Princess Academy (review from the archives)

The sweet girl and I finished Princess Academy this evening...her first time to hear the book, and my fourth or fifth time reading it. I found myself wanting to talk about it a bit, but then it dawned on me I did that already, quite some time ago! I went back to revisit the review and found myself nodding in agreement over it all, so here's an oldie from 2009 that I hope you'll enjoy, a reflection I wrote called "Quarry Speech and Kything." Happy Thanksgiving!

Fun note: the sweet girl has been very into Madeleine L'Engle lately, and our reading of this book overlapped our reading of A Wind in the Door. Not planned. Just lovely serendipity.

*******From 2009*******

In the past couple of years, Shannon Hale has become one of my favorite fantasy authors for young adults. I first really fell for her work a couple of years ago when I read Princess Academy. Recently I re-read it again twice: to myself, and out-loud to my husband (who really liked it, and who was pleasantly surprised by the un-Disney nature of the story, given its title!).

I liked it even better the second and third times around, partly because I was fully prepared to enter into the world of Mt. Eskel. Since I knew the characters and the contour of the plot already, I was able to pay more attention to Hale's world-building. I'm impressed by the details she provides about life for the villagers on Mt. Eskel and how that builds a credible, substantial world for the story.

Hale tells us about the strength of the mountain itself, the beauty of the mountain views, the smell of the goats they herd, the beautifully streaked linder stone, the wild miri flowers that grow in cracks of stone, the chips and shards of rock that cut into thinning boot soles, the essential poverty of the people who must work hard to cut enough stone to trade for goods each season. She helps us understand that, while they're illiterate, they have an amazing communal memory which is showcased in festival time through the creativity of their "story-shouts." She describes their folk dances, their physical strength, their skill in mining linder, their lack of political status as members of a non-provincial territory of the kingdom of Danland, the way they care for one another. She hints at the lacks some of them feel by not having time or space in their lives for gardens or art (and their yearning to see the far-off ocean). And of course, she describes the way they communicate with one another in the quarry, using a language without words, often communicated through the sounds and rhythms of the work, tools and stone.

A huge part of Miri's coming of age, and her growing understanding of herself as a true daughter of the mountain, is her newfound ability to sing the mountain's songs even when she is cut off from many of the places and people she once thought were needed to make such speech possible. Before she left for the academy, she had never used quarry speech because she'd never been allowed inside the quarry (her father has his reasons, but he doesn't explain them to her, hence her feeling of uselessness). Her sojourn at the princess academy, along with eleven other girls from their territory, is not precisely an exile, but it functions as one, or at least a time away in a very different place where new thoughts and ideas and dreams arise (which strikes me as a notion one might come across in a Shakespearean comedy). While Miri is there, out of necessity she learns the music of the quarry, and unexpectedly discovers that she can speak/sing it outside of the quarry itself, as long as she is physically touching any stone that can be traced to a vein of linder. That unseen network of linder veins becomes a beautiful, unconscious scaffolding as Miri learns the secret of the speech is built on shared memories/community.

I guess the first time I read the book, I was so involved in the excitement of a first read-through that parallels didn't come to me, but this time through I found myself reading the descriptions of quarry speech and thinking about kything.

Kything is the form of unspoken communication that Madeleine L'Engle developed in her fantasy novels for young adults many years ago, particularly in A Wrinkle in Time, A Wind in the Door and A Swiftly Tilting Planet. Meg Murry, her brother Charles Wallace, and their friend Calvin O'Keefe learn to communicate with one another and with other people/creatures across vast distances and without words. The concept is developed throughout the books -- it's not actually named as kything until Wind, when Meg is tutored in the practice by Proginoskes, the singular cheribum who partners with her against the evil, unnaming Echthroi. What intrigues me is that, in that first instance where it's named, Progo works with Meg to help her remember a memory that she didn't realize she had stored in her brain. She heard a conversation (not realizing its full import) and thought she'd forgotten it, but Progo, in communicating/communing with her, is able to pull the memory forth so that she can see it and hear it clearly again. Meg becomes a particularly adept kyther, especially with Charles Wallace in A Swiftly Tilting Planet. While he's off riding a unicorn on the wind to save the planet from nuclear peril, she's in her attic bedroom, keeping her hand on a dog (whom we're led to believe just might be part guardian angel) since the act of touching the warm fur of the living creature seems to connect her more closely to her little brother's mind and heart. Shades of linder lines.

Meg also kythes deeply with Calvin, the young man who will grow up to be her husband. Their intimacy of communication is similar to what she shares with others, but also different, tinged with eros as well as philos, I guess you might say (and all of it bathed somehow in agape). The nuances are hard to describe, but definitely there, reminding me of Miri's ability to quarry-speak most clearly, especially when in peril, with the young man closest to her own heart, Peder. Although their feelings for one another have not been fully acknowledged or recognized even by themselves, the feelings are there (which Hale makes beautifully clear from their awkwardness around one another).

More than Meg and Calvin, however, Peder and Miri's ability to communicate reminded me forcefully of Vicky Austin and Adam Eddington in A Ring of Endless Light. If absolutely forced to choose a favorite L'Engle novel, I would probably choose Ring, which I read over and over again between the ages of 15-25. I don't know why it never dawned on me with any forcefulness (until now!) that the unspoken communication developed in Ring looks an awful lot like kything. Vicky experiences an ability to communicate without words (and to receive communications, often in the form of wordless images) first with dolphins (animals are always very important in Madeleine's work) and then with Adam, the young man who introduces her to the dolphins.

Maybe one reason I never made an explicit connection is because distinctions used to be often made between Madeleine's "chronos" books and her "kairos" books. In her so-called kairos books, characters were not bound by the normal nature of time, while characters in the chronos books never time-traveled. That's a useful enough distinction in some regards, but it's not so easy to break her books down into categories of "fantasy" and "realism" with the kairos books neatly falling into one and the chronos books into the other. Even in her more realistic books, where the characters don't fly with unicorns, there are mystical elements. Vicky, after all, flies with dolphins.

I've wandered far afield. My main observation is that Miri's unspoken message to Peder felt familiar, not in a derivative way, but in a lovely, shared tradition way. Peder's response in her time of peril mirrors Adam's. Vicky and Adam's wondering exchange (once the peril is past) is so sweet and simple: "I called you --" "And I came," he said. Words that could have been quarry-sung in another book, time and place.

What I Am Doing With All The Time I'm Not Blogging

I realized this evening that I am on track to complete my leanest blogging year ever in the (almost) seven years I've been blogging. Which made me wonder...what precisely am I doing these days with all the time I'm not blogging? Just in case you were curious, here are a few things on that list.

1) Grading papers. Tidal wave two hit Friday. As a mere teaching assistant this year, rather than a full-fledged adjunct, I somehow had the mistaken impression that grading would take up less of my time. But when paper deadlines hit for two seminary classes at roughly the same time, the avalanche is still an avalanche, even if I am only grading for mechanics and reading accountability rather than deeper content. Reading a paper and assessing it thoughtfully still takes time...maybe not as much time as it used to, but still plenty of it. So does answering student questions and managing record keeping. All of this, of course, on the everlastingly wonky computer (that I am nonetheless grateful for).

2) Moon watching. The sweet girl has always loved the moon, and lately her love for it seems to have grown. We're doing a lot of moon watching -- and star watching -- in the evenings. And reading/thinking about/talking about moon phases and constellations.

3) Battling a falling apart clothes dryer, whom I have now named Barky. Which, as my husband points out, is better than Sparky.

4) Cooking, cleaning, lesson planning. The usual suspects.

5) Teaching preschoolers about Isaiah the prophet.

6) Planning an out of town trip without credit.

7) Ghost-writing articles (mostly travel ones). Lots and lots and lots of ghostwriting this month.

8) Refining my ghostwriting travel voice by watching Rick Steves travel videos from the library.

9) Reading a lot of Madeleine L'Engle out loud. Because the sweet girl has fallen -- and fallen hard -- for this favorite author of my heart.

10) Watching Mary Tyler Moore season 1 episodes with my dear husband. Not that we have any time, but we're sneaking them in really, really late at night when we're both giggly with exhaustion. And I am discovering that MTM is great television comfort food. I can't tell you how nostalgic and warm it makes me feel. And oh, yeah...a little bit old too (the first season aired when I was 2).

11) Feeling utterly grateful for Christian community. We have been literally held up and sustained in this incredibly lean season by provision we could not possibly have imagined. God's people responding to our needs and to God's promptings and putting feet and hands and hearts to work to help us. My exhaustion level may still be there, but you know, my heart is so much lighter than it was a few weeks ago. Knowing this level of care from so many people makes all sorts of things feel possible in an impossible season.

12) Working on writing chapter 5 of The Four Princesses. Yes!! So excited to get back to this beloved project.

13) Mentally writing book (and movie and music) reviews, and missing Epinions like crazy.

14) Finishing up our afterschool arts program for the fall.

15) Listening to lots of Elgar. And Handel. And Bach.

16) Sneaking in the writing of an occasional poem. (See previous post.)

17) Praying my way through helping the sweet girl with some new levels of intensity and anxiety.

18) Praying WITH the sweet girl, a lot. And reading Isaiah with her. It's been an Isaiah kind of month.

19) Drawing. A little. Mostly in the tired cracks and crevices when I am most worn out but needing a creative boost that involves physically holding a pen/pencil and not sitting at the keyboard.

20) Contemplating where this year has gone. Do you realize Advent starts December 2?

Dear Vincent (an original poem)

I will take up my pencil, which I have forsaken 
in my great discouragement, and I will go on 
with my drawing.
 --Van Gogh

Dear Vincent,

I received your postcard.

I don’t know how much postage

Costs in the past that was your present,

But I do sense that the words cost you deeply.

I thank you for flinging them forward

In the wild, thick-stroked way you love

So that they would stick to the wall of the world

And land in the mailbox of my heart today.

I would just like to say

Take heart, take up, and go on

And know that no matter how hard it feels

To sketch each line

There is someone in the future who believes

That it matters

And who hears the scratching of your pencil

And thinks it is the most encouraging music

She has heard

In a long, long time.

(~EMP 11/16/12)

3 Children and It

No, the title of my post is not a typo. I know the name of E. Nesbit's classic book is 5 Children and It. It's my favorite Nesbit, and one we read as a family about a year ago.

We've been revisiting Nesbit recently with a family read-aloud of The Treasure Seekers. We finished it last night. This was our introduction to the Bastables (I've been wanting to meet them for quite some time, especially since I realized they merit a brief mention from C.S. Lewis at the start of The Magician's Nephew) and we definitely enjoyed the introduction.

At the end of the book, there was a brief bit about the author, and I shared some of it with the sweet girl and her daddy -- how Edith Nesbit was born in 1858, how she wrote for a number of years before she discovered her great talent for writing for children (when she was about forty), the numbers of books she wrote after that, how it amused her when people assumed she was a man, etc. The synopsis mentioned 5 Children and It, which caused us to remember the story fondly.

Then the sweet girl said: "Ha! That's what Madeleine L'Engle could have called A Wrinkle in Time! 3 Children and IT!" and I just about died laughing.

Today's treat on the library hold shelf -- the new graphic novel version of Wrinkle. I was excited to pick it up, but S. has absconded with it already (she read the first chapter in the library). "When I'm done with it, I'll pass it on," she promised generously. She's been raiding my sock drawer recently for socks, so why am I surprised we're now vying for books on the hold shelf?

Life marches on!

Words, Words, Words

It's been a wordy week.

Not only have I been surfing the crest of the wave on essay reading/evaluating, but it's been a delightfully wordy week for the sweet girl. In Latin, she's been having fun with derivatives, and in grammar, she's been learning how to find etymologies in dictionary entries...two activities that go together so well, and yet that just "happened" to come together in our curricula this week. Love those moments of serendipity in learning.

In spelling, she's been working with words spelled with "ie" and "ei" -- and you know, some of those words are tricky, especially the ones that simply do NOT follow the "i before e except after c, or when they sound like an a, as in eighty and weigh." A great mnemonic device except that there are still exceptions like neither and either, and today's bonus word...leisure.

I think I've come up with a couple of ways to help her remember how to spell believe and pieces, however. With believe, she has a tendency to drop the second e. I told her to look for the word "lie" inside of believe, and to think "never believe a lie." With pieces, she just tends to...well, go all to pieces. She's spelled it a couple of different ways, but can't seem to get it down. So I suggested she look for the "pie" in pieces, and remember that "we cut a pie into pieces."

Meanwhile, I had another realization today about the power of words...how sometimes, maybe especially when we're tired, they evoke things for us on all sorts of levels. One of her bonus spelling words, an easy one this time, was "eighteen." And no sooner had the word left my lips than I was seeing, in my mind's eye, a beautiful bouquet of pink roses. I don't think I had consciously remembered, for years, that my parents gave me eighteen pink roses for my eighteenth birthday, but suddenly there they were, pale and lustrous, sitting on the shiny wood of the piano on Dustin Drive.

Words can be playful. They also have power!

Lovely Literary Geek Posts: Wilder Weather

I've had a simply exhausting week -- just the normal exhaustion with grading deadlines on top of it, which has meant not enough sleep for three nights running. And boy, do I feel it. At 44, one does not burn the candle at both ends. The candle burns you!

Be that as it may, utter and total exhaustion has its interesting moments. It sometimes seems to make me hear and see things with unusual clarity, followed (of course) by bouts of raucous giggling. Presidential debates, for instance, can seem a whole lot funnier and a lot less dire when you hear them in sleep-deprived condition. (Sometimes the lack of sleep can pitch me face first into despair...but just as often, it's likely to toss me off the cliff of hilarity. I prefer the latter.)

The other thing that seems to sharpen when I'm tired is my geekiness detector. I use geek here in the most loving way possible. One of the things that delights me about the world of the internet is that it introduces you to other people in the world who have crazy obsessions like your's. Well, sometimes like your's and sometimes quite different, but all in a similar "I just love to talk about this/read about this/research about this/spout fascinating facts about this" vein. I am particularly fond of finding fellow literary geeks, especially when their passions correspond at least somewhat with my own reading passions.

So I was delighted when, just yesterday, I stumbled across a blog called Wilder Weather. It's about...can you guess? can you? Yes, you can! It's about the weather in Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House books, and seeing that such a blog exists made me absurdly happy. The blogger, Barbara Mayes Boustead, is serious about this stuff. She's a writer and history enthusiast who is also an honest to goodness meteorologist and climatologist and she loves tracking down cool facts about the weather in Wilder's books. Did you know that October 15th was the 131st anniversary of the blizzard that marked the beginning of the Long Winter? Now you do, and your life is richer because of it. I know mine is!

The weather in Laura's books has always fascinated me just as much as the food. I was the kind of kid who played "Long Winter" -- I would bundle myself up in blankets and eat bits of plain bread without any butter  (I think I toasted it to make it dry and hard) while I imagined that the wind was howling outside and the snow pouring down and the trains couldn't possibly get through and we were all going to starve before spring. (Little literary geek. Yes.)

When I grew up, my ongoing fascination with the books, especially as my daughter grew old enough to read them/listen to them, got me interested in learning more about 19th century winters on the prairie.  I ended up reading David Laskin's The Children's Blizzard (if you have any interest in the subject at all, this book is a must-read...please read my review at the link to see why). Then I turned to the amazing poems in Ted Kooser's The Blizzard Voices. I wrote about that book in a review titled "Small Poems Like Landmarks in a Storm."

So...my own geek credentials on this subject are pretty high, but not nearly as high as this delightful blogger who is working on a book (oh hooray) about Wilder Weather. As you can imagine, I plan to hunker down with that when it's finally published...probably while wrapped in a blanket and chomping on dry toast.

She Loved It

We finished reading A Wrinkle in Time tonight. It was an emotional experience for me, sharing this book with my daughter, much more so than I even expected.

She loved the book (yay!) and I thought I would jot a few paraphrases of my favorite things she said about it today. I should mention that we'd been reading Wrinkle during the day (school break) and still doing our re-read of our beloved Narnia (up to Last Battle again, but just barely started it) in the evenings....

"Can we read the last chapter of Wrinkle tonight instead of Last Battle? I know everything is going to turn out all right, but I want to find out how!"

"They are going to get Charles Wallace, right? They're going to get home, right?"

"This is a very suspenseful place!"

"I love these characters!"

"It's funny, when you read the first chapters of this book, you think, oh this is a nice family story. And then you keep reading and find out their father is missing and say, oh this is a good mystery. And then they start to tesser to other planets and you say, oh this is an adventure book! And then they go to Camazotz and strange things start happening and you say, oh this is science fiction!"

"All those people whose brains are connected to IT would die if somebody killed IT. So maybe somebody should go to Camazotz and love every person there to get them away from IT." 
 
"Can we read it again, this time slowly? And then I'm going to want to read the next book on my own."

And the moments I definitely heard her chuckle during the final chapter: when Calvin kissed Meg, and when Charles Wallace said they'd landed in the broccoli in the twins' vegetable garden.

Mary's Song

I finally got my review up of Mary's Song, a lovely picture book recently published by Eerdmans Books for Young Readers.

I say finally because the book was sent to me as part of the Early Reviewers program at Library Thing. I've had it for quite a while and the review has been percolating in the back of my mind for ages, but I just now got it up. At least well in advance of Advent! (Though the fall does seem to be flying by...doesn't time seem to speed up when we transition into a new season? The sudden colder weather has me feeling like we're already poised on the edge of winter, and I haven't even put away my summer sandals yet!)

I was especially taken with the beautiful pictures in the book. As I wrote:

Even more than Hopkins’ words, Alcorn’s beautiful pictures invite us to marvel anew over Jesus’ birth. Each sketch is rendered in various media (colored pencil and crayon seem to predominate) on a creamy ivory background. The color palette seems especially royal, with many hues of reds and blues shading into purple, and plenty of lighter yellow or golden touches, though homespun brown has its place in these sketches too. The drawings themselves seem to have been crafted with a light, almost unfinished touch, as though the artist himself moves lightly and wonderingly in the face of the mystery. There are almost no solid colors; the sketches instead are made of many long, flowing lines, crisscrossed with other darker lines to blend the colors almost impressionistically and to give a sense of texture and movement. 

If you'd like to read the rest of the review, you can find it at Library Thing here. I write there as greenglasspoet.

Pearl Harbor (by Steven M. Gillon)

I found an unexpected treat on the new nonfiction shelves at the library this weekend: Pearl Harbor: FDR Leads the Nation into War by Steven M. Gillon.

I've read several books on Pearl Harbor and on FDR over the years -- it's a topic I tend to go back to. I think it started long ago when I visited Pearl when I was eighteen (my sister was living in Hawaii then). Not only did I pick up my first book on Pearl Harbor in the gift shop at the visitor's center there, but seeing the monument and much of the surrounding area forever cemented the place in my mind, so that whenever I read books about it since, I can picture things so clearly.

I also spent a winter in the company of Roosevelt when I read Doris Kearns Goodwin's No Ordinary Time. Maybe it's the sudden chill to the weather that made me drift over to the nonfiction shelves -- autumn and winter tend to be my time to hunker down with history and biography, especially big tomes.

But this is not a big tome, and I am speeding my way through its very accessible prose. Some of this is not new to me, but it's been a few years since I've visited Pearl Harbor in my reading so it feels fresh. I like Gillon's shaping of the narrative too -- he's essentially focused on the first 24 hours for FDR following the attack, though he does some necessary prologue work at the beginning and some side-stepping and rabbit trailing to provide other stories of interest.

Lots of interesting bits stand out, but one struck me especially this evening. At one point Gillon is detailing some of the condescending, sneering attitudes of the fascist nations toward the U.S. -- how many of the leaders assumed our nation was too "soft" to make a difference in the war or see it through, partly because of their beliefs about capitalism, partly because of their racism. At least in one case, however, that of Mussolini, there was sneering condescension about Roosevelt's ability to lead a country because he was crippled. Writes Dillon:

"Most of all, he (Mussolini) simply could not understand how a man incapable of walking could lead a nation during war. 'Never in history has a people been ruled by a paralytic,' he contemptuously said of FDR..." 

Contrast this with Dillon's profile of FDR's actual courageous fight to overcome polio and to help others who were battling it, and his long, arduous return to a political career despite his limitations.

"Once easily dismissed as superficial, ambitious, and shallow, FDR responded to polio in a way that added new depth to his character. It intensified his ability to set priorities and to focus. 'Polio,' Franklin Jr. said, 'taught Father to concentrate on the things he was physically able to do and not waste time thinking about things he could not.'...When asked how polio had changed him, Roosevelt replied, 'If you spent two years in bed trying to wiggle your big toe, after that anything else would seem easy!' 'Having handled that, he probably thought there wasn't anything he couldn't deal with,' said Henry Morgenthau. 'Once you've conquered that kind of illness, anything's possible.'"

Two things really stand out to me here:

~ the difference between looking only at what the surface shows you about a person versus really knowing and understanding their character, and

~the way that tribulation truly can encourage patience, build character, and lead to hope

The very thing that some thought had weakened Roosevelt had, in actuality, made him much stronger and tempered him into a man uniquely qualified to lead our nation in a time of crisis.

A lot to think about in our image conscious time.  A lot to think about as we ponder the qualities we consider essential in a leader.

Poetry Friday: Why Write? (an original poem)

Why Write?

Because words can bite
And words can sting,
But words can fly
And words can sing.
Because words make pictures in your head
And find the heart of gold in lead.
Because words can hope
When hope seems gone
And bring you friends
When you’re alone.

~EMP 10/4/12

Yesterday I found myself playing with list poems, inspired by the wonderful collection Falling Down the Page edited by Georgia Heard. This was my favorite result.

Poetry Friday roundup is at Laura Purdie Salas' site writing the world for kids. Visit and read some wonderful poetry!

Wrinkle Read-Aloud

A momentous event at our house this week...we've begun reading A Wrinkle in Time during morning reading time.

It was such an important book to me when I was around eleven. Although I hadn't put a whole lot of thought into when to introduce it, I guess I always had "eleven" in the back of my mind as the magic number. I'm not sure I had thought of it as a read-aloud either, given the fact that when I first read it, I fell into it headfirst on my own steam. But then, nobody really read aloud to me when I was a child (at least not much, and not onto in later childhood).

If I had thought about it at all, I think I assumed I would likely give the sweet girl Meet the Austins sometime this year. She's been acquainted with the Austins her whole life because I have about a quarter of a century tradition of reading The Twenty-Four Days Before Christmas every Advent, and she was born somewhere in the middle of that tradition and joined it early. She's always liked that story and so it seemed a natural extension to move her on to the rich, middle-grade goodness of Meet the Austins, a lovely book of Madeleine's that I don't think gets enough attention.

But then we were discussing possible reads for our homeschool group this fall (we try to do a monthly book, with families coming in ready to discuss it on a given Friday) and I found myself suggesting Wrinkle. It's kind of funny how it happened -- we'd asked the two older kids, the sweet girl and her good friend (whom I'll call science boy) what kinds of books they'd like to read this year. We're mostly pitching to the two of them in our group, since the rest are littles more or less along for the reading ride. Science boy immediately said "let's read something with spaceships...and aliens!" and not a heartbeat behind him, sweet girl said, "let's read something girlish!"

Now there aren't many books that fit both bills, but Wrinkle comes awfully close. Granted, the elegance of tessering does away with the clunky need for spaceships, but there are "aliens" -- beings who live on other planets and even visit our own. So...space travel, check. Aliens, check. Then there's the added bonus of a girl protagonist. And not just any girl protagonist, but the wonderfully gawky, braces-wearing, scraggly-haired, impatient, math genius Meg Murry -- and seriously, don't you just feel like hugging Madeleine right now, for gracing the world with Meg?

So I said "How about  A Wrinkle in Time?" and everybody said yes, and we picked October as our reading month for it.

I could have just handed the sweet girl the book...but she is just past ten, and does love being read to still. Plus we have a tradition of reading the homeschool books together. Plus -- true confession -- I just couldn't bear being left out of it. It had not occurred to me how momentous it would feel to read Wrinkle with my daughter. Nor had it dawned on me that apparently I've never read the book aloud. I have recommended it to countless people over the years -- I think I could seriously make a list of people I introduced to Madeleine L'Engle (I'm pretty sure reading the time trilogy was a prerequisite for anyone who dated me in college) but I don't think I've ever read it aloud.

Doing so has been a delight but also a bit bizarre. How does one pronounce Uriel -- with a short or long u? How do you reeeaaad ttthhee ssstammmering words of Mrs Which? For that matter, how do you read Mrs Who's Greek quotes when you don't know how to read Greek? What does Calvin sound like? How do you make Charles Wallace sound like a petulant, normal five year old somehow tinged with mysterious otherness? How do you change Mrs Whatsit's voice when she metamorphoses from one kind of being to another? (In the end, I decided not to.) And wow, the Black Thing -- it's pretty scary.

Those are some of the questions and thoughts that have been running through my mind as we've read the first few chapters together this week.

Oh...and in a marvelous bit of serendipity...the amazing "you could not possibly have scheduled this to happen if you'd tried a million times" kind...we are also re-reading Magician's Nephew as our bedtime read aloud. Today I got to read both Mrs Whatsit's flight with Meg, Calvin and Charles Wallace on her back and Fledge's flight with Digory and Polly on his back. I am a very happy reading woman.

On Conan Doyle

I'm about midway through Michael Dirda's biography/memoir On Conan Doyle. I'm really enjoying it, and learning some fascinating things I never knew about Doyle (though admittedly, I went to the book not knowing much).

First off, I love how this book feels in my hand. Especially in this age of e-readers, I think it's worthwhile to celebrate the pleasurable physicality of a book. It's small and slender with a lovely dust jacket featuring a black and white photo of Doyle reading in a remarkable looking sitting room with a tiger-skin rug at his feet.. My copy is from the library so my jacket is also covered in smooth plastic; even that seems to add to the pleasure of how easy it is to hold and read this book. It has ragged edges on raw-cut pages that are a perfect shade of cream for the dark text. (I live in hope that the age of e-readers may, among other things, be creating a culture of beautifully made physical books again....)

I like the way Dirda mixes biography and memoir. The reflections on Conan Doyle are biographically weighty, but they're shaped by Dirda's love of reading...not just Conan Doyle, but many other good books. For him, Doyle was his gateway into a lifelong love of reading, and many of the books and authors he's read since have some connection to Doyle, either in style or simply because he tends to compare other writers to Doyle (the first author of his heart -- he fell head over heels for Sherlock at the age of ten).

It's been interesting to realize just how prolific Doyle was and how much he wrote that most of us never hear about, knowing him primarily as the author behind Sherlock Holmes. Apparently, even in his lifetime, that drove Doyle a little crazy. That people only knew him for Sherlock was especially annoying because Doyle didn't consider Sherlock to be his "important" work. Despite not having read the historical novels and non-fiction of his that he did consider important, I found myself disagreeing -- quite vehemently -- with the sharp distinction he made between important and non-important work:

"The best literary work is that which leaves the reader better for having read it. Now nobody can possibly be the better -- in the high sense in which I mean it -- for reading Sherlock Holmes, although he may have passed a pleasant hour in doing so.  It was not to my mind high work, and no detective work ever can be, apart from the fact that all work dealing with criminal matters is a cheap way of rousing the interest of the reader."

To which I found myself saying "no, no!" in passionate (albeit inner) tones. I really struggle with this sense of "high" and "low" work -- it seems to dismiss good storytelling (and the huge human need for it) far too easily, not to mention it disqualifies a whole body of fiction from being "serious" in one fell swoop. I'm not saying I turn to detective fiction primarily for information or training in the virtues, or that it isn't pleasurable and lighter reading than, say, scholarly writing. But a well crafted work of detective fiction can provide both pleasure and tremendous insight into the human condition and into how human beings respond in times of suffering, confusion, and crisis. Compare Doyle's words there to P.D. James, in this recent interview, who provides a helpful insight into how such fiction has changed since the Golden Age:

"I think that when one writes detective stories one is imposing order, and a form of imperfect but human justice, on chaos... I think there's been a huge change since the novels of the Golden Age," she suggests. "What was popular then was the puzzle: such qualities as psychological truth or even atmospheric location were secondary to it. For me, characterisation is at the heart of my books. From the start, I felt that what I was doing was examining human beings under the strain of an investigation for murder. And such an investigation tears down all the walls of privacy that we build round ourselves and reveals us for who we are. It's a fascinating way of dealing with people."

In a less exalted way, James also values detective fiction for the way it can capture the tone and liveliness of an era (and though she uses Sayers as an example, certainly Sherlock Holmes is also proof of this premise):

"A detective story can give a much truer picture of the society in which it's written than a more prestigious literature," James suggests. "If we want to know what it was like – actually like – to work in an office between the wars, we should go to Murder Must Advertise. It's all there: the people and personalities; the inter-departmental rivalry; the great excitement of having a flutter on the Grand National; right down to how much things cost and attitudes to sex and class. I wanted my books to do the same; to be unambiguously set in the present day, so that they give a picture of the life we're living. And if I'm lucky enough to be read in 50 years' time, I hope people will be able to point to them and say: that's what it was like."

Yes and yes. Both of James' insights here point to reasons why I read her books -- and Sayers, Christie, and Crombie, just to mention my favorites. 

Patchwork Post

"I should blog about that," I've found myself thinking several times recently, but blogging time has been rare, as you can see from the paucity of posting here!

Nothing earth shaking happening, just an incredibly busy and tiring season. That's been true of most seasons lately, but it seems I am feeling more stretched all the time...and not only stretched, but slower. Slower is not always bad. In fact, sometimes I am very happy about the fact that I'm slowing down on purpose, trying to live more deeply right where I am. But sometimes slower just is, mostly because I'm getting older and my energy is seeming more finite all the time.

"Is seeming" -- is a present participle. That's what my tired brain just thought, and it thought that because I've spent a lot of time recently teaching grammar. The sweet girl's fifth grade venture is going swimmingly, but it does seem like she's doing a lot of grammar this year. The new grammar curric we went with, Saxon and Hake, does tons of review each day, though most of the concepts so far have been review or review with slightly new tweaks. I have been utterly thankful for the good foundation of First Language Lessons during the past four years, even more so because she's swimming in deep waters with grammar when it comes to Latin too.

We're loving Visual Latin. I only wish I'd found it sooner! What a terrific program! More on that forthcoming.

In fact, more on everything forthcoming. I've not forgotten that I need to do a part 2 post on teaching literature in the mid-grade levels (it's been percolating in my mind now for almost two months). I've got poetry posts percolating too, and I think I am long overdue for a reading roundup.

For now, it just feels good to check in...in case anyone is still out there listening. It's a beautiful harvest moon October evening, and yes, I'm still here. Busy and tired and slow, but here.

Happy Birthday to the Hobbit!

It's the 75th anniversary of the original publishing date for The Hobbit. I intended to celebrate today by having a second breakfast, but alas, it was one of those days that got off to such a crazy start, I hardly got a first one!

A few things have been making the rounds in honor of this special day. One I especially enjoyed was this article by Devin Brown on the C.S. Lewis blog. It's a lovely post. While most Tolkien and Lewis enthusiasts won't learn much from it that's new, it's still delightful to be reminded of the story of The Hobbit's genesis and of the life-giving friendship between Lewis and Tolkien in the early years.

Two things I especially took away from my reflections on this post today. The first is in reference to The Hobbit's beginning. About that momentous and mysterious start, when Tolkien scribbled the line "In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit" inside an exam booklet he was correcting, Brown writes:

"Had Professor Tolkien not needed the money which grading secondary school exams provided, had there not been so many of them, had there not been a blank page left in one exam booklet, there might never have been the beloved story we know today."

Don't you love that thought? We can trace the lines in hindsight, but at the time they were such ordinary things. Tolkien was a hard working teacher who needed money and took what I'm sure was a mind-numbing job. (There's that insight again: limitations can sometimes push us to new creative territory.) And in the midst of the mind-numbing pile of papers, a blank page beckoned and a story he didn't even know was percolating put forth its first tentative shoot as he scrawled that one gift line.

Isn't it good of God to give us gift lines and gift images? Remember Lewis saying that Narnia started with the picture of a faun carrying parcels in a wood? From such small beginnings -- one line, one picture -- whole stories can bloom. What a wonderful, mysterious thing creativity is.

And I loved this wonderful reminder from Brown's reflection:

"In a real life story as fascinating as the imaginary ones they would later write, J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis became friends, Tolkien became instrumental in Lewis’s conversion to Christianity, and then Lewis became instrumental in Tolkien’s completing his great works.  Together they formed the Inklings, the close-knit Oxford reading and writing group which met in Lewis’s college rooms and at a pub named The Eagle and Child.  It was at these meetings that the early versions of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings were first read aloud, critiqued, and made into what they are today."

Again we can trace the lines. Lewis and Tolkien's friendship, complex as it was, was nourishing and fruitful for them both. As Brown goes on to say, after Jack's death Tolkien would talk about what a debt he owed him and how he wouldn't have finished LOTR if it hadn't been for Lewis' encouragement. It was because Lewis wanted to hear more of the story that Tolkien kept writing; he was the kind of writer who needed that encouragement (I think most writers are, but some more than others). Sometimes in our rush to write and create as artists, we can forget how important that gift of encouragement can be to other artists who are also giving their all to write stories that are good and beautiful and true. What it would be to have a friend like Lewis to draw out the best in us. What it would be to be a Lewis for other writers.

It's the beauty and complexity of that collaboration amongst Lewis and Tolkien and the other Inklings that Diana Pavlac Glyer captures so beautifully in her masterful book The Company They Keep: C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien as Writers in Community. The book is a great read for many reasons, but I think it especially helped me to understand Tolkien better. As I wrote in my review of the book three years ago:

"If one individual Inkling stands out in this volume, it's Tolkien. Though Glyer does a great job of covering the group as a group, it's inevitable that the members who wrote more and are better known will receive fuller treatment. But I think there's more than that in the thoughtful depths of her look at Tolkien: Glyer clearly wants to paint a more accurate portrait of his working style than has been attempted before. He's often been looked at as a kind of solitary genius, but as Glyer points out (and brilliantly backs up) of all the Inklings, Tolkien may have been the most dependent on community for inspiration and encouragement, as he was what I believe she terms a "notorious non-finisher." 

That was due in part to his incredibly lengthy revisions: he could write for years on one project, and create draft after draft. Just consider that the 600,000 plus words of Lord of the Rings took him about two decades to bring to completion, and that he worked many more years than that on his Silmarillion (only published after his death, its many drafts finally edited by Christopher).  Tolkien, Glyer asserts, would never have finished LOTR without the Inklings: "they supported Tolkien's natural impulse to keep polishing and perfecting his work." Beyond this general encouragement, the Inklings and Lewis in particular made specific comments and suggestions that we know (from evidence Glyer provides here) "led to modifications" in the work. Key changes were made in the shape of the narrative, and even in Tolkien's choice of how to end the book" 

On the 75th anniversary of The Hobbit, we can celebrate not only a wonderful story that has lasted in our hearts for so long, but the creative inspiration and collaboration that stood behind it.

The George Lucas School of Cooking

Why is it that I’ve become a better and more creative cook the more our income shrinks?

I’ve been pondering that lately as I find myself cross-referencing my favorite recipes as I try to find ways to stretch what we buy. This works well when you’re cooking for three (or another small number) because many recipes are often written with larger amounts in mind. I can often cut a recipe in half, or at least 2/3, and still have some ingredients leftover. Then it becomes a creative task to try to connect the dots – what other meal can I use the remaining ingredients in? Sometimes I forget all that and just make extra of whatever I’m making – especially if it will freeze well. But sometimes I like the challenge, and my frugal Scotswoman self  loves feeling like I’ve gotten two meal possibilities out of one food item.

This week, for instance, I decided to make a pot of wedding soup. Again, I’m cooking for three, so there’s no way I’m going to start with 12 cups of broth. By cutting the recipe nearly in half, I realized that I was only going to need about half of the ground turkey for meatballs in the soup. The other half I could brown and put away and we could have them with pasta and sauce and a salad later in the week.

The soup also calls for kale (there’s that good “marriage” or “wedding” of meat and greens that gives the soup its title). I got a good size bunch, again knowing we wouldn’t need it all for the soup. Then I started thumbing through the index of the wonderful Recipes from the Root Cellar (a cookbook that never fails me) to see what I could do with a small amount of leftover fresh kale. Why not mashed potatoes and greens? Add a bit of soy sausage to the side and we’ve got another meal this week.

The irony is not lost on me. Years ago, back when I was working full-time for a fairly decent salary and had health insurance coverage and lived near scads of really good grocery stores, I was buying Stouffer’s frozen dinners. (Okay, not all the time, but when we first got married, I relied a lot on convenience foods and frozen foods for the two of us, and only slowly began to learn some tried and true “from scratch” sorts of recipes.) Now that I’m an insuranceless work-from-home mom with a family attempting to do ministry in a tiny urban area that only recently got a small grocery store within easy walking distance again, I count every nickel and dime (sometimes quite literally). And now, of course, I want to buy fresh veggies and fruits and good grains and flours and I want to cook real food.

But maybe it’s not too odd that limitations can make us more creative. Witness the vibrant original Star Wars trilogy (Lucas on a budget) versus the tepid, bloated second generation Star Wars films (Lucas run amok with money). If you don’t want to waste anything you find something interesting to do with it.

Of course sometimes limitation and lack, especially when they dip down to serious levels, can just become exhausting. We’ve been there sometimes – not quite with food (though I’ve had weeks I’ve wanted to bang my head in frustration over eating yet more peanut butter or more beans) but in other ways. There is a fine line, in all levels of life, between limitations that push you to find creative ways to do more with less and actual lack that frustrates you, tires you out, pushes you in the direction of anger and fear.  Dancing close to it sometimes has given me deeper empathy for people who have gone over that edge and live in that place regularly.

Psalms ~ For All Ages

Tomorrow we kick off a new year of Sunday School in our parish. I'm the point person for Sunday School this year, and D. and I jointly teach the pre-K/kindergarten and elementary grades. What that means is that, on a Sunday when enough of the pre-k/kindergarten age kids are there, I take them off to do the Bible storytelling time separately from the older elementary age, and then we all come back together for our missions moment, prayer time, and snack time. Since we're a small congregation, there are some Sundays when we don't have enough kids to do separate classes, and then we keep them all together the whole time -- though it's always a challenge with the little ones needing more wiggle time than the rest.

It keeps me on my toes knowing that I might, on any given Sunday, need to do the Bible lesson for 4 and 5 year olds. They have a whole different level of understanding as well as attention. It happens to be one of my favorite age groups to work with, so I welcome the challenge! I also find the preparation is often good for my own heart. Sometimes shaping the truths of the Scriptures in their simplest terms is not just what the little ones need. It's what I need.

And since we're working our way through the Bible with the kids over a few year period, I sometimes find myself faced with shaping a lesson on a portion of the Bible that not many packaged curricula for this age group tend to touch. A case in point -- this year we're kicking off with five weeks on the Psalms. My dear D., always so thoughtful when it comes to shaping the lessons for the older kids, has divided our focus over the weeks into the wisdom psalms, hymns, lament psalms, royal/Messianic psalms, and thanksgiving psalms.

So I find myself thinking through how to pull this into manageable, teachable pieces for the little guys, and here's what I've come up with:

~Staying on God's path/living God's way
~Praising God
~Telling God when we're sad
~Knowing God is our king
~Saying thank you to God

And really, when you think about it, aren't all five of those pieces part and parcel of the Psalms and of our lives as Christians? If we choose the wise way, not the foolish way, if we remember that God is worthy of our praise no matter what our circumstances and actively praise him, if we're honest before God and pour out our hearts when we're sad or lonely or afraid, if we remember that we serve the King of the universe (and nothing or no one else) and bow our hearts to him, and if we try to live each day as gratefully as we can, remembering to thank him for all he is and does -- well, that's a pretty good grounding for our spiritual lives, isn't it?

The poem I wrote and posted here yesterday, by the way, is very much a lament Psalm. I am tired and stressed and worn out on a lot of levels right now, in some deeper ways than I have ever felt those things before. But you know, it was good to bring my heart before the King and tell him what was on my heart. I learned how to do that from reading and loving and praying the Psalms.

And the Psalms, the prayer book of the community of faith, are not just for mid-life folks like me. They're for the little ones too.

Broken Things (an original poem)

Tonight I feel like a cracked plate

Or a pitcher that won’t hold water.

I am trying to remember the beauty

Of broken things, of birds

With clipped wings, chipped shells

Whose wholeness I can only guess,

Small tiles whose pictures

Made from broken bits impress.

I am trying to remember the glass

I used to find, small and worn,

Rounded smooth to my hand,

And the tiny bits of rock and mica

In the sand ~ the way they sift

Through my fingers, gritty, sharp.

And in the fire’s ashes,

One gnarled string of a golden harp.

Tonight I feel like a piece of old chalk,

A pencil lead slipped from its point.

I am trying to remember the beauty

Of broken forms, of twigs

That snap in storms and lie there on

The ground, and brown leaves,

Paper thin and crumpled, that fall

With whispered sound. I remember cups

With missing handles and bells

That no longer ring and voices

So cracked and dry they can barely sing.

A brittle bit of bone, a sagging step,

A bedraggled hem, a shoe without a heel.

It seems to me I know just how

All these broken things must feel.

Tonight I can hardly recall what it means

To be whole ~ and yet, the form is there,

The full shape, the deep wellness of my soul.

I can not turn from the hands that know

Me best, know every hurt and broken place

And all my aching need for rest.

He loves me with a love that is unending,

Knows all my wretched, ragged rending.

He sees the way my broken self is tending.

And only he can move me toward his mending.

                                                ~EMP

Remembering Madeleine L'Engle (Nov 29, 1918-Sept 6, 2007)

It's not often that I can remember what I was doing exactly five years ago, but this evening I can. It was five years ago today that Madeleine L'Engle passed away, moving from this earth to glory.

She meant so much to me as a person and a writer than her loss felt huge. I spent most of this evening, five years ago, crying and re-reading favorite portions of her books ~ which still take up a proportionately large section of my shelves.

I find it interesting that this day slipped up on me almost unawares, and yet I have had Madeleine on my mind and heart almost all week, as I'm working on the outline of a book that would potentially explore her work and the work of several other authors. 

Instead of trying to say anything moving and profound tonight (when I am, quite honestly, very stressed and tired) I thought I would post a few things from my archives. I have shared about Madeleine a good bit over the years.

Here's a post I wrote in honor of A Wrinkle in Time's 50th anniversary several months ago. It's in the form of a letter to Madeleine.

And this was the initial reflection I posted the day after she died, which I entitled, "For Madeleine, May All Her Seasons Be Blessed."  As I wrote there:

Her writing has shaped me and helped me in so many ways. She helped me think about life in terms of seasons; she helped me learn to order my time and count it as precious. She taught me the importance of names and naming, and what a precious gift it is to be given the gift of someone's name. She taught me to hope and believe that marriage, even or especially in its difficult times, could still grow and flourish. She reminded me to be honest in my prayers. Time and again, she returned my focus to God's amazing love for his beloved creation, and especially turned my eyes again and again to the incarnation and the wonderful gift of Jesus.

So thankful for her life. I still miss her.

Look What We Grew! (100 Species Challenge #s 14 & 15: Zinnias and Cosmos)

Zinnias (plantae asteraceae) so vibrant, have long been one of my favorite "easy-to-grow" garden flowers. This year I accidentally picked up a package of larger variety seeds. The results have been stunning, with this huge beauty the most gorgeous so far.

We also planted cosmos this year (they also belong to the asteraceae family) and they are so lovely, especially their feathery green leaves.

Start of a New School Year

I enjoy live-blogging. I sometimes follow live blogs for sporting events, especially since we don't really have t.v. (beyond what might or might not come in on regular reception minus cable). I like being able to follow along inning by inning in a big baseball game, reading the highlights of what happened.

Most of the time I don't think of my life as something that would be worth live-blogging (can you imagine the boredom of the description? Did the dishes. Folded laundry. Read chapter. Cleaned up spill. Checked email...) but the first day of school is always a day which makes me wish I could do a live-blog feed. Not so much to chronicle all the little things we do, step by step (though that would, at least, make for slightly more interesting reading than the above) but to remind myself of all the little things that bring joy and encouragement in our homeschool life. Not to mention to provide notes to myself about what we can always "tweak" to make something in our learning life work better.

The beginning of the year always feels shiny and new, but this year, thankfully, it's felt more that way than usual, and I'm extra thankful. The summer whipped by and was filled with so much work that it almost felt (almost) as though we'd not gotten a break at all. In fact, physically and emotionally, I'm still pretty tired as I move into this new fall...and I'll admit that had me a bit worried last week as I lesson planned and thought through all the "shape of our days" sorts of things I need to think through when we move back into this season. 

But the sweet girl was rarin' to go yesterday morning, and that makes such a difference. When you have a student who loves learning and is excited about getting the adventure going, it means the world to a teacher!

I was truly amazed at the kinds of leaps she has made learning-wise. It's not just that she's reading and writing and thinking with more confidence. She's taking ownership of her learning in new ways, and that's exciting to see.

Not that we haven't hit a wall already. At least this year it took us until day two to realize, once again, that this adventure we're on is all about learning as real human beings with lots of flaws. Not that we really forget, but sometimes in the shiny newness, we discover temporary amnesia! We are trying Latin (again) after our rather dismal Latin failure two years ago. A shiny new curriculum I am excited about, but the sweet girl still has the taste of the old one in her mouth, and balked about seventeen minutes in. Sigh. But this too shall provide good food for learning, both for student and teacher. Or so I declare.

So what are we studying this year? Besides our usual morning prayer and scripture meditation, we kick off each day (Monday-Thursday) with language arts. That includes spelling, grammar, and writing.  After that we take a little break before diving into math. Right now, while we're still in shiny new school year mode (getting up early!) and the weather is nice, we're getting in a nature/exercise walk after math, sometimes followed by journaling or reading time. Then after lunch we do either history (M-W) or science (T-Th) with supplemental subjects on different days (geography, Latin, health). Fridays are devoted to art and music (with math again afterwards) and with homeschool group later in the day.

Day two done...and tired as I am, so utterly thankful we're rolling again, and especially thankful we've managed to step, with courage, into another year on this journey.

Happy 100th Birthday, Gene Kelly!

It's the centennial birthday of Eugene Curran Kelly, known affectionately as Gene. The landmark dancer, choreographer, singer, actor, director, and producer was a Pittsburgh native. His alma mater, University of Pittsburgh, marked the occasion by giving umbrellas to their 3,000+ incoming freshmen and having them dance on the lawn.

It was a sunny day here today, no rain in sight, but that didn't stop our family from singing and dancing in the rain in our hearts...and watching the celebrated movie on video.

Gene Kelly is one of my favorite screen actors of all time. I've written numerous reviews of his movies from the 1940s and 50s, but I saved Singin' in the Rain for today: the classic 1952 film he co-directed, choreographed and starred in. Here's my take on the best movie musical of all time.

And here's a high-definition video clip of the joyous and always memorable title sequence.

Happy Birthday, Gene!

A Bad Night and a Very Good Day (or Learning to Dance in the Rain)

Late Saturday night...so late that it was actually the wee small hours of Sunday (around 1:00 a.m.)...I was experiencing what I call a bad night. These happen to me occasionally. I'm tired but too wound up to sleep and can't seem to turn off my thoughts. My thoughts lead me in anxious directions, and before you know it, I'm on the border of a full-blown anxiety attack.

This doesn't happen to me often, for which I'm very thankful, but when it does, it almost always seems to happen in those dark, wee smalls when no one else in the house is awake. It's often our family's difficult financial situation that triggers the anxiety, though strangely enough there's not usually an obvious "trigger" that trips me into the anxious zone. I have been through a lot of the biggies in recent months -- things I once thought I'd never survive well, like negotiating our debt and losing my health insurance. They were big things with ongoing challenging repercussions, and yet I seemed to weather them with at least little bits of grace.

No, weirdly, it's the little things that often trip me up. A few years ago, when we first began to realize we were in the crunch for the long haul, we started tightening our belts in all sorts of ways. I remember thinking through everything we could possibly give up that would help, and one of the conclusions I reached is that I should not buy body wash anymore. Now that probably seems silly, but body wash (the scented, silky kind you use in the shower) used to be something I really enjoyed using. But it had gotten expensive, often costing several dollars a bottle, and I knew we couldn't spend that kind of money for something so non-essential, so I stopped buying it and never looked back. I remember having a mild fit of panic, not so much over the loss, but over the realization that there were only so many "small things" left like that we could cut out -- and it still wasn't going to make a huge difference.

This time around, it was another silly little thing. On Friday night we had run some errands in a nearby town, buying some groceries and back to school supplies. Cash flow was tight and I found myself trying hard to make wise decisions about what to buy without processing anything out loud (which doesn't make for a fun family outing...and the sweet girl was already having a bit of an intense evening...W-Mart brings it out in her). We had agreed to stop by a local theater to find out if they were playing the theatrical re-issue of Singin' in the Rain this coming Wednesday. It's to celebrate the film's 60th anniversary and comes on the eve of Gene Kelly's 100th birthday. Singin' in the Rain is my favorite film of all time; I have always longed to see it on the big screen. D. and S. both love it too. I knew we had next to nothing to cover tickets, but I had also heard there might be a matinee, so I was hopeful. (We saw the classic Wizard of Oz on the big screen last year for $1 each!)

So I asked the woman at the ticket counter if they were bringing the movie. She told me yes and confirmed they had a matinee, which made my heart beat faster. Then she informed me that because it was a special event, there were no special matinee prices. And then added somewhat apologetically, perhaps seeing the look on my face, that the price was also higher than their normal ticket because it was a special showing. She then proceeded to quote a price that I knew we couldn't pay. We just didn't have it.

Walking out of that theater without tickets I actually had tears in my eyes. In the grand scheme of things, it was not, is not, a huge deal. It's a movie, for goodness' sake. We have given up lots of nights out over the years for the sake of living simpler lives and being able to have the freedom to keep doing things we love -- like have me working from home so I can homeschool the sweet girl, and having D. work multiple part-time jobs so we can all continue to minister to kids in our little town. And in the midst of all the stuff we've given up have also been all the times we've been utterly surprised and blessed by gifts that we didn't absolutely need but were so blessed by -- a case in point being two recent nights in a hotel near Lake Erie.

So this was not me crying poor us (well, okay, maybe it was a little at first). It's just that -- well, this is Singin' in the Rain. (I know I sound crazy, but stick with me.) I have loved it as long as I can remember because it has that wonderful way of affirming the joyousness of life in the midst of everything. The scene of dear Gene dancin' and singin' in the rain has, in a strange but delightful way, become an icon for me, especially during some of our leanest and most challenging years. Somehow I thought it seemed a little bit like serendipity that we'd have a chance to see it in the theater during the week we were celebrating the 15th anniversary of our move here. And instead, it ended up being just one more thing to let go of.

So there I was, in the wee small hours, feeling anxious because I couldn't buy movie tickets (it felt like the body wash all over again) and then feeling stupid and guilty to be sad about something so trivial in a world filled with so much real deprivation and pain. From there, I moved into full-blown anxiety over the fact that movie tickets are the least of our worries in the coming month -- we've got bills I don't know how we're going to pay. Once the enemy got hold of that stick, I was really getting beaten up. I ended up having to get up for a while, going to the bathroom to have a good cry (and reading time and prayer time). A very bad night before I surrendered it all to the Lord and headed back to bed for a few hours of sleep.

And then...oh joy...yesterday was a good day, and today was even better. Outwardly nothing has changed. My appliances are struggling (and at least one threatening to quit); we're having car problems; D broke another tooth; we still have bills we can't pay including one in a few weeks we truly can't default on. But you know what? Surrendering everything to the Lord, from tears over small hurts and losses to big anxiety over very real lack of resources, makes a difference. Because when things look ridiculously hard and lean, asking God to help you choose to dance in the rain is a good way to go.

So today instead of struggling, I let go again. I chose to remember the wondrous deeds of the Lord. Instead of stressing over lack of work, I ghostwrote a web article even though it didn't pay much. I enjoyed lesson planning for fall and a beautiful walk in the sunshine with my daughter. I overjoyed to her joy and enthusiasm over writing a letter to the new child we are sponsoring through Compassion, a girl in Haiti just her age (thank you, Compassion, for helping us make this connection)! I loved the beautiful picture she drew and painted to enclose in the letter. I slowed down and took the time to cook with the sweet girl -- we roasted fresh beets picked from our own little community garden plot and made homemade scalloped potatoes. And after dinner, all three of us sat on a blanket on the floor and celebrated our 15 years in this town with a miniature tea party complete with peppermint tea, tiny bread and butter slices, and tootsie rolls that rained down yesterday from a birthday pinata of a friend. Drinking tea made us feel veddy, veddy British (and veddy, veddy silly) so we popped in a travel video we'd gotten from the library and spent half an hour oohing and ahhing over the south of England. ("I have to live there," my ten year old said passionately, precisely echoing the way I've often felt. It must be genetic.)

So very thankful for this very good day.

Pondering Teaching Literature in Mid-Grade Years: Part 1

Ten days from the start of the sweet girl's fifth grade year, I find myself pondering -- a lot -- a subject I would have suspected I'd spend very little time contemplating: how to effectively teach literature in the middle grades.

I love literature. It was one of my majors in college, and I've been a bookworm almost since before I can remember (I learned to read very early, and have only one vague recollection of not knowing how to read). I have read to the sweet girl pretty much every day of her life. Our house is full of books. Her dad loves to read, I love to read, she loves to read. She is also beginning to love writing stories, perhaps at least in part because I do too -- and we've spent a lot of time talking about how stories work. We are a story kind of family. I would have told you I had this literature thing down cold -- that it was something I didn't have to think about because reading and loving literature is just a natural part of the way we live.

That's all still true. I do think the most natural way to teach an appreciation and understanding of literature is, quite simply, to a) read a lot, and b) talk a lot about what you love to read. This natural way of teaching and learning is part of why I'm drawn to the Charlotte Mason method of education, which pretty much promotes that kind of learning across the curriculum. Learning is part of life. Approaching it in a natural way fuels learning passions and just plumb makes sense.

So I fully agree with the sentiments in articles like this one, which does a nice job of laying out, simply and clearly, the Charlotte Mason approach to teaching literature. And that is basically like the CM approach to teaching most things: read lots of living books (no twaddle) and then have your children narrate what they learn. Though this discussion of teaching literature adds two tweaks I appreciate: the fact that many books are simply read for enjoyment, not primarily for discussion/narration, and that narration can and should be shaped differently for older students. I think it's that last that I find myself pondering.

What I find myself musing about is the balance between teaching literature the natural way and yet providing my daughter with good tools for beginning analysis of literature -- both the mechanics and literary elements of good writing, and a way of learning to discern deeper meaning in the text. The one thing I don't want to do is turn literature into a dreaded subject by making analysis a heavy lifting exercise, the kind that turns books into chores or into "things" to be decoded. I always think of Billy Collins' poem "Introduction to Poetry" when I think about the way some of us have been taught to 'read', especially the ending:

I want them to waterski   

across the surface of a poem

waving at the author’s name on the shore.

But all they want to do

is tie the poem to a chair with rope   

and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose   

to find out what it really means.

(You can read the whole poem here.)  While I think it takes a lot of time and practice for a student to get to the place where they feel a need to "torture a confession" out of a piece of writing, that's the place where I don't want any student I teach to ultimately end up!

But back to my main reflection. I believe that works of art have inherent, intended, and sometimes even non-intended meaning -- and that the deeper layers of meaning are there for us to find and ponder. That's true of any good work of literature, be it written for children or adults. And while it's true that some works of literature don't require us to "go deeper" to fully enjoy them, many of the best ones do. So part of my job as a teacher of literature is to help students unpack those layers by giving them the knowledge and tools to dig and discern. I also think, as readers/learners get older, it can become an enjoyable thing to be able to see how a writer did something. That may be especially true if you enjoy writing -- because you find yourself beginning to understand the tricks of the trade and to appreciate more deeply the craft it takes to shape a piece of writing.

I've been reading a little book called Deconstructing Penguins where the authors, who travel around to libraries and schools promoting book discussions involving kids and parents, suggest that one way of teaching younger children literary elements/devices is to help them become "book detectives." They suggest teaching children (and they work with kids as young as second grade) elements such as protagonist/antagonist, setting, crisis/conflict/climax, theme, and point of view. They further suggest that an effective way to do so is to help kids understand those elements through discussion of particularly chosen stories, where they're guided to look for "clues" and "evidence" about the "message" of a given book and whether or not an author plays fair and writes honestly. They invite kids to figure out what a book is really "about," and they show, through reporting some of their groups' findings/experiences, some of the creative discussions this method of teaching has engendered.

On the one hand, I'm intrigued by this idea. What kid doesn't love a mystery or enjoy playing detective? There's a playfulness about the approach that I think probably helps it be effective (and from their reporting, I sense they manage to keep the discussions pretty open-ended, not always expecting everyone to come to consensus/agreement). On the other hand, the metaphor does lend itself to the idea of a book, like a mystery, being something that needs "solving" -- as though one could find the footprints and the cigarette ash on the ground and know these things will lead, without a doubt, to a "right" conclusion. (We know how the great Hercule Poirot feels about that idea!) As much as I've enjoyed reading the recaps of their discussions, I think the weakest chapter in the book so far has been the one that should be strongest, where they present their "book detective" approach. The writers themselves seem to realize, even if they don't say it aloud, that there's something intuitively more to discerning meaning than a mere connecting the dots. I think their approach shows better through their discussion recaps than it does through their attempts to explain how it works. 

So...not sure I'm up for the book detective idea, at least not entirely, though I appreciate their insights into the various literary elements, which they explain simply and well on an elementary/late elementary learning level. (Especially good is their discussion of protagonist/antagonist, where they deepen our perception of those terms from simple good guy/bad guy to character trying to push the action forward/character trying to hold the action back. I like the way they emphasize the movement of a story here and elsewhere.)

For the purposes of our learning life together this year, I think an easier and more natural approach will be to simply present literary elements pretty straightforwardly, as ways that help us understand both a story's meaning and art on a deeper level. Some of this, I realize, I've already taught without realizing fully I was teaching it -- just through discussions we've had about books as a family, and perhaps more so through the discussions we've had about the book I'm writing. The sweet girl has a good grasp of the concept of point of view and has even played with using different points of view in her own story-writing. She has begun to ask intrigued questions about certain words that have come up in our book conversations. The other day she wanted me to explain what I meant by "sub-plot" (I had used the word in reference to something we'd been reading in one of the Trixie Belden books). I fumbled around a bit on the spur of the moment, but she must have gotten it. The next day she walked in with her beloved Penderwicks on Gardam Street in hand and announced she had figured out that the main plot was the "Saving Daddy" plan and the subplot was the "Sisters and Sacrifice" play that Jane wrote for Skye. I found that a pretty astute assessment of plot and sub-plot in that particular story! 

I guess what I'm getting at is that many literary elements have come up naturally as we discuss stories we've read and stories we're writing, and I'd like to find a way to tap into that natural learning to make it a little more intentional and explicit. I've thought of having a literary element of the month and using it as a lens to explore whatever books we're reading together as a family (which would likely influence my choice of when we read certain books this year). 

I've been looking for some books and resources that might help me play with this idea and have found at least a couple that look potentially helpful. This post has already gotten very long, so I think I'll save those ideas for part 2.

A Different Kind of Week

I'm feeling wonderfully thankful today in the midst of a very tired week. Not at all the sort of week I was expecting...but sometimes God stops us in our tracks, gently moves aside our well-laid plans, and says, "here, have THIS kind of week instead."

I thought I would be at VBS every evening this week, but thus far I've not made it once. (And they have made it just fine without me. It's going well.) That's because over the weekend I came down with terrible congestion and a croupy cough, a couple of weeks behind the sweet girl (who is finally getting over it). My summer cold immediately seemed to take a dive into sinus infection territory. Awful pain and pressure behind my eyes and in my right ear. My whole face has been aching, especially on the right side, and it's seemed to move into all sorts of muscles so that my neck and shoulder hurt too. And I just keep coughing...

But wait! you cry. This was supposed to be a thankful post! Why yes, it is.

I'm thankful that I've actually had to slow down in the midst of a summer that's had so little time to slow down. The sweet girl and I spent Monday cutting out dozens of small pieces of craft foam for a VBS project (while I coughed and coughed and coughed...) and we've watched tons of the Olympics on our t.v. without cable that hardly *ever* gets decent reception but for some reason this time around is. Most of the time. Except when we have to stand in one spot to the left of the set when it decides to get the hiccups. And sometimes stand on one leg like storks or wiggle our bodies in a strange kind of olympic dance. But even that's been sort of fun.

It's been fun letting my ten year old girl stay up extra late a couple of nights so we can watch gymnastics. We've turned off all the lights except for the television and cuddled on the couch in our pajamas (while coughing, coughing, coughing...) and she has been enthralled by the women's gymnastics team. An unabashed Gabby Douglas fan (a picture of Gabby went up in her room today, and she spent part of the afternoon practicing tumbling on makeshift mats) and yet I've been happy to see that her love of the sport is not limited by her love of country. She has been highly impressed with the Russian gymnasts (that's my post-Cold War era kid!) and she worries about the morale of anyone who falls off beam or takes a big hop on a landing. I've loved hearing her chatter knowledgeably about routines and apparatuses, using the jargon she's picked up from commentators.

Then there's been the fact that, try as I might to get writing, cleaning, and lesson-planning work done this week, all the stuff I'm a month behind on, sometimes when you're feeling this miserable, you've just gotta read. Not that I need an excuse to read, but it's nice to be able to cushion your aching head and give in. I've been winging my way through Deborah Crombie's Kincaid/James series since spring, and I do mean winging. I finished the 9th book in the series this past week (Now May You Weep, another great one) and can't wait to pick up the 10th. Gemma is my favorite character, but I'm a little in love with Duncan (which makes sense, since Gemma is too). I've also been enjoying more P.D. James, both by book and video. I just finished the third Adam Dalgliesh book Unnatural Causes, and D. and I have been very slowly wending our way, mostly on weekends, through the mid 1980s mini-series adaptation of Cover Her Face based on the first Dalgliesh book.

And finally, are you ready for this? We're getting a vacation this month! Two nights/three days!  Courtesy of several members of my extended family who know we are tired (and broke) and who want to bless us. I  am so utterly grateful. Time to breathe, to enjoy some fresh air and green, to see some dear friends. I am very much looking forward to it.

There are other things that have blessed this week...Ted Kooser poetry, Simone Dinnerstein playing Bach on piano (on my CD player), a note from a dear friend who sent two lovely little keepsakes to the sweet girl from a recent trip to Italy. A sister visiting Martha's Vineyard, the island where D. and I honeymooned 20+ years ago in what feels like a fairy-tale from another age (and the chance to look at the pictures from that magical week...were we really ever that young?)! An early reader's copy of an Eerdman's picture book for me to review. Not having to cook much all week because everyone else is eating at VBS and I don't much care what I eat when I'm sick. Even some of the harder things -- a challenging and unexpected email conversation with a friend, a time or two when I've been tired enough to lose my patience with the sweet girl's worry struggles -- well, even in the harder things, I am feeling blessed to know I am growing and learning and God is still shaping me.

So...not the kind of week I was expecting at all. But the kind of week God wanted to give me. The kind I've been glad to receive.

Read-Alouds for the Coming School Year

It's that time of year again...the time when I begin to compile my book lists for the coming fall. Actually, I usually do this in June or July, but this summer has been so busy I'm just now getting to it in August. And that thanks mostly to a sinus infection! (Silver lining, anyone?)

In the past, I've discovered that, as I look ahead to the next school year, I'm really compiling several lists. There are books I want to recommend to the sweet girl for independent reading. Her reading totally took off this summer -- she has been swallowing books whole, and actually completed the entire booklet for the library summer reading program (all 36 hours). Then there are books that I know I either want her to read independently or us to read together -- books that tie into subject matter we're tackling. This year the subject list contains ancient history, late elementary/early mid-grade biology, Middle Eastern geography, ancient art, and the orchestra, just to cover the biggies.

But then there's the really fun list: the list of read-alouds we do as a family, mostly in the evenings and on car-trips if we end up traveling during holidays. We've always tried to keep this a mix of fun things that we all just really want to read (which can include light and fluffy reading, especially during the summer) and literary classics (which may or may not always fall under the "we really want to read this" but we try to do them anyway). I like this list because we can really stretch it. Since we're reading the books together, we don't have to worry too much if the content or style is "over" the sweet girl's head -- because we can talk about it together. Sometimes it's good to pitch high even if the throw ends up a bit wild.

So I'm trying to compile a list of potential good reads for this coming year, when our dear daughter is ten and will be working through fifth grade work. A few possibilities so far include The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; The Railway Children (to follow up on our Nesbit read from last year -- Five Children and It); The Blue Fairy Book; Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of Nimh; Swallows and Amazons; Bella at Midnight; Little White Horse; Wind in the Willows; Little Women; Anne of Avonlea (sequel to Anne of Green Gables, which she loved last year); Bambi; Black Beauty. Ah, and we want to do more Shakespeare from the Lambs and from Nesbit (more on that another time when I finally get around to finishing my post about this summer and King Lear).And we plan to read the last Martha book in Melissa Wiley's wonderful series, and maybe venture into the Charlotte books too.

The jury is still out on whether or not we will venture more into Kipling -- we did big portions of Jungle Book and Just-So Stories last year. Captains Courageous? Kim? Poetry? And I'm not yet sure if we'll do more Twain past Tom Sawyer yet (maybe The Prince and the Pauper)? The sweet girl loved both The Secret Garden and A Little Princess, so should we try Little Lord Fauntleroy (one I've not yet read...)? How about Peter Pan? Sherlock Holmes (abridged or not abridged, that is the question...) My husband and I have been discussing Dickens -- all we've read aloud together so far is A Christmas Carol. What do you think: would a ten year old be up for Oliver Twist?

I know I am leaving off tons of good things...so please, please recommend more books. We may have read them already, we may have considered but forgotten them, or we may already have them on a list for later, but regardless, I'd love to hear some of the gems you think our little family would love.

The Beauty of Discipline

Our family has been catching as much of the Olympics as time and our awful television reception will allow. Actually it's been coming in better than I anticipated, though we've had some fun moments of needing to stand (yes, stand) in a very specific place to the left of the t.v. set in order to improve reception! The sweet girl and I have been experimenting with occasional movement to see if that helps. We call it our Olympic dance.

I've been really struck by something during these games in London, and that is the beauty of discipline. There is something truly lovely, sometimes even awe-inspiring, about seeing someone do so well at something that takes a great deal of skill, practice, and dedication. Watching Kenya's Tiruenesh Dibaba win the women's 10,000 meter race this afternoon, with such grace, poise, and joy, I found myself in tears -- and thinking of Eric Liddell's phrase "When I run, I feel his pleasure."

Watching a great athlete perform with tremendous skill reminds me of those moments I have sometimes as a reader or listener. When you read a beautiful stanza of poetry or elegantly crafted passage of prose, when you hear a motif in a piece of music that pulls through your heart like a bow gently pulled across violin strings, there is something wondrous about it. Sometimes those moments happen when we're experiencing tried and true classics, but other times they sneak up on us suddenly -- in the middle of just a solidly crafted piece of work. I had it happen to me the other day when reading the detective novelist P.D. James. I waded into a descriptive paragraph and by the time I got the end of it, I was just filled with delight that someone had crafted words that carefully and well.

As I writer, I've not had many moments like this -- but there have been a few. And I'm convinced that those moments happen more frequently when I am in the most disciplined seasons of crafting. Talent matters in all sorts of endeavors -- from running to writing to making music -- but the discipline of working at a skill day after day after day eventually pays off. And so does the ability to abandon oneself to the sheer joy of doing something well, even if (on any given, particular day) we don't win a gold medal."When I write, I feel his pleasure." Those are the most golden days of all.