#6 Quadrooped!

In the past week or so, two college-educated adults have picked up my latest middle-grade novel and read the title aloud: Jeremy Cabbage and the Living Museum of Human Oddballs and Quadruped Delights. A mouthful, I know. But when they got to Quadruped, they faltered a bit, and then read the word as if it were two, rather than three syllables, as in -- quadrooped. This, as you might imagine, is disheartening, especially so because one of them is an elementary school teacher. Good heavens! What is happening? While quadruped might not come up in our daily conversation, it certainly can't be considered arcane, can it? It's not a word like chthonic, after all, or analemmatic. (And for you dirty-minded types, analemmatic is not what you think it might mean.)


I could have used four-footed in the title, I know, but why should I have? There is a perfectly good word -- quadruped -- that means exactly that. Besides, with its combination of soft vowels and hard consonants it reminds us how playful our language can be; it's fun to say, and, until recently, I thought, to read. This is part of the joy of language, no? And this joy is what I want to pass on to kids. It's one of the reasons I write.

When The Transmogrification of Roscoe Wizzle came out in paperback, the publisher suggested we change the title simply to Roscoe Wizzle. When these kinds of issues come up, as they often do in publishing, I try to be flexible, but in this case I was obdurate (or should I say, stubborn?) Why? Because a year or two before, during a school visit, a boy had tugged excitedly on my shirtsleeve and said, "The Transmogrification of Roscoe Wizzle. Transmogrification! When I hear that word, it . . .it . . . it just makes me want to read the book!" Here was a boy who was experiencing the fun of his own language. Why deny him, and others like him, this very deep pleasure? By the way, I can't tell you the number of adults who have mispronounced transmogrify. Kids seem to get it right every time.

Recently, the second Evangeline came out in paperback as well. Before I realized what was happening, the title was changed from Evangeline Mudd and the Great Mink Escapade to Evangeline Mudd and the Great Mink Rescue. Escapade was apparently too difficult. I wish now I had been with it enough to make a fuss. To me, this kind of change demonstrates a lack of faith in our children. And when adults start to lack faith, the bar can only go down, down down.

All in all, this is very dismaying. In fact, I'm feeling . . let's see . . . what's the right word? Yes! I've got it! I'm feeling quadrooped!

#5 Letters About Literature

It's spring now; I know that because in our field there are eleven lambs. The sheep don't belong to us. (For better or worse, we're not exactly the farming types.) But the 4-H family who do own them needed a field, and we had one which was overgrown and a mess. So, it's perfect. I think it must be impossible to really understand the nuances of the verb unless you have had the good fortune to watch lambs gambol in the spring.

And on a completely narcissistic note, I am pleased to announce that Lydia, the third in this family of four children, has named the lamb she will show at the local fairs this summer, David the Writer. Having been a black sheep for most of my life, I am redeemed at last by a six-year-old. Thank you, Lydia!

This year, I was a judge for Letters About Literature, a national contest sponsored by the Center for the Book in the Library of Congress (in partnership with Target.) Young people from grades four through twelve write letters to the authors of their favorite books. The contest is administered by the fabulous Catherine Gourley at the Center for the Book. Cathy does a terrific job of keeping all the letters straight, managing the arcane judging, and in general making sure it all happens. Good on ya, Cathy!

I was one of three judges reading Level II -- grades seven and eight. We read over forty letters, all of which had won at the state level. The letters were charming, heartfelt and often beautifully written, but what struck me most was how many of them centered on tragedy: the death of loved ones, serious illnesses, addicted family members. Was this, I wondered, a result of the kinds of books we are putting into kids' hands? A reflection of the Reality TV world in which we all now live? A preference of the judges at the state level for "serious" letters?

It made the letters difficult to judge. I had to remind myself over and over again that I wasn't judging the life situation of the writer (which was sadder? the dying father or the alcoholic mother? -- that kind of thing) but the letter she had written. It's worth noting, by the way, that nearly all the letters were written by girls. This, in itself, is a tragedy.

I don't know yet if the winners have been announced, but when they are, I'll put a link to the two winning Level II letters on the blog. They're worth reading. In the meantime, congratulations to all the contestants and to the authors of the books they were responding to.

#4 Sideways Stories from the Wayside School

Generally, our household is a healthy one, which means that our medical supplies are limited to the basics: bandaids and aspirin. But on Wednesday evening, my fever seemed to be climbing and so Barbara drove to our friends, Wendy and Scott Hanwell --the parents of young twins --to borrow theirs. We were both puzzled by the instrument she returned with; it measured only to 100 degrees Farenheit. There was space for the mercury to rise higher, but no numbers registering the actual temperature. Weird. Only later did we discover that it was a basal thermometer.

For the uninitiated, basal thermometers are used to alert women to the actual day they are ovulating.

Apparently, I was.

I wanted to take a moment to mention another book I love: Louis Sachar's Sideways Stories from the Wayside School. Completely different from Tuck, but brilliant in its own right. And yet, at a conference a few years ago, I heard a doyenne of children’s literature announce to an audience of well over eight hundred that until Sachar wrote Holes, it was thought he was “capable of writing only B fiction.” Yikes!

Let's put aside for the moment the incredible arrogance (not to mention just plain bad manners of saying such a thing publicly) and ask ourselves why the Wayside School and its inhabitants were dissed so out-of-hand. Is it, one suspects, simply because the book is funny? If so, it seems terribly short-sighted since the surreal humor in the book, as well as its masterful structure, cloak, among other things, astute observations about human nature and the wonderfully subversive relationship between children and adults. But even if this were not so, isn't it enough that the book makes us laugh? What about humor for its own sake? Good heavens! Must a book always teach children something? What about the sheer value of story? Somebody! Tell me! When did we get to be such fuddy-duddies?

The truth is that kids still love the Wayside School nearly thirty years after it was published. Hooray for them! I can't help but wonder if that will be true of the A fiction of which the aforementioned doyenne seems to approve.

More on this next time. Still foolish . . . er . . . I mean fluish.