“Once upon a time there was a little brown mouse.”

“No, wait! I want the mouse to be blue.”

“Well then, this mouse was blue, except for her tail, which was black. Her coloring was an advantage for the mouse, because she lived in the library, and she could blend in among the books. She would press her body against the spine of a blue book, and shape her tail into script, so it looked like the book’s title. . .”

I have very little skill as a storyteller, despite a lot of practice. My daughter requests stories every day, and the story of the mouse, which we haven’t finished, is our latest endeavor — “our” because it’s most certainly a collaboration. In addition to insisting that this story’s mouse be blue, Meg asked whether the mouse had any parents, and why she didn’t live with them, and if she saw them often, and why she lived in the children’s section. I begin with characters and then try to discover where they’ll take us. Meg’s prompts help form the characters or shape the plot.

There are at least two children’s books famous for their origins as tales told to particular children, and both begin with a request. Just after Edward Bear bump, bump, bumps down the stairs to be introduced as Winnie-the-Pooh, Christopher Robin asks for a story for the bear “About himself. Because he’s that sort of Bear.”

Alice and her sisters also “beg a tale”:

Imperious Prima flashes forth
Her edict to “begin it”:
In gentler tone Secunda hopes
“There will be nonsense in it.”
While Tertia interrupts the tale
Not more than once a minute.

“Tertia”/Edith’s interruptions give way to “sudden silence” in the following line, just as Christopher Robin’s questions end after he asks whether the Christopher Robin in the story is himself. I understand the silencing of those voices on the page, as their inclusion in the tale would repeatedly take the reader out of it. But I can’t imagine that in the initial telling, the children would have merely listened.

One of the characteristics of oral tales — not to mention young children — is their interactive nature. There’s a fluidity to stories not present in books. Though a child might ask as many questions about a written tale as an oral one, she has fewer opportunities to shape a story that is already fixed in print.

A story’s interactivity means that it is usually personal to the child, involves play between the adult and child, and allows opportunities for the child to assert her power to direct the action. That’s a remarkable set of possibilities for one activity with my girl, and it probably explains how often I hear: “Tell me a story.”

Is there a word for a feeling or insight so subtly and perfectly expressed that it touches you and moves you and becomes a touchstone for what a concept — one as large as “love” or “family” or “reconciliation” — truly means?

Where The Wild Things Are is like that. Max, after making mischief of one kind and another, is sent to his room without supper. He journeys to where the wild things are, becomes king and leads a wild rumpus, then feels lonely and wants to return to where someone loves him best of all. He gives up being king and sails back to his room, and there his supper waits for him, and it is still hot.

The movie, to be released in October, has a lot to accomplish in transferring and expanding Max’s evening of exuberance, conflict, fantasy, and forgiveness. Based on the trailer, I’m hopeful.

Bonus: Did you see President Obama reading Where the Wild Things Are in April?

My declaration yesterday that Mo Willems’ Gerald and Piggie are kid lit’s best-written friends since Frog and Toad was rash. While I do love the duo, had I considered more carefully, I would have qualified that statement: they are one of the best pairs.

How could I have forgotten Houndsley and Catina? Like Gerald and Piggie (and Frog and Toad), their distinctive personalities and voices complement each other. Houndsley seems more introverted and mellow, Catina more extroverted and anxious. While G&P make me laugh, Houndsley and Catina charm and soothe me. Each is careful with the other’s feelings, and though the stories aren’t preachy, together the pair discovers more in each interaction about how to be a good friend.

There are four tales so far in the Houndsley and Catina series, each surprisingly nuanced and poetic for early reader/chapter books, and they present an established, comfortable friendship.

Other favorite friends are Bear and Mouse from A Visitor for Bear. The language here is also part of the appeal, though in this case it’s an expansive vocabulary: “This is impossible! Intolerable! Insufferable!” says Bear, about the persistent Mouse’s efforts to gain his attention. Here, we have a friendship at its sputtering start, and I’m glad to learn that there are more Bear and Mouse books planned. I want to see how they settle into their relationship.

Who are your favorite friends in children’s literature?

Related post:
popular children’s books I hate

The winners of the 2009 Children’s Choice Book Awards, announced this week, include The Pigeon Wants a Puppy, by Mo Willems, as the Kindergarten to Second Grade Book of the Year. While I’m charmed by the simplicity of Mo Willems’ drawings, and I think his Elephant and Piggie are the best pair of friends in kid lit since Frog and Toad, I don’t like the pleading pigeon. I understand the role reversal. I understand the delight some children experience in saying, rather than hearing, “no, no, no.” I get it. I just don’t enjoy it.

Another popular children’s book that gets on my nerves is The Tale of Despereaux. I was along for the ride through most of the first few chapters, though I bristled every time DiCamillo addressed me as “Reader” — only Charlotte Brontë gets to call me “Reader” (N.B. This is in no small part why I stopped reading the often lovely Gluten-Free Girl blog). DiCamillo lost me when she asked if I knew the definition of “perfidy,” and admonished me to look up the word in my dictionary just to be sure. I can’t abide a finger-wagging narrator. I kept reading, since I was sharing the story with my girl, despite the tone and the inelegant perspective shifts, but I didn’t get through the whole tale. I adopted a “don’t offer, don’t refuse” policy at storytime, and my daughter lost interest in the story — something she hasn’t done with any other bedtime book.

And I may be banished from the nerddom for telling, but I don’t enjoy The Phantom Tollbooth, either. It’s entirely too clever and at some point the wordplay becomes simply tiresome. Again, I get it. I just don’t like it.

And you? What well-regarded kid’s books would you like never to read again?

Sandman and a fifth of Jack are the only good things I ever picked up from a boy’s dorm room floor. That was 15 years ago, and I haven’t discovered a comic book that’s grabbed me since.

Now I’m in the position of trying to find intelligent comic books that work for a young child and aren’t utterly boring to a grown literature lover. It’s the early childhood version of seeking out Sandman.

Serendipity isn’t serving me now as it did then, despite the tractor beam that draws any comic in the vicinity into Meg’s grasp. Most of her finds are adult-oriented. Though she has adopted her mom’s Death and Delirium dolls (imagine: muppet-baby-style wide-eyed goth-chick Death and pretty punk Delirium in a 4-year-old’s sling — that’s cognitive dissonance right there), she hasn’t found the Sandman series yet. She has discovered all of her dad’s comic strip collections, though, and they’re only moderately more age appropriate. His tastes run toward clever 80s-90s favorites like The Far Side, Dilbert, Bloom County, and Calvin and Hobbes. One thing those strips have in common is wit, and that’s exactly the reason I can’t bear to read them to the girl. It’s hard enough to encourage her learn the medium by matching the written with the drawn elements of the story. Add to that the need to explain every joke, and it’s a bit of slog.

I discussed the situation with my friend Bill, who draws the library- and book-focused Unshelved strip, and he thought Meg might just be too young, but suggested Owly (here’s the Unshelved Book Club’s presentation of Owly). Given her driving interest, which I can’t imagine is unique in the realm of little kids, I’d like to identify additional candidates.

What comic books or comic strips do you think might entertain a 4-year-old and her possibly overly picky mom?

Audio books make for pleasant car rides, especially with my girl. Though I’d never listen to hours of Raffi on a road trip (or any other setting, truth be told), I’ll gladly revisit favorite books from my childhood read by talented performers.

A good audio book does require a good narrator. We’ve discovered some gems, like Stephen Fry’s renditions of A Bear Called Paddington and More About Paddington, and Mary Beth Hurt’s reading of The Fledgling. We’ve also borne some disappointments, like Eric Idle narrating Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

I like Idle well enough, but Meg wasn’t impressed. “When are they going to start talking?!” she wanted to know, and we finally understood her to mean, “When is the narrator going to adopt the voices of the characters?” I’m glad she’s not so demanding of her parents — she’s since contentedly listened to her dad read Charlie and the Chocolate Factory without ever expressing disappointment that the characters weren’t talking — but she wants her audio books performed.

I’ve found that I share her sensibilities. I feel more engaged in the story when the narrator voices the characters, subtle though it may be. This has been harder to find than I expected, so I was delighted to discover a story I remember diving into as a child with a delightful narrator who successfully (for the most part) manages several characters in two accents. Though the author was English, I think the story, set in India, benefits from a narrator presenting an accurate Indian voice.

Meg was enchanted. We listened to the story on our way across town, and when it ended on the way back, she asked to start it over. She then had her first experience of something all audio book listeners will recognize: sitting in the car outside our house to hear the story through (once again) to the end.

I’ll send you now to get your own free download of Rikki Tikki Tavi read by Sumeet Bharati from Audible.com. In return, will you tell me your favorite audio books in the comments?

Related post:
E.B. White and the spiral

“Emergent” means “in the process of becoming.” My daughter is an emergent reader. While she’s not yet reading independently, she has many skills of a reader. She understands the arc of a story, she can read the pictures, and she recognizes some words and can figure out others from the context and the letters of the word itself.

Seattle Homeschool Group (SHG), of which our family is a part, includes an emergent readers’ book club, but it’s meant for children further along the path toward independent reading than Meg is, as the group asks that children bring books to read aloud to each other. Together with a couple of other reading mamas, I’m considering starting a group for children in the earlier stages of becoming readers.

In discussing the group, one mama distinguished between storytime, which is mostly about reading aloud, and book club, which also includes discussion about the books with the goal of encouraging critical thinking about form and content. I’m excited by the possibilities, and yet I don’t know what this might look like with group of 4-year-olds. I have confidence that it is possible, as I’ve had many thoughtful conversations about stories and ideas with Meg, and I’m considering how to bring the joy and wonder of those free-ranging conversations into the corral of a regular, organized meeting.

I’m interested in your thoughts. Parents, librarians, booksellers, teachers: When you read with children, what have you noticed gets them thinking and talking about what you’re reading? Have you read books to young children that always seem to spark conversation? Are there activities you’ve done that help them engage with a book? What other ideas and advice can you offer? Please share your thoughts about discussing books with children in the comments.

Related post:
E.B. White and the spiral

I didn’t read Charlotte’s Web as a kid, sadly. Re-reading such books in adulthood is like finding the butter-yellow stuffed elephant you cuddled and carried on car rides. A new buttery elephant encountered first as an adult is likewise endearing and cozy, but it doesn’t smell of warm sleep and grandparents.

I read countless other classic children’s books, though, and they live in me still. I can feel a glass elevator shaking just before it bursts out of the ceiling. I can see a secret island below from a circle of boats lifted high in the air by balloon. I can feel the edge of a windowsill as I climb out into the night to join a great V of geese in flight. (I didn’t notice until now that my most vivid images are from moments of leaving the ground.)

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I’m reading Charlotte’s Web now to my daughter. We have three versions going. The first is the unabridged audio, so really it’s E.B. White reading his story to both of us. As he reads, Meg is relying on her own mental images to vivify the characters and take her to the Arables’ farm, and she’s hearing a story that is longer than any she’d have the patience for a parent to read to her.

My former-children’s-librarian friend tells me that three-year-olds still need pictures to truly understand what’s going on in a story, though. When I read to her, it’s clear that Meg wants her books to have pictures. So when I saw Some Pig at a bookstore after we were already well into the audio version, I brought it home to share with her. It is a picture book of the second chapter of Charlotte’s Web.

I also have an annotated edition, which I’ve flipped through and plan to explore. I referred to it yesterday after rereading in Some Pig that Wilbur “looked cute when his eyes were closed” and feeling bothered once again that perhaps this wasn’t the original text — maybe an editor added a bit here or shaved a bit there for a younger audience — since I thought the word “cute” pointed to a pen other than White’s. Turning to the annotated page, I saw that White did call Wilbur “cute,” and Peter Neumeyer told me that he knows “of no other instance in White’s voluminous writings in which he uses this word,” so I felt both newly informed and instinctively clever.

The annotated edition reproduces the original Garth Williams drawings, which I like better than the picture book illustrations. I think I’m unduly distracted by visual details in Some Pig. The illustrator shows pastures across the road from the Arable farm enclosed by hedgerows, a landscape which strikes me as more English than American. Nevertheless, I’m pleased by the practice of transforming portions of classic children’s novels into picture books. I introduced Meg to my favorite marmalade-eating bear through a similar volume.

In Raising Lifelong Learners, Lucy Calkins describes this as a spiral: introducing concepts and then revisiting them in greater depth at later ages. I think of the picture-book version of a classic children’s novel as an example of starting a spiral, and I wish there were more points along it.

There is a great distance between picture books and novels, and as far as I can tell, most of the books that lie between are chapter books. Someday Meg will enjoy reading Frog and Toad or Houndsley and Catina on her own, as she now enjoys having them read to her. They are charming stories with dear characters, and I’m happy to read them. But I prefer the greater nuance and complexity of language in picture books and novels, both meant for experienced readers — whether the parent reading to the child or, later, the child reading on her own. In between, we abandon early readers, leaving them to travel the broad paths alone, offering no invitation to explore the rockier byways hand in hand.

In the space between Some Pig and Charlotte’s Web, I wish there were a another version, not a chapter book, but the entire story with vignettes of Charlotte and Wilbur and Fern on every page, similar to E.H. Shepard’s images of Pooh and Piglet and Christopher Robin, which offer a glimpse of the Hundred Acre Wood without elaborating every detail. Such a version would add a turn to the spiral, like Pooh and Piglet chasing a Woozle, or Charlotte spinning her web.

Flat Stanley

Flat Stanley visited us this week. He’s a children’s book character who inspired a literacy and geography project for elementary school classes.

Larry Gets Lost in Seattle

Our visitor arrived from LaRue, Ohio, home to my cousin Natalie’s family. Her daughter Avery sent Stanley to visit my daughter Meg. We took him on a tour of Seattle inspired by the book Larry Gets Lost in Seattle.

Stanley wrote a letter to Avery, telling her about his tour. Here’s the letter:

Hi Avery,

Thanks for sending me on an adventure in Seattle.

I started at your cousin Meg’s house. She told me she’s two and a half, and she lives on Queen Anne Hill. Her mom Jenni pointed out their house on a map, and she said I could bring the map back with me when I come. Until then, I’ll tell you about my trip.

I rested with the family after my long journey from LaRue to Seattle. We relaxed and read one of Meg’s favorite books, Larry Gets Lost in Seattle. Meg’s parents decided to show me around by following the travels of Larry and his boy Pete from the book, though none of us planned to get lost.

First, I walked with Meg and her dad Steve to Kerry Park, which was on the cover of the book. We saw so much from there, including ferry boats like the one Pete and Larry rode on, the Seattle Space Needle, and the Experience Music Project – which Larry thought looked just like a pile of clothes on the floor.

Later that day, Meg and her mom Jenni took me to see the EMP and Space Needle in person, along with the monorail. It traveled from beside the Space Needle at the base of Queen Anne Hill to Westlake Center in the midst of downtown.

From there, we took a quick walk to Pike Place Market. Just like Larry, we saw Rachel the Pig, a life-sized piggy bank that Seattleites think of as the market’s mascot. Meg helped me give her a couple of quarters.

Rachel stood right in front of Pike Place Fish. Meg told me the fishmongers really do throw fish, but no one bought any while we were there, so I didn’t get to see fish fly.

From there we continued down the hill to see Hammering Man, the giant statue outside Seattle Art Museum. He hammered away the whole time we watched. Meg said she’s never seen him rest. Jenni told me he gets a break every year on Labor Day.

Our next stop was Pioneer Square. On the way we saw one of the ferries as it landed at Colman Dock, the ferry terminal on Seattle’s waterfront. It was fun to get close to one. It was so big! I didn’t know so many cars could fit on a boat.

Pioneer Square was really close to the ferry terminal. No wonder it was Pete and Larry’s very first stop. After all our walking, we rested between the pergola and a totem pole. They’re both really old. The pergola has been there for about a hundred years, but it had to be rebuilt a few years ago when a truck backed into it and knocked it down.

The entrance to Seattle’s underground was in the same square. Larry searched the underground for Pete, but we skipped the tour since we already had such a full day and we still wanted to see the stadiums.

We stopped at the field where the Seattle Seahawks play, and after that at the Mariners’ stadium. I liked peeking through the ball and glove sculpture at Meg.

By then, we were tired and it was getting late, so we hurried back to catch the monorail before dark.

We didn’t go to every place that Pete and Larry did in one day. We saw all the places that they did downtown, and even though we took a more direct route than they did, we still needed more time for the places in other neighborhoods.

The next day, I went with Steve and Meg to see the Fremont troll. That was so fun. He lurks under the Aurora bridge. I got to slide down his fingers, and I saw for myself that he was holding a real VW bug.

Down the hill, we saw the folks waiting for the interurban. It must have been pretty cold standing in the snow. The Pete and Larry book said people dress them up sometimes. Maybe we should have left them with warmer clothes.

We were warm enough ourselves, so we left the Fremont neighborhood to go to Ballard, where the Ballard Locks are. We didn’t see boats using the locks like an elevator, but we did watch salmon climbing the fish ladder. There was a place at the locks to view them from underwater, and we could see a few swim upstream to get back to where they were born.

After that, I wanted to warm up, and I got toasty in the car on the long ride to West Seattle. Just like Pete and Larry, our last stop was at the little statue of liberty on Alki Beach.

I had such a fun trip. See you soon!

- Flat Stanley

Each Peach Pear Plum

This journal is about writing that informs and inspires me. It might be an inviting story or a cogent argument. It’s not usually a kid’s book.

I’m currently reading a children’s book that is a notable exception. I say “reading” not because it’s so long that I can’t get through it in one sitting, but because I’m reading it about once a day.

I’ve read most of the books in our daughter’s library tens of times. Only a few interest me after the first. But I’m probably on the one hundred and eleventh reading of Each Peach Pear Plum. It hasn’t always been in heavy rotation as it is now, but it was one of her first books, and years before she was born I read it frequently to another child.

The text is simple. The plot is minimal. The characters are undeveloped. So why do I still like this book? I’ll admit it: it’s the pictures.

The book’s first illustration is a landscape — a few hills, two houses, a stream, a wheat field, an orchard. Every subsequent page is illustrated. On one leaf is a vignette, on the other, a scene. The scene is from a perspective within that first landscape. The landscape maps the world of the story, and the scene is a pinpoint on the map.

The illustrator gets the perspective just right. What you see from every window or hilltop or bridge is what you would expect to see based on the relationship of locations in the landscape.

My daughter is interested in the book’s rhyme and rhythm, and in the repetition of its reading. I’m fascinated by a setting so carefully crafted that it could be a real place.