Where the Creek Goes Wide

As promised, here's a total change of subject to help mark the shift from politics back to more pleasant diversions of life. The next chapter of "Unsettled" will be coming soon. In the meantime, here's something very different. [This post was actually written last Thursday.]
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Those of you who read here may recall that my middle daughter, Kim, is now in college in Chicago. My oldest daughter is a teacher (interim medical leave sub in 3rd grade) who called me last night to borrow "Kim's book," a hand-made hard cover book Kim made for a "Written and Illustrated" contest when she was in fifth grade herself (10 years ago). Em wanted to read it to "her class." [It's not hers but she's been teaching them for a month as the teacher makes miraculous progress from a head injury after a serious bike accident.]

I'll never forget the year Kim took on the task of writing her own book. She did not want to include "people" in the story because she could not draw people. She was much better at doodling flowers and trees and such. Then she needed a "plot" and I helped her with an anthropomorphic "what if" based on some simple pond science: Toads and frogs start out looking alike in the pond but they grow into slightly different critters who live in very different ways. "What if" two became friends in the pond and then "changed."

Kim went with it. She wrote and re-wrote. I kept stressing that stories--especially stories for children--were meant to be read aloud, so we kept "tweaking" the flow of her narrative. I think you'll notice it as you read. I tend to write from an aural approach, too, and you may think you hear me in some of the phrasing, but I can assure you I merely "coached" her. The final wording reflects her writing and reading each line aloud as if to a child.

Then she began her drawings. This took weeks of entire evenings after school, focusing on one "spread" [two open pages] at a time. She set up a "studio" in the breezeway of the "little blue house" and drew and redrew each page. Sometimes she felt like quitting. Sometimes she'd get in a hurry and settle for a drawing that did not look as good as the pages before, and I'd say, "Kim, you really need to do that over again. Think of the book as a whole. Each page needs to look like you cared. The tree toward the end has to look as good as the tree on the first page. It's the same tree." She'd take a deep breath and sigh, "All right. I'll do it again."

We laugh about it now, but she used to think I was making too big a deal out of this project, and I'll admit I was. I really thought she had a good thing going and wanted her to see it through. That's hard for a fifth grader to do--let's face it--it's hard for adults to do.

When the book was done, she sent it in (by mail to a company far away). About a month later it was returned with a letter informing her she got "honorable mention." She was disappointed, but I think she would be very honored indeed to know that a classroom full of third graders heard her story read aloud today by her "big sister" who watched her write it more than a dozen years ago. [I scanned the book last night before giving it to her sister. The pages were meant to be seen in pairs, but that won't work on a blog. If you can't read the text, go to page menu and "zoom in" to 200% . . . or click on each page to enlarge.]


















































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































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