March/April 2013 Newsletter

YA Novel Review

First, sorry to everyone for sending the newsletter from last time!  Clearly, I’m spending too much time gazing out the window. Here’s the one I meant to send:

The Earth is Painted Green:  A Garden of Poems About Our Planet edited by Barbara Brenner (Scholastic)

So in case you haven’t heard yet (you know, from my shouts on Twitter, Facebook, or from my rooftop to the wide sky), my next YA novel CATCH A FALLING STAR will be published by Scholastic in Summer of 2014.  You can’t quite hear the cartwheels in my voice from where you’re reading, but, needless to say, I’m thrilled.  So, my family and I have been playing our own sort of springtime egg hunt:  We’ve been searching the house for the red SCHOLASTIC bands on our books.  “Look, that one’s Scholastic,” my husband will point out. “So is that one!” Anabella loves to shout, “Scholastic!” when she spies one and I imagine it’s much how the miners sounded when they said, “Eureka!”

For this Point of View newsletter (in honor of  my new publisher, national poetry month, and also Earth Day) I wanted to talk about one such gem from Scholastic that my family and I return to year after year called The Earth is Painted Green: A Garden of Poems about Our Planet edited by Barbara Brenner and Illustrated by S.D. Schindler.  Here’s an example from the collection:

The Garden Hose
In the gray evening
I see a long serpent
With its tail in the dahlias.

It lies in loops across the grass
And drinks softly at the faucet.

I can hear it swallow.

— Beatrice Janosco

The book is full of these earthy meditations and Anabella and I love to open it at random, read a poem, and then write whatever that poem inspires.  Schindler’s illustrations are both lush and watercolor-washed, cradling the poems on each page.  With our neighbor’s tree bursting with color, with the daffodils poking up through the brown ground, (and with my gaze clearly out the window), now is the perfect time for a garden of poems.

Writing Exercise

Look out your window.  What do you see bursting there?  The light comes later now, is sharper somehow in the evening, and everywhere there is suddenly color – white, pale pink, red.  Find one slim piece of the blooming world and choose it.

Title a poem with the name of this bit of the spring world you found.  Using “The Garden Hose” as a guide, write your own addition to the garden of poems, giving a simple thing a singular life.

Outside Reading School Project

Mary Oliver wrote:
“Instructions for living a life.
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.”

What is in your garden of poems?  What about the world astonishes you?  Write a series of poems about your earth, your outside places.  Then, include photographs, create art, find illustrations to support your poems.  Be astonished.  Tell us about it.