A Q&A with David Biedrzycki, Author of Groundhog's Runaway Shadow 1

We spoke with David Biedryzcki, the author of Groundhog's Runaway Shadow, about his inspiration and process behind writing and illustrating the book, just in time for Groundhog Day! 

The idea of a runaway shadow is something that’s often played with in fiction. What drew you to this idea?

Initially, the idea for the story wasn’t at all about a groundhog. It was about a very boring person. His shadow one day decided it wanted more out of life than to just work in the quality control department of a Grass Seed Company watching grass grow.

As with most of my ideas, I started showing it in little bits during my presentations at school visits. The idea wasn’t resonating very well with students. I was thinking of shelving the idea for a while but one day after a presentation a student came up to me and suggested she’d like to see the main character as an animal. Bingo!

The story has a little more meat to it, too. It can also be read as a story about growing up, and staying friends even when you change. Why did you think this lesson was important for kids?

Good friends have much in common. But the friends I find the most interesting are the ones that are diverse and have different interests. Those are the friends I learn the most from.

Sometimes I might not totally agree with their points of view or beliefs, but deep down inside they are good people and good friends. They just have a different take on life than I do. I respect that and they respect me. I think sometimes that’s lacking in today's social media society, where a lot of people are spewing out their point of view and not taking time to listen or understand anyone else’s.

Groundhog’s Runaway Shadow works as an introduction to the tale of Groundhog Day. Did you originally think of this story with that in mind?

Well ,when that student suggested I have an animal as the main character, I immediately thought “groundhog,” with a different take on the story. Sometimes the groundhog sees his shadow and sometimes he doesn’t. So where is the shadow? Is his shadow still sleeping? Did his shadow run away? Why did it run away? Once I had that idea in place, the shadow became a character with it’s own wants and desires. I researched and found out that groundhogs by nature are very sedentary. They have a very limited palate: clover, tree bark and dandelions. Boring. But when the groundhog was little, he acted like a little kid, full of energy and fun. As he got older, though, he was expected to act a certain way. That’s when his shadow started having his own ideas.

Tell us a little about the process of writing and illustrating a book. Do the illustrations come first, or do the words? How do you work on both in harmony?

It has always been the drawing first. The drawings, for me, always plant the seed. I’ve always worked like that and probably will continue to create like that forever. I draw and then write the words. When I get stuck for words, I do more drawings. That’s my process.

Here are some drawings that inspired the beginning ideas for Groundhog’s Runaway Shadow.

<br>Happy First Birthday Dear Book!<br> Reading Picture Books with Children One Year Later<p><font size=2>by Megan Dowd Lambert</font></p> 0

Earlier in October I gave a talk at The Carle’s annual Educator’s Night applying the Whole Book Approach to some of the books illustrated by the keynote speaker, Christian Robinson. In preparation for this talk I’d visited local schools and read his books with students, so I got to share their responses to his work with him and the rest of the audience.

Here Christian is looking at a picture that I’d discussed with kids. The text has Nana say that the tree is “drinking through a straw” and the children read the picture and noticed that the reflection in the puddle makes it look like the tree is going down through the ground into the water, like a straw breaking the surface of the water in a glass. “That’s not what I intended, but I can’t stop seeing it now,” Christian said.

Isn’t that wonderful?

In my Bank Street talk I quoted a line from Reader Response theorist, Louise Rosenblatt, who wrote, “Books do not simply happen to people. People happen to books,” when she described reading as a “transaction” between the reader and a text. It follows that meaning resides, not in the text, but in the space between the reader and the text, and this line of thinking allows us to engage with a book and consider a multiplicity of possible meanings it might provoke depending on what the reader brings to the reading transaction.

Allowing readers to “happen to books” is at the heart of my Whole Book Approach work as I center children’s responses to text, art, and design—the whole book—during storytimes. And, hearing readers’ responses to my book over this past year has been just wonderful. It’s so gratifying to know that teachers, librarians, parents, and other caregivers are reading my book and getting new tools to add to their storytime toolkits as they renew their appreciation for picture books and shore up their passion for reading with children.

An exciting surprise is that I’ve heard from many artists, writers, an publishing professionals, too. These are people who are already engaged in the creation of picture books and are using my book to augment their knowledge and refine their craft. And, several writers and artists have told me that they’ve used my book to hone storytime skills since visiting schools and libraries to lead book programming has become a big part of their promotional work.

Although I’ve had some readers reach out to me through my website, one of the main ways I’ve heard from people has been through social media. I had never even had a personal Facebook page before this year, but right before Reading Picture Books with Children came out I joined Twitter, and then a few months later I bit the bullet and set up a public author’s Facebook page. I haven’t really taken off with Facebook, but Twitter has been a great way to interact with readers, learn from others in the field, and otherwise immerse myself in a community of people passionate about children’s literature. I am daily grateful for the connections I’ve made there and for the ways it allows me to grow as a writer, a teacher, and a reader.

November 2016 is Picture Book Month, and I will draw upon my book to tweet about picture book art and design. I'll feature new books each day that make the most of design and production elements including: trim size and orientation; jackets and cases; endpapers; front & back matter, typography; and page design elements such as framing, pageturners, and the gutter. Follow along and enjoy!

I have lots of other projects and events on the horizon related to this book, including a guest lecture in a Book Studies course at my alma mater, Smith College, a Skyped Whole Book Approach training with educators in Indiana, and a workshop at a public library in Massachusetts, among other plans. And, of course, I will keep reading picture books with children. I have other writing projects in the works, too—essays, picture book texts, and more Whole Book Approach storytime documentation.

Thanks to everyone who helped make this first year of my book’s publication a success—especially to my readers and to the many people at Charlesbridge, The Carle, and Simmons College who have supported me as I’ve stepped into the role of author. I am hoping my book will appear on lots of holiday shopping lists for teachers, librarians, writers, illustrators, parents and other caregivers (a portion of all royalties goes to support The Carle and you can purchase signed copies through The Carle’s Shop), and I am always eager to hear from readers about their Whole Book Approach experiences. 

Happy Whole Book Approach reading to all,

Megan

Walking a Bridge between Two Worlds: An Interview with Nancy Bo Flood 0

An excerpt from the CBC Diversity blog post on October 5, 2016:

Nancy Bo Flood, author of more than fifteen books, sat down with her editor, Yolanda Scott, to discuss Soldier Sister, Fly Home, out from Charlesbridge in August 2016.

YS: You often mention “walking a bridge between two worlds or cultures,” and you’ve said that’s what Tess does in the Soldier Sister, Fly Home. What do you mean?

NBF: Soldier Sister, Fly Home is about walking the bridge between two worlds, Navajo and Anglo, and also the bridge between three generations: one’s own, one’s parents’, and one’s grandparents’. The two sisters, Tess and Gaby, are bi-racial. They walk several bridges daily, between different cultures and different generations. Many of us do this, to different degrees and at different times in our lives.

. . .

YS: You and I were talking about your book, and you told me about a time that Tim Tingle, Choctaw, said that one can never really know another culture, but that shouldn’t stop anyone from sharing their perspective. Can you say more about what you think he meant and how you’ve incorporated this notion into writing your book?

NBF: “Let us meet on the bridge.” This idea was central in a talk given by Tim Tingle, Choctaw, several years ago at the Tucson Book Festival. Tim spoke about writing and sharing stories and emphasized that “One can never ‘know’ another culture, just as one can never completely understand the experiences of another generation. But that should not stop us from sharing our perspective.”

I also think that sharing one’s perspective is important and valid. That’s how we learn from each other and how we begin to care about others. I believe that although cultures differ, the human heart does not. As children or adults, students or parents, we share common struggles, yearnings, joys, and sorrows. Participating, listening, sharing heartaches as well as stories is how we come to know each other. So over the years as I taught at Diné (Navajo) College, I learned as I comforted fussy babies, helped grind corn for a girl’s coming-of-age ceremony, sat in rodeo stands as mothers watched their youngsters race around barrels or cling to the backs of bucking bulls. And then as mothers we talked. We shared from the heart. I sat with students after class as they worried about discrimination, being bullied, about frustrations with parents and grandparents. I listened. I did my best to share what I heard.

To read more of this discussion, please visit: http://www.cbcdiversity.com/post/151438543403/walking-a-bridge-between-two-worlds-an-interview

As a fish-brain surgeon or a rodeo poem wrangler, Nancy Bo Flood has always loved stories. She strongly believes that words—in poetry or prose—help heal our hearts and give us new eyes to see the world. Nancy was first a research psychologist studying brain development at the University of Minnesota and London University before following her passion: writing for children.

Yolanda Scott is associate publisher and editorial director at Charlesbridge, where she has edited nearly 200 books since beginning her career in 1995. She is a co-founder of Children’s Books Boston, sits on the board of directors of the Children’s Book Council, and is a former member of the CBC Diversity Committee.

Money as a Musical? Who Knew? 0

by Elaine Scott

I grew up in a family of bankers. Father, brother, aunt—seemed like everyone in my family worked in a bank. Debt, credit, accounts, collections—these topics were fodder for dinner table conversations. And like most adolescents who grew up in an era when the adults dominated the table talk, I was bored out of my mind. I also assumed everyone knew what I knew. I thought checks, balances, and overdrafts were part of everyone’s everyday conversation, right up there with politics, the neighbors, and what was going to happen over the weekend. It took me quite a while to figure out that wasn’t the case. I just didn’t think about it until I became a parent myself.

I remember my first astonished reaction when my then ten-year-old daughter asked me for some amount of money and I declined saying I didn’t have it. She countered with the suggestion I “write a check.” (This was back when we had the quaint custom of paying for groceries with a check and not a credit card.) I had to explain that checks were not the same thing as money itself—that there had to be enough money in the bank to cover a check. I assumed she knew that, but when I thought about it, how would she? We never talked about banking at our dinner table. Instead, conversation focused on her father’s swashbuckling adventures around the world in search of oil—or how her softball team was doing in the playoffs. She had no concept of how a checking account worked.

When this same child went off to college, I remember buying her a T-shirt emblazoned with the words “What do you mean I’m overdrawn? I still have checks!” across the front. She was not as amused as I. However, in one of those ironies that often happens, she actually became an accountant who supervises banking practices for the FDIC.

 I think it was that early exchange with her that inspired the idea for Dollars & Sense. I knew that she couldn’t be the only pre-teen—or for that matter, adult—who didn’t understand how money, and therefore the economy, works. But how to make a potentially dull subject entertaining was the challenge.

As I began the text for Dollars & Sense, I chose to write informally and was delighted to see that the tone was matched with the droll illustrations done by David Clark. I particularly loved writing about one of our more colorful founding fathers, Alexander Hamilton. However, as I wrote and researched in Texas, I had no idea Hamilton and the fiscal policies he began in the late eighteenth century, would dominate the cultural scene in the early twenty-first century—this time in a musical that bore his name! Money as a musical? Debt and dance steps? Rap and regulations? Who knew? Certainly not I.

The musical Hamilton covers many of the topics I write about in Dollars & Sense, but it’s not the first time money has been celebrated in song. In the book’s Introduction, I mention a line from a duet sung by Liza Minelli and Joel Grey in the 1972 classic film, Cabaret; “Money makes the world go around.” As I wrote, I had no idea that the musical Hamilton would become the most coveted ticket on Broadway. Apparently it isn’t that far-fetched to sing about money!

 Of course I want kids to read about money, too. And I want teachers to use my book in their classrooms as they teach about our country’s economic and cultural development. I can also imagine how much fun it might be to use some ideas from my text and combine the information with snippets from the hip-hop score of Hamilton to drive a lesson home. In Hamilton, the song “Cabinet Battle #1” pits Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson against each other as they rap about the establishment of a national bank—a topic I cover in the book. How much fun would it be to have kids create a rap “duel” among themselves arguing the pros and cons of fiscal policy? If it can delight sophisticated Broadway audiences, it could delight energetic middle-schoolers, too.

I write about the early days of America when each colony issued its own currency. How about creating a rap arguing, “Our Money’s Better than Yours!”, or use the chapter that discusses the Great Depression and create a piece called “I’m Depressed!” I write about debt in the book, so perhaps students could rap about “There’s Good Debt and There’s Bad.” You get the idea…the possibilities are endless.

Hamilton has raised awareness of a crucial period in our history. It illuminates the humanity and the passion those first fiscal policy discussions raised among our founding fathers. It was that same kind of passion that animated my own father’s dinner table talk. It is the passion that led me to write Dollars & Sense, just as passion drove Lin-Manuel Miranda to bring Hamilton’s story to Broadway.

So money and music go together. I hope you’ll read (and maybe even rap) Dollars & Sense with your young audience. And please, let me know how it goes!

Elaine Scott is the author of several books, including Buried Alive!: How 33 Miners Survived 69 Days Deep Under the Chilean Desert and When is a Planet Not a Planet? The Story of Pluto (Clarion). Her latest book is Dollars & Sense: A Kid’s Guide to Using—Not Losing—Money, illustrated by David Clark. Elaine lives in Houston, Texas.