trees

In parts of the world, but not where I live in North Florida, plants are stretching tall in springtime.

We always appreciate trees when the leaves are new. But I think in the fall & winter, when the  full show of their

green is absent, this is a time to consider what our every day world would be like, if we lived in a land where the trees as we understood them to grow naturally, in woods, & in clumps at seepages of water, down hillsides and circling fileds, were only planted in rows.  Or if the trees weren’t there at all. Maybe you have lived without the cloaks of trees. But I have not. I grew up by a woods. My mother recited the line, “Woodman! spare that tree,” to me about the youth who was sheltered by a tree & could therefore not cut it, when he was older.

When I read children’s books about the tree woman of Kenya, Wangari Maathai, I felt that she must have loved being a little girl, & that in that time of her life, she must have loved trees.  The shade of them, the fruit of them, the branches of them.

There are several good children’s books about her. The one I currently have is from author/artist Claire A. Nivola.

Like all good books, it made me want to know more about what happened to Kenya’s trees. And about how Ms. Maathai brought them back.

So my bedside reading right now is Unbowed: a memoir by Wangari Maathai.

a funny Halloween

Is “Smell my feet”  the best greeting  a Trick-or-Treater can say at the door today?

That’s how the green-haired twins, Delia & Ophelia, want the neighborhood children to respond when they ring the bell & the door opens.

The twins are witches who are up to their britches stirring up a witchy brew of trouble in this most-inventive Halloween book.

Trick-or-Treat  SMELL MY FEET! from artist-author Lisa Desimini is a treasure.

Her collage art is a wizardry of the highest order.

I was so unhappy when this beloved book wasn’t in our box of Halloween that we unpacked at the beginning of the month.  Then last night, like a work of magic, I found it in a pile of great items in a box in my office – just in time for Halloween.

a little help from some friends

Here are 3 places to go when you need a quick pick-up in your writing world.

www.goodreads.com

www.write4kids.com

www.writeonline.com

I’ll have more next time, but these will keep you busy for now.

This is in birthday celebration.  It’s one year for bookseedstudio here online!

Books for the Boo!

We keep creepy Halloween in a box 11 months out of the year.

Come October, the ghosties & ghoulies, black cats & bats

are let out of the box.

We hammer tombstones into the yard dirt & place home-made pumpkins

of paper around the living room.

My daughter puts read-aloud Halloween books on a low  table.

And she & her father stuff & dress a scarecrow who guards our yard. We will all

carve the pumpkin closer to the big evening.

What are your favorite Halloween titles? Once you read some of ours, these may become a grand part of

your Halloween bookshelf:

SIX CREEPY SHEEP by Judith Ross Enderle & Stephanie Gordon Tessler, with illustrations from John O’Brien

BAT JAMBOREE by Kathi Appelt, with illustrations by Melissa Sweet

THE LITTLE SCARECROW BOY by Margaret Wise Brown (yes, MWB herself, without a bunny in sight) and brought to a delightful modern art interpretation by David Diaz.

Trick or Treat (I want it to be Treat) to You & Yours

september’s garden

“Flowers are blooming all over the place… “ the character Lydia Grace, in  The Gardener,

by Sarah Stewart with illustrations by David Small, 1997

“… It is that rarity, a pictorial delight that in 20 double pages gives more and more of itself each time it’s read, and whose silent complexities reveal themselves with continuing pleasure.”  Edward Koren/The New York Times Book Review

My gardening pal Ann gifted me with The Gardener ages ago & it’s now part of my late summer ritual, to pull it down from the shelf near my Frost poetry books & enjoy Frost the farmer & then, the character Lydia Grace’s gardening skills in David Small’s artwork & Sarah Stewart’s inventive series of letters. Late summer is the time when I give my vest-pocket patch an imaginary rainbow-ribbon, for its color mix.

The flowers here, shrimp plant, brown-eyed Susan & blue something that I have to ask Ann about the name, grow in my  September garden in the back yard, a flutter of petals and juicy dirt lined with fallen live oak tree limbs that bear the otherwise aboreal resurrection fern…

I like to write outdoors by the garden with a pencil & pad. Then take inside what has taken off on paper & get that into the computer.

signs

I am enjoying  The Signmaker’s Assistant, which carries with it a whimsical, Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs (Cloudy is soon to be in a theater near you) sensiblilty that I like.  More on Signmaker in a second.

This story sends me into my library, to look up at a message high on the wall above the window. The message is in black paint, on wood. It’s a sign.

I grew up with this sign &  I think you can guess that I love it.

Among the houses of pals & family folks I visited in childhood, ours was the only house with a sign in it.

It was given to me by my father, who had been a drill sgt. in the U.S. Army. This sign was made for him by a solider. Dad was good at making the guys write their letters home, in the Writing Room.  I love the uneven sides sawed for the sign and the big block letters. I can imagine him walking through the room where it hung at Fort Dix, N.J., making sure the boys had paper and pencils. The sign later hung over a family desk during my childhood. When it became clear I liked writing, my Dad promised it to me.  I can write when I’m not near it. But I have also looked up at it when stuck & found something in it that helped me forge on.

These days, I find  something stuck above it at the top, red words on white paper  - a Florida sign in the form of a bumper sticker.  Every so often here in the Sunshine State some of us think perhaps a fella named Skink should enliven election coverage by campaigning for Governor of Florida.

Skink is the nickname of  a character  Carl Hiaasen created, a rascal who is a book-toting, wilderness-camping, former Florida governor, living out of a station wagon in the cypress swamps of South Florida. The paper sign says “Re-elect SKINK for Governor.”

Both signs are totems in my writing world.

THE SIGNMAKER’S ASSISTANT

Nathan is the young character in The Signmaker’s Assistant by Tedd Arnold who discovers the power of words when he goes beyond his little job cleaning paint brushes for the town signmaker. Nathan posts a few signs around the village that any child would applaud. But are these the kinds of signs that will help the town run smoothly?

I lucked into this book – signed by the talented illustrator-author – in a small art gallery gift shop in North Florida when my husband & I visited it on a recent weekend. Tedd Arnold is the 2006 Theodor Seuss Geisel Honor Book Winner for Hi! Fly Guy. He also won the 2007 Edgar for RAT LIFE, a Young Adult novel & it was his very 1st novel, after publishing more than 50 successful picture books, which keep on dancing out of his studio in New York State.  The p.b. title in his line up that intrigues me most from the title, is Catalina Magdalena Hoopensteiner Wallendiner Hogan Logan Bogan Was Her Name. Makes me think of Double Trouble in Walla Walla from Andrew Clements with pictures by Salvatore Murdocca.

For more on Tedd Arnold,  sign-maker, book-maker, word-slinger:

http://www.teddarnoldbooks.com

Chickees

Inspection

The office assistant weighs in on a summer project, experimenting with different materials for miniature chickees.

Palmistry

First readers looked like this

Is this shape a little Kindle-like?

This is a Horn Book.  The kind before we had today’s The Horn Book .

Horn Books were available to learners, especially children (usually boys) who were able to  sit with a teacher,  in the Colonies, especially Massachusetts, New York, Connectitcut, Rhode Island, New Jersey & Pennsylvania, of Great Britain (later the U.S.A)

This Horn Book is for a wealthy family, crafted of silver and ivory & it most likely was made in England.

It is one of many treasures in the Children’s Literature Center of the Library of Congress, where the Chief, Dr. Sybille A.  Jagusch, is herself another treasure for you to discover there.

www.loc.gov/rr/child

Follow the Library of Congress on twitter http://twitter.com/libraryccongress

c. 2009 Jan Godown Annino at the Library of Congress

In the Library of Congress

To visit the Children’s Literature Center online, in the Library of Congress :

www.loc.gov/rr/child

For an online visit to the Library’s Rare Book and Special Collections

www.loc.gov/rr/rarebook

Cozy in the Children's Literature Center