Deedee Cummings's Blog, page 10

Scary Books and Facing Fears

Although retailers started preparing for Halloween in July, most of us don’t really start getting into the spooky season until well into the month of October. Maybe September! Some people hate a scary Halloween season; they prefer a cute version of spooky, like on the order of the Peanuts gang. (My personal favorite!) Other people are all in on screams and a scare factor.

At the Columbus (Ohio) Book Festival this past summer, several children’s authors held a panel discussion about writing horror books for children. Both speakers, Mar Romasco-Moore and Matt McCann, talked about how as children (and into adulthood), they have used writing and reading to process things that scare them through the safety of books. A reader who is scared while reading has the ultimate capacity to close the book if it feels overwhelming. They can stop the situation if and when it feels uncomfortable. 

Scary books aren’t as visceral as a movie, which is another reason why some kids like them. Just as they control whether and when they open and close the book, they control what their imagination makes of the words. 

Sometimes parents want to steer their children away from scary books because the parents don’t think these books are “quality” literature. But sometimes scary books (and any book, really) serves a purpose beyond just being quality literature. Books sometimes are what kids need to process feelings, including fear, and on a greater scale- the world around them. Books sometimes inspire kids because of the fear factor. How many authors who publish now were inspired by Stephen King or the Goosebumps series when they began reading these stories in school? 

Scary books can also be just a fun, entertaining romp. Many people would not consider themselves horror devotees, but they can get on board with a Grady Hendrix novel or a Victor LaValle book once a year in October.

Have you ever read a scary book to work through a fear? Comment below an let us know how a scary read helped you. 

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It Pays To Read and the Louisville Book Festival

Make A Way Media was founded by Deedee Cummings after she worked as an in-home therapist and saw just how many children lacked books in their homes. Children need books and they need books with stories and characters that reflect their own experiences. In children’s literature, this concept is called “windows and mirrors”.

She began buying books to use in therapy and giving them away to the kids she worked with. Recognizing that the call was greater than she could address on her own, Deedee went on to found the It Pays to Read program and the Louisville Book Festival in her hometown of Louisville, Kentucky.

Last year, Deedee was responsible for children in her community getting more than 7,000 books directly in their hands. 

The Louisville Book Festival is now in its fourth year. This year it will be held on November 10th and 11th in downtown Louisville at the Kentucky International Convention Center. The festival will host over 100 authors, exhibitors, presenters, and even Pete the Cat is expected to make an appearance.

There are so many ways you can help your community highlight literacy issues and foster a love of reading. If you don’t have the energy to start a festival that is perfectly okay. You can:

volunteer to read books at a school or day care.buy books for a teacher’s classroom. Ask teachers about the books their students want.support authors by buying their books and talking about them on social media. Don’t forget to tag the author.start and maintain a little free library in an area where access to books is limited. Here is an article on how easy that is.host a book club and write about your journey for others to follow.give books as gifts. Because they are!treat yourself to your own collection of books. Read them regularly and talk about them to everyone you know. Many times, we actually forget how good a good book can be and we all need a reminder to step away from screentime and get back to the goodness of books!

Any of these steps will help your community do exactly what Deedee’s reading program, It Pays To Read, and the Louisville Book Festival do: highlight how important books and reading are to all of us, individually, and as a community.

Give us more ideas for how anyone, especially those with limited time and resources, can highlight books in their community! We will compile a list and post it when it is complete. Happy reading!

 

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Banned Books Week is Happening NOW

Most of the time when we talk about a special day or week, it is out of celebration. However, the week of October 1-7, 2023 is a bit different. Banned Books Week, as it is called, is a time when we reflect on the books that are censored because someone doesn’t like what is inside the pages. This is often a time of sadness and dismay.

Bridging where one person’s rights begin and another person’s rights end is complicated. Legal minds spend their lifetimes debating the ins and outs of this topic. It can be argued that banning books harms more people than it benefits. 

Who does book banning harm?

Authors

First, the authors who spent time and energy writing their books. Most authors will tell you they didn’t get into writing to make bank. They got into writing because they had stories to tell or experiences they wanted to share. Writing a book is all about, ultimately, making a connection with others via story. Having one’s book banned is stressful at a minimum.

Readers

Book banning harms readers. If a book is banned in a school district or town, it doesn’t just take the book out of the hands of the readers who parents or school boards determined were too young to read it. It takes the book away from the myriad other people who are adults or children or teens whose parents allow them to read the book. It hurts children who need and want to see themselves and their stories reflected in books. It hurts children who need to see other people’s lives in books to expand their thinking and empathy. 

Future Creators

Book banning has the potential to harm our future creators—be they writers or other kinds of artists. Culture wars may make future artists determine they don’t want to spend their time and energy on an endeavor that will be banned. 

Our Economy

For those interested in economics, book bans harm people’s pocketbooks from authors to publishers to paper suppliers to bookstore owners. This is obvious. But book bans result in lawsuits, as there are constitutional issues at play. If schools or libraries ban books and a lawsuit is filed, as they often are, our tax dollars are spent paying for these lawsuits. They are costly in terms of money and time. 

Librarians, Teachers, Book Sellers

We wish that lawsuits were all we had to worry about. There is also an extreme uptick in harassment, threats, and firings of librarians, teachers, authors and booksellers across the country. This is indeed a targeted effort. Read more about this here.

All Of Us

Most concerning to us at Make A Way Media is the harm book bans do to marginalized populations. The recent book bans we have experienced in the United States of America, tend to apply to stories from groups of people who need their voices amplified the most. Black people, indigenous people, people who identify as LGBTQ+, and the stories of immigrants are by far, the group of books who have their voices suppressed the most.

“You don’t have to agree with what you read. You don’t even have to understand it. But you should absolutely respect it. That book is someone’s journey.”- Author Deedee Cummings

You have to ask why this is the case? This is so important that we need to highlight this urgency every day of the year, but Banned Books Week is a great time for all of us to call attention to a growing crisis.

For these reasons, and many more, Banned Books Week is one of somber reflection.

“This is a dangerous time for readers and the public servants who provide access to reading materials. Readers, particularly students, are losing access to critical information, and librarians and teachers are under attack for doing their jobs.”

– Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director of the ALA’s Office  for Intellectual Freedom

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Daring to Dream: Changing a Plan

Change is part of life, and that means that sometimes you

Decide to change your plan

or

life changes your plan for you.

Change, despite its ubiquity, is hard. If we have a plan or a dream, and we change it for some reason, we may feel that we’re giving up on our dream or that this modified plan isn’t legitimate. If change happens to us and we have to modify our dreams, we may feel a sense of loss, sadness, or even resentment toward whatever obstacle is in our way.

It is at moments like this when we need to regroup and reflect on our dream. We need to ask some questions like 

Is the original dream still doable?Do I even want the original dream anymore?Am I ok with not wanting the original dream? If not, why do I not feel ok?How do I feel about the dream changing if I don’t have control over things changing?What do I have the power to do to make myself more content with how this dream has changed?

People often have a dream that they don’t quite fulfill before they have children and boy, can children defer (at least temporarily) a dream. This is completely normal and expected, even if you don’t like the way your dream has gone offline. 

It is important to remember, though, that deferring is not ending. Not even a little bit. It is a delay- not a death! The timeline might change, but the dream doesn’t have to. When life changes, sometimes your dreams do as well. Maybe getting that Ph.D. no longer seems as important at age 48 as it did at age 28. Does that make you a failure because you never got your Ph.D.? Of course, not. 

The most important thing, whether you’ve changed your dream plan or whether life has changed it, is to keep moving forward even if it is in a new direction that you didn’t expect. Forward momentum at any pace is always progress.

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Checking in with Goals at the Three-Quarter Mark

By the time September rolls around, we are coming up quickly on the end of the year, which begs the question: How are your goals? The ones you set in January? Do you need to check-in with yourself and reconfigure things?

So many people think of goals as these unbreakable structures that once voiced cannot be modified, but that simply isn’t true. Changing a goal isn’t the same as breaking a goal (and even then, sometimes breaking goals is necessary depending on if life throws lemons your way). 

If you haven’t met your goals, or haven’t met them as well as you’d like, consider whether your original goals were SMART?

Were they specific?

Were they measurable?

Were they achievable?

Were they relevant?

Were they time-bound?

Maybe your goals were specific and measurable but the time-frame was too short or too long? It makes sense to rework your goal so that it becomes something you can do. Or maybe your life situation has changed and the goal is no longer relevant to you. This requires a change to the goal. Why keep doing something you no longer want to do just because you said to yourself that you wanted to achieve it? 

As the year begins to wind down to its end, check in with yourself and determine how you’ve done on your goals. Consider doing some reflective journaling to help you process where things have gone right and wrong. Where have your successes been? What have you considered a failure? Was it really a failure? What did you learn from this? 

While reflecting on your goals, pay attention to the little voice in your head and what it tells you. That voice is often extremely negative and critical. If necessary, write down what that voice is saying to you and ask a friend, advisor, or therapist to help you process your inner voice and goal reflection. It can help to have an objective person there to point out successes that your negative self-talk will ignore or undercut. We wish you the best on your journey because that is exactly what you deserve.

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The First Six Weeks of School

The first six weeks of the school year are critical. It is a time when routines are created and first impressions are made. It sets the tone for the rest of the year.

This is why it is important for parents to check in with their kids in September to ensure things are going well. 

Most school systems now offer a portal that allows parents to see their child’s grades, including grade updates and even upcoming assignments. This is a HUGE tool that can help parents as they guide their kids. Be sure to take advantage of this ability and check in there often.

Many of these portals have a feature that allows parents to tailor their notifications. Maybe you want to be notified for every grade or maybe you only want to be notified if your child earns less than a C? If your child knows you are keeping up-to-date on their grades (and there are consequences for not completing assignments or achieving certain benchmarks), they will be better incentivized to do well or ask for help when they need it. 

Another tool that can be helpful for parents is via Google Classroom, which is used by many, many teachers. Parents can allow for notifications on Google Classroom that will send them a summary of assignments that their student had during the week that came through their Google Classroom school account. Usually on Fridays, Google will send an email so parents can see what was due during that week. These summaries also give them insight into what their child is studying in more detail and allows for conversations with your child. For example, “I saw on Google Classroom that you are studying metaphysics in Philosophy class. What is metaphysics, exactly?” 

Parents often ask their children “How was school?” which, unfortunately, only elicits a one-word response, which is usually “Fine.” But there are other questions you can ask that will give you better insight into their daily experience:

Who is your favorite teacher so far? Why do you like this teacher?Who is your least favorite teacher so far? What don’t you like about this class?Which class is easy for you? Why is it easy?Which class is challenging for you? What makes it a challenge?Who do you sit with at lunch? What did you learn today that was new or interesting? (Even if it wasn’t in class.)Who got on your nerves today at school?Who made you laugh today at school?What are you looking forward to the most?

Be sure to talk with other parents too. We are a community after all. Usually any issues you experience have already happened or will happen to someone else. Other parents can be a great resource for other ideas on how to stay ahead of the issues we all face during the school year.

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The Power of Literacy

Make a Way Media believes in the power of empathy and kindness. We believe in the power of dreams and possibilities. But we also believe that reading is a fundamental right. It is why founder Deedee Cummings launched The Louisville Book Festival. We love to read, and we love that reading can help us understand ourselves and others. 

We often think that illiteracy is a problem in other places, like in countries where girls are not allowed to seek an education, but there are people right where you live who cannot read or cannot read well. Research suggests somewhere between 18% and 25% of adults in the United States are considered illiterate. Some of them may have learning difficulties, while others simply fell through the cracks of the educational system. There are many families who don’t, for a variety of reasons, promote reading. 

If you love reading, then you also understand that people who cannot read do not get to experience the joy, the escape, and the enlightenment that can come from reading books. Illiteracy also has serious financial implications for our communities according to a report from the World Literacy Foundation. It impacts people’s ability to get and keep a job. It impacts people’s ability to generate wealth or protect their wealth; a lack of understanding of documents and paperwork may get people into financial problems. On a daily level, it impacts the ability to do things we take for granted, like read a prescription bottle or navigate directions.

September 8 is UNESCO’s International Literacy Day, and we hope you find a way in your life to celebrate it and to promote the work of literacy. What might that look like?

Read in public that day.Read to or with a loved one. Talk with others, especially children about the impact of reading on their lives and what illiteracy means to our community.Visit your local library and let staff know how much you appreciate them. Better yet, contact your local government that funds your libraries and let them know why library funding is critical.Donate to a nonprofit organization that supports literacy (maybe even consider a donation to Make a Way Media for the It Pays to Read program or the Louisville Book Festival) because the impact of illiteracy affects us all.

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Where You Put Your Time

There is nothing wrong with being on your smartphone. It’s like a little computer in your hand. After a busy or stressful day, it can be a preferred way to decompress for a bit. But sometimes our phones sort of hijack our time. We get sucked in and find it hard to escape. I know I am not the only one who looked up two hours later and wondered how that much time had passed and all I had done was stare at my phone at one app or another.

It’s important to remember that we control our phones; they don’t (or shouldn’t) control us. 

Being intentional is an important part of living the life you want to lead, and being intentional with our phones is part of that. It is easy to fall into habits and suddenly hours of time are gone, and we have no idea where they went. If you are working towards a goal or a dream, it is especially important that your time goes into dream-building and not endless scrolling.

I talk a lot about mindfulness, and this is one clear example of that. A lot of people think that being mindful means sitting in a yoga position and being quiet for half an hour while humming “om” out loud. It can be that. But it can also be being fully present and “checked in” to what is happening in real-time. It means not getting sucked into your phone. Saying to yourself (and following through) that you will only check this email or that bank account, and then you are done. We forget that these smartphones, social media especially, are designed to keep us on them. After all, the longer we are on it the more information we give, interaction we have, and stuff we buy- and that’s the goal. Don’t fall into the goal of the developers. Use your phone to achieve your goals- not distract you from them.

So what are some ways to ensure that your phone doesn’t get the best of you?

Turn off your notifications, sounds, and lights. There is nothing that gets a person distracted like the sound of a smartphone. You don’t have to keep notifications and sounds off all the time (although some people do- me included- and find it makes them much happier). But definitely turn them off during the times that you’ve allotted to working on a project or doing something constructive, whether that be reading a book, playing a board game with a child, or making plans for a goal you want to see through. 

Set a timer on your smartphone usage. There are apps available that can monitor how much time you’re spending on your phone and help curb it. There are apps that will lock you out of another app if you have reached the time limit you set- if you really want to go that far.

Take “vacations” from social media. If you struggle with scrolling or find yourself getting depressed when seeing other people’s curated lives (and they are curated), consider taking time off from social media Monday through Friday or maybe on the days that you find yourself with the time to get sucked in (which could be the weekends). 

Whatever you decide to do know that this is within your power and that ultimately you will seek the happier and more balanced life you seek.

 

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Daring to Dream: Finding Financial Support

When you’re working to make a dream come true, it can be difficult to find the financial resources to support that dream. For many people, this can be the one thing that holds them back. Maybe you don’t have a lot of money to put towards the dream– or you are scared to put in the little money you do have. What do you do?

If you think you don’t have money to put towards your dream, step back and reassess. Sometimes we get into financial habits that feel necessary but are really choices. So think about the choices you are now making with money. Could those be changed and the money be reallocated towards making a dream come true? Remind yourself that dreams often require sacrifice.

For instance, maybe every weekend you go shopping on Saturdays and then out to dinner and a movie. In this day and age, this could add up to a hundred dollars or more (especially if you are doing it with a family). Could this become a once-a-month activity to free up money to save toward a goal? Remember that this is just an idea. Not all of us are able to do the same weekly activities. What you do decide to sacrifice will be a personal choice only you can make.

Some dreams, like opening a business, require more funds than simply changing habits. Believe it or not, there are all kinds of grants to help entrepreneurs launch their dreams. If you are a veteran, a woman, or part of a minority, there are special programs at the federal, state, and local levels just for you. But there are also many entrepreneur and small business programs for everyone.

Connect to groups in your community and keep your eyes and ears open.

If you have a solid support system, you may find that a crowdsourcing option is the way to go. Continue to build your network of contacts and colleagues who you share your dream with; often you can find plenty of support within your own family, friend, professional, church, or neighborhood network. Especially when they see you working hard.

If the financial mountain seems too tall to scale, think about making your dream happen in smaller increments so you aren’t faced with something that feels so overwhelming. There are several booksellers across the country that have, or had, book trucks with the goal of eventually having a brick-and-mortar bookstore. Starting small doesn’t mean you’ve given up on your dream; it means you’re making progress.

One of my favorite examples of this is a story I saw on the morning news. A woman named Mignon Francois was $70,000 in debt and had $5 to her name when someone asked her to make cupcakes for an event. She took her last $5 and made those cupcakes. The money she made from selling the cupcakes went right back in to selling more cupcakes. $5 turned into $25. $25 turned into $100. $100 turned into $1,000 and now, today, she has a million dollar business. That’s how dreams work. They work when you do. We do not all have extra money lying around or the help of a business loan. Being steadfast and creative is all the currency you need.

Progress, even if it is slower or smaller than you’d like, is still movement forward! And that is the mindset we must hold on to.

Be sure to follow the hashtags #HowToDream and #MakeAWayMindset for more tips! Dreams also need support.

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Quieting Negative Self-Talk

We are often unaware of the negative things we tell ourselves. These thoughts over time may become so ingrained that we assume they are reality. We actually begin to believe these thoughts are fact- not just feelings that can be processed and dealt with. For example, if you are a person who worries, you may expect the worst possible thing to happen. You may “catastrophize” situations even though the truth is that the worst thing rarely happens. 

What negative things does your brain tell you?

Does it tell you that you’re not smart or capable?

Does it tell you that a goal you have isn’t attainable?

Does it tell you what other people think of you?

Now, what is the reality? What is the proof- the evidence– of these negative ideas? Does reality support any of them? You have to ask yourself these questions.

Sometimes people think they aren’t smart because they struggled in school, but school only measures certain types of intelligence; it certainly doesn’t measure all of our abilities. Someone I know always struggled with spelling and retaining information in school, but she can sew circles around people, she makes beautiful quilts, and she is an avid mystery reader. She clearly has talents and skills that school simply didn’t attempt to measure. 

In what ways are you intelligent? Are you compassionate? Are you a leader or are you an awesome supporter (because being an awesome supporter is critical to the functioning of our world)? Can you fix things? Do you understand complicated mechanical issues? Are you able to get indoor plants to survive? Do you have a special knack for cleaning things to a pristine shine? Can you draw? Are you able to put together an outstanding outfit that gets you compliments? 

If you have a dream, is it really unattainable? Have you tried to make the dream come true or are you just assuming it won’t come true?

Do you actually know what other people think of you? Are you a mind reader? Have you asked them or do you just assume to know what they think? 

When our brains are telling us negative things, it is important to ask our brains some questions, like the ones above and not just decide to sit in our own little worlds. Sometimes our brains don’t know as much as they think they do. Hold on to inspirational messages and quotes like the ones you find here in our articles every week. One of my personal favorites is, “Whether you think you can or you think you can’t, you are absolutely right”. And that’s the truth. Don’t limit yourself. Go out and live the life you dream of. 

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