Charlesbridge Unplugged #16: Middle Grade Panel

Today we're talking to two of our esteemed middle grade authors, as well as one of our middle grade editors! Joining us today are Ellen Wittlinger (Someone Else's Shoes) and HP Wood (Fakers: An Insider's Guide to Cons, Hoaxes, and Scams, illustrated by David Clark) as well as Editor Julie Bliven. You can have a listen by clicking HERE or clicking play below:

Charlesbridge Unplugged - Charlesbridge Unplugged #16: Middle Grade Panel

In Honor of Family

Photograph by David Schlatter

My first book, At Home in Her Tomb: Lady Dai and the Ancient Chinese Treasures of Mawangdui, describes a woman and her elaborate tomb─the memorial created by a grieving family. Writing this book was not only a fascinating intellectual endeavor for me, but also a personal journey of connection to my extended family and our ancestors.

After growing up in China, my parents immigrated to America in 1946. My brothers and I were born in the Northeast, and then we moved to the Midwest when I was three years old. So I grew up far from the land of my heritage. 

But every summer we drove from Kansas City to Toronto for reunions with our extended family. (My father's parents and siblings had also immigrated to the USA or to Canada.) There I was aware of belonging to a large family, a long history, and a complex culture beyond my everyday life. I was surrounded by my grandparents, uncles, and aunts chatting in Cantonese while I played with my cousins. I was introduced to dimsum—small plates of juicy dumplings, steamed buns, and other mouthwatering treats—plucked from carts rolling between a restaurant's giant round tables. I remember my grandfather giving me candy from a secret cache high on his closet shelf, but I also sensed that the entire family treated him as the most honored member.

When I was a mother with two young children, my own mother died. My parents always being there had been my secure foundation, but that shifted with her death, leaving a hole of grief and vulnerability in my life.

In November 1999, I traveled with my father to Taiwan and China. Serendipitously I stumbled upon a special exhibit of Han dynasty artifacts at the National Palace Museum in Taipei. This was the first time I had ever heard of the three tombs of Mawangdui, but I was immediately hooked on learning more about them. Who were the mother, father, and son buried in the tombs? Why would their family bury them with so many treasures, including personal items like the mother's cosmetics case, the father's signature seals, and the son's zither? 

The next week, we journeyed to the southern Chinese village where my father's family has lived since the late 1500's. Along with two dozen relatives living in or near the village, we visited the cemetery where four generations of our ancestors are buried. In front of their niches, we lit candles and incense, offered food and drink, and burned mock money and paper clothes—modern versions of rituals performed for thousands of years. I was struck by the realization of being connected to these people whom I'd never met, yet were literally part of me.

After lighting candles and incense, we set out food and drink in front of our ancestor's niches.

Three years later in June 2002, my father took me, my brothers, and our families to visit his homeland. We entered the Forbidden City, inspected the First Emperor's terracotta troops, sailed down the Yangzi River, and saw where my parents had lived and been schooled.  

I took a side trip to Changsha to see the Mawangdui tomb site and the many artifacts in the Hunan Provincial Museum. By then, I had studied enough about Mawangdui to be completely agog at seeing the silk-draped body of Lady Dai and the cavernous tomb of her son.

The following day twenty-one of us from America and ten of us from China met at the same cemetery I had visited before. My daughters, nieces, and nephews participated for their first time in the traditional rituals of lighting candles and incense, offering food and drink, and burning mock money and paper clothes. I marveled at the continuity of life that bound us together across centuries and continents: four generations of living descendants paying our respects to four generations of ancestors. As I watched the smoke from the burning paper rise into the sky, I saw an image in my mind of an endless queue of our ancestors winding across the cemetery.

It is believed that burning mock money and other paper goods sends them to the ancestors.

 

 
Through seeing artifacts from the Mawangdui tombs and performing rituals at my ancestors' graves, I could imagine the family of Lady Dai expressing their love and respect in creating an elaborate tomb for her. I could identify with her family through my experiences of missing my own mother and of honoring my ancestors. And through learning about Lady Dai and her world, I understand more of the history and meaning behind the rituals my family performs to commemorate our loved ones.

*****

Posted by Christine Liu-Perkins, author of At Home in Her Tomb, which releases on April 8, 2014. Find out more about her at www.christineliuperkins.com.

Real (and) Scary

As a young reader, my tastes often tended toward the macabre, fantastical, and horrifying—I probably started reading Stephen King before I should have. Books were an opportunity to keep myself up at night—even after the lights were off and the books were closed, I’d lay in bed awake, my mind replaying over and over a slideshow of the startling images I’d just absorbed. Though I was also a sucker for classics like Charlotte’s Web, The Outsiders, and Mrs. Brisby and the Rats of NIMH, it was always the scary stories that I tore through the quickest. And the scariest stories, to me, were always the ones that seemed the most real. Or the ones that were, in fact, based on real events. For me, a terrifying event—an out-of-control factory fire, an earthquake hitting a city, a terrorist attack—inherently contained more horror than any fictional story featuring vampires, zombies, haunted houses, or masked madmen with a knife ever could.

I was in sixth grade when undersea explorer Bob Ballard discovered the wreckage of the ship Titanic two-and-a-half miles below the surface of the North Atlantic in 1984. My English teacher passed around the new issue of National Geographic, which featured on its cover a ghostly blue image of the ship in its watery grave, taken directly above it by a roving remote-controlled deep-sea film camera called Alvin. Then she passed out a photocopy of an article that gave an overview of the Titanic tragedy: that it was the biggest and most luxurious passenger ship ever built and was proclaimed to be “unsinkable”; that it hit an iceberg on its maiden voyage from Southampton, UK, to New York City in 1912 and sank, taking 1,500 passengers with it into the freezing water; that, though it carried a total of 2,224 passengers and crew, it only held enough lifeboats for 1,178; that its list of passengers included some of the richest people in the world; and that the majority of those lost on the ship were the third-class passengers, mostly immigrants, who were stuck below decks without a fighting chance to access the limited number of lifeboats on the main deck.

Paging through the National Geographic—with its full-color photographs of the wreckage two-and-a-half miles below the surface, its timelines of the tragedy, its diagrams and drawings of the gash in the hull the iceberg had made—I was transfixed by the sheer horror of what all those passengers­­­­—those who lived and those who died—must have gone through on the night of April 14, 1912.  

I became obsessed with the story, and started tracking down any books out there that told it. I scoured my local library, uncovering a few titles—The Story of the Titanic As Told by Its Survivors, by Jack Winocour from 1960, The Odyssey of C.H. Lightoller by Patrick Stenson from 1984, and, of course, Walter Lord’s classic from 1955, A Night to Remember—and read them with eyes wide and a chill running down my back. The stories collected in the pages of these books were horrifying, even more so for being true. These were real people, lucky enough to have secured a place on Titanic’s maiden voyage across the Atlantic, and, four days after departing Southampton, unlucky enough to be fighting for their lives amid the wailing of people drowning, the horrible creaking and groaning of the massive ocean liner as it surrendered to the sea, and the dark, earsplitting chaos that would only subside after the ship had disappeared under the water and almost 1,200 lives had been snuffed out.

Tales of terror from our history have always drawn me in, whether they took place during the Civil War that gave rise to countless battlefield horrors, the Gilded Age that produced the Titanic, or the Great Depression that birthed dust storms on the Great Plains that suffocated thousands and turned the sky black. So when I was approached by Hilary Poole, the editor and creator of the Horrors of History series for Charlesbridge, about writing a book for young readers about the Galveston hurricane of 1900, it seemed like the perfect project for me to take on. Even though I was a little nervous about writing for a young audience for the first time, I was excited at the prospect of researching and writing about an event that had been largely forgotten—much like Titanic had mostly disappeared into the mists of history until Bob Ballard’s amazing discovery reignited interest in the story of the doomed ocean liner. I wanted to bring this horrific bit of history to life for the hungry young readers I know are out there, since I once was one.

The hurricane of 1900 remains the deadliest in American history, and it changed the trajectory of the island city of Galveston forever. For my book City of the Dead, I plumbed survivor accounts, newspaper articles, historical records, and local archives to bring to life various Galvestonians’ experiences during this storm that hit on September 8, 1900, and killed 6,000 to 8,000 people, nearly one quarter of the city’s population. I discovered amazing stories of survival, heartbreaking accounts of bravery and sacrifice, and jaw-dropping details of the merciless violence of Mother Nature at her worst.

I was particularly gratified to be able to write about the Sisters of Charity orphanage, which sat just a little ways from the beach. The story of the child survivors is truly astounding, and City of the Dead represents the first time their accounts have been dramatized in an historical novel. 

City of the Dead is dedicated to the people of Galveston who suffered this tragedy. It is my hope that it will ignite in young readers not only an interest in exploring the frightful and awe-inspiring stories of death and survival in Galveston in 1900, but also a desire to start their own searches into the countless amazing and spine-tingling true tales from our country’s past. 

Posted by T. Neill Anderson, author of City of the Dead, the first book in the Horrors of History series. This is his first book for young readers, and one that he wishes was around to enlighten (and terrify) him when he was a kid. T. Neill Anderson lives and writes in Brooklyn, New York. 

The Horrors of History series commemorates horrific, life-changing events in our nation's past. Each novel combines thorough research, first-hand accounts, and fictionalized characters and scenes to make history accessible to young readers. The results are gripping tales of devastation and bravery, made all the more intriguing by their foundation in real-life events. Stay tuned for the February 2014 release of Ocean of Fire: The Burning of Columbia, 1865, which details life in the South at the end of the American Civil War through the retelling of the fire that swept through Columbia, South Carolina, after the city surrendered to General Sherman’s Union troops.

Every Boy Needs an Island

At the outset, let me acknowledge that I have no research to back up the statement above. No scientific studies to cite; I haven't even taken a poll. My only authority comes from my having raised seven boys, all of whom, I'm glad to say, are happily married, gainfully employed, and still speaking to me on a regular basis. (I am also the mother of a lovely, intelligent daughter, but her story will have to come at another time.) I acknowledge, too, that not everything I say here will be true of all boys, and that some of my observations will apply to girls too. Still...

When my first child was born, I was disconcerted to learn, as I swam groggily to consciousness, that I had given birth to a boy. Of course, I'd known this was theoretically possible, but since I had no brothers, no neighborhood boys to play with as a child, and had gone to a woman's college, I kind of assumed that God would know I wasn't equipped to be the mother of a boy. Let alone another boy. And then another, et cetera, et cetera, until my sons numbered five (I'll get to the seven part later).

As my sons grew older and their number increased, I made some interesting observations. Number one: No matter what the intended purpose of a toy might be, a boy would immediately consider it something to take apart, to use as a hammer or a drumstick, or to convert into some sort of military weapon.

Number two: Boys are incapable of holding still. I am convinced that as grade-schoolers, were such diagnoses then available (along with their pharmaceutical remedies), my boys would all have been labeled hyper-active, overly distractible, and possibly of below average mentality. In view of their later achievements and those of a number of boys I have tutored, I've come to the conclusion that boys should always start school a year later than girls, and that they should never be expected to sit quietly for more than ten minutes at a time until they reach the age of maturity, which is usually about forty-six. (Sometimes older)

Number three: Boys occupy at least twice as much space as girls do. Watch a group of three or four girls. They can entertain themselves for hours just sitting on the top of a stoop with books or crayons or dolls. During the same amount of time, boys will need the front and back yards of four or five houses, preferable furnished with trees for climbing, bushes for hiding in, and one or two areas where digging is allowed.

My oldest son was thirteen and my youngest two when I realized that these boys were not meant for suburbia. They needed space to stretch their burgeoning wings. I thought a house surrounded by four or five acres of woods would be just about right. Unfortunately, acreage of that size in or close to Cincinnati was more than our budget could handle and I couldn't convince my husband of the advisability of a move to Australia where there was still that whole lovely Outback to explore.

We compromised by selling our five room ranch-style house at a loss (something IRS agents found unbelievable - obviously none of them had ever seen what five boys can do to a house), and moving to a three-story Victorian on the other side of town.

For a while, exploring a new neighborhood provided sufficient outlet for the boys' need for adventure, particularly after they realized that they could tell me they were going to a perfectly acceptable park where, unknown to me, a slight depression under the fence allowed them access to the siding of a railroad in active use.
(Just an aside: I've written a middle grade novel in which the young protagonists engage in a few of the hair-raising escapades I've since learned the boys somehow miraculously survived...Editors, envisioning I suppose, hundreds of letter from horrified mothers, have told me that such activities are far too dangerous for suggestible young readers. What I feel is that it's hard to suggest something dangerous and exciting that boys haven't already thought of.)

What drove this need to explore, to test limits, to court danger? Were my sons so very unusual? I worried about this for years until through a series of freakish occurrences, two more boys joined our family. They were brothers, one twelve at the time, the other fourteen - ages that fit nicely into the middle of the boys. It was only a matter of months until, as a foster mother, I realized it wasn't a lack of parenting skills on my part that made my sons bundles of curiosity and adrenalin. It had something to do with the drive that long ago had propelled one particular sperm to beat the others in the race to the egg.

So what has this to do with boys and islands? In Kyle's Island, I have tried to show that boys need an unexplored place beckoning to them. For Kyle, if he can explore the island, he can satisfy his need to find a place not already known, defined, and reduced by grown-ups. The nondescript island in the middle of a small lake in Michigan is Kyle's Bali Hai, his Shangri- La, his Ultima Thule.

This restlessness of boys, this drive to explore, to master - I've seen my sons wrestle with it. I've watched some inner-city boys turn sullen and hopeless because they could see no island on their own horizon. My heart aches for them and for the boys whose only outlet for their restlessness consists of overcoming obstacles to attaining a higher level on a video game.

I know we can't go back to the days when unexplored frontiers were part of every boy's landscape. I know that not every boy can realistically hope to become an astronaut, a mountain-climber, or a deep-sea diver. But I hope that parents and teachers will recognize, honor, and try to accommodate the inherent restlessness that is part of every boy's make-up instead of trying through discipline or medication to transform boys into "well-behaved" counterparts of their sisters.

Let's watch and applaud a young boy's search for his own island, no matter how different it is from what we dreamed of for him. And if we are lucky, some day he will come back and say to us, "Hey! I want to show you what I've found!"



Posted by Sally Derby, author of Kyle's Island.