Let's get KOOKY!

Just in time for National Poetry Month, Janet and I are so excited to announce a new book for kids: MY Kooky Compendium of Thimblethoughts & Wonderfuzz! 

This is a companion book for Clara’s Kooky Compendium of Thimblethoughts and Wonderfuzz, with fun and funny prompts to ignite kids' imaginations and get them wondering and writing! 

do elephants like music?

things I wonder . . . 

what new holidays should we invent?

here's a list of happy sounds:

These prompts are organized around sub themes and topics to guide young writers in trying a variety of activities. Kids can write IN this book because most of it is BLANK. But around each blank space, you'll find kooky prompts and crazy questions to spur creativity and critical thinking. Here are four sample pages: 

Janet and I talk about it briefly here:

Let's grow young writers and encourage their wondering, their curiosity, their research, their writing, and their laughter! You can find the book at QEP Books and Amazon. Check it out!

Now head on over to Rose's blog, Imagine the Possibilities, for our Poetry Friday gathering! 

Guest Post: Joan Bransfield Graham and AWESOME EARTH

I'm so happy to share this space with poet Joan Bransfield Graham as she debuts her new poetry collection, AWESOME EARTH: Concrete Poems Celebrate Caves, Canyons, and Other Fascinating Landforms. It is illustrated by Tania Garcia and published by Clarion/HarperCollins on Feb. 18. Here Joan writes about how this book came to be and what influenced her writing of it. 

From Joan: 

At the end of Mary Oliver’s poem “The Summer Day,” she asks, 

young Joan

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with this one wild and precious life?” As someone who grew up on a barrier island at the southern tip of New Jersey, where the waves whispered, “See the world, go beyond the horizon,” I wondered will I ever see what is on the other side of this huge ocean?  Yes!

Eventually, I found that not only did I want to see the world, I wanted to capture it, write about it, photograph it, embrace it. With poetry and photography, you can capture a moment in time, a place, a new perspective. 

The inspiration for this book happened one day when I was in my yoga class.  The teacher asked us to do the “Mountain” pose (Tadasana), to feel its power and majesty.  And I did!  I started to write a poem in my head in the voice of the mountain, a mask poem.  What I scribbled down on a scrap of paper, evolved into my “Mountain” poem. Later I thought about all the amazing landforms on our Earth and realized what better way to write about all these awesome shapes than with shape itself--concrete poetry. This picture book combines poetry, science, art, and the art of words to explore what creates landforms from “Mountain,” “Glacier,” and “Volcano” to “Island,” “Hills,” & “Hoodoos” -- artistic wonders that cover our Earth’s surface.

I did a great amount of research and had learned much from all of my travels.  I have snorkeled in Bora Bora and the Galapagos Islands, hiked on the Great Wall of China and in Machu Picchu in the Andes Mountains. I’ve sailed on the Yangtze River and on the Nile.  I’ve gone black water rafting and cave tubing in Waitomo, New Zealand & much more. What I wrote as sidebars became back matter, along with my glossary, and my additional resources. Of the 16 photos that I submitted, they were able to fit in six.

Artist Tania García, from Barcelona, Spain did a fantastic job with a palette of luscious, jewel-toned colors, creating a glorious, inviting environment for the poems! I love the cover, the whole jacket! ¡Muchas Gracias, Tania—magnífica! And, of course, abundant accolades to my editors Ann Rider (now retired) and Lynne Polvino and the whole team at Clarion/HarperCollins for their awesomeness! 💖

 

Joan with her painting 

Interestingly, many years ago after my second year of teaching, I took a Summer Session Abroad through the University of San Francisco. Majorca, an island in the Balearic archipelago off the east coast of Spain, is almost directly across the ocean from where I grew up. I lived with a Spanish family there and took classes in Landscape Painting and Drawing.  Later I toured through Spain and Portugal and visited Barcelona.  I certainly did get to see what was on the other side of that huge Atlantic Ocean and am so grateful.

Now I am 15-20 minutes from the Pacific Ocean in California. I’ve lived in the north, south, east, and west US and have visited about 50 countries. I want to see as much of our planet as I can and want to open the world for curious, creative children everywhere to enjoy and embrace this Awesome Earth we all share.  As I say on my website, “A good poem surprises your senses, shakes you awake, stirs your emotions, and startles your imagination. Each poem is an act of discovery. Poetry helps us widen our vision and our hearts.”

 

Thanks for helping me celebrate, Sylvia, and for all you do to bring a “passion of poets” together—such an incredible community! Enjoy all of your many travels! ❤️

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AWESOME EARTH -- BLOG/MEDIA TOUR, Feb. 17 – Feb. 21— Pub Date: Feb. 18

Monday, Feb. 17-- Poetry for Children -- Dr. Sylvia Vardell, Professor Emerita, Texas Woman's University, Past President of IBBY, author, and publisher, a look behind-the-scenes (here!).

Tuesday, Feb. 18 – Georgia Heard, poet, educator, author, and inventor of Heart Maps ®, 2023 NCTE Excellence in Poetry for Children Award here and here.

Wednesday, Feb. 19-- Simply 7 Interviews -- Jena Benton Lasley, Alaska SCBWI Illustrator Coordinator, author-illustrator, poet, teacher; interview, plus giveaway:  .

Thursday, Feb. 20-- The Miss Rumphius Effect -- Dr. Patricia M. Stohr-Hunt, Chair, Education Dept., University of Richmond, VA; President, VA Association of College and Teacher Educators (VACTE):  

Friday, Feb. 21-- Jama’s Alphabet Soup — Jama Kim Rattigan, Virginia-based author, blogger, foodie, alphabet lover, picture book nerd; review of book, recipe, plus giveaway: 

Guest post: Matt Forrest Esenwine

I'm so happy to welcome poet and now anthologist Matt Forrest Esenwine to my blog this week. His newest book, the collaborative A Universe of Rainbows is out soon (April 1) and he shares a bit of the back story here.

From Matt:

 “Organization, Research, and Luck: Crafting a First Anthology”

It’s one thing to come up with an idea for a poetry collection. It’s another thing to try to figure out what types of poems (rhyming, free-verse, formal, etc.) will be written for which subjects. And then there are…

Anthologies.

 

These require a whole other level of organization – especially when they include a nonfiction element. With an anthology, one needs to determine not only how to balance the poetry with the facts, but which poet might be best suited for which subject, according to their style, ability, and interest.

 

That’s where I found myself when developing my very first poetry anthology, A Universe of Rainbows (Eerdmans Books for Young Readers 2025), which arrives in the world April 1.

I’d been a contributor to numerous anthologies already, but had never been the one to steer them to completion! Fortunately, my experience with these anthologies – coupled with a conversation with my friend Lee Bennett Hopkins and some good old-fashioned intuition – helped me immensely when it came to trying to create something cohesive and not just a smattering of random poems and science.

Excuse me while I back up a moment. Many anthologies, you see, are crafted using open submissions, whereby the anthologist announces the premise for the book and invites multiple writers to submit their best potential contributions, then chooses the entries they feel are the best. 

 

Other anthologies, such as A Universe of Rainbows, were created with a closed submission process; after extensive research, I decided upon a list of subjects I knew I wanted to include, then I went out and asked specific poets if they would be interested in contributing poems about those specific subjects. (Fortunately, they said YES!)

 

I did this for two reasons. One, because I wanted the book to be as good as I could possibly make it! I knew that by inviting the best of the best (Betsy Bird at SLJ even called this book a “veritable Who’s Who of poets” – and she’s right!) I would have the highest-quality poems possible. 

 

And two, as an unagented author, I needed to show prospective editors that I not only knew what I was doing (ha!), but that I could pull off a project as ambitious as a debut anthology comprised of some of the most highly-esteemed names in children’s poetry, dedicated to the late, great Lee Bennett Hopkins. So I “front-loaded” my proposal by including 4 or 5 completed poems I had written along with the complete list of contributors and the subjects of their yet-to-be-written poems.

 

After a couple of rejections, editor Kathleen Merz at Eerdmans Books for Young Readers – who had worked with Lee on his anthologies Night Wishes, Manger, and the posthumously-published Bless our Pets, loved the premise of my book and seemed just as thrilled to offer me a contract as I was to accept it!

 

So I set about reaching out to everyone who had agreed to contribute, letting them know we were moving forward and to begin working on their poems. And it was at that point that the balancing act of poetry and science really began.

 

I knew sidebars would accompany the poems so that readers unfamiliar with some of the subjects could gain information that might elucidate the poems a little better. I had notes about each subject, but I didn’t write any of the sidebars until I after I had worked with some of the poets on revisions and received finalized poems. 

 

I wanted to be able to connect the sidebars with the poems either through a reference to the poem or its subject. And above all, I wanted poems written not for the sake of science, but for the sake of poetry. In other words, I wanted poems that weren’t didactic, explanatory, or fact-laden; I wanted poems that sang, that flowed, that resonated with imagery and emotion and wordplay! 

 

I wanted poetry, first and foremost.

 

This is where that balancing act was crucial. If the poems were beautiful, but the sidebars were too verbose or technical, it would feel like two different texts competing for attention. If the poems were too heavy with details and facts, they would lose their poetic souls. 

 

But by allowing the poets to simply write about the subjects in whatever way they chose, without worrying about needing to “explain” their subjects – then writing the sidebars as complements to the poems – the beauty of the poetry and the science meld as one cohesive text! The poems have a little bit of science, the sidebars have a little bit of poetry, and Jamey Christoph’s beautiful illustrations pull everything together.

                                                          

Kathleen was a joy to work with, and the revision process we went through was extremely collaborative – she’d suggest revisions, I’d suggest revisions – and eventually we had a finalized manuscript with final art, ready to head off to the printer!

 

Of course I don’t know exactly what Lee would think, but I have a suspicion he’d be pretty proud to see such an incredible book, written and edited by his friends, dedicated to him. I’m sure he’d be over the moon(bow)!

>>>> Matt shares more about this beautiful book at his own blog here.

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Me: Thank you, Matt, for sharing this glimpse into your process. I can attest that the book is really lovely and does a great job of melding lyrical poems and fascinating facts. Contributing poets include Nikki Grimes, Renée M. LaTulippe, Joyce Sidman, Irene Latham, David L. Harrison, Heidi E. Y. Stemple & Jane Yolen, Amy Ludwig VanDerwater, Alma Flor Ada & F. Isabel Campoy, Rebecca Kai Dotlich, Marilyn Singer, Charles Waters, Laura Purdie Salas, Charles Ghigna, Lee Wardlaw, Janet Wong, Allan Wolf and Georgia Heard. Don't miss it! Now join the Poetry Friday crew where Carol is hosting all the poetry goodness here.