For Parents

Wishes for my son

By on October 10, 2012   /   For Parents  

My 18-year old son left for college this fall. He’s attending the University of Iowa, the only college he wanted to go to, the only college he applied to, and luckily, the college he was accepted to. Unlike many high school seniors, the choice was an easy one for Sam — his dad, grandfather, and two uncles were Hawkeyes. Sam’s easy-going, middle child thought process was this: why mess with tradition? It worked for them, it’ll work for me.

Among my many worries about Sam’s departure are the facts that he’s never done a load of laundry, has a knack for losing things, and has no idea what he wants to do in life. But among my comforts — he has an inner yearning to learn about subjects that interest him. And there have been many over the years: coins, constellations, basketball, the Beatles — to name a few.

Before he left, he asked me to help him go through the stuff in his room. His bookshelf was crammed with many favorites he had hung onto since his days in elementary and middle school. Seeing the books, I wasn’t just reminded of what he had loved to read for the past eighteen years, but the way the stories had shaped the young man standing before me.

And as we pulled down the books, I realized I had wishes for my son as he left the protection, familiarity, and security of the home he had known his whole life.

I wish that he will stay close with his sisters and hold on to his curiosity and thirst for knowledge, like Jack and Annie in the Magic Tree House series, those beloved books that Sam devoured throughout second grade. Sam and his sisters used to act out the stories, going on adventures that took them from their bedrooms all the way downstairs to the family room, through the kitchen and back upstairs. (They did not have Smartphones, tablets, or any type of texting device at this time.) Stuck among the piles of books was the pad of paper where they started writing their own version — Monkeys on Monday. They were determined to finish it and send it off to Mary Pope Osborne. (They didn’t, although I’m sure Ms. Osborne would have loved it.)

I wish that Sam will cling to his imagination for a while longer, before the weight and seriousness of adulthood forces it away. Like Joe Stoshack in Dan Gutman’s baseball adventure books, there was a point when Sam believed a boy could time travel just by holding a baseball card in his hand.

I wish that he will be brave and determined, like Harry Potter, as he faces the many obstacles that will be sure to block his path. He won’t have a wand, just his intelligence and heart. I wish that he always finds humor in life’s trying situations, like Louis Sachar’s Marvin Redpost, and holds tight to his passions, always continuing to seek out what makes him happy, like the main character in one of our favorite picture books of all time, Shy Charles, by Rosemary Wells.

And I wish that he will fight for what he believes in, and fight for those who cannot, like Annemarie in Number the Stars by Lois Lowry, and many other heroes in these books he read, who triumphed over enemies real and imagined.

There were many more wishes on my mind, but the bookshelf was empty.

Now there was room for college textbooks, the framed graduation photo, the Bob Dylan guitar chord book. I asked Sam if he was sad to pass these childhood books along to our local library. He said no, not at all, because the stories were “in my brain.”

In his brain. Wow.

Maybe, just maybe, those wishes have a chance of coming true.

Michele Weber Hurwitz still has her worn copy of Eight Cousins by Louisa May Alcott, which she read over and over as a child. She is the author of Calli Be Gold (Wendy Lamb Books/Random House 2011). Visit her at www.micheleweberhurwitz.com.

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Community-Building at KidLitCon 2012

By on October 4, 2012   /   For Librarians, For Parents, For Teachers, Giveaways, News  

KidLitosphere Conference

We interrupt our regularly scheduled programming to tell you about a beautiful fall day last week when kidlit bloggers came from all around the country to talk about their favorite subject: children’s and teen books. Along with librarians, authors, school teachers, agents, and publishers, three Mixed-Up Files members were there, too. Us, three that is.

Michelle Schusterman, Sayantani DasGupta, and Sheela Chari talk about community-building and the Mixed-Up Files at KidLitCon 2012

At this year’s KidLitCon held at the New York Public Library, Michelle, Sayantani, and I shared our experiences in community-building on the blog and off the blog, using our collective Mixed-Up Files experiences. Not only that, there was KidLit Jeopardy, live tweeting, and prizes we handed out to our Jeopardy winners and 3 tweeters in the audience chosen at random!

Books by Mixed_Up Files authors that we gave away at our presentation. All right!

We split our presentation into three parts – building, sustaining, and expanding your blogging community. Michelle started us off, using her previous experience as a founder of the group blog, YA Highway, to talk about how to build a blog, find friends instead of just followers, seek IRL or in-real-life interactions, and learn how to balance it all by finding the right methods of communication for yourself and taking time to unplug and recharge.

Over twitter, audience members in the room responded to our question:

What’s the best place for a meet-up? #mglitchat

 ‏@ohmiagarcia: cafe! Coffee is always a must.

 ‏@celialarsen: virtually: twitter; in person: a place that serves alcohol!

‏@SleepingAnna: depends on your group: living room to coffee shop to Skype!

‏@RobertFWalsh: Bill Gate’s basement. Failing that, his garage. (Note: I’m no longer welcome there.)

Next, I talked about sustaining a community – finding ways to keep your readers coming back. I focused on giveaways, something we’ve done frequently at the Mixed-Up Files, and shared two major ones: The Great Library Giveaway and Skype Author Visits. I talked about how giveaways, while fun, don’t always generate enough traffic on their own. But with some planning and innovation, and by looking at the big-picture, you can still have successful giveaways that benefit more than just the winner but the community, too. It was especially to nice to share the successes of the 2010 Library Giveaway, where we gave away 70 brand-new library books to a library in need.

Psst… we have a new goal this year of 100 – so if you are interested in donating a book or nominating a deserving library, details are at those afore highlighted links.

I also shared some of the joys and challenges of Skype visits – and even tried to enact a real-live Skype conversation with Elissa Cruz in front of everyone – but the technological gods were not on my side and the call didn’t go through. But never fear! We continued on gallantly!

During this part of the presentation we asked over twitter:

how do you get readers excited about a giveaway?#mglitchat

‏@celialarsen: post link to contest in various places, offer swag/book of choice.

@SleepingAnna: Get the readers excited about giveaway! Thru info and fun contest!

@LeeandLow: Re giveaways: “Don’t have to give things away. Good content has more reach than giveaways.”

‏@RobertFWalsh: Giveaways should involve George Clooney. Or tickets to a Notre Dame football game. (Hint: my wife suggested 1 of these)

Sayantani ended the last part of presentation with a look at diversity in blogging. She suggested that expanding a blog’s readership with an eye to diversity means paying attention to who writes for the blog, and what they write for the blog – including a diverse blend of interviews, booklists, and general posts focusing on issues such as gender or multiculturalism. This also means diversifying who is on your blogging team. She gave the example of the Mixed-Up Files application process, our methods for scheduling posts through a message forum and calendar, and stressed the need for a robust membership committee that doesn’t always agree on everything.

She also talked about diverse content and shared several booklists from our blog that cover a broad range of interests, from books for boys, books for girls, books about disability, strong girl characters, and books by debut authors.

During Sayantani’s section, we asked tweeters:

What does diversity in blogging mean to you?#mglitchat

@SleepingAnna: Variety of ages, professions, opinions, interests. Ex: food story time entry read by a cook!

Yin (Perrine Wynkel), via paper and pencil: Diversity engenders a collision of different perspectives and ideas, which increases the possibility of something new and exciting and fascinating being created – new avenues of thought.

All in all, we had a fantastic time at KidLitCon, meeting so many wonderful bloggers and children’s lit enthusiasts. We feel especially lucky to have the chance to share some of our blog’s successes and challenges. Thanks so much to everyone who came out to hear our presentation! And thank you to all the wonderful Mixed Up Files authors who donated their books for our giveaway! And for those of you who weren’t able to attend, here’s three of the Jeopardy questions we asked attendees — test your knowledge of all things Mixed Up Files and leave your thoughts below in the comments section! (answers in form of a question, please):

Jeopardy “Answer” 1: The name of the statue at the center of the mystery in “From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler.”

Jeopardy “Answer” 2: The names of the two children in “From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler.”

Jeopardy “Answer” 3: The day and time #MGLITCHAT convenes to talk about all things middle grade

And now back to our regularly scheduled programming.

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Sheela Chari is the author of VANISHED (Disney Hyperion). You can watch her this morning on the TODAY Show with Al Roker.

Sayantani DasGupta is the co-author of The Demon Slayers and Other Stories: Bengali Folktales (Interlink, 1995), the author of a memoir on race and gender in medical education, and co-editor of an award winning collection of women’s illness narratives.  She likes to tweet, blog, and otherwise blather.

Michelle Schusterman  is the author of the I HEART BAND series (Penguin, 2014). She’s currently living in Queens, and she blogs, tweets, and Tumblrs.

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How Do You Make Time to Read?

By on September 5, 2012   /   For Librarians, For Parents, For Teachers  

 

I have a confession to make: I’m a bad reader. Let’s be honest: I’m a lousy reader.

I’m the kind of reader that lets all kinds of interruptions stop me from finishing a book. There is my schedule, my kids’ schedule – my writing projects that always seem to take precedence over an evening curled up in bed with a great book. And there is my writer brain that doesn’t seem to turn off when I’m reading supposedly for pleasure. There is the unwillingness to suspend my disbelief like I did when I was young, a general impatience for the story to get where it should be, then exasperation when it does and I think I’ve seen it all before. Is this adulthood? Lack of sleep? Lack of time? Is this maturing writer syndrome? Whatever it is, I feel like I should be reading, and enjoying reading a lot more.

This summer I read six books. For me, six is a pretty good number. I read two on the plane, to and from ALA. The other four I read at my parents’ when I had no place to drive my kids, no major cooking or housework to complete – nothing to do really but kick up my legs for a few weeks.

But let’s compare this to the number of books my fourth-grader read. That would be 26.

6 and 26. Luckily, I’m not trying to be her. Otherwise, I would feel like a pile of doo-doo.

But I did study her reading habits over the summer, to find out how she read so much. She didn’t have a completely free summer. She had a morning camp that ran for 6 weeks, But her afternoons were open until the end of July, and then for the whole of August, nothing at all. She read the Percy Jackson series, the Sisters Grimm series, several standalones, and even a few ARCS that I brought back from ALA, or that she received through a fantastic children’s reading program at a bookstore in Boston. Some came from the bookstore, but most came home from the library. She was not a picky reader, but she read what interested her, and during the summer, she completed every book she started.

Then I looked at my own reading patterns, during the summer, and during the school year (because even if I’m not a student, my day-to-day life is determined by the academic and extra-curricular schedule of my kids).

This is what I came to realize about reading:

1. It’s important to have uninterrupted time. For my daughter, this time was vast – enough that she could keep reading until she finished a book, which was generally in about 2 days. It was harder for me to find this same kind of uninterrupted time. If I did, it was generally when my kids were asleep or out playing with friends, cousins, etc. The best time honestly, was at night, when everyone was asleep. For this I actually preferred my iPad, because I could read in the dark (which okay, might be horrible for my eyes), but which gave me the closest sensation that I was completely alone with my reading.

2. Even when you’re busy, you can still make time for reading. You need to carve out a time to read, and keep that time only for that. It might be at night before you go to sleep. It might be on your morning commute. Or maybe it is at your kid’s soccer game. Where ever it is, it should be consistent and guarded against other obligations.

3. Reading is a mental exercise. Just like your body can go out of shape, your reading muscles can atrophy over time, too. The best way to build up those reading muscles is to keep reading. It gets easier to read when you develop the habit of reading.

4. Sometimes liking a book means having to get to the end. While I don’t advocate finishing everything I read, I do also find that certain books require a greater amount of time to build trust. In a way, when you decide to read a book, you are trusting the author to take you somewhere you want to be. One of the books I read this summer became extremely satisfying by the time I got to the end – but it was an end I couldn’t have seen coming (or enjoyed) when I reached the halfway mark.

5. Reading a little more means writing a little less. I don’t know how to get around this fact, at least as it stands in my life. Because as a writer and mom and family member, there are only so many hours in a day to get things accomplished. Sometimes a fabulous book means giving up an evening dedicated to writing. Sometimes it means putting that fabulous book on hold while you finish your draft. It’s a delicate balance. For me, it does help to be between writing projects. So for the time being, reading is a great way to transition from one project to another, to refill the well, and allow myself to enter someone else’s imagined world for a change.

Now that school has started for my kids and me, I’m sure our reading habits will change. But at least I’ve got 6 books tucked inside my brain, and I feel so much better because of it.

So how about you? Where do you read? When do you read? How do you fit reading into your life?

 

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Sheela Chari is the author of VANISHED (Disney Hyperion), the latest Al Roker Book Pick. You can watch her live on the Today Show in October, or visit her online at www.sheelachari.com. 

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