Debbie Levy's Blog, page 10

Jumping Into The Children’s Poetry Blog Hop

Most writers spend a lot of time sitting at their desks, messing around on their computers.  So when we do something called a “Children’s Poetry Blog Hop,” which sounds like something that involves dancing or, at the very least, moving around, it is no surprise to find that the “hop” involves. . . sitting at our desks, messing around on our computers.

Works for me!  I’ll dance later.

April Halprin Wayland and Janet Wong seem to have started the Children’s Poetry Blog Hop back in September.  April nominated the rabbit pictured here on the left, whom she called Mortimer, as the event’s meme, which is the first time I have ever used that word.

Janet took to calling the exercise “The Mortimer Minute” and offered a logo, I assume because the rabbit photographed in April’s blog post filed suit for invasion of his right of publicity. 

Here’s the task April put before the blog- hopping writers:  “Make up three questions you’ve always wanted to be asked in an interview about children’s poetry and then answer them on your own blog.”  Janet added some more rules.  She is, after all, a lawyer.  I am going to ignore Janet’s rules because I, too, am a lawyer, and because one of her rules is “Keep it short, please!” which I have already violated.

So the weeks spin by.  The thing circles around to fellow D.C.-area writer Mary Quattlebaum.  Mary does her lovely and entertaining post, enlisting her dog, Yoshi, as an assistant, which at first I thought demonstrated a pushback against the whole rabbit thing until I noticed that Yoshi was wearing rabbit ears (see photo).  And Mary taps me and Jess Stork to carry on the blog hop.  And so here I am.  I, too, am enlisting my dog in this endeavor, although I will not outfit her with rabbit ears.  I would like to say that Toby is far too dignified for such a prank, but that would be untrue.

Toby is asking the questions here, although in the photograph she is doing something she far prefers to interrogating people about poetry, which is sleeping with her head, and only her head, under the bed.

TOBY:  What do you do when you come across a poem that makes your fur stand on end, as if you have just seen a fox in the driveway which causes you to strain and squeal at the door until somebody, *somebody!!* lets you out?

ME:  I read it again to make sure I can believe my eyes.  I read it aloud, making sure I can believe my ears.  I try to sit with it, but, since it is like that fox in the driveway–a source of excitement–I get up and pace around, as I am a bit uncontained.  Throughout the day, I look at it periodically.  I may send it to somebody.  And I make a copy of it and put it in a file labeled “Things I Like.”

TOBY:  Huh.  I thought you were going to say you gently hold it in your mouth, which is the sensible thing to do with something you love.  Anyway, what are some of the things in your “Things I Like” file?

ME:  There’s a photocopy of page 49 of Jennifer Roy’s Yellow Star, with the following lines highlighted:

She does not say “I love you” in hugs or kisses,

but her love fills my plate,

and I gobble it up.

There’s an interview with Cynthia Rylant from Paul Janeczko’s The Place My Words Are Looking For, a book in which poets talk about their work.  She talks about a boy she met who told her how he feels every time he walked into the Western Auto Store in his town, which is the way you feel experiencing a good sunset.  She concludes:

A lot of people think they can write poetry, and many do, because they can figure out how to line up the words, or make certain sounds rhyme, or just imitate other poets they read.  But this boy, he’s the real poet, because when he tries to put on paper what he’s seen with his heart, he will believe deep down there are no good words for it, no words can do it, and at that moment he will have begun to write poetry.

The thing I put in the file most recently is a poem by Frank O’Hara, “Autobiographia Literaria.”  You can read it here, at the Writer’s Almanac.  It may not make everyone’s fur stand up on end, but I find I can’t turn away from it.

TOBY:  Do you like poems about dogs?

ME:  Oh, yes I do.  My son Ben–you remember him, Toby, your first owner in the way all dogs are owned first by a child in the family and then by the parents–introduced me to Mary Oliver’s “Percy” poems a while ago.  Here is her “Percy (Six)”, from The Truro Bear and Other Adventures:

You’re like a little wild thing

that was never sent to school.

Sit, I say, and you jump up.

Come, I say, and you go galloping down the sand

to the nearest dead fish

with which you perfume your sweet neck.

It is summer.

How many summers does a little dog have?

Run, run, Percy.

This is our school.

And here is my own dog poem, a haiku:

Emily Post For Labradors

This is the first rule:

Always answer the door with

a toy in your mouth.

TOBY:  [Looking pleased.]

I am tagging the versatile and talented Jacqueline Jules to carry on the Children’s Poetry Blog Hop.  Jackie is the author of the multi-award-winning Zapato Power book series, as well as a host of other books and more poetry than I can quantify.  Her picture book, What a Way to Start a New Year! came out in 2013, and 2014 will bring Never Say a Mean Word Again and Zapato Power:  Freddie Ramos Stomps The Snow.  Jackie will post in this space on November 8.

But wait, there’s more!  I am also tagging the versatile and talented (I know I used those words already, but they fit) Cynthia Cotten, whose picture book The Book Boat’s In and story collection Window Across Time both came out earlier this year.  Look for Cynthia’s post next Friday on her blog, Writing It Down.

Thank you, Mary Q, for bringing me into this whole mishegas.

Good is Good

Thinking about inspired novel openings for a guest blog post over at Adventures in YA Publishing led me to the Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Rebecca Stead books on my shelf.   Yes,  very different writers with very different novels for very different audiences.  But they both know how to start a story and good is good.  See what you think:  http://tinyurl.com/lpnnb4p.

Wish Fulfillment

As close readers of this website–so, basically, me and my husband–already know, when I was seven years old my mom and I sent my first picture book off to the Scholastic Book Club.  It was called The Little Red Train, and I can’t show you what it looked like, because I never saw it again, but I can tell you it looked a lot like this–

 

 

 

 

 

 

–a book I wrote around the same time, only the one we sent off had a red train instead of a purple tugboat.

Weeks went by and, shockingly, I did not hear back from the editors.  Months went by—nothing.

Every  month when the book club newsletter came, I kept looking for my book for sale, thinking maybe the editors at Scholastic wanted to surprise me by publishing Little Red Train without telling me.

They didn’t surprise me.  I got on with my life, albeit with my spirit a wee bit diminished.

So I am exceptionally pleased to report that, all these decades later, my book is finally a Scholastic Book Club book.  No, not Little Red Train.  But just as exciting for me, a special paperback edition of Imperfect Spiral is an October 2013 Scholastic Book Club selection.

The seven-year-old who lives inside of me is very, very happy.

She is also laughing, and here is why:  Imperfect Spiral is the “October Tearjerker” and–can you read this in the image I’ve pasted here on the left?–when you buy the book you get a pack of tissues.

And on the pack of tissues is this:  ”Read it and weep!”

You could call this a case of be-careful-what-you-wish-for.  I’d rather just laugh, and thank the Scholastic Book Club for finally fulfilling my wish.

 

 

 

Jutta Salzberg Levy

I have put off writing this post.  I have put off writing, because it is so painful to share the news that on September 4, 2013, my dear mother, Jutta Salzberg Levy, died.  Not just that, though–it’s not just that it is painful.  If I’m going to tell you about my mother’s death,  you see, I want to tell you about her life, too.  You may know something of her life, because she is, after all, the central figure in my book, The Year of Goodbyes.  But that book covers just one year in her long (not long enough) life, when she was 11 and 12 twelve years old.  And there is so much more to know than her life in Germany in 1938.

So I have put off writing because when I reach inside for the right thing to say here, I am finding both a geyser of memories and, at the same time, a well that has run dry.  Some might call it writer’s block.  I think it’s simply daughter’s grief.

And yet, I do want visitors to this website–who are likely to know “Jutta Salzberg” from The Year of Goodbyes–to know that she is gone, and I want you to know at least a little bit more.  For that little bit more, the best I can do for now is to share what I said about Mom at her funeral service. . . .

———

When Rick told me on Thursday morning, the day after Mom died, that my sister in law and brother in law were going to drive in to D.C. from Ithaca for today; when Sharon told me, also on Thursday, that my mother’s niece and her husband were driving down from New Haven—I had the same impulse I have when I catch a really nice fish:  To tell my mother.  “Mom, Ann and Brian are coming in, isn’t that nice; Mom, Susie and Marty are driving down, isn’t that great; Mom, Kathy flew up from Greensboro; Jon and Melni are here from Connecticut; Mom—I caught a 23 inch rockfish. . . .”

I’m having the same impulse now:  “Mom, look at all your friends who gathered to say goodbye!”

I don’t know that I’ll ever free myself of the impulse—the need—to pick up the phone or get in the car and drive over to talk to my mother.

And I know that I’m not the only one.  My mother made friends everywhere she went and at all stages of her life.  In the grocery store checkout line.  At the gym.  In the beauty parlor.  The nail salon.  The theater.  The doctor’s office.  The dialysis center.  At my dining room table, with my friends.  At my friends’ dining room tables, with theirs.  There was, it seems to me, nothing my mother liked to do more than get to know people, all kinds of people, from all walks of life and different ages and religions and ethnicities and, even, believe it or not, political persuasions.

We could always get a table at Clyde’s because she became friends with servers and managers there.  We could always get a hot ticket at the Kennedy Center because she became friends with a very dear man, whose name shall remain top secret, in the box office.  She didn’t make friends to score a reservation or a theater seat.  Mom was without guile in that way.  She made friends because she found people, in all their variety, infinitely interesting and inherently worthwhile.

But, as anyone who knew her knows, my mother was not all talk.  Relationships and the attendant yakking were central, but so were experiences.  Here are some things Mom did with me into her 80s:  kayak, fish, fish from a kayak, run around in a power boat, run aground in a power boat at a fairly high speed (my heart was in my throat, she was kind of, “and so?”), explore Sugarloaf mountain or, to be exact, the products of the Sugarloaf mountain winery, go to dive-y jazz clubs. . . .

Here are things she did without me—not into her 80s, but still—helicopter around the rim of a volcano, get submerged in a submarine, travel to Alaska and Russia when such travel was still exotic, become a charter member of Bally Total Fitness and joyfully head to the gym for classes—aerobics, weights, Pilates—almost every day. . . .

Really, Mom could be a beer commercial:  “Go for the gusto.”  She loved the Kennedy Center, National Theater, opera, parties, movies, her grandsons, the rest of us in the family, her friends. . . .

And so I’m back to her friends.  Which brings us back to relationships, and to talking, and how, right now, I want to say, “Hey, Mom, shall I bring you a copy of Rick’s eulogy?”

But I’m going to veer in a slightly different direction, to finish out with something else that Mom loved, and this is a direct quote:

“I love my stuff.”

She said this to an auditorium full of seventh and eighth graders at the Holton-Arms School.  It was 2010 and I’d just finished a talk on my then-new book about Mom’s last year  in Nazi Germany.  One chapter depicts my 12-year-old mother agonizing over what would fit into the suitcase she was allowed when she and her family were packing to leave Germany forever.  Now, at Holton-Arms, it was Q&A time, and I had a not-so-secret weapon in the audience:  my mother herself.  Hands waved.  The kids wanted to know—how did she feel leaving behind her friends, family, home?  How did she feel about leaving her stuff?

How did she feel?  “Terrible,” she said.  “I love my stuff.”

Truer words were never spoken.

When we sifted through her stuff at the house on Vance Place, before the move to the apartment, Mom could barely contemplate selling anything.  I insisted—everybody downsizes, Mom!—and we pulled together enough for an uninspired estate sale.

I admit:  Mistakes were made.  The Barbra Streisand CDs:  missing and presumed trashed.  There were tears.

The opera glasses that belonged to Mom’s mother-in-law, a woman so forbidding that my mother only ever referred to her as “Mrs. Levy,” not “Mom” or “my mother-in-law”: missing and presumed sold.  More tears.

My mother’s love affair with her stuff makes sense.  You may lose your childhood, but if you manage to hang on to your poesiealbum—it’s not entirely lost.

You may lose your father at a young age, but if you have the mother-of-pearl handbag he gave you, his doting love remains tangible.

Your mother-in-law never liked you—but in the end you got her exquisite opera glasses.

So, loving your stuff isn’t really about loving your stuff.  It’s about loving your life.  And, although there were certainly some low points, my mother loved her life.  It was full of people, it was full of gusto, and also, okay, it was full of a certain amount of truly cherished stuff.

At a park in Hamburg, Germany

Vacationing with family near Lodz, Poland (Jutta is on far left)

Around 18 years old, Washington, D.C.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

2005 reunion in D.C. with classmates from 1930s Jewish School for Girls of Hamburg, Germany

With Valerie and Janee Ross, creators of incredibly good Boss ice cream

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

With me and Sister Patricia Gamgort, OSB, of Saint Martin’s Ministries, Ridgely, MD

Making an instant connection, of course, with Adriana Trigiani

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Garrison Forest School, Owings Mills, MD

And now she paddles away. . . .

Rounding Up The Early Reviews

It’s Imperfect Spiral‘s four-week birthday, the perfect occasion for rounding up the blog reviews for this, my first young adult novel.

I won’t collect all of them here.  That would be obnoxious, right?  Or perhaps I should say “more obnoxious,” if we start from the premise that all of this self-promotion is obnoxious. . . .

Starting with a couple of reviews by teachers:  I love when educators like a book so much they want to share it with their students.  So I appreciate what the ReadingJunky (a “multi-layered story of love, blame, and justice”) and The Hodgenator (“one of my favorite reads of 2013″) have to say about Imperfect Spiral, and you can read their reviews here and here.

Over at Teenreads, Imperfect Spiral “just keeps getting better” with the illegal immigration story line that is layered in with Danielle’s and Humphrey’s stories, “giving IMPERFECT SPIRAL even more meaning to its readers.”   And I’m pleased that the KellyVision blog (“I absolutely loved this book”) thinks that the novel “would be ideal for book clubs.”  I agree!  Book club participants, invite me to join you for a Skype session.  Then there’s Kacey Vanderkarr, herself a young adult author, who writes, “The story was so carefully created–it wasn’t that the author used distraction to keep the reader from figuring it out.  I was just caught up in everything, so every pivotal moment felt right and fell into the perfect spot.”

I’ll close it out here with National Book Award finalist’s Beth Kephart’s post about Imperfect Spiral.  (Her books include A Slant of Sun:  One Child’s Courage, Undercover, The Heart is Not a Size, Small Damages, and the just-released Handling The Truth).  To my great pleasure, she finds Humphrey “one of the most endearing little boys I’ve encountered in all of literature.  He is big hearted, smart, playful, and still a kid.  He is the sure thing, and he is gone.”  And overall:  “Tender, compassionate, big–a book written neither to leverage nor advertise an issue (but to illuminate it)–I recommend Imperfect Spiral to every reader out there.”  Read the complete post here.

Okay, so maybe this all really is too obnoxious.  Let me assure you, there are some reviewers who criticize the immigration issue and other elements of Imperfect Spiral.  But I don’t have to publish links to them, do I?

I Can’t Improve On These Posts

About the event I shared with Beth Kephart last Saturday at Hooray for Books!–in which we talked about the lines that separate and connect fiction, nonfiction, memoir, and autobiography (not to mention poetry)–I can’t improve on these tweets and posts.  Thanks, Beth and Serena Agusto-Cox, for doing the work for me!

Hooray! An Event of Successful Fiction and Memoir – http://t.co/PlT9W9tMU6 @BethKephart @debbielevybooks @HFBooks

— Serena Agusto-Cox (@SavvyVerseWit) July 28, 2013

@HFBooks @debbielevybooks How incredibly wonderful this day was for me: http://t.co/AmeHdYO3Bn

— Beth Kephart (@BethKephart) July 28, 2013

 

An Afternoon With Beth Kephart

            

Nearly every book lover I chat with about young adult fiction and memoir knows who Beth Kephart is.  So I probably don’t  need to introduce her here, but I will, if only because it’s so enjoyable to write an introduction for a writer of her accomplishments.  Beth’s first book, a memoir, was A Slant of Sun:  One Child’s Courage, and it was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1998.  Her subsequent books–novels such as Undercover, The Heart is Not a Size, Dangerous Neighbors, Small Damages (this is just a partial list!)–have garnered too many starred reviews and “best of” designations for me to count.  Beth is also a master teacher, speaker, and essayist.

Apart from the pleasure of telling you about someone you probably already know, here is why I’m talking about Beth:  this coming Saturday, July 27, I will have the opportunity to spend an afternoon with Beth at Hooray for Books! in Alexandria, Virginia.  We’ll be talking about books and the line between fiction and reality, and you are welcome to join us.  Beth will talk about two of her books in particular, the novel Small Damages and her brand-new Handling the Truth: On The Writing of Memoir.  I’ll focus on my brand-new novel, Imperfect Spiral, and on my nonfiction-in-verse The Year of Goodbyes:  A True Story of Friendship, Family, and Farewells.  We’ll each read briefly from these books and talk about their creations.  The afternoon’s theme is “Get Real,” so you can be sure that most of our discussion will be about reality in writing–the lines between fiction, nonfiction, and memoir and all the places in between.  For those who are inclined to write, we’ll have in-store writing exercises related to our discussion.

               

So:  Saturday, July 27, 3:30-5 p.m., Hooray for Books!, 1555 King St.  Alexandria, Virginia 22314, 703-548-4092.

Beth and I look forward to seeing new and familiar faces there!

 

Book Birthday!

Today is publication day for Imperfect Spiral, day two of the Imperfect Spiral blog tour, day three of this fourth week of summer, day four of a stretch of no-rain weather, after endless rains, here in the D.C. area (but the day is young). . . . I will stop now.

Back to the book, my first novel for young adults.  Today’s stop on the blog tour is over at Happy Book Lovers, where you’ll find a review.  The tour kicked off yesterday at The Irish Banana Review, with an interview of moi.  (My use of French is an homage to a character in the book.)  And here are links to some early reviews:

http://kaceyvanderkarr.com/2013/07/13/review-imperfect-spiral-by-debbie-levy/

http://mustbe14.wordpress.com/imperfect-spiral/

http://www.alan-ya.org/page/alan-s-picks

I wish my book a long and happy life, and I wish you, dear reader, would go out today and get yourself a copy!  On bookstore shelves everywhere, so I’m talking about an opportunity for instant gratification here.

Or, if you are in the D.C. area and can bear to delay your gratification for forty-eight hours, please come to the Bethesda Library at 7 p.m. this Thursday, July 18.  The library and the great independent bookstore Politics and Prose are hosting my book launch party for Imperfect Spiral.  Details here and here.

Parks We Love

Getting geared up for the release of Imperfect Spiral next week!

And in that connection, since much action in the novel takes place in a neighborhood park, I’ve been thinking about parks that I have known and loved.  When I was in high school, my favorite was Sligo Creek Park, in Silver Spring, Maryland.   It’s a long, meandering strip of a park that follows a stream.  I rode my bike there.  I walked along the creek.  I took photos with my beloved Minolta SRT-101.

This picture from Sligo Creek won first place in the regional park administration’s annual photo contest–in the “junior”/”monochrome” category.  This was, as it turned out, the height of my photography career.  And it was back in the days when you didn’t need to dial the area code to make a phone call.  Long, long ago. . . .

In Imperfect Spiral, the fictional park is on a fictional street, Quarry Road.  But I can see it–with its swing set, roundabout, climbing gym, three bumblebees mounted on springs, picnic tables, and basketball court–with perfect clarity.  As if I had taken a picture with my SRT-101.

Want to share parks you have loved?

A Terrapin Tale

A couple of weeks ago, I came upon a diamondback terrapin laying her eggs in a small, deep hole she had dug in the sandy soil and pebbles at the threshold of a shed.  It was a sight to behold and although I had my trusty iPhone video camera with me, I was so excited at what I was watching that all I managed to film of the egg-laying was my leg.  About three minutes of my Bermuda-shorted thigh, to be exact.

But I settled down enough after the deed was done to take some pictures and video of a sight that was almost as thrilling to a nature nerd like me, and that was the terrapin using her hind, webbed feet to cover up the hole that she’d excavated for her eggs.

It took her a while, but by the time she was done, you would never have known that ten minutes before, the place was a reptilian construction site.  All contractors should clean up a site the way this mother terrapin did.

And then she walked off without a backward glance and took a flying leap into the river.  Here’s my video:

Returning some hours later, the site appeared disturbed to me.  Did some other critter–an osprey, a fox, a crow–come along and eat those eggs already?  Nature may be fantastic, but it’s cruel.  I wasn’t going to poke around and risk damage to the eggs, if they were still there, to find out.  I’ll just have to keep an eye out for tiny hatchlings in 60 to 120 days.

Now you didn’t think you’d get out of this post without a book reference, did you?  I can’t write about diamondback terrapins without mentioning a great picture book about this animal, the state reptile of Maryland, called Jemma’s Got the Travel Bug.  It’s by my friend Susan Glick, with vivid, appealing illustrations by Kelli Nash.  I love this gentle but also exciting book about a young terrapin’s travels in the Chesapeake Bay.  A perfect summer read for the kids in your life.