Believe It or Not! (A Guest Post by David Elliott)

A guest post by my friend and colleague at Lesley University, David Elliott




As an elementary school kid, the closest I came to
voluntarily reading nonfiction were the Ripley’s
Believe It Or Not bubble gum cards I bought for a nickel every Saturday
morning at Jackson’s Newsstand.  Even
now, I can hear the satisfying crinkle of that red cellophane as I peeled it
away from the pink slab of brittle gum and the slippery, sugar-dusted card
beneath it. And I’ll never forget my favorite card, the one about that guy who ate
a truck, bumper to bumper. Ripley’s, by the way, is still around and still
connected to the malleable world of gum. Check it out. 



But when Mrs. Stevenson, my funny and terrifying
sixth grade teacher, passed out the orange books that were filled with dates
and names and other info lethal to the imagination about, oh-my-god, the
Presidents, I felt a sudden, uncompromising urge to see the school nurse.  I was a dreamy kind of kid, one whose life at
home was filled with enough cold, hard facts to last a lifetime. I craved the
escape, the relief, that fiction offered. 
No wonder I became an author of picture books and middle grade novels. How
odd then, that in my most recent work – a poetry series illustrated by the
wonderfully talented Holly Meade --On the
Farm, In the Wild, In the Sea  --
many of the reviews mention the amount of real information the poems contain.





But I shouldn’t have been surprised; the inspiration
for many of the poems came from the facts I learned during the many hours I
spent reading about the animals. When I discovered, for example, that while a
leopard has spots, a jaguar has rosettes, I knew I’d found the beginning
lines of my jaguar poem. 






The
jaguar’s back is flowering



with
delicate rosettes



as
if she’s grown a garden there...









And who
knew that a female sea turtle has to reach the ripe old age of thirty before
she can lay her first clutch of eggs? 






[She] swims the seven seas



for thirty years,



where
she was born 

then
finds the beach






With many of the poems, I found that unless I
included a fact, it was nearly impossible to say anything interesting or new.  






Dear
Orangutan,



Three cheers to you man of the forest.



You
arrived here long before us . . .  






Orangutan is a Malay word. It means man-of-the-forest.  






The more I wrote, the more I discovered that hard
fact expanded the world of my imagination. This was never more true than when
writing about the prehistoric creatures featured in the forthcoming In the Past.

 



I was excited about the opportunity to write the
poems, partly because the idea had come during a school visit. I was standing
in the cafeteria, haplessly blinking at the very, very yellow trays of macaroni
and cheese, when a second grade boy came rushing up to me. “You have to do a
book of poems about dinosaurs,” he panted, tugging on my sleeve. “You just have
to!”  My editor agreed. (Okay, maybe she
didn’t think I had to, but she liked
the idea.)






When I sat down to write about dinosaurs though, I
found that the only thing I could think of was that most of ‘em were big. Not a
very interesting book.  But by the time I
had finished with my research, I had become a kind of annoying know-it-all
junior paleontologist on the subject of prehistoric fauna. I had a homemade
chart of the geologic eras taped to the wall, along with a timeline of the
animals I wanted to feature.  Brachytrachelopan tripped off my tongue as if it had been my
first word.   And in every single poem
there is a fact, though it may sometimes be hidden.  Here’s an example.






Trilobites 



So
many of you.



So
long ago.



So
much above you.



Little
below.



Now
you lie hidden



deep
in a clock,



uncountable
ticks



silenced
by rock.










A nice poem. I think (if you’ll allow me to say
so), but it becomes a better poem when you learn that trilobites are, in fact,
the ancestors of that modern day scourge – the tick.



It has been a lucky surprise, too, to see the way
the blending of fact and poem seem to fit so nicely with the language arts standards
of the Common Core --“Research to Build Present Knowledge” for example, with “Craft
and Structure” and/or “Integration of Knowledge and Ideas.” On a more personal
level, I feel just as lucky that the process of writing these books has opened
me to the poetic possibilities contained in a single fact.



Believe it or not, one day I may even try to write
some prose non-fiction. But one thing is certain: I’m not going to eat any
stinkin’ truck.