Books and Adventures

Books and Adventures has moved!

2011-06-19T11:01:00.000+01:00

After carefully digging up the foundations and hoisting the whole thing on to a flatbed truck, I've shifted the blog over to http://booksadventures.wordpress.com/, where you can currently find the first part of my interview with Nnedi Okorafor.

I've also pulled my finger out and fired up the Twitter as well, you can find me at http://twitter.com/booksadventures.

If you want to subscribe to the all-new, all-singing Books and Adventures, the RSS feed is here: http://booksadventures.wordpress.com/feed/

Impending Relaunch of Books and Adventures

2011-06-08T04:43:00.000+01:00

It's been a while since my last update, as my Peruvian project ended in a robbery and a bout of fever - but I'm pleased to say that I'm back on the web, and the Books and Adventures site is about to receive a major overhaul.

The all-new, all-singing, all-dancing site will be launching shortly, including the long-awaited interviews with YA author Nnedi Okorafor and Finnish Education Minister Henna Virkkunen, as well as new features from New Zealand and Australia, where I'm discovering that Sydney is neck-and-neck with New York for the title of 'Matt's Favourite Place on Earth'.

Stay tuned for more from the all-new Books and Adventures...

Matthew

Travel and Tourism for the Ethical Gringo

2011-05-17T00:56:00.000+01:00

You'll find my latest piece of travel writing for La Vida Idealist up at http://lavidaidealist.org/2011/05/07/help-or-harm-travel-and-tourism-for-the-ethical-gringo/

Playing sapo in Huamanga, Peru

Raising Expectations: Gringo Teachers in Peruvian Schools

2011-05-01T18:37:00.000+01:00

You can find this weekend's interview with Sue Allsworth, director of San Domingo Savio School in Ayacucho, Peru, here at La Vida Idealist.

Latest from Ayacucho, Peru: Pascuatoro and the running of the bulls

2011-04-27T18:27:00.000+01:00

Where do we draw the line between animal rights and respect for tradition?

In the Peruvian city of Ayacucho, bull running is a recent addition to an Easter celebration that goes back centuries.

You can find my latest piece, on the revival of the traditional pascuatoro, at http://www.livinginperu.com/features-2126-art-culture-lifestyle-running-bulls-ayacucho-peru

Q&A with Ken White, Manager of Educational Programs at Brookhaven National Laboratory

2011-04-20T22:50:00.000+01:00

This week on Books and Adventures we’re joined by Ken White, manager of educational programs at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL), an advanced research facility run by the U.S. Department of Energy.

BNL was founded in 1947, with a mandate to promote research across the fields of physics, chemistry, biology and engineering. I began by asking Ken how long BNL has been involved with schools outreach and science education.

'The Laboratory has been a supporter of science education pretty much since its inception. Science education and workforce development are part of our mission at BNL, and we have been fortunate to have leadership support to enable greater interaction with our academic community. College students have come here for internships since the early 1950s and the Lab frequently had open houses and school outreach programs well back into the early 1960s.

Over the past six years we have developed hands-on inquiry-based experiences for middle and high school students to enable them to conduct science similar to that of our researchers. These are offered at cost and have become quite popular with local schools. These programs have expanded the way in which we satisfy our responsibility for educating the next generation of scientists.

Successful offerings need to be exciting, with engaging activities that enable students to realize science is accessible to them. The best programs often include a story as well – we try to humanize the program by relating it to our scientific staff actually working on the problems being presented. Programs that show how the academic work applies to real life problems we face as a society tend to do well.'

What can a visit to BNL do for students in mainstream schooling?

A visit to BNL becomes a very memorable experience for students. The excitement of science and the magnitude of the facilities, with seven Nobel Prizes being earned here, leaves a lasting impression. Ideally, the visit provides students with relevance to their academics, a bit of career exploration, an understanding of the integration of subject matter, and an appreciation for what science is and can do for humanity.

How can you make cutting edge research accessible to such a wide age range of visitors?

This can be a challenge because of the depth of training our scientists go through to become world class researchers. Their communication processes become fraught with technical jargon and complex content to the point that researchers in other fields may not fully understand the content. One thing you find out quickly about scientific staff is that they have a passion for sharing their work with interested people. Often, we will work with researchers to help them drop their jargon and put things into laymen’s terms, and to help them clarify the “so what” of their research. This makes for a more enjoyable interaction for both the scientists and the audiences they reach out to.

What is the lasting impact of a visit to BNL?

As noted above, the experience is usually a memorable one. There are several ways for students to stay engaged. Venues would include everything from readings in a bibliography supporting our elementary programs, to summer research experiences, attending open to the public seminars and lectures, or participating in science-based competitions. Another great way is to have the teacher participate in programs such as our “Introducing Synchrotron Science to the Classroom” or the “Open Space Stewardship Program.” In these programs, teachers can work with the Lab, interact with scientific staff and others, and develop and enhance their own skills in guiding students in science classes and research.

Do your educational programs focus on “hard science” or is there scope for students to consider the social & philosophical implications of BNL’s work?

Much of the work at BNL is on the hard sciences, but there are often considerable social and philosophical implications from our work as well. For example, students working in the nuclear diagnostics area for neuroimaging are deeply engaged in “hard science,” but their results can have a profound impact on the larger understanding of addiction and treatment. Another good example is the work the Lab does on nuclear non-proliferation. This work is technical in nature, but also crosses into policy discussions affecting nuclear material management, control and safeguards.

In an age of ruthlessly pragmatic ‘Tiger Mothering’ and an increasing focus on educating children to aid them in a future job market, what can students learn from the ‘blue skies’ research at BNL?

So much of talent in the workplace is in the ability to question, think critically, solve problems, be resilient to failure, and move forward productively toward a reasonably well understood objective, while still being flexible to change. “Blue Skies” kind of research can be a way to learn many of these skills. Be creative and thoughtful, design a means to test your hypothesis, don’t be afraid of failure, and find a way to right yourself. What more could an employer want?

You can find out more about the educational programs at Brookhaven National Laboratory at http://www.bnl.gov/education/

Report from Holy Week in Ayacucho

2011-04-19T21:50:00.000+01:00

You can catch my latest from Holy Week in Ayacucho - including how I ended up taking an impromptu role in a traditional religious procession - at Living in Peru.

Telling Stories From Cultures Not Our Own

2011-04-16T01:45:00.000+01:00

This week's guest post comes from Eric Maddern, writer, teacher, singer, storyteller and mastermind behind the Welsh retreat centre Cae Mabon.

As Books and Adventures explores the indigenous cultures of Peru, Eric - an experienced traveller and storyteller - kindly agreed to share his thoughts on 'Telling Stories from Cultures Not Our Own'.

By what right do storytellers tell stories from Africa, Native America, Aboriginal Australia and other similar cultures? Isn’t appropriating and telling these peoples’ stories an extension of colonialism? We stole their lands and livelihoods; we decimated their cultures; we virtually drove them to extinction. Now we want to tell their stories. Isn’t this just the latest stage of colonial theft? It’s not surprising that some survivors from such cultures think so.

Storytellers who want to tell stories from other cultures need to be sensitive to this issue, in terms of both choice of story and where and when the story is told. It seems any story in print is fair game and therefore tellable. But first you have to find a story you like. A storyteller may read dozens of stories before finding one he or she wants to tell. And then it’s not just a matter of liking it. You’ve got to develop a relationship with it. Learning it for telling requires effort. In time you must grow to love your story. If you don’t it won’t survive in your repertoire. The more you love and relate to a story the more meaningful it becomes. It helps if you care about its culture of origin. You have to make the story your own, but in the telling you have to show an appreciation of its source. As you get inside the story so, to a degree, do you get inside the culture itself. The story should help you cultivate an empathy for the culture that you will convey in the telling.

It makes sense to look, initially, for stories from cultures you already have some relationship with, whether it be ancestral, geographic or perhaps through travel. Knowing what is your ‘own culture’ is not always easy these days. The mixing of bloodlines, geographic mobility and increasing globalisation mean that roots and influences can be many and varied. I was born in Australia with Cornish and Scottish ancestry, spent my teenage years in England, travelled for ten years around the world through the Americas, the Pacific and Australasia, and now live in Wales. That’s quite a mix but at least it gives me scope to choose stories from cultures with which I have associations.

One of the biggest influences on me was the work I did in the Aboriginal communities of Central Australia. This led me to feeling great sympathy for the people. Not surprisingly the first story I ever told was an Aboriginal story. I wanted a tale that would convey the power and beauty of the culture. The story I chose came from ‘Australian Dreaming’, a beautiful coffee table book edited by Jennifer Isaacs. It was from the Dalabon people in northern Australia about how the rainbow bird stole fire from the crocodile.

The story was only a paragraph in length so I was soon embellishing it in the telling. I’d throw myself on the ground to become the crocodile, stand on one leg with outstretched arms to be the bird. After telling this story for years, my publisher – I was writing children’s picture books by then – asked for another story and I sent them ‘Rainbow Bird’. An artist was chosen and the book progressed to the point where ‘the galleys’ were done. The text and pictures were ready to be made into the book.

It was at this time that I went to Australia again, my first visit in ten years. Eventually I made my way to Katherine in the Northern Territory to visit a cousin who worked in Aboriginal communities. He took me to Manyallaluk where, it turned out, they knew ‘Rainbow Bird’ story. I had the galleys with me and so showed them to a young man who carefully read the entire text then said: ‘Come to me tomorrow and I’ll tell you the story.’

The next morning he dictated the story and made me write it down. He wanted to be sure I got it right. This meant I could ask questions for clarification. I wanted to know, for example, whether at the beginning the main character was a man or a crocodile. He was a man. The young man and his friend demonstrated the fire making referred to in the story. And I learned about the nits! It was a much fuller and more satisfying version of the story than my original.

But back in Britain my publishers couldn’t change the galleys as it meant redoing the whole book. So the picture book remained based on the Dalabon version from ‘Australian Dreaming’, not the more nitty gritty, personal version I’d been given at Manyallaluk. Paradoxically, though it is the picture book I’m least satisfied with, it sells more than any other book I’ve done. Perhaps the title ‘Rainbow Bird’ has the appeal. Would it have sold so well if it had nits in it? Who knows? Fortunately I was later able to get the fuller version published in the ‘Young Oxford Book of World Folktales’ edited by Kevin Crossley Holland.

I was lucky to track down my first story to its source and to be given both a fuller version and, it seemed, permission to tell it. Very rarely will storytellers be able to do such a thing. Even though I feel I have permission to tell the story I’m still careful about where I do. I feel OK telling Aboriginal stories in Britain where there are very few Aboriginal people to speak for themselves. But in Australia I’d be more cautious. If I was trying to get white Australians to appreciate Aboriginal culture it might be fine. But if there were Aboriginal people present I probably wouldn’t, or at least I’d ask them if it was OK first.

Paradoxically I now live in Wales and am often called upon to tell traditional Welsh legends and folktales to Welsh kids and sometimes adults. Perhaps here the difference is that very few Welsh adults can tell the traditional tales and they enjoy hearing them told well. Also, the time when those stories were a really live part of the culture is, for most people, long ago, so there’s not so much of an issue about ownership and rights any more.

But in other cultures – the Native American for example – the stories are still very much a live part of their culture. Although plenty of their stories are in print and therefore available for retelling (always bearing in mind the context), if you hear a Native American storyteller tell a story which you’d love to tell, you must ask for permission first. And don’t expect it to be granted. Or if it is it may come with a condition. For example I once asked a Lebanese storyteller if I could tell a story she’d told which had been written by a Palestinian man for his daughter. ‘You can tell it,’ she said, ‘As long as you tell it better than I do!’

So we have to be sensitive in choosing the stories we tell. Those in the public domain are, by and large, available to tell but, as always, need to be appropriate to your audience. Preferably choose stories where you have some personal connection to the culture of origin. Develop a relationship with the story. Get inside the story and let the story get inside you. Be cautious about telling someone else’s story where it’s clear they’ve done a lot of work on it. You must do your own work to make it yours. And where the story is particularly personal – either culturally or autobiographically – leave well alone. There are plenty of stories to choose from. Find ones you love and love them into life.

Find out more about Eric Maddern's work at www.ericmaddern.co.uk/

Interview: Sally Wendkos Olds, Super Granny

2011-04-09T17:39:00.014+01:00

Today’s interviewee, Sally Wendkos Olds, is an accomplished writer, with special expertise in child development, families and travel. Sally has 11 books and over 200 articles to her name. Even more importantly, she’s the devoted grandmother of 5 lucky children.

Sally’s book Super Granny: Great Stuff to Do With Your Grandkids is packed with original and exciting activities for modern grandmothers to do with grandkids of all ages, from high-tech intercontinental Skype chats to simply eating your dessert before your dinner!

Sally’s book and award-winning blog address the new breed of grandmothers who don’t look like the fluffy-haired, passive picture-book stereotype of the past. Glamorous, jet-setting, technologically savvy, the Super Granny is more likely to catch up with her grandkids via Blackberry than slump on the sofa with tea and biscuits.

Here at Books and Adventures we recognize that learning and reading is an adventure which children share with many people beyond their immediate family. Friends, teachers and relatives, including grannies, have so much to offer as we learn and grow.

Sally kindly took time for a Q-and-A with Books and Adventures by e-mail. There’s more on her work here, and you can find the Super Granny book here.

Q: The Super Granny ‘doesn’t look like the grandmothers in the picture books….like your own grandmothers or even your own mothers. And you don’t act like any of these either.’ What’s brought about this generational change?

A: One major reason this generational change came about is the improved health and vigor of today's Super Granny generation, due partly to the fitness revolution, which encouraged women (and men) to exercise more, eat better, and in general pursue a healthier life style. Youthful experiences and attitudes have also played a part: people in their sixties, and even seventies, don't consider themselves old and don't act old ("60 is the new 40"). The new technologies are helpful, but the bigger change is in Super Granny's willingness to use them.

Q: You also note in your book that grandmothering is an ancient tradition in which today’s grandmas still take part. So what common ground is there between Super Granny and her predecessors?

A: Grandmothers have always been the traditional "next-best-to-Mom" in terms of loving and caring for children. Even today, if a grandmother lives nearby, is healthy, and doesn't have outside work commitments, she's usually the caregiver of choice while Mom is at work or school. And in most cases, you couldn't ask for anyone more loving to your children or better able to take care of them.

Q: How does a busy Super Granny make that time for her grandchildren? Are there sacrifices involved in being a Super Granny?

A: All through life we set priorities in terms of how we spend our time. No matter how busy a grandmother is, if the will is there to be with your grandchildren (and it usually is), you can manage to carve out some time for them. It's not the quantity of time -- the number of hours we spend -- but the quality, so that when we are with our grandchildren, we are totally with them. This is what matters in any relationship, and what can be meaningful in a really short span of time.

Q: You have experience of living and working in Nepal, which clearly had a major influence on your life. What did you learn from Nepalese grandmothers? Is it truly possible to be a Super Granny without a cellphone, Skype account and plenty of frequent flyer points?

A: Sure, you can be a Super Granny without all those techno gadgets. The grandmothers I met in the hill villages of Nepal didn't have any of them! Of course, the ones I met did live close to their grandchildren and were a constant presence in their lives. It's harder, of course, when grandmothers (like me) live far away from our grandchildren and don't have the time or the means to visit frequently, but still there are so many ways of reaching out. I do use phone, email, and Skype -- but also snail-mail. Kids love getting letters, poems, and cards that they can actually touch -- in addition, of course, to presents!

I have lived far from three of my grandchildren ever since they were born, so I am especially aware of the need to make extra efforts to have a relationship across the miles. And that's why my book points out so many activities that Super Grannies can do long-distance -- some that I have done myself, some that other grannies told me about.

Q: ‘Grandparents and grandchildren share a common enemy.’ What does a Super Granny, devoted to her grandchildren and armed with a roster of cool and creative projects, feel about the current debate around ‘Tiger Mothering’ and ‘Attachment Parenting’. Is having a Super Granny going to help a child get into law school? Or is it all about fun and frivolity?

A: There are many styles of grandmothering, just as there are styles of mothering. Some Super Grannies focus on fun and frivolity, while others are more interested in stimulating their grandchildren's intellectual curiosity and offering projects that will, in fact, help children achieve in school and in life.

There's no one right way for everyone. When I was researching my book, I was struck by all the different ways that the grandmothers I met related to their grandchildren. So some of the activities in the book don't have any goal other than enjoying your time together, while others are more oriented toward education. You have to allow for individual differences in families and in individual personalities of both granny and child.

A Super Granny might relate one way to one grandchild and a different way to another. As long as you let all your grandchildren know that you love them, you don't need to be the same kind of grandmother with each one.

Q: The research on parenting and child development is advancing all the time. Have your opinions on how we should bring up our children changed dramatically over the years between your roles as Super Mom and Super Granny?

A: My opinions about the important issues in raising children -- being sensitive to their individual needs and encouraging them to follow their own interests and abilities, while helping them to become competent and caring members of society -- have not changed. What has changed is my attitude.

I have discovered over the years that some of the things I worried about as a young mom -- and even an older one -- didn't come to pass, and that lets me be more relaxed with my grandchildren than I was with my children. I care about and love my grandchildren as much as I did (and do) my children, but I don't worry so much about them, and as a result I can enjoy them more. This is one of the glories of being a grandmother!

Find out more about being a Super Granny at Sally Wendkos Olds’ site - http://www.sallywendkosolds.com/.

My latest news from Peru can be found at http://lavidaidealist.org/2011/04/09/escrutineo/

Nnedi Okorafor, Akata Witch Review at Brooklyn Rail

2011-04-05T18:32:00.000+01:00

My review of Nnedi Okorafor's new Young Adult novel Akata Witch is now online at http://brooklynrail.org/2011/04/books/home-truths-and-african-magic, and available in print across NYC.

Later this month, you'll find an in-depth interview with Nnedi right here at Books and Adventures.

New Zealand Book Month Extended in Christchurch

2011-04-05T13:05:00.001+01:00

A quick update from New Zealand Book Month (NZBM), which has been extended into April for Christchurch after the recent earthquake.

Sadly numerous NZBM events in the city have been cancelled, including workshops with comic book writer Steve Malley, and the exciting 'Create an NZ Superhero' online competition - but libraries are still playing a major part in the recovery effort.

Carolyn Robertson, the city's Libraries and Information Manager, told Books and Adventures, 'I think books and library services were absolutely instrumental in helping people cope in the aftermath. The quake occurred on a Tuesday. By the following Sunday, there was a library story teller at every shelter with books, rhymes, and songs. The children's responses varied from shelter to shelter: at one, they were very hyper and upset, at another they were painfully shy and needed lots of encouragement to even sit on the mat. So the library staff had to pull out all their tricks, and adjust the programme to meet different needs.

'Parents were having to queue for hours to get money, grants, information and so on, but the presence of our storytellers meant they could concentrate on the survival business and know their children were being well cared for - and within their eye sight.

'We currently have eleven library sites open and our customers are thrilled to be enjoying these services again. We have stepped up our Mobile Library service, targeting the worst hit parts of the city, roads permitting, as well as taking pre-school outreach and other programmes further into the community. Some of our libraries are being used to accommodate essential council services, but we're busy looking for ways to establish temporary sites or alternative services where there's need and demand.''

Carolyn is pleased that NZBM were able to extend their activities for people in Christchurch: 'NZ Book Month provides events that are fun and don't involve much financial outlay. One of the things that gets some people down is the endless focusing on the quake and its impact. We also need to escape a bit - and we're already planning for next year!'

Rimaykullayki!

2011-04-02T14:57:00.000+01:00

Rimaykullayki...or, ''hello'" in Quechua!

After my three month project with Behind the Book in New York, I'm now in Ayacucho, Peru, delivering professional development and curriculum advice for staff at San Domingo Savio School.

Books and Adventures will continues to feature its usual mix of articles and interviews, but for the next month or so, you can also find a personal account of my Peruvian experiences at La Vida Idealist.

Stay tuned to Books and Adventures for charter schools, New Zealand Book Month, science teaching in the USA, Super Grannies and the secret of Finland's education success.

But drop in on La Vida Idealist if you want to know the meaning of this picture...

Nnedi Okorafor: (Re)Writing Destiny

2011-03-26T20:53:00.002Z

Next month’s issue of the New York arts journal Brooklyn Rail features my review of Nnedi Okorafor’s new Young Adult novel, Akata Witch.

I think Nnedi is one of the most important YA authors writing in English at the moment. Her books blend science fiction and fantasy in epic adventures, which draw heavily on African culture and beliefs. Zahrah the Windseeker, Nnedi’s Wole Soyinka Prize-winning debut, is my all-time favourite book for young people. I wrote on it a few months back, here.

Raised in Chicago by Nigerian parents, Nnedi was a teenage tennis star forced into more sedentary pursuits by a bout of scoliosis when she was at college.

When we met on my recent trip to Chicago, she told me: ‘I would not be writing but for the paralysis. I’d never have thought to pick up a pen. I was only nineteen, really athletic, but scoliosis painted my life.

‘It was like destiny making me write. It was terrible, brutal and completely changed my life in a very specific way. Destiny is brutal, it does not care about you.’

Destiny, and the limits of our freedom to question its demands, is a major theme of Akata Witch.

Its hero, 12-year-old Sunny, is an American-born girl who moves to Nigeria with her parents. As an albino and an akata (a derogatory term for black Americans), she is an outcast within her community. Yet when she begins to develop strange powers and joins the secret society of Leopard People, it seems Sunny may have a part to play in saving the world from apocalypse…

Nnedi freely admits she’s a fan of putting teenage protagonists through the Hero’s Journey as described by Joseph Campbell: ‘I LOVE the hero’s journey. I can’t get enough of it. Coming of age is a magical time, in-between, full of conflict. And writers love conflict!’

What makes Akata Witch stand out from other fantasy quests, is the marginalized quality of the heroic protagonist. Sunny is not ‘the chosen one’ nor even, like Harry Potter, a key player in the battle for the survival of the world.

When Sunny and her friends are sent to frustrate a child-murdering sorcerer’s attempt to summon a monstruous spirit, they are merely one more team in a long line of failed, dispensable young magicians.

Sunny is explicitly told by her elders that she is effectively cannon fodder: ‘The world is bigger than you are, it will go on without you.’

Destiny seems to have brought Sunny from the US to Nigeria to discover her powers, but it doesn’t guarantee her survival, or even victory.

As Nnedi puts it, ‘Destiny has always been something I’ve been fascinated with, but also resisted. Is everything written? And even if it is, can you rewrite it?’

I’ll be featuring more from my interview with Nnedi on Books and Adventures in the month of April, and you can find my review in the forthcoming issue of Brooklyn Rail. Akata Witch is released in the US by Viking Juvenile on April 14th - find out more at Nnedi's site.

Coming soon on Books and Adventures: charter schools, interviews with Finnish Education Minister Henna Virkkunen and Super Granny Sally Wendkos Olds, guest writing from Eric Maddern, and reports from Peru as I begin my new project training teachers in Ayacucho.

A Child's Adventure in the Swedish Countryside: Scandinavia House NYC feature at Playing By the Book

2011-03-23T08:01:00.000Z

Zoe Toft's blog Playing by the Book has just posted my short feature on A Child's Adventure in the Swedish Countryside, an installation designed by Sarah Edkins for the American Scandinavian Foundation at Scandinavia House, New York City.

Scandinavia House, NYC (c) Jonathan B. Ragle

You can find my piece on this exciting children's book exhibit here: http://www.playingbythebook.net/2011/03/21/a-child%E2%80%99s-adventure-in-the-swedish-countryside-children%E2%80%99s-literature-installation-at-scandinavia-house-nyc/

New Zealand Book Month: Interview with Lincoln Gould of Booksellers NZ and Jo Ockey, World's Smallest Library, Whanganui

2011-03-21T03:17:00.001Z

While I prepare to move my next literacy project with Domingo Savio school in Peru, on the other side of the world New Zealand Book Month continues.

On February 22nd, a magnitude 6.3 earthquake struck the city of Christchurch on New Zealand’s South Island. Among the many people left in need of assistance after the quake were booksellers, some of whom had been hit by the previous tremor in September 2010.

At the close of 2010, New Zealand had already begun to address the legacy of the previous quake through initiatives like Scholastic’s special picture book Quaky Cat, designed to help children cope with the shocking events they had experienced. Now, the city finds itself once again recovering from a natural disaster, and a number of bookstores have been badly damaged.

Zoe Toft at Playing By the Book was one of many bloggers who drew our attention to various relief schemes and aid programmes being run by the children’s book world, here: http://www.playingbythebook.net/2011/03/02/books-for-families-in-christchurch-new-zealand/

Lincoln Gould, CEO of trade association Booksellers NZ, joined Books and Adventures for an interview.

He told us by e-mail that international booksellers’ organizations have been quick to offer their support: ‘In particular, the American Booksellers’ Association has not only donated generously to the Relief Fund but has also offered help based on their experience in providing assistance to Members following the Katrina disaster.’

‘Every effort is being taken to restore the availability of books to readers,’ Lincoln explained. ‘One group, Paper Plus, have established a special scheme to allow customers in other parts of the country to donate books for distribution in Christchurch. The Board of Booksellers NZ will administer its own relief fund, used to assist member booksellers in practical ways. One idea is that the expenses might be met for Christchurch members to attend this year’s annual conference, which by necessity has been moved from Christchurch to Wellington.’

Details of the relief fund can be found here: http://www.booksellers.co.nz/book-news/christchurch-booksellers-relief-fund

Meanwhile, in the North Island community of Whanganui, New Zealand Book Month took on a celebratory form as Jo Ockey and the team at Open Studios opened the World’s Smallest Library.

Based on an idea piloted in the UK, the project sees a working telephone booth in Whanganui transformed into a tiny book-swapping venue.

‘We’ve got stuff for all ages - everything from books for wee ones right though to the oldies,’ Jo told us via e-mail. ‘I have been trying to get folks to swap their favourite, not just any old book! There’s a real mixed bag: To Kill a Mockingbird up next to hand-bound books.’

The World’s Smallest Library is also the World’s Smallest Publishing House. Poet David Merritt will be taking up a residency at the micro-library during New Zealand Book Month. There’s a method to David’s madness as he perches on a park bench with a pile of old Reader’s Digests and Jeffrey Archer potboilers. Jo explains: ‘David makes new books from recycled ones – he cuts and stamps and in about 6 minutes creates these beautiful new editions with his own poems inside. David’s a very quiet man but every so often he may recite from the books too!’

The phone booth library is a bit of fun for local residents, but there’s also a serious point for Jo and the rest of the Open Studios team of community artists. ‘NZ Book Month gives us a chance to show the rest of the country a good side to our city. Over the past 6 years, we’ve had some bad press, but I want our town to realize how clever we all are – and understand that sharing is caring! Whanganui is a beautiful town with some spirited folks, and tons to do!’

For more information on the scheme, visit http://www.openstudios.co.nz/

Up next on Books and Adventures, more NZ news from the Create a Superhero project in quake-stricken Christchurch itself, interviews with Wole Soyinka prize winner Nnedi Okorafor and Finnish education minister Henna Virkkunen, plus charter schools and the future of US education. Stay tuned!

I've become THAT kind of jet-setter...

2011-03-16T14:09:00.000Z

So, I'm in Chicago for 36 hours, mostly to interview the great Nnedi Okorafor, and I've finally reached that point where there's no time for exploring.

Chicago Skyline by J. Stephen Conn. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Nnedi and I met at Yassa, a great Senegalese restaurant on the South Side of Chicago, and the sum total of my Chicago tourism has been the journey out there from O'Hare Airport.

To be fair, it was a pretty epic journey, involving 2 trains and a bus which wound through a rather desolate low-rise stretch of boarded-up and barred shopfronts. On the bus, a Vietnam veteran began to lecture a group of teenagers who were skinning up right under the driver's nose.

'I'm glad to see your education ain't going to waste,' he growled sarcastically. But the boys were smooth talkers and somehow the vet's stern monologue on the importance of getting an education was turned around until he was admitting that he didn't mind the occasional toke, and it all ended in hugs and handshakes.

When I stepped off the bus and through the door of Yassa, the world seemed to come alive. The restaurant is bright, welcoming and decorated with displays of African goods, from sculpture to musical instruments and even perfumes!

The television was tuned to Africa 24, and despite my best attempts to dredge up my schoolboy French, I'm afraid their political pundit's commentary escaped me.

Between the sorrel drink and maffe (a kind of lamb stew), I was totally sold on Yassa's menu. Nnedi's grilled tilapia looked great too, although I figured it's bad manners to take food from the plate of the person you're interviewing!

I hadn't realised that African restaurants also serve as general stores for African clothes, music and African DVD's, so I was pleased to pick up a Nollywood movie about a crime-fighting female journalist - although they didn't have Nnedi's recommendation, Warrior's Heart.

Despite all this adventure, I'm going to be told off by my friends when I return to New York.

'You didn't do the architectural boat tour?'

'You didn't go to Hot Doug's?'

'You didn't go to Do the Moon Hop at Late Bar?'

(My friends all have very different ideas of what constitutes a good time).

But there's work to be done, so I'm sitting in the Holiday Inn Express, with a terrible coffee and a lot of writing to be done before they kick me out at midday. I've finally become that kind of jet-setter.

It's probably good that I haven't activated my Twitter account - I might mutate into one of those terrible corporate travellers who spends all their times tweeting complaints about the Chicago transit system or the quality of hotel breakfasts.

Much better to celebrate yesterday's fine meal with one of the greatest living writers, and crack on with the day job.

If I'm lucky, there's time for a pilgrimmage to the Threadless store. As New York continues to mutate me into a hipster, I feel the need to buy this shirt. Don't you?

Next time on Books and Adventures: more news from New Zealand Book Month, reports from a Q&A with charter school pioneer Geoffrey Canada, and, of course...Nnedi Okorafor.

New Zealand Book Month: Interview with Nikki Crowther

2011-03-13T18:41:00.000Z

When a teenage photography apprentice picked up a 25-year-old fantasy novel to while away a long train journey through New Zealand, he could hardly have known that his choice of reading would lead to a knighthood and a piece of Kiwi cinematic history.

But for movie director Sir Peter Jackson, J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings would become one of the books that changed his life.

This March, the people of New Zealand are being encouraged to share the books closest to their hearts as New Zealand Book Month announces that ‘Books Change Lives!’

Undeterred by the tragedy of the recent earthquake, the campaign is running over 200 events across the country, from the ‘World’s Smallest Library’ in a Whanganui phone box to a nationwide giveaway of four million ‘Books Change Lives’ vouchers.

Throughout March, Kiwis will find these discount vouchers in their schools, banks, gas stations and letterboxes – a free gift from New Zealand’s booksellers and publishers to readers old and new.

‘New Zealand Book Month celebrates books and reading – all books, any books – and takes that message out to an audience who do not necessarily frequent libraries and bookshops. We have strong ongoing support from committed and passionate readers,’ Book Month director Nikki Crowther told me by e-mail, ‘but we wanted to extend our message to lapsed and occasional readers, and to parents of young children – to remind and re-engage them: with books, and the value that books can bring to all of our lives.’

Across the world, Books and Adventures – always a lover of Kiwiland - has found organizations recognizing the power of the book, especially in the early years of childhood. Australia’s Paint the Town Read scheme, which featured on the blog last November, has encouraged parents to read with their children right from the maternity ward. New York Presbyterian Hospital’s Reach Out and Read program, which I also wrote on for Books and Adventures (here) and DNAInfo (here), ensures that their child patients each receive a book at every clinic visit from birth until the age of five.

That’s not to say that the Kiwi book lovers are being prescriptive with their scheme. Nikki explained:

‘As far as we’re concerned, any book you enjoy is a good book. Choosing a book for oneself is an important step to becoming a passionate reader, and we hope to empower as many people as possible by having them choose the right book for them.’

To help readers find that special book, Nikki and her team have instigated a national conversation around the books that have changed Kiwis’ lives. Not everyone will read a book, as Peter Jackson did, and find themselves making a multi-million-dollar movie adaptation – but many of us have special favorites that have sustained us through significant moments in our lives.

Some of these choices can be very revealing: a British survey of male and female readers in 2006 suggested that men and women had very different senses of what constituted a ‘life-changing’ read, and Nikki Crowther admitted that the results of her survey in New Zealand were equally surprising:

‘So many people voted for the classics! Do people feel compelled to pick what they think they “ought” to love, rather than the books they really couldn’t put down and raved to all their friends about?

‘My first life-changing book was Ballet Shoes by Noel Streatfield. There have been many since – perhaps it was rather cruel to ask other folk to choose just one. I certainly couldn’t. I always reckon that the next book I read will be the next life-changer…!’

While New Zealand Book Month was born among Kiwi publishing insiders, it’s supported by a network of passionate volunteers across the nation.

‘I’m completely awestruck by our “activists”,’ admitted Nikki, ‘in terms of the time, energy and ideas that they put into promoting books and reading in their local communities. We’re taking the message that “Books Change Lives” out to a much wider audience than the traditional places where books exist – so that it touches people sitting at home in front of the TV, or listening to the radio, or visiting their local bank.

‘We hope to promote the notion that books can be a part of everyday life – and that by giving people a good reason to pick up a book during March, we will encourage just some of them into starting a regular reading habit!’

To find out more about New Zealand Book Month and its nationwide program of events in March, visit http://www.nzbookmonth.co.nz/

World Read Aloud Day at New York-Presbyterian Hospital, Manhattan

2011-03-11T16:07:00.001Z

Busy times here at Books and Adventures. Caught up in the celebrations for World Read Aloud Day, I managed to turn in a photo story for local Manhattan news website DNAInfo.

You can check out the great work of New York-Presbyterian Hospital's Reach Out and Read program at http://www.dnainfo.com/20110310/washington-heights-inwood/waiting-rooms-become-reading-rooms-on-world-read-aloud-day

Next - New Zealand Book Month's Nikki Crowther joins us to discuss book token giveaways, Kiwi lit culture, and her own life-changing reads...

World Read Aloud Day, Part 2: Q and A with Pam Allyn

2011-03-10T23:45:00.000Z

For the first part of this featured interview with Pam Allyn, click here.

Continuing our interview with Pam Allyn, founder of LitWorld, we moved on from World Read Aloud day to the wider work of her non-profit organization in fighting illiteracy around the world.

Are literacy challenges the same in developing countries as in a place like New York City?
In some significant ways, literacy challenges are far more extreme in developing countries. In other ways, they are more alike than you might care to think.

In terms of differences, the developing world has only just come to the idea of mandatory primary education. It is only in recent years that the expectation that all children must attend school is adhered to (and in many cases, still not completely). This is of course a good and great thing, but most of the developing world was not prepared to handle all the children who then poured into schools. As a result, there are far too few teachers per child (in Liberia, the average ratio in a classroom is 90:1), hardly any classroom supplies at all, and not nearly enough structures in place to train teachers on an ongoing basis or to provide state of the art learning that will help children move forward and stay in school. The conditions are grueling and difficult, for teachers and children alike.

In the developing world, we have access to extraordinary resources, especially literature written specifically for children, that teaches children how to read and conveys important big ideas. In fact, the materials used to teach reading can be too dense: they’re not written at a level children can understand and don't do enough to draw a child into a world of words.

Even here in the United States, we do not guarantee equity of access to all children. High poverty districts are far more likely to have fewer books and computers in the classroom. And this is 2011! We still use outmoded forms of teaching in classrooms all over this country, and sad to say, the testing mania has driven us back to some terrible teaching practices that I haven't seen since I was a child.

Just when we have to teach innovatively and creatively, we are all across the world teaching out of fear and insecurity, and that is not going to raise children to be the innovators and creators we hope and know they can all be.

Do your literacy schemes like use a particular approach to teaching and learning literacy? Are you subscribers to a particular philosophy of education?

I am a fierce advocate for what I call a "toolkit" approach to the teaching of reading. There are skills every child needs to learn to read; these include phonics, but also include fluency, stamina and comprehension. One without the others is a waste of time.

I believe in an integrated approach that will both help the child decode words but also beyond that help him to soar through them and transcend the work on the page to see reading as a joy, an art, a pleasure.

One of my heroes is Paolo Freire, who famously asked women in rural villages to tell their own stories as a way to learn to read and write. He was convinced that narrative is the force that drives us in everything we do and that was how he taught women how to read, was by asking them to tell the stories of who they were. I advocate this in my work with children; if they write about their experiences, both imaginative and real, and then read them back, they have a far better chance of becoming lifelong readers. They understand the power of story.

When I started LitWorld, I was thinking a lot about the most vulnerable children I had met, especially those who had been displaced or traumatized, and I wondered if teaching writing could actually HELP to build resilience. Teachers of such children often focused on their trauma. I wondered if by writing narratives that told the stories in ways that would give hope and strength, we could teach the child how to read and write, but also how to grow strong.

I developed the Seven Strengths model in response to that: learning based around Belonging, Compassion, Esteem, Friendship, Confidence, Curiosity, and Hope. We end up raising healthier children emotionally because they can use literacy as a tool for their own sustenance.

In much of the world, literacy and education are not seen as a priority for girls and women, but is this really true of the USA, where you also run your Girls’ Clubs?

At first we thought it would simply be fun for the girls here to join our worldwide network. We thought that the needs of girls here are more taken care of, and there wouldn't be such a demand for the Clubs in the USA. What startled me here is how necessary they are HERE too. The girls we work with in Harlem tell us that the Clubs have been lifesaving. They feel very vulnerable and isolated in their communities, and find it difficult to talk in class. Here in the Clubs, we provide a sanctuary.

You can find out more about LitWorld here, and about Pam at her own website, http://pamallyn.com/.

Next time on Books and Adventures, we head down under for the opening days of New Zealand Book Month!

World Read Aloud Day: Interview with Pam Allyn, Director of LitWorld

2011-03-09T14:34:00.001Z

Today is World Read Aloud Day, an event which draws attention to the 774 million people in the world who cannot read or write.

The event is run by LitWorld, an international non-profit organization based here in New York which seeks to cultivate literacy initiatives around the world.

At 1am I will be reading in Times Square from my prize-winning children’s story ‘Shark with the Mind of a Rabbit’ in support of World Read Aloud Day. LitWorld’s goal is for people around the world to read aloud for a grand total of 774 million minutes on 9th March, drawing attention to the challenges faced by those on the planet who cannot enjoy their right to literacy.

In just 4 years, LitWorld has managed to extend its work in literacy advocacy across 35 countries. With initiatives including Girls’ Reading Clubs, workshops for literacy leaders in developing countries, family reading initiatives and book supply to low-income communities, the non-profit takes on literacy challenges wherever it may find them.

I was joined by Pam Allyn, director of LitWorld, on the eve of World Read Aloud Day.

She said, ‘World Read Aloud Day is an advocacy event for all people, to really raise our voices together through the act of reading aloud itself. This is where WRAD is special. We have children and adults all over the world on March 9th reading aloud with the idea that their voices are going to matter for each other.

‘Literacy is the linchpin for all the UN Millennium Development Goals. The statistics are staggering and untenable. Women who are educated even to fifth grade are sixty percent more likely to vaccinate their own children. High poverty areas have higher rates of illiteracy worldwide. Children who are not in school have poorer nutrition and girls who drop out get pregnant earlier. But beyond the plain facts that a literate person can read a medicine bottle, navigate a subway, apply for a job and keep one, there are more spiritual benefits to literacy.

‘A child who can read can comfort himself, make himself laugh, find refuge in a good story and discover the magic of the imaginative universe. It should be a human right to be happy, and reading makes us happy.

‘Literacy is democratizing. When we have access to information, we know ourselves and the world far more deeply. We can take action and stand up for what is right. We can advocate for ourselves, our children and for each other. And we can connect with all humanity.

‘If I could not read or write, I would miss the way I can connect with others, with friends and even strangers who have touched my life in so many ways through notes, emails and messages. It's an extraordinary power, literacy. Someone once asked, what is the opposite of fear? And the answer was love. With all this talk about data and accountability in schools, at the end of the day, being literate teaches us how to love. Love of people, love of ideas, love of story. And that's what I'd miss most.’

You can find out more about World Read Aloud Day and the wider mission of LitWorld at http://www.litworld.org/.

Pam joins us again for a Q and A session on Books and Adventures next time - click here for the second part of this interview.

Alex Simmons Interview, Part 3. Kids Comic Con: ‘Giving Comics Back to Kids Again’

2011-03-07T01:19:00.000Z

For the previous parts of this interview with Alex Simmons, click here: http://booksadventures.blogspot.com/2011/02/alex-simmons-interview-part-1-blackjack.html

‘When your children are growing up, you suddenly realise – I’m not Batman, I’m Batman’s Dad!’

Comic creator, writer and educator Alex Simmons’ main community endeavour these days is the international Kids Comic Con, which gives children their own comic book event at a time when so much of the industry seems focussed on marketing to geeky adult males.

The Comic Con originated when Alex provided a children’s activity area at Wizard World's Chicago Con around 1998. Many visitors used the area as a babysitting service while they toured the convention, but that small side event was enough to provoke Alex’s creative streak.

‘That experience validated what I already suspected - that we needed events specifically for kids. Overall, the comic book industry is geared towards selling to guys in their thirties - and in economically depressed times, they’ll continue to follow the money.

‘It’s another symptom of the way we are short-changing our children in society at large. We keep giving them failure, anger and frustration. They are the future – and that doesn’t just mean training up a new generation to look after us in our old age – it means giving them their own lives, their own opportunities and choices.’

Alex’s yearly Comic Con brings together artists and publishers, librarians and educators, to give children and their caregivers just such opportunities to explore the world of comics. Attendees participate in workshops and meet with the men and women behind the adventures of their favourite characters. In 2010, the Convention went to Senegal to bring their brand of fun along with an art exhibit called, 'The Color of Comics‘ to an African audience of children, fans, educators and – hopefully – future comics creators!

Alex couches his sense of mission and personal responsibility in terms of comic books. ‘I love sidekicks like Robin from Batman or Short Round from Indiana Jones – as a kid, I was inspired by junior heroes who were an integral part of helping the hero win. Later I went through the stage of life where you identify with Batman. And then your children are growing up and you suddenly realise – I’m the parent that gets killed now! I’m not Batman, I’m Batman’s Dad!’

Alex’s acceptance of his role as a parental figure and mentor is part of his unique success as the mastermind of Kids Comic Con – ‘How come it was me of all people who set this up? It wasn't that i was the only one on the planet who could do it... But i was the one committed to making it happen. Obsessed, even. I had the contacts in the comic book industry and the connections with educators too.’

Alex didn’t do this alone, though. ‘Much of what we’ve achieved would never have happened without Eugene Adams, Director of Collaborative Education at Bronx Community College. Working with him is endlessly remarkable, endlessly rewarding. He’s been a kindred spirit who gave the Comic-Con a plan, a venue, and a staff of volunteers. If we hadn’t made it happen with all that support, then we’d have been asleep at the wheel.’

A large part of the work of Kids Comic Con involves empowering young creators with the latest technology, using free workshops and outreach sessions to give a taste of the software used in modern comics production. Last month’s Books and Adventures interview with Cody Pickrodt showed how hard it can be for young creators with no computer skills to work in this medium.

Kids Comic Con offers a wide range of opportunities for young people to develop such technical skills. Even the convention website was originally designed by students at Borough of Manhattan Community College.

Alex says, ‘The future is in danger of separating us into technological haves and have-nots. People need access to the means by which they can make a living, and more and more that means technology. Not every child we work with may grow up to be a graphic designer, but they’ll surely need more from a computer than just Facebook.’

For more information about attending the Kids' Comic Con, check out their web site at: http://www.kidscomiccon.com./

Kids Comic Con brings together many strands of Alex Simmons’ work over the past 20 years: a sense of social and historical consciousness, seen in his 1930s adventure stories; a duty to empower young readers and writers with critical thinking, as found in his Archie-meets-Obama story; and above all, a sense of wonder and desire to explore and engage with the world around us.

‘No child is born with a desire to fail. It’s our mission to fire their sense of wonder and of possibility. To empower them to believe in the thoughts which occur to them, and give themselves time to consider the value of their own ideas.’

For more information about Alex Simmons visit his web site at http://www.simmonshereandnow.com/

Alex Simmons Interview, Part 2: Archie Meets Obama and Palin

2011-02-28T02:24:00.004Z

For the first part of this interview with Alex Simmons, click here.

Comic creator Alex Simmons’ most recent work has been a two-part story for Archie Comics. In it, Barack Obama and Sarah Palin visit the high school at Riverdale, home to all-American teen Archie Andrews and his friends since the 1940s.

Archie's World Tour by Alex Simmons

Alex has previously written numerous stories for Archie, including Archie’s World Tour and a series which reimagines the easygoing Jughead Jones as a hard-boiled private investigator, but writing two of the most recognised political figures in America today was a special challenge…

Alex Simmons reimagines Jughead Jones as a 'semi-private investigator'

'Victor Gorelick, the Senior Editor at Archie, called me requesting a story featuring President Obama and Sarah Palin. My first pitch was based on environmental issues, but we felt this was too edgy. A comic like this is not a soapbox for political views – although we also don’t want to paint these heavyweight politicians as sweet or innocent. The challenge was finding a way into these real-life characters through the Riverdale mindset.’

Barack Obama and Sarah Palin visit Riverdale in Archie Comics issues 616-617, written by Alex Simmons

Alex’s finished story focusses on spin and media manipulation. Rival candidates for the class presidency, Archie and Reggie both lose sight of their moral compass when their respective campaign managers, Veronica and Trula, encourage them to pose for photographs with Obama and Palin! The implied endorsement sends their popularity skyrocketing, but the politicians catch wind of the media manipulation and descend on Riverdale to assert control of their public images.

Alex explains how the media came to be at the heart of this high-profile political story:

‘This comes back to the idea about balance which shaped my Blackjack story about the Touaregs: one man’s insurgent is another man’s freedom fighter! I felt I couldn’t weigh in on specific issues which divide the parties. But politicians are politicians – they have to do certain things to get where they are – and it’s important that we hold them to account. So the message behind my story is one of responsibility for your actions in the public arena.’

Archie and Reggie eventually repent and redeem themselves by taking responsibility for the media spin done in their name by Trula and Veronica. For this plot twist, Alex drew inspiration from Republican presidential nominee John McCain’s personally gracious defeat speech on the day of President Obama’s victory, in which he stepped back from what had been an aggressive campaign and chided those among his supporters who booed Obama’s victory.

‘In the Archie story, I wanted to show what should happen – politicians being true leaders and taking responsibility for things done in their name. Comic books are fun, but especially when they’re aimed at children, a positive message never hurts.’

Next time on Books and Adventures, we look at Alex’s greatest contribution to comics for children, the international Kids Comic Con convention.

Alex Simmons Interview, Part 1: Blackjack

2011-02-23T06:33:00.003Z

This week, our Books and Adventures interview is with Alex Simmons, who has written for the stage, screen and radio alongside work as an educator, performer and comics creator.

Over the course of a 20-year career, Alex has founded the Kids Comic Con and taken it around the world from Buffalo, NY to Senegal, created the African-American comic-book adventurer Blackjack, and even brought Barack Obama and Sarah Palin to Riverdale in a special two-part story in Archie Comics.

In a conversation that covered everything from 30s movie serials to the outreach work of Bronx Community College, Alex demonstrated that Books and Adventures are his business.

Appropriately for Black History Month, we began by talking about his character Arron Day, a globe-trotting soldier of fortune known to the world as…Blackjack.

‘In the 1930s, we were prepared to go out and explore. To inspire kids to be good adults.’

In his teens, Alex Simmons attended a film club on New York’s West 40th Street, showing old movie serials such as Captain Marvel, King of the Rocket Men and The Phantom. One particular show stayed with him.

‘Daredevils of the Red Circle stood out,’ Alex explains. The 1939 serial followed a trio of acrobats turned private investigators, who seek revenge for the death of a family member. ‘Daredevils had a black character: he was the butler to one of the main characters...and his name was “Snowflake”!

Fred Toones aka "Snowflake"

‘He was an awful stereotype, rolling his eyes, with this high-pitched voice, but I remember one episode where the heroes were trapped in a garage filling with fumes…The stereotype suddenly falls away, Snowflake helps break into the garage and rescue the others. It’s his one moment of competence. Of course, nobody even acknowledges this, and within a minute he’s straight back to the old characterization.

‘Watching that serial made me think – this was the 1930s. There was a black presence. We were there. And not just rolling our eyes and waving our hands in the air! I wanted to tell stories about the African American presence in this time, when parts of the world were still full of mystery and wonder, when we were willing to go out and explore! Unlike now when we’re so jaded by technology and shaped by the media that the devout can go to confession through an iPhone app.’

Alex came up with Blackjack in 1988 as a conduit for telling stories about the 1930s and writing an African-American presence back in to our vision of those times. Arron Day, adventurer for hire, grew up travelling the world with his soldier-of-fortune father. As he takes on enemies both foreign and domestic, he explores his father’s legacy and rights the wrongs of a blood-soaked past.

Arron is a two-fisted protagonist in the style of Indiana Jones, but also a thinking man’s action hero, perceptive and astute. In the Blackjack stories, Arron’s ability to pick out a face in the crowd or spot a secret glance between two conspirators is often the key to his survival and ultimate success in saving the day. Alex, who wrote the stage play Sherlock Holmes and the Hands of Othello, acknowledges a certain debt to the man from 221b Baker Street:

‘I’m a big fan of Conan Doyle’s writing and I wanted Arron to be an intelligent hero, without being a carbon-copy Sherlock. He doesn’t pull together evidence to make elaborate deductions, like Holmes – but Arron is supremely observant.’

Arron is accompanied in his adventures by Tim Cheng, a dignified Asian servant who Alex wrote as an intelligent and independent figure - ‘my apology for Charlie Chan.’

Tim falls into Arron's service after Arron wins a New York brownstone 'and everything in it' during an unseen adventure prior to the first Blackjack story.

The Blackjack comic toys with the old Green Hornet/Kato dynamic by having Arron suspect that Tim resents being ‘owned’ by another man. In the storyline Blood and Honor, Arron and Tim are called on a mission to China, during which Tim’s trustworthiness is put in doubt - but Tim’s secret loyalty proves to be to his family, rather than Blackjack’s enemies. By choosing to live in New York with his bride, alongside Arron as a friend and partner, Tim ultimately redeems the loner hero whom he serves.

Alex’s commitment to redressing past prejudice extends to the villains Arron confronts on his travels. The first Blackjack comic sends our hero to the Middle East, a location suggested to Alex by his mentor, the celebrated editor-illustrator Dick Giordano.

‘We wanted to open the Blackjack series with a story that showed Arron to be a globetrotting hero. This got me thinking of those prejudiced old Thirties movies again. I couldn’t have all the Middle Easterners be dumb bad guys who go ‘Aieeeee!’ when they die. So I focussed on the Touareg people, nomads who had fought against the colonial powers.

‘In Second Bite of the Cobra, Arron faces a principled, intelligent villain – a Touareg rebel gone sour, robbing from his own people. So the final showdown between hero and villain is also a crisis of conscience, with the Touareg leader forced to recognise that he’s betrayed his own beliefs.’

Alex always envisaged Blackjack as a legacy character whose heroic mantle is passed down through the generations. Arron’s father Matthew appears in the series seen through the prism of his son’s memory, and Alex even played Matthew, alongside his own son as the young Arron, in the flashback scenes of a 2001 radio play. Alex also laid plans for a sequel series running in the present, where Arron’s estranged grandson finds himself drawn back into the family business.

With comic books and even a radio show to his name, Blackjack remains a compelling character and a great contribution to the roster of African-American heroes. But his greatest adventures are surely yet to come…

Next time we move from Alex Simmons’ original creations to a famous American comic-book brand, which Alex took into the 21st century by bringing Barack Obama and Sarah Palin face to face with none other than…Archie!

For part 2 of this interview, click here.

Interview with Cody Pickrodt, Comics Creator

2011-02-19T02:21:00.001Z

A former teacher in public schools now inspires a new generation of comics creators in Brooklyn and beyond

'Sometimes it felt like babysitting,’ comic book author Cody Pickrodt says of his days teaching in the California public school system. ‘There’s not enough money and not enough choice, when we need something more like a university, which caters to what the kids want to do.’

Cody is speaking to me in Café Grumpy, ‘a perfect café for comic book artists: big tables and not too loud.’ It’s located on a snowy streetcorner in Greenpoint, a world away from the West Coast schools where Cody first became involved in education. As an art teacher within the state, he would drive from school to school delivering sessions which increasingly came to focus on his first love, comic books. Returning to his native New York, Cody turned his passion into a profession as the leader of comic book workshops first for 3rd Ward, and then for Uproar Art.

Cody’s passion for comics in fact began in the city – specifically, in Chinatown. The young Cody’s Chinese-American mother took him on shopping trips where he developed a taste for Asian comic book imports.

‘I went from Disney comics straight to manga,’ Cody tells me. ‘I couldn’t read what they were saying at first, but the pictures told the story nonetheless. After a while, I even learned how to read Chinese, which after all is just another set of pictures. This was twenty years ago, well before the current popularity of manga today. And I actually learned something then, which I can't say for the quality of manga that kids read today.'

Cody feels it’s vital to encourage a new generation even as Hollywood promotes comic adaptations from Spider-Man to Superman and Tamara Drewe to Scott Pilgrim. ‘It’s easy to forget that comics are actually on the wane. Graphic novel sales have dropped significantly in the last year. The boom in comics became a glut, and it’s only now that the industry is shrinking that there’s room to take creative chances. It’s a great time for young, original creators to jump on board.’

Cody has done his part to foster this new generation of talent among both students and teachers, having trained a new generation of instructors at 3rd Ward, including comics teacher Joanne Sherrow.

Now Cody’s workshops are available for all ages from Kindergarten to 12th Grade, via Max Goodman’s non-profit organization Uproar Art, featured last time on Books and Adventures.

Working around a simple 6-panel page format, Cody uses a variety of techniques and tricks to get creativity flowing among his classes. In one activity, students may pass their comic book to a partner between panels, creating a collaborative work.

‘These classes work with all ages from infant to adult,’ says Cody, although he’s particularly impressed by Kindergarteners, who he says ‘focus and really get into it’.

In common with Uproar’s director Max Goodman, Cody believes that many subjects can be taught via creative, practical art activities. The comic book form lends itself to almost any subject on the curriculum. And, taught in small groups – 6 students is the optimum number – Cody’s classes enable students to find their own creative impulses and express them through the comics medium.

Cody’s own journey from those Chinatown manga to his current output has been a painstaking one. Cody's first comic book, Night Swim, boasting a 200 copy print run, was drawn, printed and individually assembled entirely by hand, prior to his experience using computers. Today his work, largely aimed at an adult audience, includes two concurrent narrative comics alongside countless cartoons, illustrations and the art project Men with Whom I Share the Same Height.

Cody works from a movie-style script, writing up to twelve issues in advance and creating thumbnails before moving on to a Zen-like drawing process. ‘It sounds odd, but I try not to think about drawing while I'm drawing. I'll put on a movie or a listen to the news in the background, or just think about something else entirely, daydream even--anything to occupy that analytical part of my brain while I work. You achieve a purer line that way.'

Cody’s current series Francine Way, born during his studies for an BFA in Sequential Art, follows a teenage girl, interested in survivalism, who leaves her home for the nearby woods. Her illusions about a life of solitary freedom are shattered when she meets a feral boy, living rough in the wild, who may be linked to a series of violent and disturbing events in the town.

‘It’s a kind of Nancy Drew story with a twist,’ says Cody, ‘about an outsider girl who wants to find out who’s behind this mystery, but who also doesn’t want to jeopardize her friendship with this fellow outsider.’

More about Francine Way and Cody’s other work – some only suitable for adult readers – is available at http://codypickrodt.com/shop

In March, Cody will run a one-day parent and child workshop for Uproar Arts, sharing his expertise and giving families a taste of comic book creation. To find out more and get in touch with the Uproar team, visit http://www.uproarart.org/

Interview - Max Goodman, Uproar Art

2011-02-14T12:07:00.002Z

Never mind the nightlife and the skyscrapers, one of the most exciting things about New York is the commitment of the many artists and educators who serve their community through not-for-profit work. Over the coming weeks, Books and Adventures will be speaking to some of these American heroes striving to provide the best possible start for their city’s children.

Today we speak with Max Goodman. Max is a young artist and educator who, in 2009, founded Uproar Art, a Brooklyn-based non-profit organization which delivers weekend workshops and after-school classes to the local community. A talented jeweler in her own right, Max has assembled a team of artist-educators who offer courses on everything from recycled art to creating your own comic book.

Max is a dynamic and independent figure - she created her own first job in NYC by contacting 3rd Ward, who were advertising their own arts classes, and convincing them to take her on as an instructor! Although she had intended to teach in New York schools, the constraints of the system led her to found her own non-profit organization for arts education.

‘When I arrived in January 2009, there was a hiring freeze in the district,’ Max explains. ‘Founding Uproar Art gave me the chance to commit fully to my students without giving up my own art-making practice. It was a great way to give back to the young art-making community without sacrificing my own art.’

Max believes that an artist-educator who remains committed to their own practice can offer students new ways into learning, beyond the traditional classroom.

‘Pattern, rhythm and symmetry can all be used in art, but they're concepts repeated in math and music. Working with paints and metals helps students understand chemistry in a way that a science textbook could only illustrate flatly on a page. Frequently, students who feel they cannot achieve in other subjects are able to find an outlet in the arts, and in this way art keeps students in school who otherwise might drop out.’

Max gives the example of an 8-year-old student who spoke no English when they first met: ‘Her eyes lit up when she was in my art room, because she could follow the visual examples and create a beautiful piece. She expressed herself without worrying about the boundaries of language. That kind of outlet is absolutely invaluable in our world of standardized tests and rubrics.’

We’ve discussed British educational assessment on Books and Adventures before, but Max’s comments highlight the issues raised by testing on this side of the Atlantic, where there is a move to regulate education at a more national level. Max is ambivalent about this move:

‘I believe that funding for education should be sourced and therefore equalized on the national level, but I do not think it's reasonable to expect students everywhere to pass nationalized standardized tests. Individual communities understand the challenges facing their students, and should be afforded more local control over curriculum. A national curriculum should definitely be offered, but expecting students who speak English as a second language, or those with learning disabilities, to test the same as their peers is absolutely unproductive.’

As Max’s home patch in Brooklyn undergoes gentrification, wealth brings new opportunities and resources to the community – but it can also divide a neighborhood. On a recent visit to Bedford-Stuyvesant, I spoke with a local parent who decried the privileged do-gooders who parachuted in to a deprived area – but were free to leave the community’s problems behind at the end of the day.

Max’s team at Uproar Art are sensitive to these issues and committed to the place where they live: ‘We seek to ease tension and conflict - to make sure we're serving the community that has existed before the influx of wealth as well as the newcomers.’

Wherever possible, Uproar Art offers free and low-cost workshops alongside their comprehensive range of classes. ‘Eventually, we'd like to be a resource for children with an interest in the arts who may not have the means or support to pursue it extra-curricularly, as well as for the students that have the support system in place. We’re hoping to offer sliding scale payments for classes over the coming year.’

Max’s ethical commitments extend to opposing the involvement of the private sector in public education: ‘I think no for-profit entities should be allowed to play any role in our educational system. When I was a student in the Philadelphia public school district, a for-profit company sought to take over our schools in order to use them as a fertile captive audience for advertising. Education is for the good of the students and of the society in general, and somebody seeking to profit from that loses sight of these moral truths.’

Uproar is on the cusp of finishing its incorporation process, which will enable it to accept grants for future projects – and Max’s team are already looking ahead to the months and years beyond.

‘Our first year of business has gone well: we've found many allies in the local community, and have been welcomed with open arms into local studios. In the coming year we'd really to work more directly with local schools. It's time to start reaching out to the parts of the community that don't have access to programs like ours.’

In the immediate future, Max is excited by launching her own workshop on Organic Sculpture in Lefferts Garden. It’s based in part on the work of Andy Goldsworthy, who makes temporary artwork from found items in the environment.

‘Before now it's been difficult to find a location that parents and art studios were both comfortable allowing students to make nature based art, but I'm very excited to see what my 6-8 year old sculpture students discover in our own back yard. In addition to teaching Organic Sculpture we also offer a Recycled Art course. Because of our strong community focus we're always looking for ways to blend art making and the environment, and luckily there's no shortage of other environmentally friendly non-profits ready to partner with us - friends like Glenn Robinson at Bags for the People or Annie Novak of Rooftop Farms.

To find out more about Uproar Art and get in touch with Max and her team, visit http://www.uproarart.org/.

A thank you on behalf of VRH

2011-02-12T13:55:00.000Z

I wanted to write a brief thank-you note to everyone who supported my fundraising efforts for Volunteer Reading Help in 2010.

I've just heard that, including gift aid, we reached a final total of £680. This will pay for four children to receive one-to-one reading support in this school year.

It is only through the generosity of people like you that Volunteer Reading Help can give this much-needed support...so if you ponied up the cash in 2010...give yourself a pat on the back!

New York, Same Old Blog

2011-01-22T15:41:00.001Z

Welcome back! Books and Adventures may have moved to New York, but the blog is alive and kicking in 2011, with upcoming features including NYC literacy charity Behind the Book, Alex Simmons' Kids' Comic Con, guest writing from Eric Maddern and much, much more. Off-line, there's a host of educational and literacy projects I'm working on - you'll hear it all first here on Books and Adventures.

I've been staying in an apartment with a lovely cat who nonetheless saw fit to empty her bowels all over the floor of my room, but rather than indulge you with a comedy cat video on Youtube*, I've decided to include a snowy Central Park landscape, photographed this week:

*And if you really need comedy cats...will this do? Or this?

Time Travelogix - Interview with Claire Dopson

2011-01-09T13:25:00.000Z

Today on Books and Adventures we’re joined by my friend Claire Dopson, writer of the children’s adventure Time Travelogix.

Back in the day, as teenagers, she and I fought crime and battled evil on the mean streets of Warwickshire, but now Claire is London-based, with a sensible job and a passion for children’s fiction.

Time Travelogix

Claire started writing seriously while studying French at university. ‘I used to want to be an artist, but actually writing fits in much more easily with everyday life, so it’s good I changed my mind!’

After travelling, teaching and general adventuring around the world, Claire set her mind to writing an adventure story of the kind she loved to read. ‘I started something dreadful, which has now ended up as a short story (“I Know What You're Thinking”). I abandoned that and a couple of years later, I began Time Travelogix.’

Claire’s novel sees Ixian, a 24th-century schoolboy, blasted into Victorian times after foiling a an attempt to steal the mysterious ‘Infinity Triangle’. Ixian struggles to cope without the labour-saving gadgets he’s used to, but he has an ally in Ruby Swift, a pickpocket from the era in which he finds himself. Now Ixian must survive in Victorian London, escape the baddies and find his way back to his own time...

Claire explains that the novel was very different in its earlier drafts: ‘It started as an idea of doing some grail-type quest though time, which also dreadful because I had no idea how to write, but it gradually morphed into what it is now. Ruby used to be a boy and Ixian wasn't from the future at all until about 2006.’

Claire Dopson

Claire found researching the Victorian settings for the novel much more challenging than creating a 24th century society – ‘Imaginary things are much easier to write about because no one can tell you it's wrong’ - and she doesn’t envy Ixian his lot, trapped in the past: ‘I’m so dependent on my laptop. I write with it on the sofa – under a blanket in winter, minus the blanket in summer! I can't begin to imagine how Dickens and co managed to write their novels by hand.’

Time Travelogix is the first part of a projected series, which required Claire to develop planning skills as a writer:

‘I just started writing Time Travelogix as it came to me, and spent years editing and perfecting as I went, which was a mistake because I ended up changing so much of it when I finally got to the end. So now I sketch enough of an outline so I know where it's going, write loads of unedited rubbish based on this, then edit and polish afterwards (and abandon if the idea just isn't working). Much more productive. The other 2 books are planned out, but I haven't actually started writing them yet, as I want to see what happens to Time Travelogix first. I'm working on a completely separate novel now, and various short stories.’

Claire writes in the evening and on weekends, with a work ethic that puts some of us to shame! ‘I hate that feeling that you’ll never get anything published ever, ever, ever – but I’m always looking for that turning point in a project, when you realise that it’s not going to be rubbish and you can finish it.’

It’s time to let today’s guest crawl back under her writing blanket now, but to read some of Claire's stories, including extracts from Time Travelogix, visit www.timetravelogix.com.

Books and Adventures Review of the Year

2010-12-27T13:47:00.000Z

As we soak in the warm bath of another festive lull, it seems a great time to review a busy first year on the blog at Books and Adventures.

We got started in February with an ABCTales/AbracaDABra Radio award for my children’s story Shark with the Mind of a Rabbit. The story had a dual origin in reading sessions with Volunteer Reading Help and old university jokes about a lecturer who we had cast as a wicked witch...

Then came the interviews – and our first celebrity interviewee was a Teletubby, no less...Nikky Smedley joined me to discuss her storytelling and dance production The Tell Woman in March.

April saw the Annual General Meeting of the British branch of IBBY, where I met Mick Inkpen of Kipper fame. During my time with Volunteer Reading Help, I saw a child go from tearing books up on sight to vowing to write his own...Mick’s Anything Cuddly Will Do was a key book in making that transition.

In May I wrote my first theatre review for Claire Massey’s great blog, The Fairy Tale Cupboard. Claire, who edits New Fairy Tales, also pointed me to one of my favourite events of the year, Ignite 2010.

July was the highlight of the literacy calendar for me - I was privileged to speak at the House of Commons on behalf of Volunteer Reading Help, the incredible English charity which helps children develop a lifelong love of reading.

In the same month, I read the first of the late Patricia Wrightson’s Wirrun books, which led on to an interview with Patricia’s publisher Mark Macleod and a series of features on these important, controversial and underrated pieces of fantasy writing. Huge thanks to Judith Ridge for putting me on to this great writer.

The Song of Wirrun, and Nnedi Okorafor’s pitch-perfect novel Zahrah the Windseeker, were my favourite reads of the year. (To be honest, I’m almost scared to read anything else by Nnedi because that first book was so perfect!).

The latter part of the year saw Books and Adventures go on a ‘world tour of literacy support’ with NGOs and charities from San Francisco to Sydney and beyond. Starting with Reading Partners and Reach Out and Read in the USA, we moved on to South Africa’s help2read, and then Rhonda Brain’s inspirational Paint the Town Read scheme in Australia.

In November, I was foolhardy enough to participate in, and complete, the 50,000-word challenge of NaNoWriMo, although the resulting text (written to a topic determined at random by fellow writers) will now be broken up to be re-used in an entirely different way!

Still, Chris Angotti, who runs the Young Writers’ Program for Nano, was kind enough to grant an interview during his busiest month of the year –you can find what he had to say about enthusing and supporting young writers here.

Roland Pietsch

Other highlights from the year’s interviews included: Stories from the Web, Edgardo Zaghini of Outside In, storyteller and psychologist Steve Killick, philanthropy guru Mike Dickson, Elena Schmitz of Wales' Young People's Writing Squads, and an old colleague turned pirate historian, Roland Pietsch. Some of these went on to provide useful fodder for Zoe Toft’s directory of book charities at Playing By the Book.

Amid all this frantic reading, writing and blogging, there was a little time for some running, too. Getting bitten by that bug has led me to make some dumb commitments, like signing up to run a 10k in the immediate aftermath of Christmas. (Assuming we don’t get snowed off, I’ll be the guy at the back of the field, with turkey and sprouts visibly bouncing up and down in a still-swollen belly!).

Once post-Christmas recovery has completed, there’ll be a lot more Books and Adventures to come in 2011...I’m looking forward to more interviews from around the world, including YA author Claire Dopson, and guest bloggers including storyteller Eric Maddern. There’s also some big travel plans on the horizon, so hopefully I’ll be delivering some front-line reports from foreign climes along the way!

Wishing you all the best for the season...see you in 2011!

Matt

PS...How pleased was I to see flying sharks in Doctor Who???

Festive sneak preview

2010-12-21T12:04:00.000Z

Especially given the weather...I couldn't resist a festive sneak preview...

Winter wasn’t right this year.

It seemed normal enough in the city of London. The weather was cold, the streets were full of shoppers, and there were Christmas songs on the TV and Radio. School finished and the holidays started. Children played in the park, wrapped up in coats and hats and thick woollen scarves.

But winter wasn’t right this year. And only Stella knew it.

Stella’s parents were in the kitchen having breakfast. Dad served the coffee and peeked over Mum’s shoulder at the newspaper.

‘I see there’s a new exhibition on at the Modern Art Gallery,’ he said.

‘Mum,’ said Stella.

‘We could go and see it after we take Stella to the theatre,’ said Mum.

‘Dad,’ said Stella.

‘That would be nice,’ said Dad. ‘I’m just so excited about seeing Barry Hercules! They say it’s the greatest magic show ever!’

‘OI!’ shouted Stella.

‘What?’ said her parents.

‘Come and look at the snow,’ Stella said. ‘It’s…weird.’

Stella and her parents stood in the doorway looking out at the street. The sky was thick with black clouds and the cars had almost disappeared underneath a deep sooty layer of snow.

Stella looked at her parents.

‘Well?’ she said.

They looked at her.

‘Black snow?’ she said.

Dad reached down and picked up a handful.

‘Looks pretty normal to me,’ he said. He made a snowball and threw it at Stella.

It exploded with a PLOOMPH on her coat. It left an oily stain.

‘Look!’ said Stella. ‘Look at my coat!’

Mum reached out and put her hand on Stella’s forehead. ‘Are you getting a temperature, darling?’

‘It’s black snow!’ Stella said again.

‘I think she’s overexcited,’ said Mum. ‘With the trip and all.’

‘Probably,’ said Dad. ‘Come on, Stel, let’s have some breakfast. Plenty of time for excitement later.’

Stella scowled as her parents led her back in doors.

Soon the family would be off on their special trip to the theatre.

And by the end of the night, Stella’s parents would disappear from the face of the Earth.

Merry Christmas!!! Matt

The Lesson of League Tables

2010-12-17T09:35:00.000Z

I’m sure many UK readers will have seen the news today about the primary school league tables, whose results have just been published.

Angela Harrison of the BBC reports that almost 1 in 10 of schools with validated and published results failed to meet minimum standards in the SATs. But how many of these schools will be located in the most challenged areas of this country, where pupils and parents alike need support and encouragement, rather than teachers bound to a regime of relentless formal assessment?

Teaching in a London school where a high percentage of pupils had English as an Additional Language, I was incredibly frustrated by the box-ticking mentality, especially in literacy.

Such an attitude encourages teaching to the test rather than a love of reading and writing. The best teachers in the world will find themselves sitting with an “underperforming” student on the day results are due in, thinking, “Just let me tick one more box so I can move you up another sub-level!”

My class made great progress in their literacy skills – but more from an attitude on the part of our year group that we would make learning fun, engaging and creative.

A poetry unit was delivered to rap music – our class gave themselves rap names and learned to freestyle to The 900 Number (“I like / chocolate / I want / CHOCOLATE CAKE!”). I knew we had made an impact when months later one of our pupils, who had little English and numerous educational needs, was still using the rap names with his friends in the playground.

In another class, we created a ‘living comic book’ together, using a whiteboard for each panel of the story of ‘Melon Boy’, a superhero who transformed into a caped, flying cantaloupe when he consumed too much of the fruit in question.

The story was inspired by a boy in our class who had given himself a laughing fit that morning, when he said, ‘My mum says if I eat too much melon, I might just turn into one.’

It was the first time he had ever given himself an attack of the giggles. He couldn’t stop, and the whole class ended up laughing along with him.

By using that moment as a springboard for our literacy lesson, the entire class became enthused and empowered to apply their own creativity to reading and writing.

When the education system mandates ‘teaching to the test’ in the very earliest stages of schooling, which should be about fostering a love of learning...
When teachers have their performance management directly linked to children’s formal levels....
It becomes incredibly difficult for classroom practitioners to be confident, creative and...dare we say it...a little subversive.

With the best will in the world, teachers find themselves ‘playing it safe’ and delivering mediocre education under such a system. Check-boxes will never prioritise the kind of passion for learning which brings together parents, pupils, and teachers – the kind of whole-community commitment which schemes like Paint the Town Read deliver so well in Australia.

It’s frustrating that around the world, so much of the ‘heavy lifting’ of encouragement and enthusiasm in education – work which is actively frustrated by the league table/”No Child Left Behind” mentality – falls to committed, creative, subversive teachers – and to those generous members of the community who commit to schemes like Volunteer Reading Help, Reading Partners, or Paint the Town Read. It’s time for the authorities to rethink their priorities and put a love of learning before league tables.

Well, that’s almost it for 2010. Next time on Books and Adventures, our review of the year, along with some sneak previews of features, interviews and guest writers for 2011!

Paint the Town Read - Interview with Rhonda Brain, Part 2

2010-12-01T07:50:00.001Z

You'll find Part One of this Interview here:

http://booksadventures.blogspot.com/2010/11/paint-town-read-interview-with-rhonda.html

Rhonda Brain, founder of Australia’s Paint the Town Read scheme, now takes the PTTR message to other towns across New South Wales and beyond.

“When I share our scheme with communities, I always remind them that we have been going for a long time, so they shouldn’t be daunted by the amount of things we do....Other towns may use as many or as few of our strategies as they like: they’re a springboard.”

A number of the communities have adopted the idea of a reading mascot, and most run a Community Reading Day, but as Rhonda puts it, “on the whole, committees take on the concept and run with it! The concept is THE biggest "engenderer" of creative and fun ideas, I have ever come across....PTTR committees are always amazed and excited at how the ideas will flow...”

For example - in Toongabbie, New South Wales, the Portico Plaza shopping centre worked with local authorities at Holroyd City Council this year to run storytelling and craft sessions for children, hosted by local reading mascot Poppy the Possum.

'Poppy the Possum' in Holroyd, NSW encourages the community to 'Paint the Town Read'

Diane Hacking of Portico Plaza explains why the staff and management were so keen to get behind the scheme:

“We’re a small neighbourhood centre, and the majority of our shoppers are families. We had no hesitation in helping local children to get a good start, giving them a chance to be better educated, and hopefully to secure a good job later in life. Many of them will grow up to be the teenagers, mothers and fathers who we serve here at Portico Plaza.”

The fun-filled events run by PTTR committees are fuelled by grassroots passion, but based in the latest scholarship on language development.

“There’s a plethora of research now on the brain's need for stimulus for language development, from birth right up to age five,” says Rhonda Brain. “But it’s of little use if parents near hear of it....so, our motto is RESEARCH SAYS IT, WE SPREAD IT! In a creative, fun-filled, celebratory way.”

Rhonda sees a profound impact in this apparently light-hearted approach: “When something is celebrated, it is given value. We create a climate of wanting to read...with the whole community owning the project, from the mayor to the schools, businesses, parents, maternity wards, police, and beyond!”

Rhonda is emphatic that such a project serves the whole community, not just infants:

“We’ve seen the huge impact such a project can have on building social capacity and connectiveness - addressing our 3 basic emotional needs: to have a sense of belonging; a sense of worth and a sense of competency; relationships - not to mention the positive impact it could have on the economy...”

In 2010, PTTR continues to spread from town to town and Rhonda is now lobbying the government of New South Wales to adopt it as an official scheme.

‘Whether they do or they don’t, it’s happening, spreading like wildfire from town to town’ she says. ‘I would love to hold a book relay across New South Wales…and then Australia. One day we hope to have Australians celebrating literacy at the same level we celebrate sport – wouldn’t THAT be something!’

Paint the Town Read - Interview with Rhonda Brain, Part 1

2010-11-24T07:47:00.001Z

Find the latest on Paint the Town REaD at www.paintthetownread.info
Dr. Matt Finch's new website is at booksadventures.wordpress.com

‘I hope you’re reading to the baby, Mum, ‘cause I don’t want a dumb sister’

When a child in a New South Wales kindergarten met his newborn sister for the first time, he knew just what advice to give his mother.

The young boy wasn’t even in primary school yet, but he had been brought up to value literacy thanks to ‘Paint the Town Read’ (PTTR), an Australian campaign to raise awareness of children’s need for a language-rich environment right from birth.

It seems that no-one does ‘Books and Adventures’ quite like Australians. We’re back down under on the blog this week to talk with Rhonda Brain, a former headteacher from New South Wales who has seen the PTTR scheme, which she devised, take her homeland by storm.

Teaching in Parkes, New South Wales, Rhonda and her team realised that there were a growing number of children coming to kindergarten with delayed language development. Rhonda decided to target every new parent right at source – in the maternity ward!

She continues the story: “I wrote to every school and pre-school in Parkes, asking them to donate an agreed amount to purchase books for every new born, with a message in it from the schools ...and later from the Shire Library.”

Government funding allowed Rhonda to think even bigger. She recruited a team of movers and shakers in childcare and literacy, including teachers, maternity nurses, and the local speech pathologist. With a motto of “We don't want your money but we do want your co-operation!”, the team quickly secured the support of the mayor and other town leaders.

Rhonda explains: “It is wonderful, the town really do have ownership of the scheme, even to the point of being annoyed when TV reports the latest person as coming up with this wonderful idea of reading to your children from a young age.

“We held our launch in August 1996, gave the first baby born after the launch many books and prepared for our first Reading Day, held in 1997. We had many out-of-town guests from educational institutions and from parliament. The mayor held a civic reception for them and our committee and principals. Special education expert Dr Loretta Gircelli spoke at our launch and at our first reading day.”

PTTR activities today fall into three categories: on-going, one-off and annual.

Communities involved in PTTR arrange for books to be given to every child throughout their early years. The first of these on-going gifts is given to every newborn baby by their maternity nurse, complete with a personal message, and is followed by age-appropriate PTTR-designed story booklets, given out at immunization days, antenatal bookings and high school events.

One-off events included the clever appropriation of Y2K media panic to create the Millennium Reading Bug in 2000. This mascot has become increasingly popular, even generating its own fun dance at school socials and PTTR events. (When the Reading Bug laid an egg in 2004, children were encouraged to visit it and read to it just as their parents read to them!).

Along with a human chain of readers stretching more than a kilometre down Parkes Main Street, a 12-hour overnight “readathon”, and other attention-grabbing activities, Rhonda’s team have worked hard to keep literacy in the spotlight across New South Wales. In 2005, a Reading Relay saw a book passed, like the Olympic torch, from town to town across over 60 communities and 5500 kilometres in just two weeks. The message to ‘Paint the Town Read’ travelled by hot air balloon, motorbike, fire engine and even on horseback in a striking celebration of the communities’ dedication to encouraging children’s literacy.

The highlight of the PTTR calendar is the Annual Community Reading Day. Now in its fourteenth year, this event sees schoolteachers rise early to literally ‘paint the town read’, decorating shopfronts and streets throughout the town. Pupils, teachers and local workers all dress up according to a theme, and storytelling events take place in the town’s stores before the local park plays host to a celebratory ceremony that has over 2000 people in attendance. Guest speakers have included sports personalities, writers, government ministers, and even the Governor General of Australia.

Next time on Books and Adventures we’ll follow Rhonda as she takes the message of Paint the Town Read to communities across Australia.

You'll find Part Two of this Interview here:

http://booksadventures.blogspot.com/2010/12/paint-town-read-interview-with-rhonda.html

NaNoWriMo Young Writers Program – Chris Angotti Interview

2010-11-12T08:26:00.000Z

It’s been hard to miss it this month – in cafés and libraries from Vancouver to Vienna, you’ll have seen them hunched over laptops or notepads. The Internet is resounding with their hopes, dreams…and occasional frustration as they battle on towards a final word count.

Over 250,000 people worldwide are participating in this year’s National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), which sets contestants the challenge of producing their own novel between 1st and 30th of November.

Among those thousands of dedicated souls are 50,000 under-18s who have signed up for NaNoWriMo’s Young Writers Program, setting their own word count goal for the month. The Program provides a wide range of resources and support for budding novelists and their classroom teachers – available here.

Chris Angotti, who runs the Young Writers Program for NaNoWriMo’s parent organization, joins us today for an interview on Books and Adventures.

What was the aim of setting up the Young Writers Program at NaNoWriMo? Was it hard to get schools on board initially?
The Young Writers Program was originally set up as a way to support teachers who wanted to implement NaNoWriMo in their classrooms. In the beginning, many of them were participants or friends of participants. So it wasn’t hard to get schools onboard; these folks were already aware of the potential of NaNo. Since then, we’ve done some outreach, but most of our expansion has been through word of mouth, with more and more young writers and educators excited by NaNo every year.

What has been the Program's greatest success to date?
I think our greatest success has been how much we’ve evolved. We’ve gone from a few classrooms to thousands. Our materials have gotten better, and we’re seeing the results of the hard work we’ve put in.

In terms of specific successes, I get those when I ask for stories from our participants. My greatest satisfaction is when I hear about kids—sometimes whole classes—who have gone from writing simple sentences to entire, involved novels. All because of the Young Writers Program.

What else does the YWP teach apart from creative writing skills? How does it affect students’ broader outlook?
I’m very proud of what we do for students’ self-esteem. In our surveys, almost 100% of educators agree that the program has made kids look at themselves as more capable and accomplished. They tell us that their students are ready to take on far more in life than just writing.

In addition, the program teaches time and project management skills—life lessons that are well conveyed through this challenge.

Is there a danger of pupils taking away a message of quantity not quality from the Young Writers’ Program? Are there educational benefits to a ‘quality not quantity’ approach?
We’ve always said that what NaNoWriMo helps with is a first draft. We definitely think it’s important that writers edit and revise their work. By the end of November, students are so attached to their novel that they want to do this. It’s no longer the chore it might be during standard grammar lessons. These young authors are proud of their work, and they want it to shine.

There’s a lot of pressure on teachers to fill an already packed school day with all the curriculum activities demanded by education authorities. How much time should they make for NaNoWriMo each day and why?
It’s really up to the individual teacher to determine how NaNo can work with his or her class. Some teachers simply introduce the challenge, and then students work on it individually at home. Others make it a major part of November, with time spent in class for planning, sharing, and editing. I think it depends most on students’ needs, and nobody knows that better than good teachers.

Have there been any memorable ‘Thank Goodness It’s Over’ parties held by the YWP groups?
We hear about people doing all kinds of stuff: prizes—quills, crowns, certificates—for writers; presenting students with finished copies of their novels; even just eating lots of pizza and celebrating. The TGIO party is an important part of the process—to acknowledge what students have completed and to make a special time to celebrate it.

One of my favorite parties is the one the Washington School for the Deaf throws every year. That’s a great inspiration.

What have been your own experiences as a ‘Wrimo’?
This is actually my first November as YWP Director, and my first year doing NaNoWriMo. So far, I’ve been keeping up the best I can with my word count. It’s not as hard as people think! The support I’ve gotten from the office, and from my local region, has been invaluable. I love it, and I’m happy to be forced to write. I know that even if my book is not perfect (or even close to it), I’ll have accomplished something that most others haven’t.

What are your favourite books?
I like most anything by Fitzgerald or Hemingway. They’re my go-to authors. Two more recent books that I really love are Jim the Boy by Tony Earley and Underworld by Don DeLillo. Each is epic and evocative in its own way—one more simple and restrained, the other sprawling. I’m always reading, though, and have too many favorites to list.

You can find out more about NaNoWriMo’s Young Writers Program at http://ywp.nanowrimo.org/

Patricia Wrightson, Part 5: Looking To The Future

2010-11-10T09:35:00.000Z

You can find the first part of this feature here:

http://booksadventures.blogspot.com/2010/10/patricia-wrightson-part-1-song-of.html

We've made it to the fifth and final part of our discussion of Patricia Wrightson, and it's time to look towards the future.

The challenges of Wrightson’s legacy, the power of her storytelling, and the undeniable literary quality of her writing, make it an absolute shame that her books are so hard to get hold of today.

I was lucky that Judith Ridge’s notice of Patricia Wrightson’s death led me to pick up old paperback editions online, and lucky once more that Claire Massey of the Fairy Tale Cupboard led me to Katherine Langrish’s blog, Seven Miles of Steel Thistles.

A post on Seven Miles, ‘Cultural Appropriation and The White Saviour’, addressing Katherine’s own use of Native American myth in her fantasy writing, brings us forward to the 21st century. It pointed me towards the Australian government’s protocols on using Aboriginal culture in literature – a valuable initiative which nonetheless raises further interesting questions about how legal and governmental bodies regulate the imagination!

But ultimately, as Katherine points out: ‘While I find it terribly sad that Wrightson’s books were shunned, I can see also that when so much has been stolen, people are going to feel strongly about ownership of their own stories. Stories are the signature of a culture. And sometimes stories are all you have left.’

I recognise the limits of what we’ve done here at Books and Adventures this month. All I can hope is that, for readers as new to Wrightson as me, these few instalments on the blog have gone beyond the obituaries and given a little more attention to the issues, and existing discussions, surrounding Wrightson’s work.

Let's give the last word to Mark Macleod, who talked to me about the prospects of a reissue for Wrightson’s works:

‘A very few publishers have shown that they are willing to republish Australian classics, but the problem is that the 'classic' presentation they choose has almost no appeal to young readers today, and the sales that result create a self-fulfilling prophecy about the likely level of interest in such writers. Maybe some enthusiast will find ways of making them work in the digital space, by focusing on readers who are not the traditional supporters of literary fiction.’

Next time on Books and Adventures: an interview with Chris Angotti, Director of the Young Writers' Program at NaNoWrimo...

Patricia Wrightson, Part 4: Shadows of Time

2010-11-08T08:39:00.001Z

You can find the first part of this feature here: http://booksadventures.blogspot.com/2010/10/patricia-wrightson-part-1-song-of.html

Patricia Wrightson’s Shadows of Time (1994) is a strange and powerful novel. It recounts the journey of an Aboriginal boy and English colonist girl who, by the gift of spirits, ‘travel in a timeless dimension’ – drifting without ageing or changing through Australian history. En route they are chased as devils, encounter various supernatural creatures and even come across a mysterious stone figure who may be the protagonist of the earlier Wirrun books. Although Wrightson had to some extent ‘let go’ of indigenous subject matter by this period, Shadows unmistakeably revisits some of the themes of her earlier novels.

Mark Macleod links Shadows to the Australian bicentenary of 1988. ‘That itself was a problematic anniversary. Indigenous Australians had already renamed Australia Day (26 January, the day when Captain Phillip took possession of the country in the name of the English king) 'Survival Day'. And as the Bicentenary approached non-Indigenous Australians were increasingly asking 'What is there to celebrate?'

The timeless quality of the children’s journey in Shadows, ‘given the privileges of water – to flow wherever is natural’, allows for a meditation on Australian history and, thereby, on Wrightson’s concept of culture.

As Mark Macleod explained in our recent interview:

‘In Shadows of Time, Wrightson invents a spirit character that seems very like those she borrowed from Indigenous culture in earlier works, but is in fact her own. For a writer who speaks repeatedly of borrowing only the equivalent of European 'fairies' and being careful not to touch the spirits of creation mythology, and who speaks of her terror of misrepresenting the spirits she does borrow, this is almost a defiant move, coming as it does after she has acknowledged that time has overtaken her whole project. The novel is therefore a coda to her major work, reasserting the mutability of cultures and her right as an artist to let her imagination flow where it will. Her readers and Wrightson herself might have changed their views over time - but not entirely.’

As time continues to flow, and Wrightson becomes a posthumous figure to be considered primarily through her legacy, there are challenges ahead for those who wish to preserve her work and circulate it for a new generation.

Mark Macleod comments, ‘I think we are still vaguely embarrassed or guilty about the idea that she might have been just another one in a long line of exploiters of Indigenous people.’

But it is precisely the encounter with Wrightson’s texts which dispels that idea, while at the same time forcing us to consider the complex and uncomfortable connections between storytelling and the legacy of colonialism.

A fantasy writer ‘cannot restore the original context for mythic stories, but she can create new contexts – as living cultures themselves do constantly. The fantasist can use all the resources available to the contemporary novelist to fill gaps within and around the story, and at the same time can alert the reader to some of what was lost.' - Brian Attebery

Brian Attebery makes a distinction between a fantasy writer like Wrightson and any self-appointed white spokesperson for Aboriginal people: ‘Her job, as a writer, is to work out in fictional form her own relationship with Australia’s troubled history and haunted landscape. Her strategy has been to bring in Wirrun and other characters to share the task, going where she cannot go. These fictional collaborators remind readers that we need to invite other collaborators, fictional and real, to help us extend the quest for understanding beyond the boundaries of the text itself.’

Attebery’s comments raise so many questions worthy of debate. That fantasy writer ‘alerting the reader to some of what was lost’ sounds like those white 1930s poets busy writing on behalf of the Aboriginal culture they perceived to be dying, which leads us back to asking: Who set Wrightson the task of ‘working out in fictional form her own relationship with Australia’s troubled history and haunted landscape’? And what do we make of the notion of a ‘fictional collaborator’?

These are questions to which there’s no final answer, but they are thrown up by the challenge of Patricia Wrightson’s legacy today – which forms the basis of our final instalment, next time on Books and Adventures.

You can go to the fifth and final part of this feature by clicking here.

Patricia Wrightson, Part 3: Outsiders and Indigenization

2010-11-05T11:44:00.001Z

You can find the first part of this feature here: http://booksadventures.blogspot.com/2010/10/patricia-wrightson-part-1-song-of.html

Patricia Wrightson was born in 1921 and grew up between the two World Wars of the 20th century. Publisher Mark Macleod points to her childhood in the 1930s as setting the context for her relationship to indigenous culture. The interwar years saw Australia disillusioned by the sacrifices of the First World War and turning away from ‘Old Europe’ towards the cultures of its own continent: ‘This was the Australia that Patricia Wrightson grew up in: with some sense of loss of its connection with Europe, and some sense of impending loss of its Indigenous culture and the need to 'save' it.

‘The devastating loss of young Australian lives in a war that had no geographical imperative for us, but was wholly motivated by the political connection with the UK, and the resulting destruction of European society on a massive scale produced a turning-away from Europe by many Australian artists. It seemed to many that European culture was moribund … So writers and visual artists particularly began to look to Indigenous Australian sources of energy for the imagination … The artists - having been brought up with the general belief that Indigenous Australian culture was dying - thought they were preserving it.’

John Murray locates Wrightson’s work within a tradition of literary ‘indigenization’ – fiction that seeks to bring European-descended inhabitants of countries like Australia ‘into imaginative contact with the lands in which most of them were born but in which, by comparison with their indigenous peoples, they are aliens.’ To Murray, Wirrun himself becomes an explicitly indigenizing figure, unifying Australia: by the final book of the trilogy, he has taken on heroic responsibilities to the entire spiritual and material ecology of the continent, from spirits to the white urban population and the animal kingdom besides.

Mark Macleod told me: ‘It is possible to read Patricia Wrightson’s emphasis on 'folk' as a romantic reverence for simplicity or innocence. This comes dangerously close to the racist construction of indigenous cultures generally as childlike … We understand now that we can kill the thing we love, but it is too easy to approach this difficult and complex issue ahistorically and condemn it out of hand.’

An alternative, Mark suggests, is to look at the overlapping experiences of outsiderness between indigenous Australians and other groups. He points to the poet Les Murray's early interest in Indigenous subject matter in the 1960s and 70s: ‘With his Scots heritage and his upbringing in rural Australia, he sees a natural empathy between the marginalising of Celtic Australians, non-Anglo migrants and Indigenous Australians. They have all been colonised by the English.’

Brian Attebery, writing on Wirrun in 2005, chimes with this perspective when he discusses George, a white ‘Inlander’ who helps Wirrun at the climax of the first book by distracting other white Australians who threaten to interfere with our hero’s plans. George, a farmer of harsh and isolated country, is an outsider in the mainstream society of white Australian ‘Happy Folk’, figures who feature only in the margins of the Wirrun books.

Attebery suggests that the Australian continent is the real protagonist of The Song of Wirrun, and all the other characters are defined by their relationship to the land – a sliding scale from the ignorant, superficial Happy Folk with their air conditioning and service stations, graduating through the Inlanders to the Aboriginal People, heroes like Wirrun, and finally the spirits whose actions trigger Wirrun’s quest.

Mark Macleod writes, ‘The reality is that there are Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians and they need to find ways to coexist. Their histories and mythologies are different; their values often seem diametrically opposed. [Wrightson’s] project to try and create a pan-Australian imagery therefore rests finally on the idea that all they really have in common is the land.’

‘There is a sense of loss by both Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. But what they all have in common is the land. Wrightson says repeatedly throughout her career that her books must not be read as 'good vs. evil' stories. The real issue is ecology: the rightful place of all beings.’ - Mark Macleod

Seen in this light, George the Inlander is an outsider, too – like Les Murray’s Celts. Although he’s not directly allied with Wirrun on his quest, he obliquely helps by keeping other white Australians away. He does this, tellingly, by taking on a number of roles which satirise relations between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians, pretending to be first an anthropologist, then the producer of a hippyish Aboriginal ‘happening’, and finally a snake collector who has hired Wirrun and company to collect poisonous reptiles.

Mark Macleod suggests that for Wrightson, the key figure was always that of the outsider, be that the artist in Australian society, or the child in the adult world. In their different ways, George and Wirrun, and Wrightson herself, are all outsider figures.

Wirrun was Wrightson’s first indigenous main character. As Macleod points out, ‘He is a city boy, who travels to the central Australian desert and reconnects with the Dreaming. He is marginalised in his own culture.’ Brian Attebery takes this further by pointing to the Stolen Generation of Aboriginal children who were taken from their families and raised in homes or adopted by white families. The white-educated Wirrun is likely either a member of the Stolen Generation, or a child of that generation – although this is not confirmed explicitly by Wrightson’s text.

Mark continues: ‘By the mid-70s, when the Wirrun books started to appear, Indigenous Australian voices were becoming a powerful political and cultural force … So Wrightson's desire to alert non-Indigenous Australians to the need for a new vision was becoming increasingly irrelevant … She did realise it, and from the mid-80s she lets go of the Indigenous subject matter for which she had become known around the world.’

This idea of letting go of indigenous subject matter from the mid-80s is the line that is taken in Patricia Wrightson’s UK obituaries…but one of her most interesting and challenging books is the unusual, dreamlike Shadows of Time. This novel, published in the wake of Australia’s bicentenary, seemed almost to revisit the world of Wirrun, with both an indigenous main character and seemingly indigenous spirit characters.

We’ll be looking at Shadows next time on Books and Adventures. To go to part four of this feature, click here.

Patricia Wrightson, Part 2 - The Representation of Aboriginality

2010-11-01T09:41:00.003Z

You can find the first part of this feature here: http://booksadventures.blogspot.com/2010/10/patricia-wrightson-part-1-song-of.html

Clare Bradford’s 2001 Reading Race: Aboriginality in Australian Children’s Literature was one of the key academic texts to question Patricia Wrightson’s use of Aboriginal myth.

Bradford’s study was a clear-headed critique of Aussie writing for children, with lasting value. Reading it now prompts us to consider, for example, that this year’s Australian movie Tomorrow, When the War Began, adapted from the 1980s novels by John Marsden, is also implicated in the period of colonialism by harking back to the ‘frontier spirit’ in a tale of white teens fighting back against Asian invaders.

For Bradford the key question was how children’s texts try to position their readers with regard to aboriginality. From 1950s books, where Aboriginal Australians ‘appear, if at all, as a melancholy presence, doomed to extinction’, to more recent appropriations of Aboriginal myth, she diagnoses a tendency to represent Aboriginal people as an undifferentiated ‘Other’ to the white Australian readership.

Bradford questions the image of Wrightson as an advocate or defender of Aboriginality. She writes: ‘To look closely at the discourses which inform these texts is to recognise how the warm glow of Aboriginality conceals its appropriating and controlling strategies.’

In Wrightson’s later Shadows of Time, Bradford suggests, the novel’s Australian spirits are merely mapped on to Western notions of hobgoblins, mermaids and dragons.

Brian Attebery and Mark Macleod have both emphasised that Wrightson was always careful to use figures from Aboriginal superstition and myth rather than sacred religious beliefs such as creation myths, trying to focus, as Attebery writes, on fantastic creatures ‘without explicitly invoking religious ideas.’

This was an attempt to show respect by populating her fantasies with the creatures of folk tale rather than figures of religious significance, but Clare Bradford questions the legitimacy of such a sliding scale, where all supernatural tales are assigned a value – sacred or trivial – according to the writer’s judgment: ‘Cinderella and ‘How The Kangaroo Got Its Hop’ jostling in the lowest level, Adam and Eve at the top with the Rainbow Serpent … Wrightson’s use of the term ‘superstitious’ degrades the narratives that she claims for her own purposes.’

Against this, we can read Attebery: ‘No amount of care can make [Wrightson] into a tribal elder, nor can her use of Aboriginal folklore ever be fully ‘authentic’. However, she can become... a participant in the reshaping of tradition for a modern world in which authenticity is an inaccessible ideal.’

So why was Wrightson looking to participate in these traditions at all? Next time we’ll go back to the 1930s, the time of her childhood, to look at the impulse by some white Australian artists to ‘save’ a culture they saw as threatened with extinction.

For part three of this feature, click here.

Patricia Wrightson, Part 1: The Song of Wirrun and Beyond

2010-10-27T09:54:00.003+01:00

Books and Adventures starts an in-depth look at the work of the late Patricia Wrightson (1921-2010) this week.

I read her trilogy The Song of Wirrun for the first time this year, immediately after hearing news of her death in March. It’s an absorbing, sophisticated fantasy quest rooted in Aboriginal mythology.

A few comments from my earlier blog post are here. I wrote it based on the books I happened to be reading at the time, Wirrun and John Gordon’s The Giant Under the Snow, which draws on British legends for its spooky, dark adventure. Now, looking back, my comments on ‘the power of the land’ seem rather naïve in the face of long and deep-rooted debates about the place of Aboriginal culture in Australian children’s writing.

I was keen to move beyond the snapshot of Wrightson’s work offered by the obituaries and, from my limited Pommie perspective, try to understand the issues raised by her use of indigenous Australian myth. In fact, I was compelled: these books were just so gripping for me as a reader, I needed to know why they were out of print and so controversial. Over the next few posts on the blog I hope to give an outline of the critical debates on Wrightson for readers as new to her novels as I was.

Mark Macleod, Patricia Wrightson’s friend and publisher at Random House, was kind enough to join me for an e-mail discussion of her work and legacy. I started by asking him about the importance she held for Australian children’s literature in the postwar period, as both a writer and as the editor of Australia’s School Magazine.

He explained how Wrightson acted as ‘an enabler, whose passionate commitment to making stories with an Indigenous theme part of the literary mainstream helped prepare readers for the many Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists who followed. The cross-cultural partnership of Dick Roughsey and Percy Trezise, who changed Australian picture books in the 1970s, for example, found an audience already used to thinking of Indigenous subject matter for children as exciting, dramatic and edgy. That is at least partly due to the high profile success of Wrightson as a 'real author' in the education market before them.’

Yet somehow Wrightson has become a writer less read than revered: a name to conjure with, but one whose books are difficult to obtain.

‘It was significant that news of her death was carried in Midwest newspapers and regional networks in the United States, but barely rated a mention in Australia,’ Mark Macleod suggests. ‘I think we are still vaguely embarrassed or guilty about the idea that she might have been just another one in a long line of exploiters of Indigenous people - but in many cases that view is not the result of close acquaintance with the texts themselves.’

So why are these fantasy adventures by a heavyweight of children’s literature so hard to get hold of these days? And what is there to say about her use of Aboriginal myths and beliefs in those fantasies?

Over the next few blog posts, I want to look a bit deeper at Patricia Wrightson’s work and legacy. As critic Brian Attebery points out in a 2005 article, ‘the borrowing of one culture’s traditions by another is a serious and risky business’, with a danger that privileged white societies ‘acquire whatever is of value in indigenous culture while consigning the bearers of that culture to invisibility or extinction.’

So how might we read Patricia Wrightson’s relationship to the Aboriginal myths in her writing - appropriation, advocacy or something else entirely?

We'll be looking at this question next time on the blog. For part two of this feature, click here.

Birmingham Half Marathon

2010-10-25T09:28:00.000+01:00

Yesterday saw the EDF Energy Half Marathon take place in Birmingham. I was pleased to get round in 1:48 - just shy of my target time.

Thankfully donations for VRH didn't fall short and I'm pleased to say that we've raised enough to fund the Helper based at Herne Bay Infant School for 2010-11.

A few odds and ends are still coming in from generous folk who weren't able to donate online - and there's still time to click on the widget above and give to this outstanding literacy charity. Every penny goes towards helping school pupils become literate for life.

This week on Books and Adventures we'll be starting the long-awaited series on the late Australian writer Patricia Wrightson, and following that up with news from Paint the Town Read, an exciting literacy scheme that runs down under.

Roland Pietsch on The Real Jim Hawkins

2010-10-20T08:14:00.001+01:00

Today on Books and Adventures we’re joined by Roland Pietsch, a historian whose chequered past includes running a music venue, and work on TV’s Who Do You Think You Are?, alongside university and outreach work in East London.

Roland’s book The Real Jim Hawkins, released this month, looks at the real-life counterparts of the hero of Treasure Island – boys as young as thirteen who enlisted in the Navy when Britannia ruled the waves. For fans of Robert Louis Stevenson’s great adventure story, it’s an opportunity to see the truth beyond the swashbuckling adventure.

‘Of course I was a Treasure Island fan as a kid, even though I grew up in the very non-maritime city of West Berlin,’ Roland told me.

Roland Pietsch

‘Treasure Island had been adapted as a West German television series. Then my auntie from the other side of the Wall gave me the actual book, and an East German record, as Christmas presents. Jim Hawkins’ treasure hunt not only easily crossed national borders, but even the hardened ideological borders in my childhood.’

As an adult researching his PhD, Roland discovered the truth behind Stevenson’s novel in the archives of the London Marine Society, an eighteenth-century charity that recruited thousands of impoverished boys for service at sea.

Roland found that the real-life boy sailors had a surprising amount in common with Stevenson’s Jim Hawkins: ‘Both were placed in such dangerous and adventurous situations, that they had to stop being boys and prove themselves in the adult world.’

One of the reasons for recruiting sailors so young was to make them immune to the horrors of war. The Navy fostered a culture of fearlessness and nonchalance in the face of danger. It was also necessary to impose discipline on unruly boys brought on board.

Roland compares this to ‘an eighteenth-century ASBO’, but then points out that Stevenson’s Jim Hawkins is no clean-cut hero himself: he takes the stolen treasure at the end of the novel, without considering that his mates have no more right to it than Long John Silver and company: ‘Doesn’t this hint that even the fictional Jim Hawkins was a bit of a cheeky character?’

Sadly the fictional Jim’s prospects were far happier than those of real 18th-century boy sailors.

In such dangerous roles as ‘powder monkey’, boys were expected to fetch gun powder from below decks to charge the ship’s guns, dodging shot and wooden splinters in the heat of battle.

‘Many lost their lives at sea,’ says Roland, ‘or struggled to come to terms with witnessing so much bloodshed at such a young age. Some battle scars went deeper than a wooden leg.’ Alcoholism and internment in the infamous madhouse at Bedlam were often the consequence of a seafaring youth.

One of the more incredible real-life stories discussed in Roland’s book is that of Mary Lacy. Disguised as a boy, this teenaged girl managed to serve on board a cramped Navy vessel. Ships of the time like HMS Victory comprised 850 men in a small wooden world, 50 metres long, 15 metres wide and 6 metres deep, a challenging place in which to conceal one's true gender.

'Then again,' Roland points out, 'washing opportunities were limited, so nobody ever detected Mary. The closest they came was when she challenged one of the other ship’s boys, who was a bit of a bully-boy, to a fight - she was expected to take her shirt off for the boxing match!’

Roland’s book offers a fascinating and often surprising glimpse of the truth behind the vision of seafaring life found in novels and movies. It’s available here, and you can find Roland’s article on The Real Jim Hawkins for Sabotage Times here. For more information, visit Roland's website, http://www.rolandpietsch.com/

Next time on Books and Adventures – pausing only to catch breath after the Birmingham Half Marathon – we’ll be beginning our in-depth look at the writing, and legacy, of Australia’s Patricia Wrightson.

help2read - Volunteer Literacy Support in South Africa

2010-10-15T11:10:00.001+01:00

Books and Adventures continues our world tour of literacy support this week, heading to South Africa to visit the literacy NGO help2read.

help2read founder Alex Moss started visiting South Africa shortly after the introduction of democracy to the country in 1994. A visit to a township with a leading member of the struggle against apartheid inspired Alex to help with the construction of a new society in South Africa.

‘I was struck by the shocking levels of illiteracy arising out of the lack of adequate education during the apartheid years,’ Alex explains. ‘I was convinced that the disadvantaged majority would only ever be able to reach their full potential if they could fully enjoy the benefits of education, benefits which require the prerequisite of literacy.’

Working as a volunteer with Volunteer Reading Help in the UK showed Alex a model of literacy support which could be taken to South Africa at a comparatively low cost, but it took time for the project to get off the ground.

Early in 2005, Alex met Dee Cawcutt, the Principal of Muizenberg Junior School, just outside Cape Town. Dee offered to put her school forward as the first for what would become the help2read programme. The children, aged 5-12, are selected by class teachers as being those, other than children with special needs, perceived as most in need of assistance. They read and play literacy games with their volunteer helper, working in the school library or a quiet place outside the classroom, supported by help2read’s resource boxes full of interesting and beautiful books.

Alex takes up the story:

‘In the summer of 2005 I persuaded my daughter to come back from Washington DC, to be trained at VRH and to go to Cape Town to set up the programme. She arrived in Cape Town in early November 2005 and quickly set about recruiting volunteers wherever she could. On 1 February 2006, six trained volunteers started at Muizenberg Junior School.’

Within weeks the school was reporting unprecedented change in the pupils on the programme, ‘from being completely shut down to becoming happily involved in school life and the excitement of learning.’

The early volunteers for help2read were, like those of VRH in the UK, often middle-class people eager to share the benefits of their education and make a contribution to society. In South Africa, this group continues to provide a significant minority of volunteers – but a great change has come about from 2006, when help2read began recruiting from among the parents of a township school.

This proved very successful and quickly became the model for most help2read volunteer recruitment. Alex explains: ‘The volunteers are the literate parents of children at the same school as the children they are helping and are able to achieve equally impressive results with the children as those we gained at Muizenberg. Volunteers also benefit from the empowerment that they experience in becoming a respected member of the school community and with the success which they achieve with the children they are helping.’

help2read has already helped over 5000 South African primary school children to become literate. ‘In every single case,’ says Alex, ‘these children would have been early drop outs from the education system without the help our volunteers have given them. Now each one of them has the opportunity to go all the way through the system, to university and beyond.’

help2read’s sights for the future are also set high. Having adapted the VRH model, developed in a wealthy Western country, to a South African setting, the help2read team are planning to extend their programme to all African countries where English is the medium for education.

‘We hope to open our first programme outside South Africa by 2012,’ says Alex. ‘In the longer term, we believe that the help2read concept can be replicated in other languages and can be a major part of the solution to the literacy problem that exists in all developing countries.’

To find out more and get involved, visit http://help2read.org/

Running for Reading at Herne Bay Infant School

2010-10-11T08:31:00.000+01:00

Busy times at Books and Adventures – but we still need your help to raise just £510 for a Reading Helper at Herne Bay Infant School.

Tomorrow I’m speaking at a VRH event in Kent, the county where I first discovered this amazing charity – and I’ll be dropping in to the brilliant school whose pupils need your help.

Our fundraising target is tantalisingly close – as is the race; my aching legs will find the end of all this training on 24th October a welcome relief – so every penny counts.

Click on the widget below or go to justgiving.com/booksadventures...

Books Around the World with Outside In - Children's Book Week Event

2010-10-01T12:12:00.000+01:00

Just a quick reminder that next week is UK National Children’s Book Week.

This year’s theme is ‘Books Around the World’, and to kick things off, the team at Outside In are holding an event at the Free Word Centre, Farringdon, on Monday 4th October at 5pm.

Alexandra and Ed from Outside In will be talking about the ‘Reading Around the World’ programme which has successfully encouraged UK children to read more books in translation.

You can find my May 2010 interview with Ed here and more on Children’s Book Week at the Outside In website, here.

Have a great weekend, all.

Reach Out and Read at New York Presbyterian Columbia University Medical Centre

2010-09-29T17:17:00.000+01:00

Staying with our transatlantic theme after our feature on San Francisco’s Reading Partners, this week finds Books and Adventures in New York to find out more about the Reach Out and Read (ROR) programme at the New York Presbyterian Columbia University Medical Centre.

ROR is a national literacy and healthcare programme which operates across the USA. Under the scheme, volunteers read stories to children in clinic waiting rooms, paediatricians advise carers on the importance of reading aloud, and children visiting their doctor from the ages of six months to five years receive a new book to take home at every check-up.

Paediatricians and educators working together founded the programme in Boston in 1989; in 1997, Reach Out and Read came to New York Presbyterian Columbia Medical Centre, serving families in largely Spanish-speaking areas of Northern Manhattan.

Over 13 years the programme has grown from a single site in Washington Heights to cover five clinics, serving more than 10,000 children and distributing nearly 20,000 books per year.

Volunteers commit at least six months a year to engaging children in literacy activities and demonstrating to carers that sharing books with a child helps them to bond and communicate with adults. Volunteers’ interactions in the waiting room can inspire parents and carers to support their children’s literacy at home.

Paediatricians and hospital administrators have shown equal dedication to the programme, reflecting their belief that exposing young children to high quality, age-appropriate literature will not only encourage a passion for books, but also have a positive impact on growth and development.

‘Paediatricians do not merely give books to their patients as lollypops at the end of a well-child visit,’ says Emelin Martinez, Literacy Co-ordinator at New York Presbyterian. ‘They provide parents with advice and strategies they can use to enhance their child’s social, cognitive and motor skills development in using books that are developmentally appropriate.’

ROR as a programme takes a long-term view of literacy support: as part of care visits throughout early childhood, doctors see the same children two to four times a year.

‘Advice from each encounter builds on the last encounter and at the end of the five years, each child has a library of 12-14 high-quality, culturally, developmentally and linguistically appropriate books,’ explains Dr. Mary McCord, medical director of the programme. Many volunteers establish a bond with patients who attend multiple well-child visits. As the average wait in a clinic runs to two hours, volunteers have plenty of time to engage children with pleasurable and constructive reading sessions on each visit!

What really marks ROR out from other literacy programmes we’ve discussed on Books and Adventures is its pre-emptive approach. Where many schemes operate with a remedial focus, ROR aims to prevent literacy problems before they start. There is a focus on delivering anticipatory guidance to the carers of young children, promoting literacy and healthy development from as young as six months.

Emelin Martinez explains how this attention to literacy benefits a community’s health and well-being: ‘From a population perspective, poverty is the single most important determinant of health. Education has proven to be the only strategy to successfully move people out of poverty. Promoting literacy is one of the most important tasks that a paediatrician has with their patients early in life, to ensure that children can become healthy and successful adults.’

The ROR team at Presbyterian are proud of the positive impact their programme has had on families in Northern Manhattan. Caregivers have reported that watching their children’s interaction with volunteers has inspired them to implement the strategies seen in the clinic when they get home.

Emelin Martinez says, ‘On many occasions, I’ve witnessed parents reading to their children in the waiting rooms of our clinics, which demonstrates that parents’ behaviour regarding early literacy is changing. For some families, ROR books are the first books they have in the home. For others, parental illiteracy emerges as a problem when giving out these books and encourages caregivers to attend literacy programmes themselves. For paediatricians, it is touching to see how children ask for the books as soon as they come in, changing a long standing tradition of having stickers or candy be the reward for a medical visit.’

Huge thanks to Emelin Martinez and Dr. Mary McCord for joining Books and Adventures to discuss a programme which reflects such a positive and progressive approach to literacy and well-being. You can find out more at http://www.columbia.edu/itc/hs/medical/residency/peds/new_compeds_site/programs_ror.html

Birmingham Half Marathon / Volunteer Reading Help Fundraising Update

2010-09-23T12:06:00.000+01:00

As regular readers will know, I’m running the Birmingham Half Marathon on 24th October to raise funds for Volunteer Reading Help, after I found out that they need just £510 to fund their helper for 2010-11 at Herne Bay Infant School in Kent.

Well, I'm glad to say we're now more than three quarters of the way there, thanks to some generous donations.

In particular I'd like to thank staff and customers of the Anne Tudor fashion shop in Stratford-upon-Avon, who worked hard to boost my coffers prior to the run!

Just a few hundred pounds will pay for a year’s worth of one-to-one work with the children who most need support with their reading skills, so please click on the justgiving widget at the bottom of this post or head straight to justgiving.com/booksadventures to help out this marvellous charity.

Reading Partners - One to One Literacy Support in California and Washington D.C.

2010-09-16T16:23:00.000+01:00

This week Books and Adventures crosses the Atlantic to feature Reading Partners.

This US non-profit literacy organisation, which celebrates its tenth anniversary this year, helps children to become lifelong readers by developing communities’ ability to provide individual literacy support.

I was particularly excited to discover the scheme as there are many parallels between Reading Partners and the UK literacy charity Volunteer Reading Help, on which you can find more here.

Reading Partners was founded in 1999. A retired school nurse, Mary Wright Shaw, was working in a neighbourhood of Palo Alto, California, when she discovered that many local children were unable to read the books provided in her clinic’s waiting room. Together with two friends, she committed to do something about this – and what was then the ‘YES Reading’ programme was born.

Now known as Reading Partners, the organisation has expanded throughout California and Washington D.C., serving over 1700 pupils and growing from a single trailer outside of an elementary school to 37 school sites.

Volunteers work on school campuses in 45-minute one-to-one sessions with children who need extra help to get their reading up to grade level. Many pupils, coming from homes where English is not the first language, may have stronger speaking skills, but still require support with reading and writing. Reading Partners, whose volunteers range all the way from high-schoolers through to retirees, records an 88% success rate in helping students accelerate their progress in reading.

Development Manager Allison W. Cohen joins Books and Adventures to tell us more.

‘Our model is scalable, high impact, and high quality,’ she explains. ‘In the past five years Reading Partners has grown by over 600% and maintained consistent results for students in the program.’

The Reading Partners scheme has its own curriculum, designed to California Department of Education standards in collaboration with experts from the Stanford School of Education. The organisation uses Houghton Mifflin’s RIGBY PM to assess student progress, alongside state standardized tests.

This commitment to providing measurable results makes Reading Partners an attractive option for charitable donors, as Allison makes clear: ‘Reading Partners gives donors measurable, tangible results that they can point to. It is easy to see how your money is being used and the value of that donation.’

Reading Partners has responded to the challenges of the economic climate by partnering with the federal AmeriCorps programme. As the charity becomes leaner and more efficient, plans for the future are optimistic: ‘We hope to serve at least 100 schools in the next three years and tackle the childhood literacy crisis on a national scale.’

You can find out more about Reading Partners, and read their report ’10 Stories for 10 Years’, here.

Hansel and Gretel, Ghosts and Mirrors: Ignite 2010 at the Royal Opera House

2010-09-08T07:56:00.000+01:00

On Sunday I managed to spend some time at the Ignite Festival in Covent Garden, thanks to a tip-off from Claire Massey's Fairy Tale Cupboard.

Over three days, guest curator Joanna MacGregor had transformed London’s Royal Opera House into an enchanted zone whose magic permeated not only performance spaces but also foyers, cloakrooms and cafes within the building.

I guess it’s the academic in me, but my favourite part was the museum-styled Hansel and Gretel exhibition from Ghosts and Mirrors, Drama Centre London’s presentation of moments from opera in a living cabinet of curiosities.

Behind the doors of the subterranean Supper Rooms, visitors to Ghosts… found strange fragments from the world of opera, reworked as English-language vignettes by director Richard Williams, in minutely detailed sets by David Collis and Janey Gardiner.

An excerpt from Tosca, bringing us close to Scarpia’s interrogation of Cavaradossi, was almost too comfortable for anyone who’s spent a night on the sofa in front of Law and Order: high culture neatly equated to primetime police procedural.

At the other end of the spectrum, the scene from La Traviata, which allowed the audience to approach the mourners at the side of coffin, was almost unbearably intimate and felt almost intrusive to watch from arm’s-length distance.

After these tableaux and another taken from Der Rosenkavalier, it was a bizarre experience to step into the Hansel and Gretel room, and be addressed by the curators of a mocked-up museum exhibit, who anatomised the fairytale – and Humperdinck’s opera - through the academic presentation of an archaeological dig.

Laminated academic reports were passed around to visitors as the two scholars, deftly played by Alex Large and Michael Hanratty, explained their aim of obtaining DNA samples from a chicken bone and lollipops uncovered at a 1936 excavation in the German village of Rottweil.

A theory of ‘Old Crone Optometry’ was used to explain how ‘living in an over-aerated and artificially engineered gingerbread environment could result in a serious loss of response from the optic nerves’; similarly there was a ‘theory of crumb consumption’ and a display correcting factual errors in Engelbert Humperdinck’s account of the ‘Hansel and Gretel Incident’.

The atmosphere of W.G. Sebald-meets-Fred-Dineage was perfect, and the performers took every response in their stride, from visitors entirely ignorant of the folk tale through to more inquisitive, difficult types like me!

It would be lovely to see Ghosts… performed in a larger venue one day, with the Hansel and Gretel performers given more time to develop a thorough backstory to the project and slightly more rounded characters, but even in its current form this was far and away the pick of an outstanding line-up at Ignite 2010.

Claire Massey’s post, with information on the whole Ignite Festival, can be found here.

Steve Killick Interview - Being Our Best at Cae Mabon

2010-09-01T07:45:00.000+01:00

Storyteller and child psychologist Steve Killick returns to Books and Adventures this week, in advance of his workshop ‘Being Our Best: Bridging Storytelling and Positive Psychology’, run with Eric Maddern at Cae Mabon this month.

The four day event offers participants the opportunity to explore and apply the wisdom of traditional stories in the context of modern psychology.

Steve explains: ‘By Being Our Best we mean looking at the best aspects of human nature, love, creativity, compassion, co-operation, rather than our negatives: selfish, destructive, short-sighted ,fearful. In a sense, this is the symbolic struggle between good and bad that is played out in stories.

‘Stories have always been the most effective ways of transmitting ideas, values and beliefs essential in religion, mythology and simply learning how to live. Education without them is impoverished and, in my mind, impossible.

‘In the course Eric Maddern and I are running we look at what Positive Psychology, the study of wellbeing and optimal performance, and what the wisdom of traditional tales is telling us- and what they have in common- and there are some surprises there!’

Steve is concerned that, in a technologised world, oral storytelling should continue to have a place alongside other media. ‘Storytelling takes place without technology, just “eye to eye, heart to heart and mind to mind” as the proverb goes.’

Often, participating in this oral tradition involves retelling time-honoured myths and fables. This requires a delicate balance of respect and reinterpretation:

‘On one hand, you cannot just change a story on a whim. On the other hand, it is a dynamic thing that needs to resonate again in the present, rather than be a museum piece to be looked at and never touched.

‘A story is a message from the past to today. For me it is about making the tale live now – what values do we find in this story now? We don’t always know what the story meant in the past.’

As an example, Steve points to the radical renegotiations of traditional stories which have been popularised by the like of Neil Gaiman and Angela Carter:

‘Heinrich Zimmer said about myths that they have to be questioned and consulted anew, with every age approaching them with its own variety of ignorance and understanding. If you are working with traditional material you do it with love and care. You retain the spirit and breathe new life: That’s what I think Carter and Gaiman have done fantastically. Carter’s reworkings, particularly, have contributed to the revival of interest in storytelling.’

There’s still an opportunity for participants to sign up for Steve and Eric’s journey of narrative exploration at Cae Mabon from 23rd-26th September. You’ll find more information on Steve’s site at http://www.wordsofwonder.co.uk/Cae-Mabon.html

Anti-Tales Symposium, Glasgow

2010-08-26T08:50:00.000+01:00

I was disappointed not to be able to make it to the Anti-Tales Symposium, an academic event on fairy-tales (and their "evil double" the anti-tale!) at the University of Glasgow.

Luckily, Claire Massey of The Fairy Tale Cupboard has written a report on the event, here.

Carnaval del Pueblo, Outside In World, Peru Interviews!

2010-08-20T08:58:00.000+01:00

It's taken me a while to get around to posting this, but...

I was in London on 1st August for the Carnaval del Pueblo, the city's annual celebration of Latin American cultures and communities in the city – and the largest outdoor Latin American festival in Europe.

I hooked up with an old TEFL buddy to enjoy the sun, salsa and four stages of live music in Burgess Park.

This year’s Carnaval was special as it celebrated two hundred years of independence for many Latin American nations.

For our own little celebration on the blog – a little nod to Latin America – I’ve brought together Sue Allsworth, an English teacher based in Peru, and Ed Zaghini from Outside In World, the UK organization set up to promote children’s books in translation.

Sue is in charge of English language teaching at Domingo Savio primary school in Ayacucho. The city has a difficult history as the former heartland of Shining Path terrorism, but these days receives increasing attention from foreign NGO’s and travellers. It’s a long way from Sue’s home town of Folkestone.

‘England always felt like a pair of jeans that didn’t quite fit,’ she says. ‘But when I came to Ayacucho five years ago, it felt like a really special place. Nowhere is perfect, but you have to find somewhere where you’re most content.’

Sue had a qualification to teach English as a Foreign Language when she arrived in Peru, but her vocation took time to fully develop. ‘I became a language teacher because it was a way of staying here. I found out I was good at it, and actually enjoy it…Here, I get to make a difference in the world, and now I’m here for the job as much as the place.’

Sue and her business partner Gloria, a primary teacher with 9 years of experience, had each independently planned to establish their own school in the city. When they joined forces, the director of Domingo Savio, an existing primary school, licensed them to use the school’s name in their district.

Today, they offer primary and pre-school teaching in English and Spanish, with activities to develop English language and vocabulary hand-in-hand with the Spanish-language curriculum. It’s a demanding role for both teachers.

‘I must love my job so much,’ says Sue. ‘From 7.30 in the morning I teach adult classes before the children arrive. School runs from 10 until 3 pm, and then we have homework classes right through until seven-thirty or even later. Sometimes it’s hard to get away from the school site!'

Sue’s entrepreneurial attitude and sheer determination to make a difference in a remote and impoverished country has been very rewarding, from the five-year-old pupil who greets her with an impeccable ‘Good afternoon, how are you Miss Sue?’ to children who find the atmosphere of the school supportive and liberating.

‘Local kids with tough backgrounds flourish and develop in the school environment and find the security to be emotionally open,’ she says. ‘Even kids who have relatively good lives materially face emotional challenges.’

While Sue has taken a little piece of the UK with her to South America, the team at Outside In World are bringing the cultures of the world to Britain by promoting literature in translation.

Tying in with our Latin American theme, Ed Zaghini was kind enough to recommend a book by a Chilean author, from the selection at the Outside In World website:

'When I Was a Boy, Neruda Called Me Policarpo is by the Chilean author Poli Delani. Poli was born in 1936 and at that time his family was living in Spain where they become friends with the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda and his wife.

'Between 1940 and 1943, Neruda and his wife lived in Mexico City. This memoir is set at this time and follows Neruda’s relationship with the young Poli – and his adventures and misadventures.

'In this book you will learn about Poli and his encounters with the most amazing animals and insects; of his experience of being bullied in a boarding school where he had to stay when the family and Neruda travelled to New York.

'Perhaps the most touching story is that of Poli wanting to buy a fountain pen and a watch and in order to find the money he decided to sell chewing gum at the cinema and clean cars in the car park. When the poor children saw him taking over their job, they violently sent him away. Poli was very angry and frustrated by the incident but his parents and Tio (uncle) Neruda calmly explained that those children needed the job to eat while his motives where purely superficial.

'This memoir is full of facts about Neruda: his passion for collecting things and the time spent in the antique markets in Mexico City looking for strange objects to add to his unique and growing collection; his very strange food habits, including insects and monkeys. But what clearly stands out here in this memoir is his touching relationship with a very young boy.

'There are six of Neruda’s poems included in the book and a short biography of the poet that will clearly serve to introduce his life and work to younger generations. Manuel Monroy’s illustrations perfectly match the spirit of the text.'

You can find more on When I Was a Boy, Neruda Called Me Policarpo at the Outside In website, here. Thanks to Ed at Outside In World for recommending this book!

Birmingham Half Marathon - Fundraising for Volunteer Reading Help

2010-08-16T07:32:00.000+01:00

The best thing about July and August is catching up with all my teacher buddies on holiday.

Even though those supposedly ‘long’ holidays are actually pretty full of planning, paperwork, and getting your classroom sorted for September, we still find time to catch up for dinner and drinks and a few giggles. Even if, like me, you’re not actually tied to the academic year and should probably be in the office…

I was especially enjoying the wine and tapas this week, because today I start training for the Birmingham Half-Marathon on October 24th.

I’m running to raise funds for Volunteer Reading Help, after I found out that they need just £510 to fund their helper for 2010-11 at Herne Bay Infant School in Kent.

Just a few hundred pounds will pay for a year’s worth of one-to-one work with the children who most need support with their reading skills.

We’re off to a good start but every little helps, so click on the justgiving widget at the top of this post or head straight to justgiving.com/booksadventures to help out this marvellous charity.

You do your bit and I’ll do mine; I might even try and get my half-marathon time down to something creditable!

Zahrah the Windseeker by Nnedi Okorafor

2010-08-13T13:06:00.000+01:00

Nnedi Okorafor is hardly short of positive reviews at the moment, but I just wanted to drop a few lines about her 2005 Young Adult novel Zahrah the Windseeker, which I picked up this month.

The book sees thirteen-year-old Zahrah venture into a forbidden jungle to find the antidote to a poison which has claimed her best friend Dari. On Zahrah’s travels there are encounters with giant scorpions, psychic baboons, and a city of gorillas, as well as the small-mindedness of Zahrah’s native town to contend with.

There’s been a lot of praise for both the Afrocentric sci-fi setting Okorafor has imagined, and for Zahrah herself as a strong, yet vulnerable and credible, heroine. However, what I really loved about this novel was its focus on the importance, and future of, the book.

The charming, rebellious Dari whom Zahrah must save is a hero precisely because of his bookishness. Dari may not be up to the jungle quest which Zahrah undertakes, but his thirst for knowledge, driven by reading, helps to upset the stagnant and self-satisfied society which Zahrah challenges.

An erratically functioning ‘digi-book’, The Forbidden Greeny Jungle Field Guide, plays a vital part in Zahrah’s journey. Her relationship to this frustrating, inspiring piece of technology makes neat comment on the various brands of e-book reader, at once incredibly useful and unbelievably irritating. Every time she tries to access its pages for advice on a particularly fearsome beast, the otherwise indispensable guide can be counted on to malfunction.

The literary lineage of this chatty, occasionally useful device is hinted at by another reference, made in the novel by a talking frog which Zahrah encounters:

‘“Like every other human explorer I’ve met, you want to know the meaning of life […] The answer is forty-four. That machine was off by two,” the frog snapped.’

Which is up there with Doctor Who’s dressing gown as the neatest Hitchhiker’s reference you will see this decade!

Zahrah the Windseeker isn’t as jokey as The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, but somehow Okorafor has seen straight to the heart of the Hitchhiker’s series and the sense of wonder that permeates it.

She also makes a neat swipe at the current vogue for ‘adding value’ to books with interviews, extraneous material and reading-group prompts when Zahrah mentions her favourite novel:

‘I’d read it four times. But not once did I read the rambling thoughts of the author – on how to cook the perfect holiday fowl – that came stored in the digi-book along with the story. Of course, as I read the book, every ten pages a little window would pop up on the bottom, saying “Hey, why don’t you read a bit about my thoughts on glazed bush fowl? As you can see, I write brilliantly. I cook even better!’

You can find out more about Nnedi Okorafor at her website, The Wahala Zone, here.

Interview: Young People's Writing Squads

2010-08-09T07:36:00.000+01:00

Today Books and Adventures features the Young People’s Writing Squads, an exciting scheme run by Academi, the Welsh National Literature Promotion Agency and Society for Authors.

The squads give gifted young writers in both English and Welsh the opportunity to work with professional writers to develop their talents.

“The idea of the Young People’s Writing Squads is inspired by county sports squads, where talented young footballers or rugby players are pooled together to give them the opportunity for specialised training,” says Elena Schmitz, Academi’s Schemes and Data Manager.

“Similar to these sports squads, the Writing Squads are intended for children who show particular ability and promise for creative writing. This does not mean that they have to get good grades in school, be particularly good at English or be able to spell exceptionally well – but they do need to be able to demonstrate an above average ability for being able to write creatively – they need to be good at inventing characters, stories or using language in an unusual way, for instance.

“The Squads are not only for the gifted and talented performers in school, but for those with an unusual talent and passion for creative writing. “

The scheme has been running since 1996. Today, over 40 squads operate across Wales. Squads of around 15-20 schoolchildren meet four to six times a year for special training sessions. Squad members are encouraged to remain a member of a Writing Squad for the length of their school career.

Together, each squad gets the opportunity to experience and develop different styles, genres and techniques with a variety of writers.

“The children usually come together for a half day and work with one or two professional writers on a specific topic,” Elena explains. “This can include short story writing, science fiction, script writing or poetry. Some Squads tackle more unusual themes, such as writing for magazines, graphic novels or journalism. Often, the children are asked to prepare a piece of writing in advance which they can develop and improve during the session.”

Many squads have a ‘usual’ local venue where they meet. This is often a library, arts centre or council-owned venue. Occasionally, Squads meet in a school, although this is the exception. Academi is keen for Squad activities to take place outside schools and outside school hours, to ensure participation is voluntary and not seen as a school activity.

“In some cases, Squad sessions take place in unusual locations,” says Elena. “They can involve trips to a gallery, train journeys (poetry on a train), museum visits or even residential excursions to an island (the Cardiff Squad regularly visits Flat Holm Island in the autumn). The children are then usually asked to react to their environment and write about the art they have seen in a gallery, for instance.”

Examples of work from a trip to Cardiff National Museum by the Bridgend Writing Squad can be found here.

Academi was awarded a Beacon Company Award by the Arts Council of Wales in October 2008. This allowed Academi to develop the Writing Squad movement, establishing new Squads where no provision had previously existed, as well as creating a new website and running a number of conferences, workshops and special events all over Wales. Funding from the award came to an end in March of this year. Elena expresses disappointment that the additional funding will not be continued beyond 2010:

“A lot of the additional Squad activities which took place over the last 18 months will not be possible due to the lack of funding. We have pointed out to the Arts Council of Wales that timing for stopping the extra funding could not be worse: just when additional Squads have been established after a lot of hard work, money runs out to maintain them. And this at a time of the worst recession in decades, when local authorities - who share the costs for running Squad workshops with Academi - are faced with budget cuts on an unprecedented level.

“Nonetheless, Academi is committed to the Squads movement and we will try to do as much as we can to support them. We will continue to invite Squad members to special events, such as the National Eisteddfod or Hay Festival and provide funding for Squad workshops on an ongoing basis from our Writers on Tour funding scheme.”

The Writing Squad scheme remains ambitious for the future, despite these challenges. Plans to establish new Writing Squads in languages other than Welsh and English proved more difficult than first anticipated, so Academi has focussed on increasing provision, events and opportunities for these communities.

“We hope that by providing more events in languages other than Welsh and English and by engaging more closely with the Urdu and Somali communities in particular, we will be able to create more interest in creative writing amongst parents and will in future be able to establish new Writing Squads in Somali and Urdu, for instance,” says Elena.

One example of this community engagement is the joint Urdu-Welsh poetry reading organized by Academi and Swansea University at this year’s National Eisteddfod in Ebbw Vale.

Academi continues to welcome new Squads, particularly in areas where no Squads have yet been established, such as Anglesey or Rhondda Cynon Taf, as well as those areas where only limited provision exists.

“If teachers are interested, we’d recommend they contact the existing Squad Organiser in their area to start with, to see how their school can get involved,” says Elena. Details for the Squad Organisers in each area can be found at www.writingsquads.org/new-squads/, and if no Squad currently exists in your area, local teachers and librarians can contact Academi at http://www.writingsquads.org/contact/ to see how a new Squad can be established.

Our thanks to Elena Schmitz at Academi for speaking to Books and Adventures about this exciting scheme. You can check out the Squads’ site at http://www.writingsquads.org/

Next on Books and Adventures: carnivals, South America....and another visit Down Under!

Into the Hoods...

2010-08-06T07:43:00.000+01:00

It's been a busy week for me at work and play, with not much time for the blog.

Coming very soon, you can expect South American carnivals, charity news and hopefully a couple of interviews, but for now you'll have to make do with my review of ZooNation's hip-hop/fairytale dance show Into the Hoods, over on Claire Massey's excellent blog, The Fairy Tale Cupboard:

http://thefairytalecupboard.blogspot.com/2010/08/guest-post-matthew-finch-on-zoonations.html

Hasta luego,

Matt

VRH Interview with Julie Nixon

2010-07-27T08:45:00.000+01:00

Our third and final VRH blog arrives!

The tough economic climate, and forthcoming budget cuts, affect companies, charities and public sector bodies alike. UK readers may have seen Karl Wilding from the National Council for Voluntary Organisations on the television recently, talking about the NCVO’s concerns over the impact of cuts in public sector funding of charities.

Charities like Volunteer Reading Help provide an effective means of supporting children who are struggling with their literacy skills. Just a small gift of three hours a week during school term-times can make such a huge impact on the life of an individual child – and VRH is going from strength to strength in 2010.

‘We’re so proud of increasing the number of children we help by 18% this year,’ Julie Nixon, Director of Services at VRH told Books and Adventures. ‘I foresee many opportunities to provide schools with vital 1-to-1 sessions for their children. We are a cheap alternative to many reading schemes which cost far more, and our intervention is also about the whole child.’

My visit to the Birmingham offices of PricewaterhouseCoopers earlier this month opened my eyes to the generosity of firms who work with voluntary sector organisations like VSO. In addition to donating funding and the time of their staff, Julie tells me that PwC also provides rooms to host VRH functions free of charge, giving the charity a vital inner-city base of operations.

Whizz-Kidz founder Mike Dickson has spoken of the benefits of supporting a charity on this site before. Looking to the future, Julie tells Books and Adventures, ‘It would be great if companies would sponsor a local school’s VRH activities, our website, or some of our marketing materials. The support of firms like PwC is a tremendous help.’

To find out more about VRH and how you can get involved, see their website, here.

In additional news, I'm pleased to announce that on October 24th I'll be running the Birmingham Half Marathon to raise sponsorship for the VRH activities at Herne Bay Infant School in Kent, my former base as a VRH Helper. More news nearer the date!

Space Hop! Interview with Mark Brake

2010-07-23T09:00:00.001+01:00

The 2010 Summer Reading Challenge has a science fictional theme as UK libraries blast off on a Space Hop.

Over 700,000 readers are taking part in the mission to read six books from their local library across the summer holidays.

On tour as part of Space Hop are Mark Brake and science rapper Jon Chase, who are ranging far and wide across the UK to promote the Summer Reading Challenge, celebrating science fact as well as science fiction.

Mark and Jon contributed to the BBC's Space Hoppers series, which you can currently catch on CBBC, Sundays at 5.15pm, and there's also a Space Hoppers book.

Mark caught up with Books and Adventures for a brief interview earlier this week.

-You’re on tour with Jon Chase this summer to promote the Summer Reading Challenge. What can people expect from your visits?

A rather quirky fusion of science and music, I guess. The CBBC series upon which my book is based gets young viewers and readers to imagine what it might actually be like to go into space. The human experience of space, if you like. It's an approach that has inspired science fiction for centuries. Science finds out stuff about the universe, and fiction tells tales of the very taste, feeling and meaning of scientific discovery.

-What is Rap Science and how did it begin?
The fictional approach mentioned above is fused with a musical approach. After each tale of adventure we relate to the young readers, Jon retells the details in musical form using rap. It's his own unique fusion of rap to communicate science, which he does very well!

-What books would you choose for your Summer Reading Challenge?
Having read plenty of books to my 5 year-old daughter, I would choose 'Earth Story' by Eric Madden, and 'Moon Man' by David Donohue.

-A lot of science fiction is pretty wild and amazing. How accurate does the science have to be for a sci-fi story to be good?
Not at all. After all, it's fiction, not fact, and the very point is to take our imaginations where science may fear to tread!

To find out more and sign up for a Space Hop today, visit the Challenge site at http://www.spacehop.org.uk/.

The power of the land: Patricia Wrightson and John Gordon

2010-07-19T13:13:00.000+01:00

After last month’s post on sci-fi bug zappers, I felt that it was time to get back to nature here at Books and Adventures.

A few weeks ago, I found out via Judith Ridge, Young People’s Literature Officer for Western Sydney, that Patricia Wrightson had died. I was pretty ignorant about this acclaimed Australian children's writer, so I ordered up The Song of Wirrun, three linked quest stories describing the efforts of a young man to protect his land from troubled spirits.

The trilogy is incredibly powerful – I really hadn’t experienced anything like it since I heard The Iron Man and Beowulf told on the BBC when I was a child. The background, a blend of Aboriginal beliefs, is powerfully evoked as humans and spirits alike are threatened by the misadventures of magical beings. When the delicate balance of nature is upset, one young man, Wirrun, finds himself called to save his land and restore some kind of order.

Our heroes’ quest across Australia is thrilling, but undercut with a deep melancholy. Wirrun and his allies face much sadness and loss on their travels. The second story, The Bright Dark Water, finds Wirrun united with a girlfriend and ready for a ‘happily ever after’, but the ambivalent conclusion, Journey Behind the Wind, complicates matters and challenges us as readers to think about love, forgiveness and the nature of victory.

By chance, the next book I picked up after The Song of Wirrun was John Gordon’s The Giant Under the Snow. This British children’s fantasy from 1968 also takes its sense of landscape and native magic very seriously.

Jonk, a girl on a school trip, is separated from her group and stumbles across what appears to be a giant hand buried in the woods. Taking a treasure that she finds there, Jonk finds herself drawn into the final stage of a centuries-old battle between an invading warlord and the mysterious local spirit Elizabeth Goodenough.

There’s so much to recommend about this book – the unsentimental portrait of the teachers who lose Jonk on the school trip, the terrifying monsters unleashed by the warlord, and the sense of deadly high stakes for the children caught up in a plot to revive the ancient Green Man. For me, the exciting thing shared by both The Giant Under the Snow and the Wirrun books, is the sense of respect for the power of the land.

Both John Gordon and Patricia Wrightson’s spirits show a great sense of territory, and the landscapes they evoke are as powerful as they are distinct from one another. Wrightson’s spirits literally turn the world upside-down, travel through the Australian rock, or call a new Ice Age into being – but they do so with a healthy respect for the laws of territory and trespass. Gordon’s benevolent Mrs Goodenough is barricaded in her forest retreat by the evil “leather men”, while the warlord’s power gradually seals off Norwich along the lines of its old city walls. It’s also interesting to note that the heroes in both stories are given the power of flight by benign spirits, allowing them to survey their native land from a new perspective, and cross the supernatural borders.

Great children’s books are coming out all the time, but it’s also good to treasure books from the past, and it would be a real shame for either of these works to be forgotten. They've aged well and as fantasy stories they have a special quality: serious without being solemn. I love the high adventure of books like Skulduggery Pleasant or Artemis Fowl – when Skulduggery blows the front door off Stephanie’s house in the first book I stood up and cheered! – but there’s also something cool about stories where you really feel something is at stake.

There’s so much more to say – particularly about Patricia Wrightson’s work – but it will wait until a future blog post. Tonight I have gardening to do: the closest I get to the power of the land these days is pulling out fence-posts with a pickaxe…

Coming next on Books and Adventures – more science fiction, more interviews…and the true story of how I became a real-life dragon!

VRH House of Commons and Birmingham events

2010-07-09T11:47:00.000+01:00

I’ve had two wonderful opportunities to promote my favourite charity, Volunteer Reading Help, this month.

On Thursday 1 July, I was a guest at the VRH Reception at the House of Commons. I was speaking on ‘Giving the Gift of Reading’.

It was an honour to be able to speak in support of such an amazing organisation as VRH. And the honour was doubled when I was invited to speak on the following Monday at the Birmingham offices of PricewaterhouseCoopers, where VRH Birmingham held its end-of-year event.

Meeting so many VRH Helpers on both days reminded me of the vital work these volunteers do on a weekly basis, across the country and throughout the school year.

I’ve been very lucky to teach and work in a lot of age ranges, and in a lot of different environments. I’ve taught Frankenstein to English undergraduates, Aimhigher weekend courses on film and fairytale, business workshops for Y10s, even Shakespeare in junior schools, but my time with Volunteer Reading Help remains unique.

VRH is an organisation which gives children an exciting and vital one-to-one learning environment which it can be hard for schools to provide. An organisation which gives its volunteers such great opportunities to learn and develop in their own right.

With up to thirty children in a primary class, there can be precious little time for schoolteachers to give the kind of nurturing one-to-one support that VRH does so well.

Schemes like Assessing Pupil Progress can leave you focused on ticking boxes and designing activities for children purely to showcase their skill-levels.

We have to keep track of how children are progressing, but we also have to find time for the fun and adventure that makes children confident and literate for life. That's exactly what VRH offers through its child-centred, one-to-one support.

The funny thing is, if you give a child the opportunity to discover the world of words, and fall in love with books and adventures, the skill-levels will go up of their own accord!

My time as a VRH helper was incredibly rewarding.

It was my sheer good luck that I got to work with an organisation that did so much for me, giving confidence, opening doors and creating opportunities.

It was a privilege to be doing the kind of work that teachers don’t always have the time to do in class.

And above all, it was a privilege to help a child make that journey from hating books to wanting to write their own, just by providing the most gentle support.

I went into volunteering hoping to support and inspire someone in some little way, and my time with VRH repaid me thousand times over.

Find out more about how you can support VRH, or get involved, here.

Coming very soon to Books and Adventures: our final VRH interview, with Director of Operations Julie Nixon...

Mike Dickson Interview

2010-06-30T17:28:00.000+01:00

On the eve of the Volunteer Reading Help reception at the House of Commons, we have one more interview for you at Books and Adventures.

Charities like VRH depend on the generosity of businesses and individuals giving their time to a good cause. Just a few hours each week can help a child who is struggling with reading to develop confidence and a love of books and stories – but when money is tight and our lives are so busy, it’s sometimes hard to imagine giving up our time for others.

Mike Dickson is the man with an answer to this dilemma. A founder of the children’s charity Whizz-Kidz, he is an incredible, energetic advocate of generosity and philanthropy in the UK and beyond. His first book, The More You Give, played an important part in shaping my corporate outreach work; this summer sees the release of Please Take One, “a call to lead a more generous life, to maximize our life not our income.”

Mike kindly took time out of a busy schedule to answer a few questions on the benefits of volunteering at the individual and corporate levels.

Why should individuals and organisations be thinking about giving at a time when we are all tightening our belts?
Well these are two separate questions.

Organisations, quite simply because employees, customers, and shareholders now expect a business to have a life outside of just making a profit, to be actively engaged in their communities and aware of their environmental footprint. Buying clothes made in India by children who should be at school, or mowing down rainforest to produce palm oil is no longer acceptable. Especially among young consumers.

Individuals should give their time – by being generous to their families, their friends, their communities and to their planet – for it is ours/ theirs.

The forthcoming cuts are going to have a staggering impact on our communities – so it is up to us to become engaged and involved where we live – by helping, caring, teaching – as John Kennedy said ‘Ask not what your country can do, ask what you can do for your country’

Two pleasant side effects of a more generous approach to life are that companies will become more intelligent and better places to work; and individuals will become happier through contributing to others – there is lots of research to prove this.

What are the benefits of volunteering one’s time as a way of giving?
It gives you a sense of purpose; introduces you to other lives and worlds; stops you whinging on about what an awful day / week / time you have had – it is very difficult to remain fixated on your own problems when helping others are less fortunate. And it actively helps to improve the community you live in and the charity you are volunteering for.

What advice could you give people looking to volunteer their time with a charity or other organisation?
Go local, or if you are helping an overseas cause look for an association – e.g. if you love India help an NGO there.

Think about what you are really interested in, even what makes you angry. Then focus on finding charities or NGOs that work in those areas. Research them online, ask friends about them. Ring the charities up and ask them what sort of help they need, go and meet them – this is well worth it – see if you like the work, get on with or are inspired by the people working in the charity and so on.

Don’t get waylaid by City folk banging on about leverage, and Return On Investment – most of it is hubris and harmful. I have heard of NGO’s asking about gender equality policies in Africa – in the good old days they would have been captured and boiled alive in pots!

Your new project is all about generosity. Can you tell us more?
The book is called Please Take One - one step into a more generous life. We have all been living in a daft way for the last 20 or 30 years in the ruthless drive to accumulate material goods, and been encouraged to become individuals, independent etc. And we are now in a mess.

Please Take One is a call to lead a more generous life, to maximize our life not our income. There are chapters on happiness, enough, poverty in the UK (truly shocking), global poverty (how to help the bottom billion), and about the threat to our environment which.

There are some great stories, quotes and facts and list of ‘steps’ – suggested actions to lead a more generous life.

Please Take One is being soft launched at Ted Global in Oxford in July when we will also be starting a global movement to encourage generosity. For people to record generous acts they have done or witnessed and ones have happened to them. All of course ‘on line’ through the web, Facebook, Twitter etc – I have even had to learn to tweet! I am hugely looking forward to reading about people’s actions.

As the Talmud says ‘to save one life is as if you have saved the world’.

You can find out more about Mike’s writings, his charitable activities and his work advising companies about their charitable giving at http://www.themoreyougive.co.uk/

The final interview in the ‘VRH Trilogy’ will be with Julie Nixon, Director of Services at Volunteer Reading Help.

After that, Books and Adventures will be heading down under to investigate Pacific mythology, Australian children’s fiction, and the magic of landscape...

Volunteer Reading Help: Anne Loftus Interview

2010-06-21T13:11:00.000+01:00

On Thursday 1st July I will be speaking at the House of Commons reception of Volunteer Reading Help, the UK charity which supports children’s literacy development through one-to-one mentoring.

You can find out more about my experiences with the charity here, but today we’re joined by Anne Loftus, who wears two hats as a Volunteer Services Manager and as a Reading Helper in her own right. Anne is based in Kent and was responsible for training me as a Helper way back in the day!

How did you first get involved with VRH?
My involvement with VRH started in November 1993 when I was lucky enough to be taken on as a Volunteer Services Manager in Kent. My role involved recruiting and training volunteers who would then give individual help to children who were struggling with reading and in need of some 1:1 support. It is the best job in the world as you meet such wonderful, caring people who want to give something back to their local community and help children with their reading and confidence.

How long have you been working as a Reading Helper?
I have worked as a VSM for almost 17 years and became a Volunteer Reading Helper myself 4 years ago. I worked with a Looked After Child, Ryan, after school for just over a year and when he moved on to secondary school I worked with his younger brother, Tristan.

What were your first experiences of the programme like?
Although I had been training volunteers for many years it was very different becoming a volunteer myself. Ryan had a lot of problems and could be quite difficult at times. Without the knowledge of the VRH training I think I would have found him very difficult to cope with. Through playing games I was able to calm him down when necessary.

How have things changed at VRH in the intervening years?
The content of the training has not changed very much, although it has been updated regularly. Our volunteers have always been carefully selected; we still interview all volunteers, take up references and run an enhanced CRB check before training. Our main way of working – giving children choices, making the sessions fun and relaxed, putting no pressure on the child – this has not changed since VRH began in 1973.

What is your proudest achievement as a Helper?
My proudest achievement as a VRH Reading Helper is the day Tristan stood on the podium at the House of Commons last year and read his poem “I Like Lambourghinis”! I thought I would burst with pride!! I have worked with Tristan for 3 years now, following him to secondary school last autumn (his choice!) His confidence and reading ability has grown immensely.

How have you developed personally as a result of your involvement with VRH?
Working as a VRH Reading Helper is so rewarding and fulfilling. To see a child’s face light up when they see you and to share the very special time with a child – sometimes just chatting or reading the child a story. My own confidence has grown and meeting such wonderful people is a tonic.

Why should people volunteer their time with VRH?
If a person likes the company of children and enjoys reading, it is the most perfect form of volunteering. Plenty of patience and a sense of humour are quite important too. Just 3 hours per week and you can help to change a child’s life forever. The work is rewarding and great fun too. I truly believe that our volunteers get as much from the sessions as the children.

There will be more on Volunteer Reading Help at this blog in the run-up to the Commons event.
If you’d like to get involved with VRH, or just find out more about their incredible work, go to http://vrh.org.uk/Page.aspx

Star Wars, but with bees

2010-06-16T08:12:00.000+01:00

Late last year I entered the New Scientist science fiction competition. My story told of Chilean beekeepers sabotaging New Zealand's honey crop while being chased by wildlife protection robots.

I have to admit that one of the winning stories, about genetically modified burgers, did the whole sci-fi-food-nightmare thing a LOT better.

But I feel quite pleased to discover that just like in my story, where the robots used lidar (like radar, but with lasers) to hunt down Chilean bees by scanning for wingbeats, the latest bug-zapping technology uses lasers to scan for, and identify, insects. See here!

Almost like I was writing proper science fiction!

All of this is on my mind because a swarm of bees is shifting from tree to tree in the back garden, neither settling nor moving on. Sometimes I hear the buzzy vuvuzela horns being blown at the World Cup matches on TV and think that the swarm has invaded the kitchen.

But have you prepared for an attack...by killer BEES?

There will be more science fiction coming to this blog soon when Books and Adventures is joined in July by Professor Mark Brake and Jon Chase the Science Rapper, who are touring the country to promote this year's Summer Reading Challenge.

Until then, you can find out more about the challenge here.

Steve Killick Interview

2010-06-04T07:39:00.004+01:00

This week we’re lucky enough to have an interview with Steve Killick. Steve is a storyteller and clinical psychologist whose book Telling Tales, written with Taffy Thomas, is a great practical guide for people interested in education, storytelling and emotional literacy.

You can find out more about Steve and his wide-ranging work here.

What does storytelling do that stories in books can't?

I think what is happening when a story is told and heard is very different than when it is read. When told the teller is able to engage the listeners by their creation of the story, they can bring many aspects of non-verbal communication in, such as tone-of-voice, gesture, facial expression these all provide stimuli for the imagination. Most importantly the storyteller can modulate the delivery depending on how the listeners are reacting. Reading stories are good for us but by telling a story we bring it into the social domain and increase the usefulness of the experience.

One reason for this is that we think in story terms anyway and often socially we are telling each other stories, the everyday kind, what’s happening to us, our successes and achievements. By listening to stories we understand a lot about people, our imagination is stimulated and we can think more flexibly and creatively and we also learn how to tell stories by listening, and that is an important social skill. Reading fiction can help to develop social and cognitive skills in children such as language and empathy. Hearing stories can help children not only become more interested in reading but also it directly develops important interpersonal skills particularly speaking and listening.

How does storytelling benefit us, as children and as adults?

I think storytelling is one of the most beneficial activities human being can engage in but the evidence to support such a claim is limited. We know stories can certainly develop language and other cognitive skills. Stories also just inform us about the world around us, our history (or hi ’story’), they tell us what is socially valued, what’s good, bad, moral and so on. Basically they tell us about life. They are powerful things and can be abused as well. As a psychologist, I am most interested in how stories develop social and emotional skills, to understand feeling, to get in touch with them and learn how to deal with them, they help with motivation and in getting on with others.

For children stories really help us develop the key skills of what we call emotional literacy. For adults they too are very important. Many people are drawn to stories in drama on TV or film or in reading fiction. Keith Oatley, a leading psychologist in the study of emotions, feels that is because they help us attune with emotions. Being involved in a story is like a work-out at the gym for our emotional mind. However, many adults have not had the experience of listening to a good story well told and dismiss it as something for children. They are missing a wonderful experience.

Do you need special training to become a storyteller?

As an art form storytelling is one that is relatively easy to learn. It is a natural capacity and can be developed through practise. It’s not about learning how to do voices or anything like that, more about finding a style that works for you. Much can be learned through listening and watching people tell stories especially skilled and professional tellers. If someone is really interested in storytelling and especially performance storytelling then doing some training is certainly recommended and many storytellers offer training. I think most people can learn the basics of storytelling easily and find ways to use them at home or work. To become a professional storyteller needs a lot of study and isn’t for everyone.

What does "happily ever after" really mean?
Great question. Its major function is to say simply that’s the end of the story – all the issues are now resolved and it is over. Like ‘Once upon a time’ which starts a story, the phrase marks out the boundaries of the story world. It is, of course, symbolic rather than literal. Jon Kabot-Zinn felt its really meaning was almost the opposite to ‘ever after’- rather it refers to happiness in the here and now, the present – and of course the present moment is the eternal moment. I liked that! I also think there is another symbolic meaning in fairy tales for often these stories are about growing up. When the hero or heroine marries and receives untold riches it is really saying they have had an experience which has taken them to maturity and they are now able to live as mature adults. This is why many fairy stories send optimistic messages, even the least favoured smallest child can grow up to succeed.

Do you have an all-time favourite story to hear, or tell?
I don’t know about an all-time favourite but certainly a story that has obsessed me for the last few years is the ancient Indian story of King Vikram and a corpse he is fated to carry. However, his burden is inhabited by a spirit who instructs him in wisdom in living through a series of tantalising riddling stories. I have been tracking down different version of this story for year. I also tell it and am trying to rewrite my own version and I’m always finding new things in it.

Spies and Maltesers

2010-06-03T09:52:00.000+01:00

I was mistaken for a spy this week.

I was waiting for a friend in Blackheath, reading a newspaper and trying to keep out of the rain by standing under a tree.

When we finally met up and went for dinner at a restaurant overlooking the heath, our waiter accused me of being a secret agent. Luckily I was able to talk my way out of it and my cover wasn’t blown!

Over on Stories from the Web, mechanimate has written about another spy, Alex Rider – or rather his creator, Anthony Horowitz.

I’ve never read one of the Alex Rider stories, but I’ve been a big fan of another Horowitz book, The Falcon’s Malteser, ever since I read it aged 10. It's part of his series about the Diamond Brothers, hapless private detectives in London.

South Americans, cemeteries, gangsters and chocolate, all with a light honeycomb centre: that's my kind of story!

Check out mechanimate’s post on Anthony Horowitz here.

Shark on the Radio

2010-05-24T08:45:00.000+01:00

'Shark with the Mind of a Rabbit', my story for 5-7 year olds which picked up an ABCTales.com prize earlier in the year, is on the radio this coming Saturday.

You can catch it on Abracadabra Radio at 10am, or read the story at ABCTales.com, here.

Playbox Review

2010-05-18T08:53:00.001+01:00

Photo by James Blay

Last week I wrote a review of 'The Bloody Chamber', a stage adaptation of Angela Carter's book, devised and performed by the youth theatre company Playbox.

You can find my review at Claire Massey's blog, The Fairytale Cupboard, here.