dial Books for Young Readers. Kathy’s assistant, Claire Evans, sent CHIME to me out of the blue when I innocently (really! I swear!) said I was looking forward to reading it.

I'm totally prejudiced, but I can’t help myself. This book is marvelous. So sue me, FCC.

YA fantasy is choked with stories of girls coming to grips with their powers and fighting off evil. The one big difference here is the narrator’s voice—well, everyone’s voice. Oh, and the utterly original collection of supernatural elements. And the characters, who are quirky yet human, plus the setting, which is eerie and gorgeous.

“Rich” was the word that kept coming to mind as I read. Also “sepia.” Atmosphere is everything in this book. If you don’t count voice and characters and story and setting and supernatural elements.

Okay, let’s just say it’s the writing.

“The wind smacked at everything. It smacked the river into froth. It smacked the willow branches into whips. It smacked the villagers into streamers of hair and shawls and shirttails. The wind didn’t smack us up, though, not the Larkin family. We were buttoned and braided and buckled and still.”

The narrator is Briony, one of the lovely twin daughters of a village clergyman at a time when railroads are laying claim to the English countryside. She’s funny, depressed, smart, self-deprecating, honest and totally deluded.

“Adults tend to view me as being mature beyond my years. I think it has partly to do with being a clergyman’s daughter, partly to do with looking after Rose, and partly to do with being rather clever. But I can’t take any credit; I’m stuck with all of it.”

Briony hates herself. She believes she is a witch, evil enough to have damaged her beloved twin’s brain and enabled her beloved stepmother’s death. At seventeen, she has sentenced herself to a lifetime of taking care of Rose, her gently addled sister, and never, ever being happy.

“Rose hates any bit of clothing that constricts, but I say, Chin up and bear it. Life is just one big constriction.”

Briony lives in the town of Swampsea, next to a swamp governed by the Old Ones: spirits who, like nature itself, can kill you if you cross them. There are Horrors and Reed Spirits and the Dead Hand, all intent on dragging the foolish wanderer under the muck. There are Dark Muses, who feed on a man’s talents until he’s drained to death. There’s the Boggy Mun, whose anger at the railroad’s plans to drain his swamp has inflicted the town with “swamp cough.”

Into this dank life comes Eldric, a failed college student whose father plants him at the parsonage to settle him down. Eldric is lively, funny, and fashionable, not the irascible Briony’s type at all. And yet she is drawn to him, and apparently he to her. Their relationship, with its humor and shocks and life-changing effects, is a bright thread in the darkness.

“If I could love anything, I’d love the swamp,” Briony says. She stays away from it because she alone can hear the Old Ones, and letting anyone know about that gift could get her hanged as the witch she knows she is. But she’s compelled to return when Rose contracts the swamp cough, making a perilous bargain with the Boggy Mun that could end up at the gallows.

The plot twists off from there, and by the end it’s the characters and the reader who are drained, not the swamp. I don’t have time to read it again but I’m going to. I’d suggest you read it, too.

A word on the cover: Gorgeous design, perfect model. Too much make-up and hair product, though. Briony spent her childhood tramping the swamp, earning the nickname “wolfgirl.” She would not wear eye-liner. And I can tell you from personal experience: Hair product is murder in a buggy swamp.

This and That, Here and There

2011-04-30T17:20:00.006-04:00

Good news:

I love maple buds this time of year--they rival the fuschia for color and lavish shape. They're just starting to pop--right on schedule, unlike last year's early spring. My sinuses hate it, but the rest of me is dancing.

When we moved to Maine was the first time I was aware of red maples--growing up, the abundant maples around our house in Massachusetts were sugar maples or Norway maples, and budded out in yellowish-green. My first spring in Brooklin was a revelation--the maple flowers were crimson, other trees bronze, still others various shades of yellow and green. I'd had no idea that spring could be as colorful as autumn.

And don't talk to me about the gold and purple finches. They're so bright they could blind you right now. Anything to attract the ladies, hey guys?

Even better news:

I went to Belfast (the one in Maine, not involving plane flight) earlier this week, where I met with the public library's middle-school reading group organized by children's services director Jane Thompson (that's her, standing up). They'd read SMALL PERSONS WITH WINGS, so I got to talk about where the idea for Durindana came from and all that. I was delighted that the two boys in the group (one had to leave before I took the picture), apparently had no objection to reading a book with a girl protagonist and a bunch of Small Persons with Wings--contrary to the accepted wisdom.

I talked to Jane's middle-grade group a couple of years ago when THE UNNAMEABLES came out, and now those kids are in a separate group reading young-adult books. It's a credit to Jane and the library that this is how Belfast kids choose to spend their afternoons.

Jane also gives the kids healthy snacks of fruit and pretzels. I'm ashamed to say that I took cookies.

The knitting report: Socks, still. I went to Bangor and loaded up on cotton yarn, so eventually I'll be able to throw out my worn-out cotton socks and replace them with lovely handmade ones. Or maybe not so lovely. But functional.

The writing report: I'm still revising. Some unspecifiable something is wrong with one section--I keep thinking I've figured it out, then it turns out that some mysterious Something Else is still wrong. I plan to finish this first pass-through in about a week, set it aside for a few days, then print it out and start over. Tra-la, tra-la. Still dancing.

The fashion report: If you watched the royal wedding, didn't you love the young royal with the Belgian waffle/pretzel/flying buttress/godknowswhat growing out of her forehead? I vacillate between admiring her courage and wondering what on earth her family was thinking to let her go out in public like that. And wondering why she wasn't cross-eyed.

Guess I've forgotten the Seventies. Just as well.

Edited to add: This is the one I mean.

Why I Love Revision. Or: I Have a Headache

2011-04-15T15:14:00.000-04:00

I am revising now. Life is bliss. That's why the past week has been what other, better bloggers call a Blogcation. In my case it's just that time passes and suddenly it's been a week or more.

I love revision. Seriously. It may be because I started life as more of an editor than a writer, at least professionally. Or it may be because I'm anal-obsessive and love the little, niggling brushwork more than the big, broad strokes of first draft.

Also, revision tends to happen in little intense chunks. You finish one chunk and move on to the next, and it feels like you're doing some exciting new thing.

Plus, you begin to see the final shape of the book. Or what will seem like the final shape until your editor gets hold of it. (I love my editor. Really.)

Much as I end up enjoying it, revision generally doesn't start well, at least for me. Here's the drill:

1. Finish first draft, and fling self into at least two weeks away from this friggin' book, which by now has turned into the stupidest thing anyone ever thought of.

2. After two weeks of puttering around with other things, print out first draft, and read it in printed form for the first time. At this point you discover that the first draft is even stupider than you thought it was, but you also get a clearer idea of what needs to be done.

3. Flip through the manuscript, writing down what needs to be done. At length. Put your revision notes into a computer document called Revision Notes. Notice how many pages it is in 12-point type. Close Revision Notes and pour yourself a small gallon or so of wine.

4. Wonder who ever told you you could write, and why you believed them. Be abusive to your mate.

5. Take a walk. Remember how much you truly love revision.

6. Open up Revision Notes, and read a note at random. It will be something like "school scene is lame." Stare out the window, wondering if "lame" could possibly be a good thing.

7. Find a note that suggests a concrete change--in the most recent case, that was "bragging more grandiose." Scud through the first few chapters, grandiosing the bragging.

8. Discover that you're having a nice time.

9. Stop whining and get to work.

So that's what I'm doing now, whistling and making the world gruesome with glad cries.

Meanwhile, poor Rob, who dislikes showing his work and detests crowds, has a painting in the Portland Museum of Art biennial--for the third time, which is impressive. This time it's a landscape instead of one of the big narrative paintings he considers to be his "real" work, which has him wrong-footed, but he'll survive.

Here's what he almost didn't survive--last week's opening:

And here are some people with the audacity to look at his painting (the green landscape on the left):

Sorry the photo's blurry. I guess I don't like crowds either.

April Book Review Club

2011-04-06T10:30:00.000-04:00

Click icon for more
book review blogs
@Barrie Summy

I've been very good this winter--I don't think I re-read a single book. (Some winters I bury myself in Jane Austen and refuse to emerge until spring.) Here's the one exception, prompted by a bookstore find. And it's not winter anymore, so it doesn't really count.

Don't forget to click the icon above for more reviews!

Dune
By Frank Herbert
Ace Science Fiction, 2010
(Original: Chilton, 1965)

My household has been DUNE-free for decades, ever since my mid-Sixties paperback decayed or was lent or otherwise vanished. Last week, browsing at Bull Moose in Scarborough, I saw it: a shiny new paperback, not four months old. I was waiting for a reading to start, so after I bought it I huddled between the stacks for a dip into Frank Herbert’s world of marvels.

This was a true flashback to my first DUNE experience as a high school student in the late sixties. I was supposed to be working in the school library, but in the stacks I discovered this wonderful story, possibly my very first science fiction. I read a chapter a day, sneaking. Before I was very far in I found it in a bookstore, just as I did last week, some forty years later. I leapt on it then, as now, and took it home to wallow.

Today, with the Mideast in a constant uproar, it makes for a particularly interesting read. Herbert must have been eating the prophecy-inducing spice, melange.

In DUNE’s universe, an entire interplanetary culture and economy is addicted to the “awareness spectrum narcotic” melange. The Spacing Guild, which has the monopoly on travel between the worlds, must have it in order to navigate. The Bene Gesserit, a semi-religious order, needs it to fuel their insights and prophetic visions. Ordinary people use it to lengthen life or simply to get high, and eventually need it to live at all.

The spice comes from only one place: the desert planet Arrakis, also called Dune, inhabited by nomadic Fremen who use terms like “jihad” and “hajj” and describe themselves as “sunni.” The galactic powers view the Fremen as pawns to be persecuted and controlled in the chess game for spice monopoly.

Turns out they’re not pawns—the Fremen have secrets. And all it takes is one man, Paul Muad’Dib, the product of the Bene Gesserit’s long-term genetic maneuvering, to catapult them into their proper place in history.

DUNE was published in 1965, ten years before our first “oil crisis.” Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert had published THE PSYCHEDELIC EXPERIENCE in 1964. We’d learned the word “ecology,” which gave resonance to the Fremen’s dream of reclaiming their planet from the endless sand.

It’s definitely a book of its times, with a corresponding tunnel vision. Homosexuals are all distasteful predators. Although Fremen women are skilled warriors, and Paul’s mother, Jessica, is politically adept and powerful, it’s a man’s universe and women are the real pawns. (As I remember 1965, it would have been a revelation that any woman had any power at all. Herbert gets credit for a step in the right direction.)

The point of view is shared primarily between Paul Muad’Dib and Jessica, but we get glimpses into the heads of many others for a fascinatingly varied perspective. Interestingly, though, I can’t recall ever getting into the head of a Fremen—just the “European” types. The Arabs, while sympathetic, are still “other.”

Despite its shortcomings, however, DUNE is one hell of a good time. The action is thrilling, mystical journeyings fun. The world Herbert has built is flawless, the characters rich and varied. There’s very cool “stuff”: ornithopters, Guild space ships, ginormous sand worms, force-field shields, “family atomics.” The desert culture, complete with “stillsuits” that recycle breath, sweat, and wastes into potable water, is a fascinating blend of traditional Arab and sci fi.

Paul Maud’Dib, the hero, is a tad T.E. Lawrence-ish, and his character arc is a bit too much of a straight line for my taste. Overall, though, the characters have depth and variety and—pardon the expression—spice. Jessica may be in my top ten of all time: smart, insightful, courageous, but also deeply human.

Now I’m on to the next book DUNE MESSIAH, in a tattered 1970 paperback that makes me sneeze.

No Fireworks This Year. Sorry, Channel 2.

2011-04-04T09:13:00.000-04:00

I met my friend Anita at The Morning Moon cafe for breakfast Sunday morning, the day after Brooklin's annual town meeting. Owner Mike Roy, a selectman, emerged from the kitchen to say, "Jeez, they were throwing money at you."

Hard to know what to expect of a town meeting. Sometimes the voters question every minute expenditure, other times they worry that you're going to waste away for lack of funding. That was the case this year for the Brooklin Youth Corps, the town's summertime work/self-esteem program for teens.

In most respects, town meeting was blissfully boring, especially considering what happened last year. The first weekend in April, we vote for town officers on Friday, then gather at 9 a.m. Saturday in the school gym to vote the budget for the fiscal year that starts in July. Last year, after months of bickering in the town office, all three selectmen resigned and walked out two minutes into the meeting, leaving the moderator, George Eaton, to lead us in figuring out what to do next.

George talked a couple of the departing selectmen into remaining in office to sign things until we could hold a special election. Then we elected him, former selectmen Albee Smith and Mike Roy to one-, two- and three-year terms. On Saturday, George stepped down as selectman (to hearty applause) and went back to being town meeting moderator. We elected Deborah Brewster, a former school board chairman well versed in town politics, to a three-year term in his place.

Phew.

In the photo at left, Mike explains how we fund the maintenance on the fish pier and town landings. That's George on the left, then Albee, Mike, and Deborah. (I think Albee's deep in thought rather than grumpy.)

One of the Bangor tv stations sent a reporter to this year's meeting, obviously thinking we were some fractious town that would always generate news. Poor guy damn near fell asleep. We chatted in an unfocused and friendly way for the most part, flaring up just a teeny bit as we discussed whether we should give money to a lobster research and replenishment project that may not take place. (That's a representative of the organization at right, promising to not to take the money if the project dies.) We were out of there by 11:30, although most of us stuck around for a lunch raising funds for the eighth grade class trip. (Pictured below)

Re: the money-throwing incident. Financially, the Brooklin Youth Corps--the town's summer paid work/self-esteem program for teens--did well last summer. We got several grants, the weather was perfect for our garden project and the kids got to sell some of the produce at a farmers market. As a result, we needed to ask for $4,500 at most from the town (we also get money from donations, fundraising events, and homeowners for whom the kids do chores). Then we discovered we were likely to have only eight or so kids, so we'd only need one coordinator/van combo rather than two. We promised the selectmen we'd shave our request accordingly.

So Saturday morning, as BYC president, I stood up thinking I was heaven's gift to town politics and said we'd reduce our request to $500.

You would have thought I was offering to immolate myself. It was a worrisome thing, somebody asking for practically no money, and there was a splinter movement to keep us at $4,500. Others thought we knew what we were doing (not a good assumption) and should be permitted to starve if we wanted. We compromised on $1,500.

And now, being me, I'm worried that we've overlooked some gruesome thing and really needed our $4,500.

Other town meeting moments:

Town Clerk Gigi Hardy (right) yuks it up with Tad Goodale during the legally-required paper ballot vote on the school budget. Pain in the neck, but a good chance to stretch our legs. They're in the school library, which explains the dragons in the background.

Rob, having accepted the surprise Firefighter of the Year award from Fire Chief Sam Friend, attempts to escape without having his picture taken. It was actually pretty sweet--Rob coached Sam's elementary school Odyssey of the Mind team, so they go way back. That's why Sam got a little emotional giving Rob the award. It's also why he's cracking up watching Rob do the Curmudgeon Shuffle.

The Knitting Report: I'm still hunting for the right combination of sweater pattern and yarn, so to feed my addiction I've started making a hat from leftover wool. The color combination I've ended up with is either subtle and sophisticated or ugly as sin. I may abandon it and hunt for more leftovers in the attic.

The Writing Report: I'm revising. Connor's parents are giving me trouble. All my adult women seem to be either worry warts or nutcases. *sigh* The teen girls rock, though.

Filmed, Feted, and Fed

2011-03-29T16:42:00.000-04:00

I had a lovely time in Portland Friday and Saturday, hobnobbing and being interviewed and reading at Bull Moose. In addition to the general wonderfulness, it was therapeutic to get out of Brooklin for a while. There have been strings of days lately when I haven't even left the yard. This cannot be healthy.

Carrie Jones, Maurissa Guibord and I gathered first at MPBN (Maine public radio) for a Maine Things Considered interview with Keith Shortall, a lovely bearlike man who calmed us right down and asked great questions. Encouraged, we went off to WCSH and 207 host Rob Caldwell, less bearlike but equally calming and good to talk to.

We're lucky we didn't have a Live Mic incident. As we were being miked, the experience reminded Carrie of wearing a wire and pretending to be a hooker in Lewiston during college, aiding the police. She held forth at some length as the shots were being set up, which I suppose could have been entertaining if the cameras had been on. She never got a chance to explain exactly why she was aiding the police in the first place, so I look forward to that story sometime.

My potential embarrassment was that I mugged and waved at myself when the m onitor came on (again, not when we were being filmed, thank god). Such a grown-up.

The video of the TV interview doesn't seem to want to embed, so here's the link if you're interested. The radio interview hasn't aired yet.

I spent Friday night with my friends Zoe and Sosha, a mother/daughter duo who took me out to dinner and generally coddled me. They used to live in Brooklin--Zoe was in my writers group and I worked with Sosha at the school, plus she was a reader for SMALL PERSONS. So it was a thrill to hang out with them for a bit.

Here's Carrie (left) and Maurissa (in background, in black) in action on Saturday, after our reading at Bull Moose.

Many, many thanks to Tia and Brian at Bull Moose (as well as the previously hailed Gillian Britt) for setting up the event and treating us so well.

The knitting report: Finished my last sock, and I have to buy yarn in order to start my sweater. I'm noodling with a dishcloth as an alternative to fidgeting.

The Maine Politics report: Governor LePage secretly removed the embattled mural from the Department of Labor over the weekend, fearing that the opposition would sit in to prevent it going out the door. (Which they would have. Including me, probably.) Research is under way as to the legalities, since it's a Percent for Art project and could conceivably have required consultation with the artist before it got moved.

The New York Times had a good editorial. But, as usual, E.B. White said it best. The occasion was the 1933 battle between Diego Rivera and Nelson Rockefeller about a portrait of Lenin in a mural Rivera was creating for Rockefeller Center. (If you saw the movie "Frida" you know that Rockefeller's goons ended up taking sledgehammers to the mural.)

White wrote a poem called "I Paint What I See," which was published in The New Yorker. It's here. My favorite part right now is the end (the speaker is "John D.'s grandson Nelson"):

"For this, you know, is a public hall

"And people want doves, or a tree in fall,

"And though your art I dislike to hamper

"I owe a little to God and Gramper.

"And after all,

"It's my wall."

"We'll see if it is," said Rivera.

Spring and Art and Interviews

2011-03-24T15:23:00.007-04:00

Ah, spring in Maine. Gorgeous one day, eight inches of wet snow the next. But there's something about the light this time of year that makes the world smile and gives you a sense of hope, no matter what's underfoot.

That is, unless you pick up the morning paper and actually read it. For those of us who are anywhere left of the Tea Party, times are tough in the ol' Pine Tree State. This morning, the news was that our governor thinks a percent-for-art mural in the Labor Department lobby is too pro-labor and not "business-friendly" enough. (Maine is "open for business" now. The gov. was pictured at the state line last week hanging up a sign saying that, so I guess it must be true.) Apparently, only government-approved art is allowed these days.

At risk of being business-hostile, I would just like to say that tomorrow is the 100th anniversary of the fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, when 146 workers died because the bosses locked the doors and stairwells. This event as much as any other led to the formation of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union and started us on the road to today's industrial safety standards. Some of them are silly (talk to a volunteer firefighter about OSHA some time) but by far the majority were badly, badly needed. We're lucky we have the luxury of complaining about them.

A group of artists are protesting under the mural tomorrow at noon. (All of them probably ingest heavy metals using their mouths to put a point on their brushes. Don't tell OSHA.)

The writing report: I finished reading the rough draft for CONNOR'S BANSHEE. I am considering going to work in a shirtwaist factory. One day at a time, Ellen, one day at a time. *Commences deep breathing.*

The knitting report: I'm heading for the toe on my second cotton sock. When I go up to the attic to look for my suitcase (more on that below), I will try to find the old Portuguese Fisherman's Sweater pattern. Oh god.

Infuriating waste of time update: I spent two hours on the phone with Microsoft this morning after downloading a critical update that turned my computer into a large plastic boulder. The update turns out to be something that checks you for pirated software, begging the question "critical for whom"? I did not download it a second time. (I don't pirate software, by the way.)

The shameless promotion report: Tomorrow, I go to Portland to meet Carrie Jones and Maurissa Guibord, first at MPBN to tape a brief interview for Maine Things Considered, then to WCSH-TV (Channel 6) for a brief interview for 207. The radio thing may air at 5:30 tomorrow night, but not if there's too much news about, for example, the governor attacking murals. The TV thing will air tomorrow night at 7.

The three of us will read and talk (not at the same time, most likely) at Bull Moose in Scarborough at 2 p.m. Saturday. And may I just say All Hail Gillian Britt, who has organized ALL of this and is a genius of shameless promotion.

Happy Paperback Birthday, Medford!

2011-03-21T09:35:00.005-04:00

THE UNNAMEABLES comes out in paperback today, and what better way to celebrate than to subject yourself to total humiliation? So here I am, reading bits of it aloud:

In other news: SMALL PERSONS WITH WINGS got its very own paragraph in The Washington Post over the weekend, in a Book World special section on children's books. I'm ridiculously happy about it. So shallow.

The knitting report: I finished a cotton sock. Started another. The first one looks extremely sloppy in the upper ankle area, so I am trying to be A Better Knitter in this second one. But I figure, hey, nobody's ever going to see my upper ankle area when I'm wearing jeans, right? Depraved as I am, I can't see me wearing navy-blue cotton socks with shorts. (And a spectral voice intones: Never say never.)

The writing report: Back to CONNOR'S BANSHEE today. I'm printing it out in order to read it in hard copy. *shudder*

Everything else: Please, please, Qaddafi, just go to Sharm el-Sheikh and relax under the palm trees with Mubarak. (Spectral voice snickers. Yeah, right.)

Life goes on

2011-03-15T10:12:00.005-04:00

Like everyone else, I'm glued to any internet reports I can find about the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan. My friend Di (discoverer of the fairy-on-a-motorcycle pin) lives just north of Tokyo, and her Facebook updates have been calmness itself. Although her family, like everyone else, is being affected daily by power outages and transportation difficulties--not to mention aftershocks--she suffered only minor losses in the earthquake and was well out of range of the tsunami. Nevertheless, "nerve-wracking" is a vast understatement.

And of course the devastation in the tsunami areas is unbelievable. Add radiation to the mix, and you just want to rush over there and DO something.

YA author Maureen Johnson (also represented by my agent Kate Schafer Testerman) incited many of us to donate books for prizes in her efforts to raise funds for Shelterbox, a truly amazing organization that ships completely equipped shelters to disaster areas. That was great--her efforts raised some $14,000 for Japan and, earlier, $15,000 for Christchurch. (The Japanese number is smaller, I suspect, because of the whirlwind nature of the effort-- it was all over by Sunday morning.) But it feels profoundly unadequate, and I know we'll all be looking for other ways to help.

Johnson did all her fundraising on Twitter. Di keeps us posted on Facebook. Say what you will about social networks, at times like these they're worth their weight in megabytes.

Meanwhile, life goes on. It's town meeting season around here--ours is in a couple of weeks--and last week I got to cover Deer Isle's for The Ellsworth American. It was an uneventful year with nothing astounding on the warrant and the budget about the same. I loved it, though--even the most stultifying town meeting has that moment "when democracy sat up and looked around," as E.B. White wrote about a Brooklin town meeting years ago.

This time, citizens raised questions about recycling and building debris at the solid waste transfer station, support for the shellfish commission, and brush-clearing on the roads. A splinter group decided the town's long-time animal control officer needed a substantial raise to help with truck maintenance. The voters gave him another $100 a month even though he'd only asked for $15 or $20 more. He said he "doesn't do the job as good anymore" because he no longer cleans up roadkill. (The crows handle that nicely.) He does, however, keep stray dogs at his own house as much as he can. He's been looking for an apprentice, but "nobody loves animals like I do."

Here's what it looked like:

The crowd gathers in the Deer Isle Municipal Building--town offices upstairs, fire department downstairs. About 68 voters ended up attending.

Voting. In this case, whether to consider holding future town meetings on Saturday rather than Monday afternoon. (Stonington, the other town on the same island, also meets Monday afternoon. They used to call off island schools on town meeting day, but I don't think they do that anymore. That's what happens when you build a bridge to the mainland.) (They built it in the 1930s. Still.)

The Deer Isle selectmen (seated) and the town meeting moderator. The selectmen look grim here but they're really very nice.

After the meeting, Town Clerk Rebekah Knowlton explains the ins and outs of the school board vote. Since Deer Isle and Stonington share a school system, both towns vote on the same school board candidates. This can get tricky, because Deer Isle is much bigger than Stonington and can swing the vote if it wants to. Generally, though, the two towns get along pretty well.

The Wildlife Report: This morning, the cat learned how to open the door to the Milkbone cupboard, and stood aside while the dog gorged herself. The cat keeps trying to ingratiate herself, but after four years of effort the dog still won't let her snuggle up.

The Knitting Report: I'm still on my first cotton sock. It looks very sloppy--cotton turns out to be less forgiving than wool--but I'm hoping It'll All Come Out in the Wash.

The Writing Report: I'm taking two weeks away from CONNOR'S BANSHEE to gain perspective. I thought I'd work on something else but I seem to have frittered one week away on chores. I did spend a day reading about Death. That was cheery.

Read Aloud!

2011-03-09T15:28:00.004-05:00

It's World Read Aloud Day, and in its honor (and because apparently I have no shame left) I've made a video of myself reading aloud. From SMALL PERSONS WITH WINGS, naturally, for the reason stated above (the one about having no shame).

The video quality is horrible, because the words and picture went out of sync at a higher resolution. Just as well, because my visual quality is horrible today, too. It's my very first video, so think kindly of me.

So here goes, such as it is:

In other news: I have a guest post over at Cynsations, the blog of estimable children's book author Cynthia Leitich Smith. I loved writing it, so I hope you'll go over and read it. It's about when Issues in children's books become side issues (with a lower-case "i").

Dr. Seuss in Our Little Town

2011-03-05T13:54:00.005-05:00

I got to read OH, THE PLACES YOU'LL GO to the Brooklin School this week, which was especially wonderful because that happens to be a Seuss book I'd never read. I found it a bit repetitive, frankly, and not as wildly inventive as, say, HORTON HEARS A WHO or my longtime favorite, GREEN EGGS AND HAM. And I had to keep inserting "or girl" every time he used the word "guy" in addressing the reader. But it's an inspiring and truthful book, no question, and the kids did laugh, so that's all to the good.

March 2 is Dr. Seuss's birthday, in case you didn't know, and the National Education Association chose it years ago as the date for Read Across America, when community members visit schools to read aloud. In Brooklin, as in many other schools, it's also Pajama Day. (I sleep in a T-shirt--TMI alert--and don't own pajamas, so I contented myself with wearing a bathrobe over my clothes.)

As you will see in the photo below, music teacher Mike Schrader also is pajama-challenged. He solved the problem by wearing a plastic bag on his head. He and the second grade led the school in singing "Dr. Seuss, We Love You," to a devilish tune that stayed in my head all day and drove me NUTS. (IMPORTANT SANITY TIP: When that happens, go here.)

After the reading and the singing, a special guest appeared: none other than The Cat in the Hat, played by school staffer Cookie Mangels. She was the right choice for the job, never having met a kid or a dance move she doesn't love.

And then there was the cake, donated by Tradewinds Marketplace in Blue Hill. It was 8:30 a.m. so, wisely, no one cut into it. The kids would have it for dessert at lunchtime.

After the festivities, I went home and had a truly horrible writing day. Fortunately, true to the spirit of OH, THE PLACES YOU'LL GO, I then had a great day Thursday. Then a nothing day Friday and not much of a day today. So tomorrow will rock!

In other news: I signed up to do Skype author visits. I probably will die of fright the first time I do one. Very cool idea, though, especially for those of us who live miles from nowhere.

The knitting report: I seem to have hurt my arm skiing. I finally fell, in spectacular fashion, and had to thrash around in the snow for a while before I managed to stand up. Not sure when my right arm took a hit, but I decided I probably couldn't type AND knit. So, in a spirit of self-sacrifice and WANTING TO GET THIS FRIGGIN' DRAFT OVER AND DONE WITH, I've stopped knitting for a few days.

The writing report: Not even 25 pages left to go on this deeply ugly first draft of CONNOR'S BANSHEE (ETA: Maybe not even 10) and suddenly a minor character from mid-story has returned and wormed his way into my heart. He has absolutely no function at this point in the story. He might be the "darling" referenced in the old saw, "kill your darlings." Or not. One way or another, this'll be blood-curdling.

March Book Review Club

2011-03-02T06:06:00.000-05:00

Click icon for more
book review blogs
@Barrie Summy

March! Spring! Well, except for the two feet of snow/slush on the ground. (I just typed "snot" by mistake. Not sure that's far wrong.) Anyway, still woodstove weather, and what could be a better companion than an illustrated encyclopedia--short bites, suitable for a frost-bitten brain. And pictures!

Don't forget to click the icon above, which will whisk you away to more book reviews. Think spring!

Abbey Lubbers, Banshees & Boggarts: An Illustrated Encyclopedia of Fairies
By Katharine Briggs
Illustrated by Yvonne Gilbert
Pantheon Books, New York, 1979

Katharine Briggs took her fairies seriously. She was a folklore scholar, with several Oxford degrees, and did not think fairy tales were strictly the province of children. The tales she liked were those handed down over generations by people who believed in them, as opposed to the ones “made up as a pretty fancy.”

This book is a popularized, illustrated version of Briggs’s AN ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FAIRIES, with more tales and fewer scholarly treatises. I guess it was intended for kids. Born in 1898, Briggs was 81 when it was published (she died a year later), and her foreword sometimes brushes against that patronizing tone writers used to adopt when addressing children. “I hope you will enjoy the book,” the introduction concludes, “and perhaps become a folklorist, collect stories for yourself, and tell them to other people.” (My second grade teacher talked like that.)

Once she moves into the body of the book, however, Briggs is all business and forgets she is supposed to be writing for the kiddies. Describing the horrible Peg Powler, who dragged children into the River Tees, she comments: “If Peg Powler was not invented by careful mothers you may be sure that they made her sound as terrifying as they could, for the Tees was a dangerous river.”

Briggs's youthful readers have to be sturdy of psyche. Her tale of the Each Uisge, the Scottish water horse, ends with the livers of seven little girls washing up on the shore.

Briggs wrote scads of books, among them THE PERSONNEL OF FAIRYLAND and the four-volume DICTIONARY OF BRITISH FOLKTALES IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. She’s supremely comfortable with her material. She doesn’t attempt linguistic fireworks—who needs to, when children’s livers are washing ashore?—but she writes with an endearing, understated wryness. She tells the story, for example, of a young man who, when dancing with a Scandinavian elf-woman, notices that she is blessed with a tail. “But he did not betray her. He said, ‘Pretty maid, you are losing your garter.’ His tact was rewarded by good luck all his life.”

Other elven women, we learn, “were beautiful from the front, but they were hollow behind, like a rotten tree. Because of this they never turned around in their dances.”

Fun fact: Why are fairies allergic to iron? Because they’re from the Stone Age. Duh.

The book is presented as a mini-encyclopedia, with entries alphabetized and cross-referenced. It’s intended for browsing, though—no table of contents and no index. Yvonne Gilbert’s illustrations are funny, lovely, or harrowing, depending on need. If I’d read this as a child I would have flipped quickly past the color plate of the Nuckelavee, a centaur-like Orkney sea-monster that is the stuff of nightmare.

I flip quickly past it now, come to think of it.

Winners and Bloggers

2011-03-01T15:10:00.004-05:00

When a task requires intelligence, good humor, charisma, deftness, and absolute integrity, who do you call?

A librarian, of course.

And so it was that I descended earlier today on Friend Memorial Public Library, Brooklin, Maine, carrying a failed knitting project and nine slips of paper with names on them. And sure enough, Library Director Stephanie Atwater was ready and willing.

We put the slips of paper into the FKP. Stephanie went to work.

And the winner of signed copies of SMALL PERSONS WITH WINGS and THE UNNAMEABLES is ... Anamaria! (Email me your address, Anamaria, and I'll ship them right out.)

In other news: SMALL PERSONS WITH WINGS is having its own private party over at RT Book Reviews. I burbled out a guest post -- which has yet another book give-away detailed at the bottom -- and on top of that there's a lovely review.

Also Library Media Connection recommended SMALL PERSONS as "a fun, magical read."

The knitting report: Rob wore the socks I knitted out in public Saturday night, and they did not unravel. They didn't even itch, he said, although I don't think I can take credit for that. Despite my burning desire to knit myself another Portuguese fisherman's sweater, the task of finding the 20-year-old pattern (in the wasteland of abandoned craft projects that is our attic) was beyond me. So I'm knitting myself a pair of cotton socks, which was the original goal anyway. I started last night. The air was blue with cuss words. And yet I persevere.

I have to read Dr. Seuss's OH, THE PLACES YOU'LL GO to the Brooklin Elementary School tomorrow, which is all about perseverence. Maybe I'll talk about knitting. Or...maybe not.

Just to Look At

2011-02-25T16:13:00.005-05:00

You know how, when a toddler confronts an expensive china thing, you say, "No, no...that's just to look at"?

Well, I have several things to show you that for the moment are Just to Look At but soon will be To Read. In other words: BOOK COVERS, BABY, all of them announced this week or shortly before.

I am doing this today because I need something great to look at because it's snowing and it just turned to rain and sleet and at some point I will have to shovel 5 to 8 inches of wet concrete off the deck and after all that it might not even be skiable so I'll be relegated to the Evil Snowshoes That Dump Me Headfirst. Otherwise, the weather's fine, thanks, wish you were here.

First, here's the latest edition of Barrie Summy's "I So Don't..." series of teen novels (Barrie was a fellow 2k8er with her debut novel, I SO DON'T DO MYSTERIES.) This one comes out May 10.

Winner of the creep-tastic prize is the brand new cover for Gretchen McNeil's POSSESS, her debut novel. Gretchen is a fellow Enchanted Inkpot blogger, and also sings in a circus so she's well worth knowing. POSSESS, which is about a girl who can banish demons, comes out in August.

Elizabeth C. Bunce, another 2k8er AND another Inkie, is publishing her third book, for which I try not to hate her. LIAR'S MOON, Elizabeth's second fantasy about a pickpocket named Digger, comes out in November.

And Elliot's back! That would be Jennifer Nielsen's Elliot Penster, goblin fighter--now up against pixies. Jennifer's also an Inkie. This book comes out in May.

Well, I feel better. How about you?

Brandon. And stuff.

2011-02-23T13:56:00.000-05:00

The town of Brooklin, population 900, turned out in droves Saturday for a public supper to benefit Brandon Higgins, a teenager with an inoperable brain tumor. (That's him at right, working in the Brooklin Youth Garden last summer.) At roughly $10 admission, the supper made around $6,000, or so they announced as things were winding down. I'm not saying all the 600 were from Brooklin, but still...pretty impressive. (A yard sale and auction swelled the proceeds to around $8,000, last I heard.)

I love my little town. Even when it's covered with slush, as it will be a few weeks from now.

Brandon, by the way, just got back from California , having spent a long weekend out there with his family attending the NBA All Star game and attendant festivities. Yay, Make A Wish Foundation.

For more info, here's a story about him in The Ellsworth American.

That's how it goes sometimes: It never fails--just when you're writing with hands tied behind your back and a mouthful of dental appliances, A Fuse #8 Production goes and devotes a whole post to your measley little book. Did me the world of good. Betsy Bird is a goddess--or a librarian, which is essentially the same thing.

On the other hand, today I wrote a scene involving a large bowl of poisonous spiders. Could have used a dental appliance or two for that one. Euugh.

In other business: The Bangor Daily News reviewed SMALL PERSONS! Right here. And The Ellsworth American, on top of all its other lovely coverage, also posted a lovely review on its web site. I do love newspapers.

The knitting report: Mid-foot, nearing the toe. I have yarn for a pair of cotton socks, but I'm feeling slightly tempted by a cotton sweater. God help me. Rob, however, has grown deaf to swearing and has stopped asking, "What? What? What's wrong?" when I get wound up. So he'll probably survive a sweater nicely.

Don't forget there's a contest on. I didn't set a deadline, did I? Let's call it a week.

A Contest!

2011-02-21T13:24:00.007-05:00

SMALL PERSONS WITH WINGS has been out for a month now, and the paperback edition of THE UNNAMEABLES comes out in another month. So, having admired everyone else's contests over the years, I'll try one of my own.

Mellie in SMALL PERSONS is obsessed with art history, which enables her to tiptoe close to creativity while keeping her imagination firmly under control. (She collects art trivia and likes to catalog it.)

Medford in THE UNNAMEABLES is obsessed with wood-carving--in a good way, but his obsession also is dangerous for him.

So what's your passion? Music? Manga? Horses? Antique bottle caps? Ant farms? Tell us about it in the comments--what you're passionate about and why. (Keep it clean, obviously!) One random commentor wins signed copies of SMALL PERSONS WITH WINGS and the new paperback of THE UNNAMEABLES.

ETA: This contest will end at noon Tuesday, March 1!

The knitting report: I am knitting my fourth sock, and I've had to rip out the heel twice. I seem to be getting worse at it rather than better. (How, I ask you , did I end up with FIVE extra stitches?) Poor Rob has to sit there and listen to me swear. This pair is supposed to be for him, and he's been tactfully trying to say that he isn't THAT short of socks. Too bad. He's getting these if it kills me.

I Wanna Be a Paperback Writer

2011-02-18T14:43:00.005-05:00

Just LOOK at that. Did you ever see anything so gorgeous?

THE UNNAMEABLES comes out in paperback March 21. I am now the proud possessor of a whole box of them. I feel a contest coming on.

In case you want a closer view:

The cover was designed by Regina Roff, and those who've read the book will know just by looking at it that she did, too. And very carefully. Thank you, Regina! I'm also grateful to Julia Richardson, editorial director for paperbacks at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, for shepherding Medford and friends into their new home.

Bloggy goodness: Nice reviews for SMALL PERSONS WITH WINGS at Educating Alice , Charlotte's Library and Flamingnet, where young adult books are reviewed by actual young adults. Thanks, all!

Valentines Forever

2011-02-15T14:45:00.003-05:00

Rob and I observed our thirty-second Valentine's Day yesterday. Which made me think about how careful we should be about setting precedents.

On our first Valentine's Day in 1980, Rob gave me a teddy bear, for a variety of slushy sentimental reasons that will remain forever locked in our secret past. This was such a hit that he started giving me a stuffed animal every Valentine's Day, every year striving to find something new and different.

I now have thirty-one stuffed animals. (One, a bear named Fred, was sacrificed to a lonely new puppy, who grew old and went to meet his fathers a decade ago at least.) Number thirty-one is a walrus whose name has turned out to be Tuskany. "It's getting harder and harder to find new ones," Rob groused. And it's true...I have two moose, a mallard duck, a pig, a cow, and, last year, a porcupine. They all live together on a couch in our bedroom,which now serves no other function except when I toss my clothes on top of the animals, which I often do.

If this goes on, by the time we shuffle off the coil we'll have more stuffed animals than the toy store. Certainly we'll have more stuffed animals than brains. Poor Rob will be reduced to giving me a stuffed slug and/or mollusk.

And yet, we can't stop. I think we both feel that things have been going along just fine for the past three decades, and we fiddle with tradition at our peril.

I do keep trying to shake things up. At Christmas, I threatened to carry him off to Mexico to visit our friend Larry, but in the end I, too, gave in to the promise of snow and Merry Gentlemen and having the neighbors in for turkey.

Next year, maybe we'll make it to Mexico. But I suspect, twenty years from now, we'll be trying to find a spot for that fifty-second stuffed animal.

This and That and The Other Thing

2011-02-07T15:28:00.011-05:00

This: On the one hand, there's skiing. On the other hand:

The dog Callie hates this winter. Tough finding a place to answer The Call when you're up to your butt in snow. She ends up befouling the footpath, which is against her principles. (She's a very good dog.)

That: SMALL PERSONS WITH WINGS got a lovely review in The Horn Book ... or will, when the March/April issue comes out. It says, in part: Readers will pull for Mellie to prevail—not only in her efforts to help the Parvi but also in her maturing relationships with herself (as she “grows into her grandeur”), her family, her new friend Timmo, and her peers.

On the blogosphere, Francesca Amandolia used the words "marvelously inventive" at YoungAdultBooksCentral , which Durindana and Co. appreciate deeply. Cori at the Phoenix Book Company calls Mellie "a great central character," and vancie917 at Not Another Book Blog says the book is "fantastic" and "everytime you think it can't get weirder, it does." (That's pretty much what I was striving for, so I'm swelling with pride. And my friend Alice's cupcakes, but that's another story.)

In general, not a bad haul, and very much appreciated.

The Other Thing: Rob and I went to the Stonington Opera House yesterday with our friends Alice and John (hence the cupcakes) to see "Dying City," Christopher Shinn's Pulitzer-finalist psychological about a troubled Iraq-war widow and her husband's equally troubled twin brother. The acting was wonderful and the play thought-provoking. We should all be flattered that the Opera House thinks we're up to this sort of thing in February... actually, I found it suited my mood. Yay Opera House!

February Book Review Club

2011-02-01T15:07:00.010-05:00

Click icon for more
book review blogs
@Barrie Summy

Monster snowstorm happening here--hope I get this posted before the power goes out. (If the formattings a bit wonky, Blogger seems to be having issues today. Or maybe it's me.) Anyway, time to huddle by the fire and be thankful for indoor plumbing. Don't forget to click the link for great reviews--one of which is of SMALL PERSONS WITH WINGS with a fun interview by Sarah Laurence!

At Home: A Short History of Private Life
By Bill Bryson
Doubleday, 2010
ISBN:978-0-7679-1938-8

Bill Bryson is the enemy of silent reading. I defy anyone to get through more than five pages of AT HOME: A SHORT HISTORY OF PRIVATE LIFE without feeling compelled to read some paragraph aloud to whoever else is in the room. For example:

∙ Country churches in England look like they’re sinking, but really the graveyards are rising. A typical churchyard has accumulated some twenty thousand corpses, one buried on top of another.

∙ When Thomas Edison first wired a section of Manhattan in 1881-82, “horses behaved skittishly in the vicinity until it was realized that leaking electricity was making their horseshoes tingle.”

∙ “Originally, the joists in English terraced houses ran from side to side and sat on the partition walls between houses. This essentially created a linear run of joists along a block, heightening the risk of fires spreading from house to house. So from the Georgian period, joists were run front to back in houses, turning the partition walls into firebreaks.” Because the joists had to rest on interior walls, this determined the layout and uses of rooms in urban households for generations to come.

∙ In the 1700s, British colonial law and the realities of markets and transportation meant that Americans had to order manufactured goods from England even if the raw materials came from here. In 1757, George Washington’s order included snuff, sponge toothbrushes, salt, raisins, almonds, mahogany chairs, tables, Cheshire cheese, marble, papier-mache, wallpaper, cider, candles, twenty loaves of sugar, and 250 panes of glass.

Bryson is the author of A SHORT HISTORY OF NEARLY EVERYTHING, among many other books. He has a questing mind and must live for research, judging by the twenty pages of bibliography. Best of all, he has a puckish sense of humor and loves to tell straight-faced tales of eccentric aristocrats, misguided inventors, and eight hundred Thames daytrippers drowning in raw sewage in 1878.

The book’s organizing principle is a tour of Bryson’s home in England, a former rectory built in 1851, stopping at various points for a discussion of issues related to drawing room, scullery, or fuse box. The topics addressed in each chapter are wide-ranging: The chapter on the bedroom covers bedding types and syphilis, but also the evolution of medical care and attitudes toward death.

Every time I interrupted my Dear One with some new gem from the bowels of history, I found myself exclaiming: “Whatever made him decide to look THAT up?” The answer, I guess, is that the guy loves both to read and to entertain. His books do not give the impression of being planned, somehow—reading this one is not like listening to a well-reasoned discourse with a sweeping conclusion at the end. This is visiting your favorite sweater-clad scholar for afternoon tea, getting yourself invited to drinks and dinner, and staggering home delightedly at midnight.

Did you know the Aztecs made salt by evaporating their own urine?

A word of remembrance: Novelist Diana Norman, who also wrote as Ariana Franklin, died January 27. She wrote the MISTRESS OF THE ART OF DEATH series of historical novels set in the time of Henry II—they were my entry in this review club a while back. They are marvelous, and I’m desolated that there won’t be any more. I plan to get my hands on the ones she wrote under her own name and suggest you do the same. RIP, Ms. Norman.

A Grand Day Out*

2011-01-30T14:20:00.010-05:00

Saturday afternoon, Carrie Jones, Maurissa Guibord, and I gathered at Jesup Memorial Library in Bar Harbor, Maine, to talk, read aloud, and generally hobnob. We got a good crowd in the library's lovely, cozy conference room--hearteningly, there were kids there. Even more hearteningly, they were clearly readers, and smart ones. The future is in good hands.

My friend Alice Wilkinson drove over with me, and we had lunch first at a marvelous little bistro called 2 Cats, which this time of year serves breakfast until 1 p.m. I am always in the mood for breakfast, especially on those rare occasions when it involves lox. This one did. I was very happy.

Here is Alice, lining up shots as the audience jostles about setting up chairs. (She didn't take this picture while standing outside her physical body, in case you're wondering. I took it, because I thought the world should see Alice in action. )

Alice did take these. I moved out from behind the large conference tables to make sure she could photograph up my nose, which is becoming a theme of this blog.

At left I am reading like a grown-up. At right, I am guffawing like an idiot. I think I was talking about the glitter on the cover and how the cat continues to use it as a chin-scratching device.

Here (below) are Maurissa (left), Carrie and me sitting at our ease. Not sure if this is before or after the actual reading.

And here are some of the kind souls who bought our books and asked us to sign them. (I took this one, too, because it was a thrill to see such cheery faces on a bleak January afternoon.)

Deepest thanks to Debbie Taylor of Sherman's Books & Stationery in Bar Harbor and Mae Corrion of Jesup Memorial Library for organizing such a lovely event.

Bloggy Goodness! SMALL PERSONS WITH WINGS got more online attention in recent days. Brenda Kahn at proseandkahn posted a review, and then made it even better in the comments at Heavy Medal on the School Library Journal site (second comment down). Pamela Hill was extremely kind at Mrs. Hill's Book Blog. Set me right up for a blissful Sunday.

Better still, it snowed again last night! And it's flurrying now! What an AWESOME winter. (I say that now. Wait until February.) (I sound like Eeyore. Sorry.)

*The title of this post is in Alice's honor, since she's a big Wallace & Gromit fan. As am I. As is any right-thinking human. Or dog.

Socks! And some other stuff

2011-01-26T14:10:00.004-05:00

Look! I made socks! With my own hands! You can wear them on your feet, except my feet will be in there first so that would be weird. Did I mention I made them? With my hands?

I know some people reading this blog may make socks all the time and may think this is a mere bagatelle, a wisp of nothing. (Yes, I'm looking at you, Lisa and Barb and Michele.) To you I say...get over yourself. I MADE SOCKS!

Er. Don't look at them too close.

In other news: SMALL PERSONS has been reviewed or described in some newspapers and blogs. For example, the Tampa Bay Tribune and The Ellsworth American/Mount Desert Islander . Plus, the lovely and talented Kate Coombs (aka The Book Aunt) and the talented and lovely Rebecca Enzor at Sticky Note Stories. I love them all, with an abiding adoration surpassed only by my LOVE OF SOCKS.

Also, although this has already been all over Twitter and Facebook, congratulations to superagent Kate Schafer Testerman and her husband, Doyce, on the birth yesterday of Sean Douglas Testerman, clearly a work of awe-inspiring genius.

Why We Love the Seasons

2011-01-23T12:54:00.004-05:00

We got at least a foot of snow Friday, and there may be more coming Wednesday. Hibernation season is upon us. We refused all entertainment suggestions this weekend, and I haven't been in a car since Wednesday. And then I only drove to the school and the post office.

This'll send me chug-chug-chugging around the bend before long, and Steps will have to be taken. Next weekend there's all sorts of Stuff To Do. But for the moment, it's bliss, the antidote to the hectic holidays and harried summer. I'm back on my thousand-words-a-morning routine, taking care of various chores in the afternoon. At 5 or so Rob and I meet at the woodstove and spend the evening chatting, reading, and watching news or a movie. I've knitted my first pair of socks (thank you for the lessons, Lisa) ... just have to bind off one and redo the toe on the other. (Anal at all, Ellen? Nah.)

Yesterday I went skiing on the newish walking trail a group of fine citizens created in the woods behind our house. This snow was particularly difficult to break trail in--your skis sank down about eight inches, where they slid along fine but your legs had to shovel all this snow out of the way. At one point I actually found myself thinking, "There's too much snow!" (Hm. Maybe the chug-chug-chugging has started already.)

Here's what the trail ahead looked like, when I'd been skiing for about 15 minutes and was sweating in 15-degrees F.

But once I muscled my way across to the main trail, some other wonderful person had been there before me, so I could just ski. Better yet, he or she or they had skied all the way down to Herrick Bay:

Here's the trail home--our house is just behind the trees. This used to be the road to Naskeag Point, generations ago, and we blocked it with a little bit of our house (the addition for my mother, actually). I keep waiting to be haunted by annoyed Red Paint People and early Europeans, but nothing so far.

And here I am, in mid-sweat.

Charming view up my nose, hey?

Last summer was spectacular, and so far this winter is, too. The summer before was all foggy and cold, and last winter ended way too early, so I guess we've earned it. But the Puritan in me says we'll pay for it...guess I won't pack away any sweaters this spring.

I'm heading out again now.

Why We Love the Humans

2011-01-20T10:50:00.007-05:00

Today's the official birthday of SMALL PERSONS WITH WINGS. Here's what I got in the mail this week from bosom buddy and stealth copy-editor Shelly Perron in Connecticut.

I will pop it this evening, possibly on the phone or Skype (!) with Shelly. (I figured out how to use my computer camera yesterday. Watch out, world.)

Since the Small Persons have been on the receiving end of various gifts for some years now, I thought I'd celebrate their print birthday by offering "The Parvi Pennati: A History in Presents."

The Parvi Pennati (a diminutive of "small persons with wings" in Latin) first glimpsed daylight on a private forum I've mentioned before, the Leaky Marauders. We originally got together as Harry Potter fans fond of debating whether Snape was secretly good and could Harry be Dumbledore's grandson. Before long, though, we were just friends who sometimes got silly. My sillier moments involved a ladylike, overdressed, clumsy, and ill-tempered fairy who once took a wild ride on a motorcycle with a hippogriff and a stuffed teddy bear.

Eventually, I got so fond of this fairy that I started writing a book about her. She is now Durindana, Mellie's overdressed and clumsy Parva friend.

Several years ago, Marauders from near and far gathered at Niagara Falls (sloooowly I turned...)--"near" meaning Montreal and Detroit, "far" meaning England and Japan. Martje and Ruth started things off by giving me this:

Meanwhile, KZ (Laura) had come prepared with an approximation of the fairy's favorite tiara. (We like to hang it casually on the coat-rack in the front hall. It looks especially at home in the summer with all the straw hats and baseball caps.)

On our last evening, several of us were out gazing at the falls, which the authorities light up with colored lights. (They're tacky but marvelous except for the yellow, which makes you think there's an incontinent giant upstream.) Several others were visiting the souvenir shops. The falls-gazers were standing there snapping pictures when a cry rent the air and Di, an Australian who lives in Japan, hurtled on-scene looking for me.

Turns out the souvenir shop's wares included a fairy on a motorcycle.

That's a portion of Di at left, along with a portion of me. (Can't remember which Marauder's Facebook page I cribbed this from, but thank you!) Only thing missing was the hippogriff.

Years later, when SMALL PERSONS was almost finished and I was reading it to my writers group here in Maine, fellow writer Susa Wuorinen demonstrated her many talents by creating this, a rendition of Mellie's first Parvus, Fidius.

Susa writes kids books and plays, but she's also a topnotch illustrator and makes puppets. She's the one who made the marzipan fairies in the post below. I try not to be jealous.

Anyway, five years or so after the forum fairy first flitted, here' s her final home.

Many, many people have offered vast amounts of support to get her this far, chief among them superagent Kate Schafer Testerman and genius editor Kathy Dawson. Thank you all.

PS Oh my goodness, did I mention the great interview Dawn Metcalf did with me on The Enchanted Inkpot? I know I splashed it all over Facebook and Twitter. If you didn't see it there, hit it now. She asked interesting questions.

Countdown

2011-01-18T16:44:00.006-05:00

The official launch date of SMALL PERSONS WITH WINGS is Thursday, but last week was kind of an unofficial launch. Carrie Jones and I read from our new opuses (opii?) at the Blue Hill Library, before a hardy crowd of 25 people who didn't seem to mind the dreadful roads. (This is why Nick at Blue Hill Books regarded me with horror when I said the book was coming out in January... I could tell he was thinking about the joys of putting on a reading when the weather is almost guaranteed to be discouraging.)

My writers group put on a little celebration after the reading, complete with cool baked goods. Here, for example, is Ann's collection of chocolate cupcakes arranged like the title on the cover:

And Susa's marzipan Small Persons with yet more chocolate:

We drank champagne, ate cake and artichoke dip and other goodies (well, I did, anyway) and yucked it up. I can't remember which moment this is, but Becky (our hostess, at right) and I clearly had had just about enough champagne, thank you.

PS I'm reliably informed that the plural of opus is opera. Go figure. (Thanks, Aberforth aka Andrew.) Also, the photos are by Sherry Streeter, who took both of my author photos.

A Banshee, Baby!

2011-01-06T13:46:00.006-05:00

We interrupt this Thursday for an emergency announcement: I seem to have a new book deal. Here's the blurb from Publisher's Marketplace:

Children's: Middle grade
Author of SMALL PERSONS WITH WINGS and THE UNNAMEABLES Ellen Booraem's CONNOR'S BANSHEE, in which a Irish-American boy is visited by a banshee prophetizing death for someone in his family, again to Kathy Dawson at Dial Children's, in a nice deal, for publication in Spring 2012, by Kate Schafer Testerman at kt literary (World).

This is why I've been reading up about early Celtic homelife, just to get a handle on where my banshee came from and what she might be like. As you probably know, some old Irish families (usually those with an "O" in front of their names) have their own banshees, spectral woman who wail when someone's about to die. Mine's the spirit of a young girl who died too early--one variant on the tradition as conveyed by Katharine Briggs, queen of folktales from the British Isles. The entire book popped into my head almost fully armed when I was flipping through one of Briggs's books. That seems like it might be a good sign.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled Thursday.

January Book Review Club

2011-01-05T09:36:00.004-05:00

Click icon for more
book review blogs
@Barrie Summy

It's been a sunny but chilly 2011 here in Maine so far--woodstove time! Which means book time. And, possibly, imagining yourself in some warm place (an overheated New York apartment?) with adventures in the offing. If you like middle-grade fantasy, you couldn't do better than this one by Elise Broach, author of SHAKESPEARE'S SECRET and a slew of picture books.

Don't forget to click on the icon for more reviews!

Masterpiece
By Elise Broach
Henry Holt & Co., 2008

I will never squish a beetle again.

Elise Broach’s MASTERPIECE is the kind of book I would have loved in childhood, when one of my favorite boredom-fighters was to imagine myself in an upside-down house, stepping over high thresholds and trying to get comfortable with all the furniture stuck overhead.

Broach encourages us to imagine a beetle’s life in a plush New York City apartment: Settled in comfortably behind the wall under the kitchen sink, scrounging meals from the trash and what the baby drops on the floor, taking a bath in a bottle cap, riding the vacuum cleaner to a vacation spot in the conservatory.

Marvin, a young beetle, lives with his parents and extended family in the home of the Pompadays (the name says it all). The human family’s only worthwhile member is James, who turns eleven at a depressing party engineered by his uber-networking mother and stepfather. When James’s artist father arrives to give him a pen-and-ink set, he doesn’t think much of the present until Marvin secretly visits his room at night to leave his own present, a buffalo nickel.

Dipping his front legs into the ink, Marvin discovers he can draw—not just draw, but make stunning art. James discovers Marvin’s tiny, gem-like rendition of the scene outside his window, and in short order discovers Marvin, too. The two strike up a wordless friendship, so compatible with each other that they need only a modicum of code: Marvin runs up James’s finger for “yes,” and back down for “no.”

This comes in handy when Mrs. Pompaday discovers the drawing and infers that her son is an artistic genius. One thing leads to another, and before long Marvin and James find themselves in the Metropolitan Museum of Art faking an Albrecht Dürer drawing to help foil some art thieves. The plan goes badly wrong, of course, and it takes all of Marvin’s creativity and James’s upright courage to keep priceless artworks from disappearing forever.

This book itself is a tiny gem. Like Mary Norton’s THE BORROWERS series of the fifties and sixties, Broach imagines a gorgeously detailed miniature life behind the walls of the Pompadays’ apartment, complete with family suppers and missions to rescue the homeowner’s contact lens from the bathroom drain. (“Why, it looks exactly like my fruit bowl,” Marvin’s mother comments.)

Delightfully, Broach sneaks in cool insights about art and ethics without once preaching or sacrificing plot pressure. The story is entirely told from Marvin’s point of view, but his attention is so closely focused on James that we think we’re seeing things through the human boy’s perspective, too. Like Marvin’s drawings, this is an act of genius.

Seriously, you’ll think twice before you stomp your next beetle.

Dear FCC: I bought this book with my own money, and it's worth every cent.

It's 2011!

2011-01-03T15:59:00.005-05:00

Okay, it's starting to get real, this Second Book stuff. Trying to be a good author, I just set up a Facebook page for SMALL PERSONS even though I have no clear idea what to do with it. Apparently I'm supposed to connect everything in some giant web, so that anything I say on this blog or Twitter immediately goes to Facebook.

This just seems so foolhardy to me. But I'll try to do it, even though at the moment Twitter is convinced that I'm somehow blocking its cookies when I have done everything in my power to do otherwise. (I'm sorely tempted to reach for a "blow your cookies" joke but will refrain. THAT's how good an author I am.)

Anyway, here's today's news:

Sort of oldish news, but today it's official: SMALL PERSONS got its third starred review, this time from the august librarians at School Library Journal. Eva Mitnick of the Los Angeles Public Library, may their fines ever increase, says, in part:

Every character, human or Parvi, is drawn with singular care and humor, from the disgracefully clumsy Inepta to Mellie’s patient, maybe-new-friend Timmo. Spells turn people into drooling frogs and irascible bonging clocks, the truth-seeing magic of the moonstone turns out to be something of a liability, and Mellie “grows into her grandeur” just in time to save the Parvi as well as her entire family. Readers will share the girl’s irritated fondness for the ridiculous and lovable Parvi. A great choice for all who favor funny and intelligent fantasies with quirky characters and an unpredictable, fast-moving plot.

The American Library Association's Booklist liked the book, too: Together with her parents and Timmo, the nosy neighbor kid, Mellie’s odd predicament is to return to the world of the fanciful by facing what is real. This clever tale also wraps a story of acceptance, both of self and family, in the fairy dressing. I can't link to the actual review, but I'm grateful to Heather Booth for her kind words.

And in other news:

Exhausted But Happy

2010-12-31T14:38:00.010-05:00

My first New Year's resolution is to stay home tonight. I (and sometimes we) have been out about every other night for the past couple of weeks, or at least that's how it feels. Driving to Ellsworth for a birthday party last night was fun but also the last straw...I am now officially Over the holidays.

It has been a blast.

First, can I have an "awwwww"? The two young men in red are shown practicing their violins before the annual carol sing at the Rockbound Chapel in West Brooklin. Then (lower photo) they joined other young-uns to accompany "Jingle Bells." That's our neighbor Win Pusey at the piano.

Now, can I have "brrrr." You have to imagine total silence except for the moaning of wind and the distant baaahing of sheep. This is what it looked like for several minutes when I arrived to pick up my Christmas turkey and couldn't find anyone. I knew the farmers had gone out of town, and attempts to reach the farm-sitter's cell phone had failed. When I took this picture, I was envisioning sixteen friends and neighbors sitting down to peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

Fortunately, Brian the farm-sitter rescued me, and I made it home with 23 pounds of holiday bliss. Here's Rob, ministering to the beast.

He also made a pumpkin pie. Can I pick 'em or what?

Here's the table before. (I suppose that should be "tables," since we stuck together two fire department tables and one from our neighbor Ken's shop, and covered the whole shebang with three of my sainted grandmothers' tablecloths. ) (Meaning three tablecloths, not three grandmothers. There were only two. And they were more than enough.) (More than enough in a GOOD way, of course.)

And here's after, when everyone was stuffed with two kinds of pie plus chocolate truffle cake, and looking self-conscious because I was taking their picture.

And here's yesterday, when I spent valuable work time out skiing with my friends Lisa and Kim. (You can sort of see Kim behind me. Lisa's taking the picture.) It was gorgeous, and today the temperature went into the 40s so I'm glad we caught it while it existed.

And here's a guessing game, courtesy of Lisa, the snow, the wind, and a Mystery Guest. What do you think made this?

The Nose Knows

2010-12-18T10:53:00.005-05:00

The neighborhood dog walk has been spectacular the past couple of days, thanks to yesterday's new snow. I sometimes fight the urge to rub my face in it. (Rob has been known to oblige, although we haven't had a good snow fight in years.) Fortunately, I can live vacariously through my dog, who reminds us that snow hides many treasures, from questing voles to frosty bear poop. All you need is a questing and frost-resistant nose. (The photo's by my friend Lisa, who gets extra points for remembering her camera, which I never, never do.)

The Christmas season is upon us with a vengeance. Last night, I attended the second annual one-man performance of A Christmas Carol by Tim Pugliese and the New Surry Theatre. It was, if anything, even better than last year, mostly because of new lighting and sound effects. The arrival of Marley's ghost was actually scary. (Amazing what green light and clanking chains will do to your nerve endings.)

Tonight there's a Messiah sing-along in Blue Hill, during which I will pretend to sing soprano even though I stopped being an actual soprano years ago. (Thank you, tobacco. Which, I quickly note, I stopped smoking about twenty years ago. Still, the gratitude lingers.) Tomorrow afternoon there's the annual carol sing at the Rockbound Chapel here in Brooklin. Tomorrow night, Alice and John's annual do, which usually features 150,000 varieties of appetizers and cookies. Tuesday, solstice party at Kim and Tom's, which will feature a bonfire.

And Monday I trek to Happytown Farm in Orland to pick up a 23-pound turkey. Christmas dinner will be for sixteen this year. And may I just say, ohmuhgod.

A Marketing Ploy

2010-12-16T13:29:00.004-05:00

Discerning cats agree: SMALL PERSONS WITH WINGS is a head-scratcher.

I have no idea what the attraction is, other than my blood, sweat, and tears all over it. But there is glitter on the title and the fairies, so maybe something about the glue? Or the glitter's a little scratchy?

Whatever. My cat loves my book. (One minute after the last picture, though, the book was on the floor. Tough love.)

Ta-daaa!

2010-12-15T15:08:00.007-05:00

I got my first copy of SMALL PERSONS WITH WINGS this week, in a sumptuous package from my editor that also included chocolate. I have not been waving the chocolate around whenever anyone comes into the house. To be fair, I also haven't been eating the book.

In other news:

· It bucketed down rain and washed away the snow, then last night it snowed again, not enough to ski but enough to be pretty. Also enough to slick up the roads, so the morning neighborhood dog walk was conducted on a side road for fear that we would all slide out under the wheels of a fisherman. If the dogs only knew, they could buy their freedom just by taking off at a run when we're on an icy patch. But they never figure that out, which I guess is the secret to our long and friendly relationship.

· Our friend Lisa is here from Minnesota (she has a house in the neighborhood, usually inhabited only in summer), bringing with her a DVD of Toy Story 3, which Rob didn't see when the rest of us saw it last summer. My favorite part continues to be Mr. Tortilla Head. I am possibly influenced by the fact that, many, many years ago, I wrote an employee newsletter for Hasbro Toys, inventor of Mr. Potato Head, and I am the proud owner of two commemorative coasters, one devoted to Mr. PH and one to GI Joe. There was a rumor that Mr. PH was modeled after one of the brothers who founded the company, back when it made pencil cases. This rumor was hotly denied by all in authority, and yet it persisted. Much like Mr. Tortilla Head.

· As my frumious friend Bander noted in comments to the post below, the Kirkus review of SPWW is up online now. It's here .

Snow! Lights!

2010-12-06T15:40:00.007-05:00

We're getting a bit of snow today. I am ecstatic, although skeptical that it will stay around for long. We may have eight inches or maybe even a foot by the time this ends. I clattered down cellar and dragged up my skis and poles, and have them chilling on the porch. (For non-skiing readers, warm skis turn the cold snow into an icy mound under your foot. It's a lot like those ancient Chinese platform shoes. And just about as easy to maneuver in. ) I plan to ski around the yard tonight (when I should be reading about ancient Celtic homelife, but who's watching?) to get my legs under me, and hope to head off into the woods tomorrow.

Here's what the house looked like after the first round of shoveling. (Probably more to come tomorrow morning, at which point maybe I'll be a little less enthusiastic.)

You will note that I got the lights up on the maple tree without the drama of procrastination and near death I went through last year.

And here are my skis. Thoroughly chilled. Waiting. *Looks furtively around for ancient Celts.* Guess I'll head out now.

P.S. I suppose I should mention that Publishers Weekly gave SMALL PERSONS WITH WINGS a starred review. (Not sure the link will work, so I'll just say the reviewer called SPWW "wistful, humorous, and clever.") And we just heard that Kirkus Reviews did, too, although I don't think the review will be up on the web until the 15th. Yay team!

December Book Review Club

2010-12-01T09:24:00.004-05:00

Click icon for more
book review blogs
@Barrie Summy

If you're reading this, you spend time on the Internet. Like me, you might even be an addict. Ever wonder about consequences, other than carpal tunnel syndrome and eye strain? Read on...

Oh, and click the icon for more reviews. If your brain can handle it.

The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains
By Nicholas Carr
W.W. Norton & Co, 2010

In a waiting room last week, I happened on a National Geographic story about how much market gardeners in Iceland are enjoying global warming. I didn’t get to finish the story, so I don’t know whether they saw any downside to their warmer climate. But what I did read sounded familiar—I’ve heard others in the chilly zones tout the advantages of climate change, ignoring the droughts and floods and weird weather systems elsewhere.

Is Internet use the new global warming? Could be, if this book by Nicholas Carr is any indication.
Carr’s thesis is that extensive browsing, tweeting, and link-clicking is changing our brains both functionally and physically, reawakening our earliest talents as hunter-gatherers but killing off the gains we’ve made as deep thinkers. He quotes some analysts—the “yay, it’s getting warmer” crowd—who think this is just another step in our evolution. That point of view gains support from the tale of Socrates, who decried the advent of writing as a blow against our ability to remember without taking notes. It’s hard to argue that writing and reading have been anything but good for us, so maybe this is another case where we should just relax and see where evolution takes us.

Carr doesn’t think so. “We shouldn’t allow the glories of technology to blind our inner watchdog to the possibility that we’ve numbed an essential part of our self,” he writes.

Whichever side you’re on, this book is fascinating. Starting with the 1964 publication of Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media, Carr traces the past half century’s astonishing explosion of electronic communication, dwelling particularly on the advent of Google. We’ve heard much of this before, of course, but not always coupled with current research on the ways our brain adapts to new tasks.

If we repeat a task often enough, apparently, our brains not only adjust the behavior of our existing synapses but actually build new architecture, abandoning the old digs for the new.

London cab drivers studied in the late 1990s had larger than normal posterior hippocampuses (hippocampi?). That part of the brain “plays a key role in storing and manipulating spatial representations of a person’s surroundings,” Carr tells us—in other words, knowing the fastest route from Bloomsbury to the City enhances part of your brain. The cabbies’ anterior hippocampuses had shrunk to accommodate the neighboring expansion, reducing their abilities in other memorization tasks.

The biggest difference between reading a book and reading on line is probably the hyperlinks. The act of deciding whether to click that link, and then the process of following it, reading what it offers, and making our way back to our original document, changes the act of reading into something else. We are problem-solving, using hand-to-eye coordination, sharpening our reflexes, processing visual cues, increasing the capacity of our short-term memory. But we’re not “deep reading,” a process that makes us calmly deliberative and helps to build our long-term memory.

The social implications, Carr says, could be massive. For example, becoming less deliberative may make us more likely to go with the status quo rather than engaging in original lines of thought. Shallower, shorter-term thoughts may even hamper our higher emotions, such as empathy and compassion.

Engagingly, Carr does not set himself up as our model. He starts out by describing his own evolution into a truly impressive Internet user, on here constantly for research, blogging, even drivers’ license renewal. Worried about his inability to concentrate, he moved to Colorado and cut most of his Net use in order to write this book. When the book was almost done, he started reconnecting again and even discovered new stuff he could do on line. “I have to confess: It’s cool. I’m not sure I could live without it.”

Reluctantly, I have to agree. The past couple of evenings I read a book instead of watching a movie or TV show on line. As I write this, the modem’s turned off. But I found that I missed the conviviality of spending my evening with my partner rather than alone in a book. And of course I’m about to turn the modem on to post this review.

Plus, I’d like to finish that story in National Geographic. The issue’s probably at the library, but it’s December and it’s chilly out. What do you bet it’s on line somewhere?

Let's try this again

2010-11-28T14:10:00.002-05:00

I posted this yesterday, but apparently it wasn't an authorized version and YouTube took it down. The actual creators seem to have posted this one, so here's hoping. Enjoy!

The blogger plays catch-up

2010-11-22T16:52:00.011-05:00

Hello. Remember me? I am Ellen the Freelance Ne’er-do-well, but other than monthly book reviews a more accurate description lately would be Ne’er-blog-well. Herewith, the harrowing yet somehow tedious history of the past four months or so.

I'll do it backwards. Not, however, in high heels. (If you're under, oh, say, 45--and therefore perfectly capable of reading tiny type--this is a reference to the dancer Ginger Rogers, who "did everything Fred Astaire did except backwards and in high heels.")

First, SMALL PERSONS WITH WINGS has a new cover. I say “new” because this is the third one I’ve seen, and I understand there was yet another that I never saw. This is, fortunately, the best of the bunch. See?

Gorgeous, right? Plus, I’m told there will be glitter. I’ve never been a glitter sort of person—more denim and fleece. But clearly fleece fairies weren’t going to cut it.

The book comes out January 20, so it’s a fair bet that it’s gone to press now. If I bolt upright at midnight and realize that something makes absolutely no sense, I’ll just have to live with it.

Working backward through the ages, we reach the cider-pressing at the John household. We all brought apples—I stole some from our summertime neighbors’ tree—which got dumped into a grinder and then squished so the juice ran into a bucket and the apples were a juiceless pulp. If you’ve never tasted minutes-old cider, I’d suggest you try putting yourself into that position next fall.

What you see below is Rob and Nathan John running around and around to wind down the squisher.*

Let’s see. Still earlier, there’s Labor Day Weekend's Blue Hill Fair, which we attended en mass with friends. What I always like best is the juxtaposition of large animals, kids (the one in the middle is trimming her goat's toenails*), tractors, and honky-tonk. Oh, and french fries.

In the “no fool like an old fool” division, Rob and our friend Michael spent all their free time last spring building radio-controlled model sailboats. They sailed the boats, fending off interested canines, when Michael and his wife Linda visited in August.

And, for truly heart-rending nostalgia in deepest, darkest November, here's Rob and our friend Lisa watching the Eggemoggin Reach Regatta the first Saturday in August—all wooden boats, many of them vintage. Every year we kayak out to an island to eat lunch and watch the boats go by. This year the wind was so good we actually watched the boats come back, too, which is what’s going on here.

And now it’s 4 p.m., cold and dark as a witch’s armpit. But I’m going to see the new Harry Potter film tomorrow night (speaking of witches), and Thursday we hobnob and eat and drink. So who’s complaining?

*Technical term.

November Book Review Club

2010-11-03T11:05:00.006-04:00

Click icon for more
book review blogs
@Barrie Summy

We got our first killing frost last night at Castle Ne'er-do-well, so it's definitely time to hunker down. If you're already sick of the blip-bleet-blip of video games, try this one on your reluctant reader. Or grab it yourself for a laugh.

Don't forget to click on the button above for more great entries in the Book Review Club!

Diary of a Wimpy Kid
By Jeff Kinney
Amulet Books, 2007
ISBN-13: 978-0-8109-9313-6

The Wimpy Kid series spawned a movie last spring that’s out on DVD now, but that’s not why I chose it for this month’s review book. I chose it because of Arthur (not his real name).

A student at our local elementary school, Arthur’s an imaginative, potentially talented kid who doesn’t like to read—not the first I’ve run into, I’m sorry to say. In Arthur’s case, the chief competition is video games, surprise, surprise. He and I worked together on a short story last year, and I tried like hell to get him to read a book that was kind of the same genre as the story he was writing. He politely took the book home and just as politely ignored it. He told me he’d never read a book outside of school. Not once.

This year, he said he’d like to write something funny. So we went to the library and found DIARY OF A WIMPY KID, the first book of what will be a five-book series as of November 9. I got my hands on a copy of my own, and we agreed we’d read a chapter a week and discuss it briefly when we met.

Last week, he announced that he’d finished the book ahead of schedule and wanted to start the second. He’d gotten bored on a Saturday and picked it up, he said, and all of a sudden he’d finished it. He suggested he might finish the second one by the time he saw me today. He’s not a fan of the movie.

Author Jeff Kinney was at the Boston Book Festival a couple of weekends ago, which I attended. I went to another panel instead of his, but now I wish I’d sought him out and kissed his feet. It’s not for nothing that this book has a “Maine Student Book Award Winner” sticker on the front—that award is voted by Maine school kids, and this is obviously a kid-friendly book.

I mean, just look at it. The typeface is fun but readable, and the cartoons are hysterical. I often managed to read through a scene without inhaling my hot beverage, only to choke half to death when I saw the drawing that accompanied the action.

This first book is the sad tale of narrator Greg Heffley’s first year in middle school, which he describes as “the dumbest idea ever invented. You got kids like me who haven’t hit their growth spurt yet mixed in with these gorillas who need to shave twice a day.”

In middle school, someone like Greg is acted upon more than acting. Parents, older brother, teachers, bigger or more popular kids—they’re the ones with the power. We share Greg’s abortive attempts to control his own destiny, whether by running for class treasurer (in a smear campaign involving head lice) or by joining the safety patrol in order to get hot chocolate and miss some pre-algebra.

The great thing about his odyssey is that Kinney allows us to see where Greg’s going wrong without one single word of preachiness.

At one point, Greg allows his dopey best friend Rowley to take the fall when one Mrs. Irvine reports a Safety Patrol member terrorizing the kindergarteners in his charge. He admits to Rowley that he was the culprit, having borrowed Rowley’s coat.

“Then I told him there were lessons we could both learn from this. I told him I learned to be more careful about what I do in front of Mrs. Irvine’s house, and that he learned a valuable lesson, too, which is this: Be careful about who you lend your coat to.”

To Greg’s indignation, Rowley turns him in. He loses Rowley’s friendship for a while, eventually gaining it back. We know he’s being punished for being evil, but Greg never admits to the connection. He’s a modern-day Tom Sawyer.

My friend Arthur thinks he’s awesome.

October Book Review Club

2010-10-06T10:14:00.004-04:00

Click icon for more
book review blogs
@Barrie Summy

We had a spectacular summer here in New England, but now reality is closing in. The leaves are changing, the days are shorter, and there's a small evening fire in the wood stove. It's a funny time of year--we're sad that summer's over, a little worried about the darkness and the cold, but also looking forward to hunkering down by the fire and taking a break from the good times. No wonder Banned Book Week is in October--anybody who tries to take a book away from me right now gets whopped with an over-sized zucchini.

Don't forget to click on the icon for more Book Club reviews!

The Catcher in the Rye
By JD Salinger
Little, Brown & Co, 1951

Last week was Banned Books Week, in which we pay particular attention to what seems to be a particularly American pastime: Trying to prevent other people’s children from reading books you don’t want your own kids to read. We spend a lot of time in this country arguing about “government interference in our lives.” Fairly often, it seems that those who argue against Big Government are the very same ones trying to control other people’s reading. Go figure.

Anyway, in honor of the season, last week I re-read JD Salinger’s THE CATCHER IN THE RYE in the battered 1961 Signet paperback I last opened in high school. (Book hoarder? Me?) CATCHER is number two on the American Library Association’s list of frequently banned classics, right after THE GREAT GATSBY. I’m baffled why GATSBY is so frequently targeted, but I certainly understand why CATCHER strikes terror into the ultra-conservative breast. Along with John Updike and John Cheever and a few others, Salinger helped to terrify me away from the buttoned-down, suburban, 2.5-kids lifestyle my parents would have preferred for me. They did the same for most of a generation.

To understand why, you have to understand the uneasy world we Baby Boomers shared with protagonist Holden Caulfield—no more terrifying than this one, but maybe a bit weirder because everybody was so intent on creating an illusion of regularity and safety. Our parents had kept Hitler and Emperor Hirohito from our shores, but now The Bomb defied armies and oceans. Our country was in what seemed like an endless war to contain the Communist Menace; meanwhile, unpleasant men with five-o’clock shadow tried to root the Reds out of our own society. It was important to keep reality at bay: Body odor of any kind was our enemy, euphemism was king, bellies were girdled, and heaven forbid that women’s breasts should sag or wobble or look anything like actual breasts.

Then along came Holden, a kindly, befuddled teenager trying desperately not to become a “phony” like the adults and most of the other adolescents in his world. He swears, drinks, and thinks a lot about sex—and of course real kids never did any of that. About to be kicked out of his umpty-umpth prep school, he sets out for a picaresque couple of days in New York City, its wet, cold streets teeming with pimps and whores and barflies and would-be pederasts.

The story’s told first person, from the mental hospital where Holden ends up. You don’t know what will happen to him—maybe he’ll avoid phonyhood, but maybe he won’t. The reason we care so much is Holden’s voice, because he’s us. Nowadays, we’re used to a narrator talking the way we do, with all the halts and repetitions and verbal ticks of real life. Back in the Sixties, when I first met Holden, his voice was a revelation. It was like reading somebody’s actual diary, except the writer was brilliant at story-telling.

I knew Holden was me and I was Holden. I suspect that at least three-quarters of the audience at Woodstock had exactly the same experience.

I’m not saying there would have been no hippies or back-to-the-landers or lifelong Democrats without Holden—there were plenty of other factors at work. All I’m saying is that I’m grateful Holden was there when I needed him, grateful my parents bought that book (and Updike and Cheever) even though it contributed to their daughter’s headlong flight from their lifestyle—and even though the climate of the times was such that my town’s school board banned THE SCARLET LETTER. (As Holden would say: Really. They really did.)

I’m grateful no one prevented my parents from letting me read whatever I wanted. Happy belated Banned Book Week, Holden.

September Book Review Club

2010-09-01T08:56:00.006-04:00

Click icon for more
book review blogs
@Barrie Summy

August was such pandemonium that I didn't even post a review. But I did manage to read, because otherwise what is life? And now it's September, and our world begins to creep back toward normal. An excellent time for a good book, right?

Don't forget to click on the icon above for more reviews

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest
By Stieg Larsson
Translated from the Swedish by Reg Keeland
Alfred A. Knopf, New York 2010

This review will be short, because I am TERRIFIED that I’m going to spoil the book for someone. And it’s idiotic that I’m reviewing this at all, considering that I did the first two books a year ago.

On the other hand, the third book of Stieg Larsson’s trilogy is the best of the lot, and that’s saying something.

It’s significant that my partner Rob, an avid but normally disciplined reader, totally lost it on this one. Usually he reads for an hour before going to sleep, and it takes him ages to get through a book. I think he finished this one in three days. I arrived home from a day out Sunday to find Mr. Workaholic Painter hunched over the dining room table in the twilight, having been frozen in exactly that place and position since lunchtime. Dinner had consisted of a cheese sandwich. He was 20 pages from the end, and if I had anything to tell him about my day he didn’t want to hear it.

Since you’re obviously a person who reads book reviews, you already know that Larsson is the Swedish investigative reporter, magazine editor, and anti-fascist who died shortly after handing his publisher these three manuscripts. The three were supposed to be the start of a ten-book series, but I’m happy to report that HORNET’S NEST does come to a reasonable conclusion and is not a cliff-hanger. (That was my biggest fear.)

To answer the other question I’ve been hearing, yes, you do have to read the first two first, otherwise this one will make no sense whatsoever. I even had to go back and read the end of the second book just to get my head in the right place. (Maybe that’s a criticism of Larsson’s recapping techniques, or maybe I was just impatient.)

In a Swedish-English translation by Reg Keeland, whose name is on the flyleaf but not the cover, the book is a pleasure to read for the careful language as well--slightly Swedish in flavor (at least to American eyes) but colloquial and unobtrusive.

The weird thing is that this is by no means your typical suspense thriller. Unlike the first two books, which involve the usual amount of people tiptoeing around, getting caught, getting beat up and killed, racing around in mechanized vehicles, and all the rest, this one consists almost entirely of people talking to one another, standing in the shadows watching one another walk around, and using technology to snoop on each other. And yet it’s every bit as exciting as the car chase in “The French Connection.” (Yeah, that’s right, I’m dating myself. Wanna make something out of it?)

Lisbeth Salander and Mikael Blomkvist return as targets and collaborators, although I don’t think they’re physically in the same room at any time during the action. He is the investigative journalist whose poking around got things moving two books ago. She is the deeply damaged, anti-social, gorgeously goth professional computer hacker Blomkvist brought in to help him in the first book. Over the course of the second, her mysterious past began to take over the story. In this book, it IS the story.

I won’t go into detail, but we find out in this book that every scrap of the abuse Lisbeth suffered in childhood happened for a reason. That reason has national implications in Sweden, and its unraveling is a terrifying example of how fragile democracy can be. Watching how it unravels—who works together, what Mikael and Lisbeth accomplish together and separately—is the most literary satisfaction I’ve experienced since I watched Frodo and friends retake the Shire back in high school.

If this book has a flaw, it’s the same as the first book’s: The main plot concludes with loose ends dangling, and for that reason the book goes on for forty pages beyond what feels like finis. On the other hand, you’re reluctant to let go of Lisbeth, and you know this is the last you’ll see of her. So you’re really not inclined to complain.

Rest in peace, Stieg Larsson. But not for too long—I’m hoping for reincarnation.

A Series of Vapid Excuses

2010-07-15T12:36:00.009-04:00

So, I haven't been blogging. Again. This is because I am a very busy woman.

I have been:

Growing flowers. And then looking at them, which is even more time consuming.

Taking pictures of other people's flowers so I can look at them later.

Taking pictures of other people taking pictures of other people's flowers to look at them later.
(That's my friend Larry, visiting in June.)

WHAAAT? How did that get in there? How dare you imply that I just...

Now, wait just a gol-durned ... *Hits blog upside the head.*

Okay, that's better.

Actually, that's a picture of one of the summer's early triumphs: My 20-month-old Sears Kenmore vacuum cleaner, whose motor pooched this spring. Since my last Kenmore lasted 18 years, I wanted Sears to fix this one for free; Sears's best offer, after considerable to-ing and fro-ing with various customer service reps, was to pay half.

Then I found out that Maine has a consumer protection law that imposes a four-year "implied warranty" in cases like this. The last of the reps told me he wasn't equipped to deal with that news and I'd have to contact the corporate offices in Illinois. He declined to suggest any particular person or department, just gave me the overall mailing address and said,"anyone there can help you."

So I chose the CEO.

And this turned out to be a good choice, because I got a personal letter of apology from Interim CEO W. Bruce Johnson and a call from the executive offices arranging to fix the vaccuum cleaner for free. I have it back now, and it works like a charm. And I have to say I'm glad, because it's the best designed of all I checked out while I was waiting to hear from Mr. Johnson.

Now, what else have I been doing? Writing every day. Dealing with the Brooklin Youth Corps and its usual summertime ups and downs. Going through the last phases of production on SMALL PERSONS WITH WINGS (out January 20) and developing a proposal for a next book. Preparing for a panel discussion July 25 at Toadstool Bookshop in Milford, NH.

And feeling guilty about not blogging, which mostly means wondering why anyone would want to read a blog by me anyway.

Really, I've been working very, very hard.

*Sigh.*

I hate it when a blog goes rogue.

July Book Review

2010-07-07T09:25:00.007-04:00

Click the icon for more
book review blogs
@Barrie Summy

Hear that crinkling sound? That’s me, turning over yet another New Leaf. From now on, instead of waiting for the Perfect Blog Post to wander in and crawl up my leg, I will simply Post. Oh, the excitement.

I bet you don’t believe me. Such a skeptical world this has become.

Anyway, what better time to start than with the monthly Book Review Club? (Which, oddly, appears exactly one month after my last post—thank you, Barrie Summy, for making sure I at least do this much.) Don’t forget to click on the icon to find this month’s other reviews.

A Murderous Procession
By Ariana Franklin
G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2010

Sicilian pathologist Adelia Aquilar is an anomaly in 1176 England—a college-educated feminist, and a practicing doctor schooled in the forbidden art of autopsy. She is, therefore, utterly unbelievable. And I don’t care.

A MURDEROUS PROCESSION is the fourth book in Ariana Franklin’s “Mistress of the Art of Death” series, which follows Adelia from her arrival in England to help Henry II find out who’s murdering Cambridge’s children and blaming it on the Jews. She’s always homesick for Salerno, where her foster father is a Jewish doctor who has no objection to his wife and daughter following the same profession. In England, the role of women is such that she can only escape a witchcraft accusation if her Arab servant/mentor/friend, Mansur, pretends to be an Arabic-speaking doctor while she “interprets.” But she’s a talented forensic pathologist, and Henry won’t let her go home. By the second book she has tied herself to England further by acquiring a lover and a daughter.

This fourth book sends Adelia, Mansur, and the lover (I won’t say who he is in case you want to start the series at the beginning) traipsing through Europe as part of a royal procession accompanying Henry II’s eleven-year-old daughter, Joanna, to her wedding with the King of Sicily. Along the way, it becomes apparent that an old enemy of Adelia’s is also part of the procession and is plotting a gruesome revenge.

I adore these books, despite the odds. Okay, it’s a stretch that a twelfth-century woman would be quite as enlightened and accomplished as Adelia. (Although Eleanor of Aquitaine, Henry’s queen, would have kicked butt in any era.) Yeah, her lover is too consistently open-minded. And yes, it’s weird that a woman as smart as Adelia would be quite so stupid about religion, politics, and her own safety—the factors that keep getting her into trouble. It’s even a little hard to believe that Henry II would have so much work to offer a Sicilian woman doctor, no matter how talented.

But, oh, the medieval world! The details about food, clothing, daily life, travel, religion, politics, world view, and on and on! Franklin knows this era inside and out, and paints it in rich colors that seem true to life. Even Adelia and friends ring true, with suspension of disbelief.

The medieval world was equal parts erudition and ignorance, sophistication and credulity, restriction and freedom, comfort and misery, religious certainty and fear of damnation. Franklin weaves it all into a living, moving tapestry, as real as your foot. And she does it with humor—Henry’s a hoot (as he always is, especially when he’s Peter O’Toole), as are most of the characters burdened with testosterone. Adelia is exasperatingly, comedically befuddled when her status as a woman interferes with her medical practice. Supporting characters add deadpan humor without a modern author’s usual condescension toward “the Dark Ages.”

And there’s more than a touch of terror, appropriate to a time of hellfire and gargoyles. Franklin is capable of truly horrifying villains and means of murder. For sheer gruesomeness, there’s little to top the fate of Henry II’s Fair Rosamund in THE SERPENT’S TALE, a couple of books back.

In the current episode, we are privy to the villain’s thoughts, and therefore see devastation on the horizon when no one else does. You know a book has you by the gizzard when your brain screams, “No! No! Get out of there!”

It’s summertime. You don’t have much disbelief on hand right now anyway. So suspend it and enjoy.

June Book Review

2010-06-02T11:46:00.005-04:00

Click icon for more
book review blogs
@Barrie Summy

I was tempted to post something called "Check in here for all your bad-blogger excuses." But it's Book Review Club time, so I won't bore you with my tales of woe. Just as a hint: They involve spider mites, organic fertilizer, and Sears Roebuck & Co.

Don't forget to click the icon for more book reviews!

Just Kids
By Patti Smith
HarperCollins, 2010

They were kids, sure, but there was no “just” about Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe.

“Why can’t I write something that would awaken the dead?” Smith asks at the end of this absorbing, gut-wrenching memoir. She can’t do it for herself—all she has left of her friend and soul mate is a lock of his hair, mementoes, and photographs. But for us she has re-awakened both Mapplethorpe and the time he inhabited.

Smith is most famous as a punk-rock star, but she also has published five books of poetry and shown drawings, silk screens and photographs. In 2005, the French Republic named her Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres. Mapplethorpe’s beautiful, raw photographs were among the work targeted for indecency by Sen. Jesse Helms and others out to destroy the National Endowment for the Arts. That was in 1989, the year Mapplethorpe died of AIDS.

More than half of Smith’s book is devoted to five years when she and Mapplethorpe were a couple and barely scraping together enough money for art supplies. Those were dogged, creative, reckless, brave years, described with tenderness and essential honesty, although probably artistic license too.

Smith and Mapplethorpe met on the streets of New York in 1967, the Summer of Love. Smith was twenty, a middle-class, Rimbaud-loving Jersey girl who’d gotten pregnant, given the child up for adoption, and dropped out of teachers’ college to head for Manhattan and the world. (“Nobody expected me. Everything awaited me.”) Mapplethorpe, also twenty, had grown up on Long Island, loved making necklaces, and was determined to be famous, most likely for his art.

Their meeting and first years together embody both the innocence and the decadence of the Sixties, as well as the crazy courage of youth. Smith landed in New York with not a penny to her name, and survived her first days there by learning to dumpster-dive and sleep on somebody’s front stoop. She landed a cashier’s job at Brentano’s, and while she waited for her first paycheck she slept on her coat in the store and trolled other employees’ coat pockets for change. Mapplethorpe was hardly better off, although cannier.

They became a couple the night they met, and stayed that way, more or less, even after he’d discovered, wrenchingly for a Catholic boy, that he was gay. Together, they survived increasingly dire living circumstances and poverty so intense that a day’s single meal sometimes consisted of day-old cookies from a friendly bakery. Over time, Smith became the chief wage-earner, adept at peddling flea-market finds on the rare-book circuit in addition to her bookstore work. Mapplethorpe worked odd jobs but also turned tricks, as much for self-immolation as for wages.

All the while, they were making art in a vibrant city, surrounded by other artists. One time, when a local automat raised the price of a sandwich by a dime Smith didn’t have, the poet Allen Ginsburg bought it for her and shared her table, thinking she was an exceptionally pretty boy. Eventually, Smith and Mapplethorpe landed at the Chelsea Hotel, rubbing elbows with the up-and-coming artists, writers and musicians of the day. Janis Joplin, Grace Slick, and Jimi Hendrix frequented the bar off the lobby.

Mapplethorpe found his medium, photography. Smith, to her astonishment, began to transform her poems into songs. They drifted apart as a couple, and both found other mates. But they always remained touchstones, muses, and alter-egos.

Others have written of those times and similar journeys. What makes the difference here is the unembellished rhythm of Smith’s prose, her deadpan sense of humor, her erudition, and her unflinching sense of truth—all the more endearing when she mixes in a certain amount of myth. (Was she really the first to call Janis Joplin “Pearl”? Who cares?) She may be more honest than she wanted to be—Mapplethorpe, her “youth cloaked in light,” comes across as a self-obsessed hustler as well as an artistic genius.

“Nobody sees as we do, Patti,” Mapplethorpe tells Smith during the Chelsea years. Self-aggrandizing, sure, especially in that environment. But probably not far from the truth.

May Book Review Club

2010-05-05T10:31:00.007-04:00

Click icon for more
book review blogs
@Barrie Summy

For some reason, I've been thinking about the summers of my youth this week, possibly because spring is so early that it sets me apart from time. Anyway, I was remembering the utter joy of wandering to the bookstore at the end of the street, babysitting money jingling in my pocket, to find that they'd gotten in a Georgette Heyer paperback I'd never read. So I decided that this month's Book Review Club entry would be one of those blissful, now dog-eared early paperbacks.

Don't forget to click on the icon for more reviews!

The Grand Sophy
By Georgette Heyer

For a long time, many of us who were Georgette Heyer fans kept quiet about it. Her books are, after all, romance novels, even though they rival David McCullough for historical accuracy.

For whatever reason, we’re coming out of the closet in droves these days. Reprints abound, most of them with classy-looking art on the covers that’s a far cry from the cheesy bodice-ripper covers of my youth.

Georgette Heyer wrote more than 50 novels between 1921 and her death in 1974. Some of them were mysteries or historical novels about other eras—her accounts of the battles of Hastings and Waterloo are universally respected. But it was her Regency England novels that won the hearts of generations.

Like Jane Austen’s books about the same era, the plots acknowledge one central truth: In the early 1800s, upper- class women (and men, for that matter) had little choice but to marry well. Sometimes Heyer’s heroines are forthright about their goals, setting out for the London season determined to find a husband who can mend the fortunes of an impecunious family. Sometimes other concerns are paramount: saving a sister’s honor or solving a mystery. But the need for a good match is always at least an undercurrent, and the happy ending always unites man, woman, and bank balance, with a title thrown in sometimes just for kicks.

Some Heyer heroines have beauty on their side, but many don’t. What they all have is intelligence, wit, and heart, and it’s those qualities that win the day for them.

THE GRAND SOPHY was written in 1950, and was my first Heyer novel. (That’s its raggedy self in the photo at right.) I think I bought my paperback edition in high school through the Scholastic book club. Since it was the 1960s, the cover copy describes Sophy as “beautiful, gay, impulsive, [and] shockingly direct,” which is at least one-third horse-pucky. Here’s how Heyer describes her: Sophy would never be a beauty. She was by far too tall: nose and mouth were both too large; and a pair of expressive gray eyes could hardly be held to atone entirely for these defects.

Sophy Stanton-Lacy is an anomaly: Her mother is dead and her father, a British diplomat in the Napoleonic era, has hauled her around Europe all her life, sometimes in the thick of war. She’s been his hostess for years, so she knows her way around a glittering dinner table, but she also rides like a trooper, drives to an inch, and carries a tiny but serviceable pistol in her reticule.

Her father is off to South America, and it’s time for Sophy to make a good match. So she lands at her aunt's house in stuffy London with a Paris wardrobe, a stunning horse, a parrot, a monkey, a wicked sense of humor, and a ruthless talent for meddling in other people’s lives. Watching her set her unwitting relatives’ affairs to rights—while coming to identify the desires of her own heart—is a pleasure unmatched in English literature.

Like Austen, Heyer finds her humor chiefly in secondary characters, a roster of pompous society idiots whom Anne Elliot would recognize in a heartbeat. In THE GRAND SOPHY, there’s a high-bred society prude, a handsome but vapid poet, and a hypochondriacal mama’s boy who drones on and on about his one adventure, a trip to Jamaica.

“Another interesting tree to be found in Jamaica,” said his lordship, “is the balata. We have also the rosewood, the ebony, the lignum vitae—“

“The northern parts of Spain,” said Sophy defiantly, “are more remarkable for the many variety of shrubs which grow there, including what we call the jarales, and the ladanum bush, and—and— Oh, there is Lord Francis! I shall have to put you down, Lord Bromford!” [She’s driving him in the park.]

Heading up the plus side of the ledger are Sophy’s dashing but ill-tempered cousin, Charles, who’s engaged to the prude; his gorgeous and good-hearted sister, Cecelia, who’s engaged to the poet; and the quiet, intelligent gentleman whose marriage offer Cecelia had been ordered to accept before she met the poet.

You pretty much know how all the matches are going to work out well in advance, but you can’t for the life of you imagine how Heyer’s going to make that happen. Never fear: She’d been writing these things for a quarter of a century at this point, and probably came up with intricate plot solutions in her sleep.

Whether it’s for escapism or the thrill of watching a pro at work, try this Georgette Heyer or any of them. Quick, while we’re out of the closet.

Loggery

2010-05-02T16:18:00.018-04:00

Yes. Well. Another month, another set of blogging excuses. Turning over a new leaf I am, that I am, yup.

Speaking of leaves...after several years of hemming and hawing (and not sawing), we have finally committed mass-arbicide. The spruce trees around here are all dying a slow death, partly from age but also because the warmer winters aren't killing off fungi and other pests the way they used to. After the Death of the Green Monster, we revisited our concerns about the two clusters of spruces on the two north corners of the house. Actually, we were less concerned about them falling--a hazard mainly to shingles and windows--and more concerned about them catching fire if the weather got dry (a hazard to pretty much everything).

And so it was that the talented Jon Ellsworth came by with chainsaw and orange wedges, and showed us how it's done. I lost count of how many trees he cut down--fifteen or sixteen, anyway--and all but one of them fell precisely where he intended. The one that got away had been half broken off in the Green Monster Death Storm, and therefore was weighted funny. And even it fell almost where intended.

Here's the before and after:

Sad, huh? On the more positive side, the garden in the back thinks it's achieved sunshine nirvana.

Having sweated through many tree-cutting adventures on our own, Rob and I were fascinated to see how precision logging works--especially on the trees closest to the house, which had disturbed even Jon's sleep the night before. (The process might not be quite so fascinating if you haven't come this close to offing your deck and smashing a kitchen window. Bear with me here, OK?)

First, the familiar: Jon (left) and Rob set up a safety rope with a come-along to coax the tree in the right direction in case of emergency. We've done this before on big trees, and it does relax the nerves.

Jon makes the first cut, facing where he wants the tree to drop. I was taking this picture standing on the deck, to give you an idea of the stakes here.

Then he makes another cut on the opposite side and hammers in wedges. Sometimes, hammering in the wedges was enough to force the tree over.

The final cut ...

... and, seconds later, TIMBERRRR--away from the house, and right between the garden and the baby pine we were hoping to save. (Which would have gotten flattened if we'd done this ourselves, I guarantee.)

It was a pretty slick operation. Jon would drop a tree, the wade in and slice off all the branches. Rob and I would haul the brush out of the way on one side of the house while Jon got busy cutting down another tree on the other side. Jon was on hand for a total of six hours, which I think works out to dropping a tree every 22 minutes. You should see how long it takes us to do one on our own.

We are now the proud owners of many piles of logs and a brush pile the size of a school bus. Rob, being certifiable, has decided to use some of the logs to build an Adirondack shelter that will function as a tool shed. That meant peeling the bark off the logs, a chore we've managed to avoid in the 25 years since we abandoned our initial plan of moving to Maine and building a log cabin. (We were going to live in a tent while building. And may I just say... hah. Hah-hah. Hah-hah-hah. Thank you.)

Turns out if the tree is old and newly felled, peeling the bark is a piece of cake. (I speak as one who in childhood always peeled off chocolate frosting and ate it first.) Here's Rob at work: Starting the peel with a draw-knife at left, then peeling.

You will note that my participation in this phase was limited to taking pictures. I've learned something in 25 years.

I Can Haz Flawwer?

2010-04-11T14:39:00.005-04:00

It's not the best exposure in the world, but it would be proof in a court of law.

All spring, The McGonagall Cat and I have waged the Battle of the Cyclamen. The minute one of them blooms (see the little splotch of pink on the left-hand plant?), M-cat sneaks into my office, tears the flower off, and spits it on the floor. Cyclamen blossoms are poisonous, supposedly, so I'm glad she's not eating them. But still...

I've tried barricading the most recent blossom. The result may be a whole new level of destruction. Why she's so obsessed with the cyclamens this year I can't tell you--last year they were in a more accessible place and she ignored them.

It's the challenge of the thing, I guess. Or some deep-seated psychological trauma involving squirrels. They mock her. I suppose I'd eat poison, too, if it were me.

IN OTHER NEWS: In case you're wondering how Our Little Town is faring after the Selectmen-Imitate-Lemmings event, we seem to be surviving. Turns out the situation is a) unprecedented and b) impossible, since selectmen can only resign to other selectmen. The first two resigned to the third, but he's stuck in place until we elect somebody for him to resign to. It may be that all three of them are still selectmen, since nobody ever accepted their resignations.

As it turns out, two of the if-not-now-soon-to-be-ex selectmen went in to the town office Tuesday and signed the warrant so the town can pay its bills. They also have signed or will sign a warrant for a quickie election. Three fine people have come forward to run for office. One of them is Stalwart Moderator George Eaton, who was instrumental over the past week in helping to sort things out. Obviously, we need him. Yay George.

IN STILL OTHER NEWS: We went to a local production of The Threepenny Opera last night, put on by the New Surry Theatre. I can't express how mind-boggling it is when someone you've known for 25 years turns out to be a chameleon onstage, and a singing chameleon to boot. Such a person is Annie Poole, mild-mannered painter and waitress the rest of the time. She played Mrs. Peacham, and she was chilling and funny and tuneful. The production itself was fun and inventive and classy. But Annie stopped existing for a while and Mrs. Peacham took her place, and that's just incredible.

April Book Review Club

2010-04-07T10:56:00.003-04:00

Click icon for more
book review blogs
@Barrie Summy

Look at me! Three posts in six days! Don't get used to it--life is bound to intrude at some point. Anyway, it's April, and our thoughts are outside, so we need an especially compelling reason to settle down with a good book. This is it. Go get it.

Don't forget to click the icon for the rest of The Book Review Club!

A Conspiracy of Kings
By Megan Whelan Turner
Greenwillow, April 2010

I’ll have to be careful reviewing this book, the fourth in the Queen’s Thief series that debuted with 1997 Newbery honoree THE THIEF. If you haven’t read the earlier books—which you should, right now—I’d hate to spoil any surprises. Surprises are all Turner has going for her—apart from spectacular writing, deeply compelling characters, thoroughly imagined setting, and fearless plotting,.

The books follow the fortunes of Gen, the eponymous thief, in three neighboring kingdoms whose shared culture is ancient Greece with guns. Their rulers—two queens and a king, who assume a kingdom’s name upon ascending the throne—have spent the series jockeying for position and strategizing to keep larger empires from gobbling them up. The gods sometimes interfere, surprising the disbelievers.

This fourth book reunites us with Sophos, whom we met in THE THIEF as a student and heir to the throne of the kingdom of Sounis. Like the other high-born characters in the book, he must thread his way through a treacherous world, attempting to resolve the conflict between his dreams and desires and those of a leader. It’s a deeply personal coming-of-age story, but it’s painted on a broad canvas with bold, rich color.

As usual, Turner is a point-of-view trickster. We shift from third person to first person and back again, occasionally dropping into second person, gods help us. What makes this especially impressive is Turner’s ability to make us think we share a person’s every thought and then whack us with a plot twist or character revelation that we probably should have seen coming. Why didn’t we? The woman’s evil, that’s why.

She’s also gutsy. She introduces a mystery and doesn’t much worry about whether she’s confused us. There’s so much going on that we’re content to move along, confident that we’ll figure it all out eventually.

There’s romance, there’s humor… but all with an undercurrent of utter tragedy, constant, almost overwhelming. You sense that, in the end, all this maneuvering will come to nothing—or maybe the gods have some steely-eyed plan that discounts human happiness. The characters sense this, too. And then we all have a good laugh together.

I’m not sure whether these are middle-grade or young-adult fantasy. The Newbery folks obviously thought THE THIEF was for kids rather than teens, and Amazon has them at ages 9-12. Almost everyone else seems to assume they’re young adult. There is a bit of swearing here and there, but although the romance is pretty intense in places there’s no overt sex. Reading comprehension would have to be pretty good.

Regardless of the reader’s age, though, I can’t recommend these books enough.

OK, Now This Is Really Nuts

2010-04-05T15:23:00.013-04:00

It's April 5, for cripe's sakes. We're supposed to be up to our knees in mud and freezing off our tushies for another three weeks at least.

Instead, the Tiger's Bane is about to bloom in the flower garden (at left). The day lilies (below) are tall enough to be nibbled by deer. (Handy tip: Sprinkle used -- and, er, sifted -- kitty litter around the garden to make it smell like a predator. I wasn't expecting to do this for another month, but yesterday there I was in the cellar, raiding the cat box.)

The buds on the maples are sprouting fringe a month early. We have the screens up on most of the windows. I am barely restraining myself from putting up the screen doors.

No good can come of this. It's too pleasant. This is New England. We will pay.

IN OTHER NEWS: Being a sinful woman who doesn't deserve an early spring, I utterly neglected to link to a nice interview by Kate Narita on her blog, "Classroom Book of the Week." The questions were fun to answer, and I feel terrible that my brain went on the fritz. Anyway, here's the interview, and here's her feature on THE UNNAMEABLES. And here's her blog's main page, so you get the full flavor of what she's about.

Democracy in...Wait, Did Somebody Say "Action"?

2010-04-03T14:05:00.022-04:00

I took my camera to Brooklin town meeting this morning, figuring I'd blog about this most basic exercise in democracy and small-town camaraderie. Before I'd even unpacked the camera, the exercise turned into an episode of "Survivor: Maine."

The meeting started at 9 a.m. By 9:05, all three selectmen had resigned and walked out of the school gymnasium. Then the tax collector resigned and sat down in the audience. (At right, the last selectman standing, Richard Freethey, reads his resignation letter. Our stalwart town meeting moderator, George Eaton, is pondering what the hell he's going to do next and Town Clerk Gigi Hardy is pretending she's someplace else entirely.)

I've been a close watcher of town politics in Maine for 25 years and I've never seen this happen before. As I write this, we don't have a clear idea of how much trouble we're in. At the very least, we can't pay our bills without selectmen to sign the warrant that authorizes the payment.

There may have been two or three people in the audience who saw this coming, but no more than that, I bet. Maybe we should have been more insightful, considering that at the town election polls yesterday voters were handed a bunch of letters from town officials criticizing each other. It seemed to be the selectmen vs. the elected town office staff, the town clerk, treasurer and tax collector.

We also received a written report from a committee appointed to study how the town office operates. The selectmen had appointed the committee last spring, part of its charge being to investigate the possibility of replacing the elected town office staff with an appointed administrative assistant. The elected staff didn't think much of this idea, and a low-pressure system settled on the town office that has stayed there until today.

As it turned out, the report did not recommend replacing anyone with anyone else, but instead suggested things everyone--especially the selectmen--could do to steamline operations. Apparently, this did nothing to improve the weather. By last week, when I was hanging out in the town office registering my new car, the gale warnings were up, I'm not exactly sure why or from whom or to whom. All I know is that the air was crackling.

The three resigning selectmen said, basically, that they were sick of being disrespected. Sounded like the letters handed out at the polls were the last straw.

Thanks to the stalwart George Eaton, we went through the town meeting anyway--passed town and school budget items, approved a veterans' memorial, set a few routine policies, honored a couple of firefighters for exemplary service. Some warrant articles had to be "passed over" because we needed an explanation from the absent selectmen. At the end of the meeting, the tax collector bowed to pressure and rescinded her resignation. The town clerk said she would call the secretary of state on Monday and find out what we do next. Most likely, the state will appoint some sort of babysitter to take care of us until we can elect new selectmen.

It was all very weird and--although no one would admit it out loud--very thrilling.

Usually, town meeting has the same atmosphere as an extended rainy spell after a drought--a great big bore, but we know it's necessary and we feel a sense of solidarity and accomplishment just going through it together.

This town meeting was more like northeast gale, which you thoroughly enjoy even as it drops a tree on your car. (I don't seem to be letting go of that, do I?) I felt bad about the selectmen and we all griped about how terrible it was, but in reality it was the most fun we'd had in ages. People went around in the breaks suggesting each other run for selectmen and saying no, no, not me, not in a million years. (A possible worthy exception might be Lori Gallo, above at left, who would make a crackerjack selectman. She might have said "maybe." She and the woman next to her, Lauren Allen , were on the committee that studied town office operations. )

And we did a lot of the regular town meeting things, such as:

Voting by paper ballot for the school budget in the school library. We vote the individual line items by voice vote, but for inscrutable reasons the state insists that the final, comprehensive warrant article pass by paper ballot. We just write "yes" or "no" on a piece of paper and hand it in. Then, next Friday, we have to go to the polls and vote on it AGAIN. Inscrutable ain't the half of it.

That's former town clerk June Eaton voting in the photo at right. I bet she's glad Gigi's in the hot seat now, and not her.

Checking out the future. Below, Rob and several fellow curmudgeons examine the plans for a parking lot rehab (which was "passed over.") Rob and his fellow firefighters are in dress uniform, which he hates because he says it makes him feel like a Brown Shirt. The guy second from right is Ed Holden, who just got honored for 40 years of firefighting. In the photo below right, Fire Chief Sam Friend gives the Firefighter of the Year award to Scott Tierney, a relatively new firefighter who has been exceptionally active. (Another entertaining aspect of small town life: Years ago, Sam was a member of the elementary school Odyssey of the Mind team Rob coached. To this day, I have the power to embarrass Sam simply by saying the word "toga.")

Eating. The eighth-grade class always serves lunch at town meeting to raise funds for its class trip. It's a tricky business, because once in a while the meeting ends early and the moderator has to beg everyone to stay for lunch.

Today we finished all our business at the perfect time to eat, and then regathered in the gym to so that stalwart moderator George could exhort us all to "get with the program" and stop fighting with each other.

Hear, hear, George.

Bad Blogger, Good Consumer

2010-03-18T17:22:00.003-04:00

Hello. I can't even remember when I blogged last, but I have excellent excuses.

Excuse Number One: I have been buying a car to replace the late lamented Green Monster Impreza. For me, this is similar to stalking a tiger while reading up on the quality of his teeth and claws and transferring tiger bait from bank to bank all over the trackless jungle.

When Rob needs a car, he gets up one morning, yawns, scratches himself, decides to visit the dealer, drives a car, then pays his money and comes home with it that night. I am not like that. I consult Consumer Reports, Edmunds.com, the Kelley Bluebook, Cars.com, and 450,000 dealer web sites, plus everyone I know who has ever owned a car plus tea leaves and the innards of snakes.

I then test drive and dither and fret: Hybrid, or manual transmission? Hybrid, or All Wheel Drive? What about AWD but automatic transmission? Manual but front wheel drive with studded tires? If I buy a Prius, can I drive down a back-woods road without scraping hell out of the undercarriage? Do I HAVE to buy another Subaru Impreza, or would a Forester be OK?

The situation was exascerbated by the fact that, once I finally decided that I wouldn't be comfortable slinging a kayak on top of a Prius and driving it through the woods, it turned out that used Imprezas no longer exist, at least not hatchbacks with manual transmission and fewer than 50,000 miles on the odometer. I briefly considered ordering a new one and waiting three months while poking my depleted bank account to see if it was dead. But at last I decided on a 2006 Impreza Outback Sport with everything I wanted but too many miles on it. (The documented maintenance is beyond exemplary, so it could be worse.)

I bought the car yesterday. I am still hyperventilating. Fortunately, we have already tracked wood ashes into the interior (we've been burning all the trees that fell down and smashed perfectly innocent Green Monsters), so I am not subject to the usual waiting-for-the-first-ding-on-the-new-car terrors.

Excuse Number Two: I've been dealing with copy-edits on SMALL PERSONS WITH WINGS. I don't even want to talk about this. I roped in my writer's group and my high school friend Shelly (copy editor to the stars) to help me make sure all was well. They are still speaking to me. I am grateful.

IN OTHER NEWS: The entire town of Brooklin is obsessed with Battlestar Gallactica. Yup, I know, old news to the rest of the world. But we don't get cable here, and many of us wouldn't buy it anyway and therefore do not have satellite dishes either. So when the library got the complete DVD set, the jostling began.

We're next on the list for discs 13 and 14. Today, Librarian Tracey called.

TRACEY: Disc 14 came in, but Disc 13 is still out. Shall I hold Disc 14 until Disc 13 comes in?

ELLEN: What if the guy who has 13 wants 14?

TRACEY: Maybe he's the one who watched them out of order, lemme check. Nope, he hasn't seen 14. But what if I take your name off it and somebody ELSE takes out 14?

ELLEN: Oh god. I don't know. *ponders for a minute.* OK, listen, just keep our names on 13 and we'll take our chances on 14. That's only fair.

TRACEY: I'll take your name off of 14 but I'll keep it here at the desk for a day or two.

Tracey and I have conversations like this a lot, because she's the Brooklin Interlibrary Loan guru. Over the past year she has helped me score books on the Cape Verde Islands, West African animism, and literacy in Elizabethan and Stuart England. She stalks books like tigers in a jungle. We get along very well.

March Book Review: WHERE THE MOUNTAIN MEETS THE MOON

2010-03-03T11:10:00.005-05:00

Click icon for more
book review blogs
@Barrie Summy

The weather’s bad with a chance of awful around here, but yesterday there was a change of air, the hint of a smile on the face of the world. Spring is coming.

Nevertheless, the comfy chair with the good lamp beckons. If you’re a kid or appreciate books written for kids, you couldn’t do better than this tale of a plucky, kind-hearted girl and her friend the dragon. Full disclosure: Grace Lin is a fellow Inkie, I’ve written about her before, and I have no business reviewing her book. Sorry—the ghost of my younger self insists.

Don’t forget to click the icon above for more reviews. Oh, and FCC: I got this book in a swap at the Kid/YA Lit Tweetup during the ALA Midwinter meeting.

Where the Mountain Meets the Moon
By Grace Lin
Little, Brown BYR, 2009

WHERE THE MOUNTAIN MEETS THE MOON has won a Newbery Honor and a galaxy of starred reviews, but I happen to know it’s also won the highest honor in children’s literature: reports from parents that their children insist on reading it over and over and over.

One of those children would have been me.

It’s the whole package, you see. Lin is an illustrator as well as a writer, so her cozy, endearing story comes with cool chapter headers and spectacular full-page illustrations. The cover art, as you can see, is gorgeous. The book even handles well, with sturdy materials and supple binding. This would have been bedtime reading for me every night in elementary school, possibly beyond.

The book is fueled by Chinese folk tales, simple, often funny stories of greed and foolishness and hubris. As entertaining as they are, the original tales tend to rely on stock characters—crafty monks, corrupt bureaucrats, greedy merchants, foolish or kind or beleaguered peasants. It’s amazing what happens to them when you add real humans, as Lin has done.

Our heroine, Minli, is a farmer’s daughter in a mud-encrusted village under Fruitless Mountain. To her mother’s disgust, her father brings joy to her life by telling her stories of dragons and magic and the wisdom of the Old Man of the Moon. Her mother sighs, the sun burns, the mud clings, and finally Minli has had enough. She sets off on an epic journey to find the Old Man of the Moon and ask him how to change her family’s fortune.

Minli is a normal kid, not uncommonly smart or brave or virtuous. But she has the heart of a hero, and that’s what drives her to rescue a dragon, befriend a beggar and a king, overcome fear, and find help when she needs it.

She’d get nowhere without stories: the ones her father told her, and the ones she picks up from new acquaintances along her journey. The tales weave through the book, explaining the characters Minli meets, feeding her information she needs to complete her quest. They help her, and us, to understand the world a little better, adding richness and color.

Minli and others who open their hearts to stories have special powers: For them, stone lions come alive, and goldfish share their wisdom.

Guess that’s why we’re here, right?

Samson's Revenge

2010-02-28T15:43:00.010-05:00

Yes, yes, it's been weeks since I blogged. There was this manuscript, see, and this stuff and that stuff. The manuscript has now returned in copy-edited form for me to read through again in a hurry and yet I am blogging, which makes me a saint.

Also, the power's been out for three days. Also, I am bereaved. Twice.

Thursday night, which featured winds in the 80 mph range, dropped trees all over the Blue Hill Peninsula, including on my now-probably-totaled 2002 Subaru Impreza.

I was happy to see the tree go, frankly, since it was one of the scraggly, sun-blocking ones that we wanted to cut down anyway. I objected only to its sense of direction. The damage doesn't look that bad in the photo, but the frame's badly bent and it's such an old car that I doubt the insurance company will want to repair it. Also, I'm not sure the frame isn't thoroughly compromised.

Speaking of sainthood, my car sacrificed itself that Rob's might live. His car was parked next to mine, and didn't get a scratch on it. Last night, our friend John Wilkinson commemorated the occasion with this cardboard tribute to automotive unselfishness.

Far worse, however, is the loss of Delilah's head.

When we were first clearing this land for our house, Rob cut down a key couple of trees and opened up a vista that looked to us like a cathedral of spruces. We made sure we sited windows in the house so we could admire the view. After we'd lived here a while the cathedral's two spires (photo below left) became known to us as Samson and Delilah, names that seemed even more appropriate when a northeast gale gave Samson a haircut. (His pointy top fell off but grew back even bushier--he's the one on the left. Delilah apparently had broken off once earlier in her life, and had become appropriately two-faced.)

We were up all night during the storm--Rob got called out as a firefighter and couldn't get in to town because the road was blocked, so he was going to drive around this side of the blockage all by himself checking for downed wires. I didn't like the idea of him running around alone when the world was coming to an end, so I went with him.

As a result, we were beat and bleary-eyed when Friday dawned and we got our first glimpse of the new Delilah, cut off at the tree line (photo at right.)

Instead of looking like a cathedral, the woods now look like they're flipping us the bird. Which they probably are.