Why Folktales Matter

I love fairy and folktales. I enjoyed them since I was a child and continue to do so. At home in Mexico City, when I was a child we had a room that was filled with floor to ceiling shelves crammed with books of all kinds, including those of the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, and Andrew Lang's multicolored books. I also found them in the library of the American School, where the school librarian, Mrs. Figueroa, set them aside for me along with many others because she knew that I liked to read. My parents, both readers, bought me many books, comics, and magazines, mainly British and American. Besides fairy and folktales, I loved (and still love) fantasy, comic books, historical novels, short stories, science fiction, and mysteries. I read everything I could get my hands on, even the cereal box, and continue to do so. To this day, the shelves in my home groan under the weight of my books and I carry a book with me everywhere.

Reading eventually led to writing and, to date, I have had stories and books published in Mexico, the US, Columbia, and Germany.

So why folktales? Simply because I enjoyed and continue to enjoy them, no matter where they come from, be it Russia, India, Israel, the US, China, England, France, and Spain, among many others.

And why from Mexico? Besides writing stories that spring from my imagination I also retell folktales because I find them filled with wisdom and universal truths and they explain where things come from. They also enlighten, delight, and teach without being preachy. What more can you ask for? Besides, I believe that any child, no matter what his or her background is, can enjoy them.

The folktales in are five of my favorite stories from my country. They explain, for instance, why insects were created, especially a very pesky one; how an opossum gave humans a great gift; what happened when a young frog with a big mouth had a surprising adventure; and how a patient turtle helped to create the world. These stories are exciting, funny, amazing, and moving.
Whiskers, Tails & Wings: Animal Folktales from Mexico

I love to look for these stories in many different places, including libraries, dusty bookstores of used and vintage books in very old buildings in downtown Mexico City, where the shelves reach the very high ceilings and are so far up that you practically need binoculars to see what's up there. I have also listened to great storytellers who know how to enthrall their audiences.

I write about Mexico because I find my country endlessly fascinating and want children see beyond the stereotypes. Of course, writing about Mexico is also important because there are millions of children of Mexican descent living in the US who have heard versions of some of these stories from parents and grandparents. These kids live in the US and are American but they're also Mexican and there is no need for them to lose their roots to fit in. They can, like many of us who are bicultural, take what they can from both cultures and be all the richer for it. There is no need for them to feel ashamed of what they are or where they come from. There is no need for them to hide that they speak Spanish at home. There is no need for them to forget what they are so they can blend in with the rest. They should be proud of themselves and where they come from and reading books where they can see themselves and where those things that are familiar are not something "exotic." Best of all, these books, which are fun, exciting, or fantastic, do what any good book does: they enthrall readers and make them want to read more and more. Besides, any kid can read them and have a great time. Teachers, parents, and librarians shouldn’t make the mistake of thinking that because the theme is Latino only children of Latino descent will want to read them. Reading about different cultures can only develop tolerance and sympathy, something any reader, no matter what his or her age, will benefit from since what is familiar will not cause rejection.

The five stories in Whiskers, Tails & Wings: Animal Folktales from Mexico, with the wonderful illustrations by Fabricio Vanden Broeck, can introduce any child to the culture of Mexico. Though the Aztecs and the Maya are better known, these five stories come from the rich traditions of the lesser known Tarahumara, Seri, Huichol, Triqui, and Tseltal. And once readers know something about these people perhaps they will see Mexicans as they really are: friendly, warmhearted, welcoming people. Mexican kids need to be delighted by their culture and heritage so let’s give them something they can be proud about so, no matter where they live, be it in Mexico or the US, so they can be sure about who they are and where they come from. And let’s not limit stories to a certain group: kids of all walks of life should be introduced to folktales from cultures from the entire world.

That's why folktales matter.

Find out more about Whiskers, Tails & Wings at www.charlesbridge.com.
"One of the most satisfying folklore collections in recent memory."
--Kirkus Reviews, starred review

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.

 

Author Anna McQuinn shares LOLA AT THE LIBRARY and other stories with the children of Chicago. Read about her visits to the Chicago Public Library, Lurie Children's Hospital, and ALA on her blog.

Things That Could Eat You: Nonfiction for Young Readers

There used to be birds big enough to eat you, I tell my audience. Oh, yes. You. In one gulp.

Kids love this, the little frisson of danger and at the same time the inviolable safety of many, many years blocking them off from the savagery. It’s the draw of prehistory, what makes it so fun. Everybody loves T. rex. Nobody wants to be eaten by one.

Everybody loves terror birds too.

Imagine a really big, carnivorous ostrich. A bird as tall as a basketball hoop, with a beak as heavy and sharp as an axe. These birds didn’t fly. They didn’t need to. They ran down anything they wanted to eat, and they ate it. Terror birds ruled South America for millions of years.

Then they were gone. Now all we have are bones.

But bones tell a story.

Interior spread from Ancient Animals: Terror Bird

I have plans for my next several lives. First I’m going to be a set designer; I love they way a good set is a cradle and a launch pad for theatrical magic. Then I’m going to be a marine biologist, so I can study dolphins and get paid for swimming. After that, I’ll be a paleontologist. I’ll pry the past loose from its rocky bed, bone by bone, tooth by tooth. I’ll blow the dust off chips and scraps of ancient creatures and put them back together. I’ll rewrite the lost story of life.

No, wait. Maybe I’ll just write nonfiction for children. Then I’ll get to do all of it in one narrow lifetime.

This is one of the things I love about my job—I get to find out everything. For past books, I’ve researched the Elizabethan theater, the American flag, how vipers locate prey, how much a blue whale’s tongue weighs, and what Abraham Lincoln said to his wife when she suggested that he run for president. Now I get to find out about terror birds, the top predators of ancient South America, ruthless avian rulers of an island continent. I also get to discover the vital role of a top predator in an ecosystem, how a hunter like a terror bird makes life possible for the species it devours.

Then I can turn my attention to saber-toothed cats, cunning predators who competed with our own ancestors for food. I learn how paleontologists deduce facts of behavior from bits of bone. (How do we know the saber-toothed cat was an ambush hunter? Its short bobtail, like a bobcat’s today. Cats who chase have long tails, to counterbalance the body on a turn. Cats who ambush have short ones.) I learn about pack or pride behavior, its gains (aid in raising young, access to mates, cooperative hunting to bring down large prey) and its costs (competition for food in a limited territory).

And then I put this fascinating research together with something I already know—how hungry young readers are for facts. For truth. For nonfiction.

“Is this true?” my five-year-old daughter asks insistently. “Is this a true book?” She doesn’t know the boundaries quite yet, doesn’t automatically understand that dragons and talking monkeys make a book fictional, that dinosaurs and saber-toothed tigers make it real. But she wants to know, and she wants books to tell her: what’s real and what’s a dream, what could once have eaten her and what never will.

Kids want to know, just like I do—how a giant flightless bird hunted, whether a cat with giant teeth purred or roared. (No to the first, yes to the second.) And they want books written in their own language and at their own level to tell them. Even the shape of an early reader says who it is made for. The small trim size and the compact format declare that these are books for a single young reader to treasure. The expanse of a picture book, made for sharing, is gone. Early readers are books for a child to read on her own, to hold and pore over and cherish. Language and art work together to open up a world of information. A single reader’s mind acts as a key.

I’ve written picture books and novels, poetry and prose, fiction and fantasy and “true books.” Out of all of those, nonfiction early readers are the hardest. I once did nineteen drafts of a single manuscript. First the facts must be found, selected, organized, and then the language must be agonized over. Can I make that sentence clearer? Did I just start with a prepositional phrase? That word has three syllables—can I find one with two, or one? Keep the concepts complex; keep the language simple; keep the clauses short. On every page. On every line. 

But the challenge is worth it, when I visit classrooms and see the kids' eyes light up and their hands shoot into the air. They know, you see. They know about science, about animals, about prehistory. They come armed with facts and dying to share them, enthusiastic beyond measure for books that show them the astonishing truth of their world.

Terror birds. Saber-toothed cats. Other wonderful creatures of prehistory. These animals have vanished, but their bones can still tell us their stories. We need scientists to interpret this dusty, ancient language, and we also need writers to share information about these creatures with the rest of us. Then we need readers to gobble up that information and ask for more. Maybe some of my readers, hungry for “true books,” will become scientists one day, digging up more facts, knitting together more theories, sharing what they find out, teaching us more.

I don’t need more lives after all. I just need readers who will take what I offer them into their own futures. They will be the ones to create, learn, and discover more than my own life would ever be able to hold.

Posted by Sarah L. Thomson, author of Ancient Animals: Terror Bird, which releases on August 1st, 2013.

Multiculturalism within Latinos

I lived for over a decade in Somerville, the next town up from Cambridge, in Boston, Massachusetts. There was no "T"--as we called the subway--in Davis Square when I moved there, and for the first couple of years I rode a bus to Harvard to catch the train to downtown Boston. I remember hiding behind a book while I studied the world around me. In each ride I could count Greeks, Irish, Polish, Portuguese, and Italians sharing with me the early morning and whatever temperature was in season. I thought I would miss that when I moved to San Francisco; not the weather, mind you, but the fact that there were restaurants, street celebrations, and friends from all over the world that gave daily meaning to the word multiculturalism.

How far from reality that thought was! What I encountered in California was equally diverse, but this time within the Latino culture. Just a few weeks ago in celebration of spring, some forty friends descended to our house and at some point we formed a circle to acknowledge friendship and humor in the passing of time. In that circle there were at least fifteen different representations of the word "Latino," not only from the country of origin but also from ethnicity, language, and cultural evolution.

Not even our friends from the same country, Mexico, have the same first language or culture. Some of the fifty indigenous languages that are still alive in Mexico have crossed the border and fortunately survive in the realm of intimate everyday life. All of us had one language in common, English, and many two, when adding Spanish. A few three, counting the regional first languages we were born in, but the great evidence was how the mix of Latinos within the Latino community have evolved. My Salvadorian friend Vicky has married José from Mexico. Victor from Honduras has married Emilia from Panama. And my Cuban friend Diana is about to get married to a Venezuelan. I could of course continue mentioning the even larger mix that I see in the third generation. Latinos are expanding their horizons, as did all other immigrants before. 

When Alma Flor proposed the idea of writing our latest book, Yes! We Are Latinos, I immediately understood the importance of a gallery of portraits that would reflect the reality that surrounds us. Co-authorship is something we have been practicing for two decades. "It doubles the thought, the passion, and the craft," we tell people who ask how does “it” work. This particular book has been both a challenge and a pleasure. Alma Flor had hundreds of students in her doctoral program at the University of San Francisco who brought their roots to class to expose, dissect, study, comprehend, and embrace the identity hidden in their names. Many were Latinos. We joined them in a project in Teotitlán del Valle, near Oaxaca, during a summer that resulted in a profound experience for all of us. The seeds of those conversations, encounters, and friendships grew in the form of words that make up Yes! We Are Latinos.

One topic that kept coming into conversations among friends and students was the need that we all felt to share the journey, to tell each other where we came from, and how that came to be. The history of our individual immigration became the question of the social and political circumstances that motivated some and forced others to leave their countries of origin to come to the United States. In the case of Alma Flor and myself, we both are first generation immigrants. Others in our circles are second, third, or too far back to remember. We realized that it was common to many of us the need to know more about each other’s history, and I agreed with Alma Flor that we needed to leave a record of all of this, to provide knowledge of the past, and a foundation for this new social group called Latinos to continue on the path towards a broader identity. In the words of the last profile in the book, our character named Román puts into words our sentiment: 

And, looking at these walls inside the tower,
written by Frederico Vigil
I realize the strength of my heritage,
the contradictions of our history,
the battles won and lost
within our hearts.
We have been mixing for centuries.
Mixing our blood, and our faiths.
Mixing traditions, music, and dance.
Mixing our languages, our literatures.
Mixing us into a greater reality,
a larger identity.
One that now calls us Latino.
Yes! We are Latinos. 


Pienso en sus palabras, las de Frederico Vigil
y mirando estas paredes
me doy cuenta de la fuerza de mi herencia,
las contradicciones de nuestra historia,
las batallas perdidas y ganadas
dentro del corazón.
Hemos estado cruzando nuestras vidas durante siglos.
Mezclado nuestra sangre y nuestra fe.
Mezclando tradiciones, música y baile.
Mezclando nuestras lenguas y nuestra literatura.
Una mezcla hacia una realidad más amplia,
una identidad mayor.
Una que ahora nos llama latina, latino. 
¡Sí! ¡Somos latinos!



Posted by F. Isabel Campoy, co-author of Yes! We Are Latinos, which releases August 1, 2013. 


Headed to ALA at the end of the month? Mark your calendars! On Sunday, June 30th at 1:00 PM, Isabel and Alma Flor Ada, along with author Judy Goldman and Teresa Mlawer, translator and expert on Spanish and bilingual titles, will discuss the trends and needs in the Spanish/Bilingual and Latino Interest marketplace. Click here to learn more about this special ALA Book Buzz program.

Seeing All of Us in Diverse Children's Books

This past March I sat around a table with a group of women, discussing my latest picture book, A Path of Stars, the story of the relationship between a young Cambodian American girl named Dara and her grandmother, a survivor of the "Killing Fields." The group happened to be inmates at the local women's prison, participants in a wonderful reading and writing program led by author Monica Wood (When We Were the Kennedys); I was the visiting author-illustrator. 

Going around the circle, each participant--mostly white women raised in Maine--shared a response to the book. No one said, "I really liked this opportunity to learn about another culture," though I'm sure they did absorb new information. Instead, what I heard again and again was, "I really loved this book because it reminded me of my relationship with my grandmother."

In the course of the conversation, we discovered another connection between the characters in my book and the women. Like Dara's grandmother, they were survivors.

A scene from A Path of Stars; Dara and her grandmother

So often, "multicultural" books are relegated to the purpose of examining differences, such as during Black History Month. What if books with diverse characters and cultures--like the ones in the previous post--were seen as being about, and necessary to, all of us?

Face research for Dara in A Path of Stars

In 1998, I traveled with a black South African friend to southern Africa, as preparation for illustrating a nonfiction book, Africa is Not a Country by Margy Burns Knight and Mark Melnicove. I wasn't planning to do any specific research so much as to look for some sense of connection, some insight that would inform my attempts to portray the diverse range of African cultures, none of which I belonged to and all of which I knew little about. I expected the countries I would be visiting--Swaziland and Zimbabwe as well as South Africa--would be the most culturally different of anything I'd ever seen, the equivalent of traveling to the moon.

That wasn't my experience. As I shopped open air markets in Capetown, walked the dusty paths of my friend's hometown neighborhood of Dube in Soweto, and bought food from street vendors in Durban, instead of a sense of curiosity at the exotic, my response was recognition. Despite the different colors of the landscape and the different customs of people's lives, I kept seeing things that seemed somehow familiar. It took me days to realize that I was reminded of the neighborhoods I'd grown up in in 1960s South Korea, of the ways in which daily life--from brushing teeth to bathing to baby care--was communal and took place in plain sight in the streets and alleyways. In the streets of southern Africa, I saw my own story. 

This was the insight that I brought back with me from my trip, the touchstone I held onto as I went through the lengthy process of research, consulting, collaboration, and critique, to create accurate and respectful images. It taught me that after all the essential work, there's another aspect to authentic representation that can't be found in the data. If we are to truly connect across all our differences, we have to let our hearts respond, and we have to trust those responses as true expressions of our common humanity.

I don't leap over differences to get to commonalities. As I'm researching and creating, I'm focused on the particular details of what defines human uniqueness, in groups and in individuals. The details of difference matter, and have meaning. I keep remembering how little I know, what blinders I'm wearing, that I often can't even imagine what questions to ask. I assume I will make many mistakes. I seek lots of input from primary source experts, people with lived experience, to help me see what I can't see.

But the North Star towards which I am navigating is the core belonging of each of us to one human community. In the images we communicate of "other people"--through the words and pictures we create as writers and illustrators, and the books we share with children as educators and parents--the sweet spot is lively, particular human being. To see, and reach for, our own selves reflected there. Anything less is not enough for our children. 

Ultimately, authentic diversity isn't about getting it "right." It's about getting each other. 


Posted by Anne Sibley O'Brien, author and illustrator of several books for young readers, including A Path of Stars. Anne blogged for Unabridged about the process of creating A Path of Stars here.

Meet Anne during Children's Book Week! 

In partnership with Primary Source and Charlesbridge, Anne Sibley O'Brien will be discussing race, ethnicity, and diversity in children's books. 

Her program, entitled "From the Heart: Illustrating Across Race and Culture," will take place on Tuesday, May 14th from 4:00 PM to 6:00 PM at the Watertown Public Library, 123 Main Street, Watertown, MA. 

A reception and book signing will follow at the Charlesbridge Original Illustration Gallery 

at 85 Main Street, Watertown, MA (two doors down). Free and open to the public! 

Kindly RSVP to trademarketing@charlesbridge.com. 

For more information about this event, please click here.