Scott Elliott guest blogs on BOOK TOURS WITH KIDS – part 2

Here is the second of a three-part guest blog by Scott Eliott, who lives and teaches in Walla Walla, Washington.  Scott is the father of two boys and two books, Coiled in the Heart and Temple Grove: A Novel.  Click here for his bio.

Tell us more about your recent book tour with the kids, Scott – you left off with a decision to keep author-time and daddy-time separate, but to allow the boys to see one reading. Do go on….

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Before I left for each reading, I asked the boys to wish me luck, kissed their heads, fielded a few questions about where I was going and why I had to go, asked them to be good for mama. I don’t think they really understood what was going on. On the way to each venue I’d shift identities and summon the energy necessary to transform from worn out daddy to audience-commanding author. The energy always came, its supply aided in some ways rather than hindered by days spent running amok with the boys—throwing rocks at driftwood at Discovery Park, hiking in Whacom Falls Park, fishing at a few small lakes, hitting playgrounds in Stanely Park, going up the tram to Grouse Mountain to see a clever logging show and stand a few feet from grizzly bears, continuing our pursuit of food we can’t get in Walla Walla at Pike Place and Granville island Markets, participating in what we came to call the “Bellingham sandwich explosion.”  

I should say that doing this alone, short of a substantial childcare budget beyond our means, would not have been possible without a generous second adult. My wife Jenna played this role expertly. Overall, the demands on her didn’t constitute as much extra childcare as it would have if I’d said “see you in a few weeks!” and left, but it did mean extra work for her, for which I’m grateful, especially on two nights when she needed to get the boys settled  into new places without my help.  Jenna attended two of the five events on nights when we did pay for baby sitters.  

I thought the whole thing worked very well, overall. So well, in fact, that I came to think that if I had time and the resources, I could go on traveling indefinitely like this, moving from town to town, seeking adventures, finding new readers for the book. I enjoyed the strange experience, the lively jolt, of switching from daddy to writer, sloughing off the concern for dependents to move more easily, made newly conscious of my lightness (like taking off a heavy backpack) into a fluid adult world, in one its best places, rich with possibility and in which I was able even to move outside of myself a little bit to play the role of author and to stretch a little further still to play the roles of the characters in my novel. I felt immensely fortunate for the opportunity to enter this world of greater freedom with its potential for meaningful connections enabled by the book, and equally fortunate to come back to my better-defined role in the family-- to sleeping boys, a wife who must have sensed once I’d crawled into bed as quietly as I could that I was still charged up from the reading and who’d whisper, “How’d it go?” Except for the fact that it came too early, the boys could always be counted on to provide crazy morning energy that swirled into my memories of the reading of the night before like cream into coffee, or maybe coffee into cream. Or maybe like a dinosaur into a figurine emporium.

There were moments on the trip that only boys in this zone could provide: lots of discussion of sasquatches, bears, and wolves and acting like these creatures as we passed through the Cascades both ways. We raced along a boardwalk in Bellingham giving each other high fives; fed pigeons we named in Pike Place Market; played hide and seek in the Olympic Sculpture Garden; lay together in a hammock, wind off the Puget Sound in our hair. Gus, the five year old, got really excited about big trout and steelhead we came upon in hatchery enclosures in Whatcom Falls Park and asked repeatedly when we were going to get out the fishing rods and catch them. One night at a Syrian restaurant in Seattle, after hearing that a belly dancing show was expected later on, Harper, the two year old, raised his shirt and gave everyone his own early belly dance.   

The boys were supposed to attend the reading in Bellingham, in part, because we couldn’t secure a babysitter there. It also seemed like a good night for them to come out because a lot of my relatives from around the Peninsula and from nearby Lynden would be there that night. I thought perhaps Jenna could bring them by toward the end of the reading.  I wanted the boys to see this part of what I do, to show them that I write and read stories for other people, not just for them. I wanted to to give them a hazy memory to reflect on later in their lives, maybe something they’d wonder if they dreamed…

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Scott Elliott guest blogs on BOOK TOURS WITH KIDS – Part 1

Hi everyone! Hope you are having a great summer with kids in camp, coming home sun-warmed and tired and sleeping soundly through the night.  We are judging the Fellowship entries while we are on hiatus from Salons and let me tell you – there is some stiff competition this year!

Meanwhile – we are thrilled to welcome a terrific novelist, Scott Elliott, who lives and teaches in Walla Walla, Washington.  Scott is the father of two boys and two books, Coiled in the Heart and Temple Grove: A Novel.  Click here for his bio.

Take it away, Scott—

Is it a good idea to go on a book tour with two boys, aged two and five?

Probably not.

Nevertheless, my wife Jenna and I recently hit the road with two red-headed, fun-loving, mischievous imps we happened to have around.  I’ve long described the experience of having children in one’s thirties as a descent back into the tumultuous emotional zone you’ve worked your whole life to leave behind. As soon as you feel yourself standing on solid adult ground blessedly free of such swings you look at your life’s clock and say, “better have kids”  and embark on the wildest, emotional swingiest ride of your life. There are occasions during certain confluences of child raising madness when one looks to the sky and says, why… why?  balanced with times of such beautiful tender reawakening to the world and its wonders that one struggles to find words for such sweet perfection. Both states intertwined.

Rather than have me hit the road alone, we decided to morph an early summer vacation with a small Pacific Northwest book tour for my new novel Temple Grove, which is set on the Olympic Peninsula of Washington State.  The tour took me to some wonderful independent book stores in Western Washington and Oregon. I started on my own at Annie Bloom’s Bookstore in Portland, and the family went with me from Walla Walla, where we live, to Olympia (Orca Books); Seattle (Elliott Bay Book Company); Bellingham (Village Books); on up to Vancouver, B.C where I read at a tribute to Joyland Magazine at the Railway Club.   

Going on a book tour puts one in touch with one’s own day-to-day persona to a greater degree because you also begin to think about what your authorial persona ought to be. This persona may be a little different from who you are.  Fiction grants you license to tap into selves who are not you—who may be more extreme in different directions—to go into very adult and complex zones, sometimes verging on, or squarely within, our capacity for depravity. So, the fiction writer’s persona in readings may be pulled by the material away from the more accessible, friendly self your friends and family are used to seeing.

We decided to keep the readings and time with children separate, though we did plan to have the boys come see daddy read at least once….

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Graphic novels

I love comic books. LOVE. I love cartoons too--but some of them are not for kids. South Park, anyone? Family Guy? Adult Swim? We get it - just because it has drawings in it does not mean it is for children.

I happen to also be a big fan of graphic novels intended for adult consumption. Here’s a great one by a guy with three kids.

But this year, my fifth grader came home carrying A People’s History of American Empire.

This is A People's History of the United States in comic book format. This is a tough history book by Howard Zinn about how the United States perpetrated war crimes, used torture, and in general, how terribly our great country has behaved as we created our expanding nation. An important book, right? Some might say. 

Probably great for a smart high school junior or a college freshman on a debate team. Certainly should be required reading for politicians and grad students of American History. But my kid had just turned ten when he hauled this thing home from his school library. He still wasn't allowed to watch PG-13 movies. And on his way home from school, clearly traumatized, he is telling me that he didn’t eat during lunch because he found this drawing of a soldier cramming a funnel into another man’s mouth and pouring water into it.

“It was our soldiers that did it, mom,” he says, stricken. "Our soldiers!"

"Yes," I reply, carefully. "Every country has done horrible things in the name of justice, defense, or war, even us."

“The thing is, I’m just not sure I still love America like I used to.”

A picture is worth a thousand words, they say, and I must have used about two thousand to try to talk my son into at least some semblance of national pride. I'm not sure I succeeded - the book's message is very strong: America has done dreadful things to expand its "Empire."

So, because it was a graphic novel, my ten year old “got the point” of this very adult book. But to what end? He had no context of "badly taught, one-sided history" with which to compare.  If the evening news is sensationalist, how much more sensationalist is it to take a deeply-thought nonfiction book and make it pulpy with lots of violent drawings? 

Other than to make more money, is there any reason to turn a great book like this into a comic? Surely the intent could not have been to make torture accessible to a much-younger reader?  What sticks in a child’s mind is not the words, it is the images.

If it is too hard for a kid to read without pictures, maybe the concepts are still too hard. I was against Reader's Digest editions of the classics being assigned in schools (I'm for reading books in their original), and I'm equally against this "graphicalizing" of books that were intended as scholarly works. I'm not at all against adult content graphic novels in general - there just needs to be some way to explain to schools that just because it's got pictures it doesn't mean it's age-appropriate for small kids.

I'm not a book censor. I think all books should be available to all people, but I do think that some visual content might not be age-appropriate to some kids. My inner artist and my inner parent are at war. Any ideas? Am I being a ridiculous control freak?

Now I'm going to go have a huge cup of coffee and go work on my fiction so that the images are striking enough that someone wants to make a movie of them.

/bangs head on desk.

Do you need an extension?

As someone who often writes under a deadline, I have been using homework assignments to try to teach my kids the value of pacing oneself. I started college as the kid who finished all her assignments at 4am on the day they were due (I also used to suck on my used tea bags to avoid falling asleep in my morning classes - yeah, not something I want to bequeath).  But my junior year I took 24 credits and once i had thrown myself into that fire, I realized that without pacing and planning I'd never get through  the semester.

So I taught myself to be organized and I did things early, and I gave myself rewards: if I write 250 words of this stupid paper on the history of music in the 1600s I can go out on that date, if I finish my math, I can go to the Quad and hang with my friends. When my paper is totally done then I'll party.

It gave me a terrific work ethic--one that is useful for a writer with kids.

My first grader recently came home with a homework assignment over a holiday that was ludicrous - the class was to do an entire week's worth of homework in one day, including writing a story from the point of view of a beekeeper using ten vocab words, then writing each word three times, and finally writing ten sentences using these words. My girl is six. It's the end of school so there are performances and recitals as well as just the excitement of summer.

I wrote a note to the school, saying that the assignment was too much. Instead of pledging to look into it, I got an immediate note in reply - if it is too much, just don't do it, or tell your kid you will ask the parent for an extension. It's just homework.

What are schools teaching our kids? If homework is just thrown at them with the expectation that they won't do it if it's too much, what kind of adults do we expect we will get?  I can offer a possible insight as many parents who are writers are also writing teachers - and their number one complaint is the kid that walks in on the day the paper is due saying "I need an extension!" and the reason?

"I didn't finish the work."

Then in the real world, 25 yr old college-grad Petra needs to have her part of the project in by Monday to the rest of her team can present on Wednesday morning, but she emails it in on Tuesday at 6pm. The team is furious, but she shrugs, "I got it in before the meeting."

By college, the kids don't even bother to try--they know they'll get an extension. Society grouses at college profs for allowing the kids to get away with it, but I think it starts earlier. I think it starts in First Grade with schools that are not thoughtful about the amount and quality of homework that is assigned. I think that kids who are getting junk work and tons of it are being told by both their (naturally frustrated) parents and their schools that it doesn't matter if they don't do it--and that all they have to do is get an extension.

What do you think?

Creative kids can't spell

This is a personal rant against a trend in children’s literature.

This rant does not represent the thinking of Pen Parentis, just of me.

Ready?

I am so frustrated by the current trend of books aimed at a younger child audience that are filled with intentionally misspelled words (Junie B Jones, Diary of a Wimpy Kid, etc.) – presumably to show that the main character who is writing the book is a child.

Not only does it presuppose that all kids are dismal spellers, it pushes the (false) notion that creative people must have terrible spelling. And it enshrines the belief that spelling doesn’t matter.

Idea#1 – "It makes the book more real." My son actually said this to me in defense of one of these books.

I seem to recall plenty of diary books written in first person from the point of view of a child who had no spelling issues: Are you There, God, it’s Me, Margaret comes instantly to mind. Nothing was more real. I never had any doubt that Laura Ingalls Wilder’s main character was a child who grew up on a prairie writing on a slate--never! She didn't have to write letters and numbers reversed for us to know she was young.

As far as verisimilitude goes, I don’t recall The Outsiders having misspelled words among the slang S. E. Hinton used throughout. Far as I recall, the book uses the apostrophe very properly. And its author was actually a child. Well, ok, 19. So they say.

Idea #2 – "creative people all have terrible spelling."

Not going to grace this one with an answer. Well, okay. One: what about Harriet the Spy? 

Idea #3 – Spelling doesn’t matter.

It duz. Rilly. Its soupr annoing to reed bad speling. Even if you CAN.

I’m hoping that this trend will pass. You learn to spell mostly from early reading—just like you learn language from the people that surround you when you are an infant. If your parents have an accent, guess what, you have one too. It’s hard enough for a kid to figure out how to spell Light when it is spelled Lite on every package of food she has ever seen—can’t we petition the schools to please ensure that the books our kids read for reading class follow proper spelling and grammar rules?

The other books can all be in the library – I dislike censorship - but any assigned reading should really help the kids learn to write. If you're going to supply only broken tools, don't expect anyone to be able to build a birdhouse. 

I know, it’s a losing battle (heavy sigh) –which is why this is a rant and not a post.  Go write something. Sit in the sunshine. Listen to your inner editor. Buy him a cup of ice coffee. I'm buying mine an aspirin and a huge glass of water.

Publishing or Self-Publishing for Kids

This rambling post isn’t about what you think.

My kids and I have a ritual of me reading while they eat breakfast. It started because my son had read Castle in the Attic for school in third grade and wanted to share with his little sister, so, with his own money and without telling me, he bought it, along with its sequel, at his school’s book fair. Let’s just pause a moment over how awesome that is.

Yeah. Books are awesome. Kids who buy books, super-awesome.

Anyway, when he asked me to read the books aloud to both of them, it started an amazing practice of read-aloud at breakfast. She liked Castle in the Attic a lot, even though it was clearly a boy-targeted book (the only female characters are an overly busy mother and an old British caretaker who sits and sews and encourages the boy to think and act for himself). The book, however is a fun adventure story. Not perfect, but charming. We couldn’t wait to read the next part.

None of us enjoyed the sequel as much – it felt rushed and irrelevant, my daughter hated the excessive violence, my son was frustrated by the unmotivated villain (Why was there a big rat? Who made him? How did he control the other rats?) and I hated the irrelevant fake-swearing (What 12 yr old says “blast” and why put swearing in at all if the kid is only going to fake-swear? ) But ok. I figured this two-book series was a double book sale, where the new author won awards with a book she’d slaved over for a decade, and had to get the second one out within a year. The book ended and we wanted to move on to something else right away.

So I needed another book.

Last year at BEA—after seeing my badge and assuring himself I had kids—an author thrust a chapter book into my hands. “Your daughter needs this book,” he said. I remember wanting to throw it immediately into the nearest circular file, just based on his arrogance.

But it had a pretty cover, which was not pink or sparkly. The title intrigued me, and the summary implied the book would help girls learn about environmentalism.

Let’s start with the above, and talk about self-publishing.

• ·      This guy has written a (let’s presume) good book.
• ·      He wants to market it to girls only.
• ·      He does not want it to be turned into a “pink, cursive” book.  (You don’t think the publishing industry does this? Have a look at this.)

So, he decides to self-publish.

Awesome, say I. We need more books for girls that don’t force a societal “you will be pink and cursive” style on them.

Ah – but.

Now comes the next step of our saga.

Cue this morning, when we finished the highly-unsatisfying sequel to a book we had all liked, and needed something new. Immediately.

I pulled this old BEA freebie-book off my shelf. My son was willing to give it a whirl because the girl wearing a long dress in the forest on the cover was not in pink and had no tiara. Yes, the book’s subtitle mentioned a princess, but after all, fairy tales have great plots. The illustrations promised some pretty vicious bad guys, so okay.

We began.

I read the introduction. It was a scene from nature: a butterfly’s flight. My son stopped me when the chapter ended. “What was that?” he said, bewildered, “Some kind of symbolism?” I told him to give the book a chance. (Meanwhile, I was stumbling over the plethora of adverbs. The insect didn’t just fly: it flitted happily, fluttered gaily, flew hurriedly…and at the end, darted off deeply saddened.) This author wasn't writing a book, he was narrating a screenplay for a blind person who was also a little bit...slow.

The second chapter, also called “introduction,” began with a detailed description of the castle. When I say detailed, I mean: the ornate grand piano handcrafted of rosewood was actually described as a “highly ornate and handcrafted grand piano made of imperial rosewood and other exotic materials. These materials are only known to be owned and imported by those elite enough to do so. The craftsmanship on the piano is the highest level known and the attention to detail is painstakingly meticulous.”

I can forgive a bit of excessive detail. I kept reading. My kids squirmed.

A few paragraphs down, the kitchen whisk was called a “wisp” which I corrected as I read aloud. Two pages into the description of the castle, my son pushed back from his breakfast with a loud sigh and an eye-roll, “Ok! Ok! We get it! It’s the nicest, fanciest castle in the whole world!”

And that’s when I realized what excellent readers children are. Because of television and the accessibility of movies, our kids have grown up on narrative. They have been raised on action in the first moment, they have been raised with characters that have great backstory, clear motivations, and concise descriptions. They ask pertinent questions (why are all those lights flashing when he only pressed one button? Why did the bad guy not just shoot them, why talk to them first?) and they remember things that adults have long forgotten (I thought the girl had put the button into her vest pocket. When did it get into her jeans pocket?). They might be our best editors. Certainly they are the harshest critics: This book is boring. Let’s read something else.

After his sister goes to bed, I’ve been reading Jules Verne aloud to the ten year old: he is fascinated by every archaic word. The descriptions all matter – things you are assumed to know are not described, unfamiliar things are. Every character’s motivation is obvious and many chapters end with huge surprises.

Had this princess book been better edited, I have no doubt it would have been an excellent read. As is, even my daughter was squirming after the first ten pages. I’m purposefully leaving the title and author out of this post, because I hate to discourage any writer – the lesson in this post is merely: edit with a kid’s eye. They are quick to grasp and have vivid imaginations - they will fill in all your details without even trying.

And they read every single word, so they notice unintentional typos lightning-quick. My son is reading Matilda for class and he has already caught two typos (c'mon Scholastic!) and nothing pulls him out of the narrative faster.

But this isn’t a blog for children’s book authors. Here’s my question to you – given that self-publishing allowed this guy full creative control over his cover and presumably also allowed for the rambling over-detailed writing that made at least two kids not want to finish his book…what do you think? Should he have held-out for a publisher? Should he have hired a high-end professional editor? What should authors do in this day and age to ensure they have the best editing possible, hire kids?