On September 8, 2001, I was three years into the writing life and so, so, so eager to hopefully, fingers crossed, finally be an author someday. There was a new event in DC taking place that day, a book gathering started by then First Lady Laura Bush and held at the Library of Congress called the National Book Festival.

I lived in Northern Virginia at the time, so I loaded my sixth-month-old in his stroller and took the Metro into town. All morning and afternoon I sat in on lectures and book signings. It was beyond inspiring. I listened to an author (whose name now escapes me) talk about story ideas. Some, she said, you had to work for. Others she called Athena ideas: They came to you fully formed (like Athena popping out of Zeus’s head). I got to talk with Katherine Paterson and tell her how much her books meant to me. At one point, I entered an elevator and looked up to see the other passenger was Jan Karon. “I love your books!” I blurted. “And I love your baby,” she said. Then the doors opened and we went our separate ways.

So when I got an email a few weeks ago from the New Mexico Center for the Book* saying that The Burning Season had been selected as the Great Reads youth title to represent New Mexico at this year’s Festival, I could hardly believe it. This is the greatest honor I can think of for a book that in many ways is a love letter to my beautiful home. I remembered my twenty-seven-year-old self that day, soaking in the festival and so full of yearning. What if I could go back and tell her that not only would she sell a couple of books, but someday one of them would be featured at the festival too?

Two titles are picked every year to represent each state — an adult book and a children’s book. This year’s adult title is Philip Connors’s the mountain knows the mountain: a fire watch diary. Phil works in a fire tower in the Gila National Forest. His book, Fire Season: Field Notes from a Wilderness Lookout, was hugely influential in the writing of my story, and I am such a fan. I got to meet him last fall when he was in town for a book signing. After he was contacted by the New Mexico Center for the Book, he sent me a congratulatory message from his tower (fun!). This pairing of books feels like another full-circle moment. See this quick news clip and article where we both briefly talk about our books.

The writing life can be pretty discouraging, but it’s pretty incredible, too. Grateful for this incredible moment in so many different ways.

* I’m not sure why the image from their site says twenty years, as the first festival was twenty-five years ago. I guess it’s an old graphic.

The post A Twenty-Five Year Full Circle Moment: A Book at the National Book Festival! appeared first on Caroline Starr Rose.

I’ve gone back over my last few years of Quick Lit posts to highlight some middle grade titles I loved. Enjoy!

Northwind by Gary Paulsen

I am a huge Gary Paulsen fan. Hatchet influenced my first novel, May B. Brian’s Winter (and May B.) influenced my novel releasing next year, The Burning Season. Northwind was Paulsen’s last novel (he died in October 2021), and it’s a shining example of what he did best: sparely written survival stories with an eye on the wonders and dangers of nature.

We’re never told when or exactly where Northwind takes place, though it’s a medieval Nordic story (as Norse mythology is peppered in). When an terrible illness strikes, Leif is the only survivor left from his fish camp. He takes a canoe and heads north with the “moon currents” to “the heartbeat of the ocean.” The jacket copy says Northwind “does for the ocean what Hatchet does for the woods.” I agree wholeheartedly.

Wayward Creatures by Dayna Lorentz

Seventh-grader Gabe Meyer is in a rough patch. Things have been tense at home since his dad lost his job, and his friends, Owen and Leo, don’t have time for him anymore. One afternoon Owen and Leo invite Gabe to hang out, but their new friend, Taylor, makes Gabe feel like an outsider. Gabe does something impulsive and stupid in an attempt to win back his friends: he steals some fireworks from a convenience store and sets them off with the boys in a nearby park. A fire starts and the others scatter, leaving Gabe to deal with the consequences.

Nearby, in the woods, Rill, a young coyote, is fed up with her pack. She’s tired of looking out for her younger siblings. Her parents don’t appreciate her. She runs away just before a fire roars through, permanently separating her from her family.

This beautiful book about restoration really digs deep into the feelings of a young person (and coyote!) dealing with the consequences of poor decisions and coming to terms with those choices, the power of community, and the bonds formed between two unlikely friends. I can’t say it any better than Kirkus did in a starred review: “As a story about community, healing, and family—both human and animal—this is one of the best.” Winner of the NCTE Charlotte Huck Award.

Ten Thousand Tries by Amy Makechnie

When I finished Amy’s latest middle grade, I sent her an email saying something like, “You slayed me in the most beautiful way.”

Eighth-grader Golden Maroni is convinced he can master anything if he puts in the effort. He’s going to be soccer captain and get his team to the championship, he’s going to keep his best friend and neighbor from moving away, and he’s going to help his dad beat ALS — all he has to do is try hard enough. I loved Golden’s totally kid-like impulsivity, his big heart, his realistic relationship with his siblings and friends, and the way he slowly comes to terms with his father’s progressive and fatal illness. Soccer fans will gobble this up. Kids who have a family member with a difficult diagnosis will find comfort and so much love in this story.

The Patron Thief of Bread by Lindsay Eagar

Longtime readers here will know I’m a HUGE Lindsay fan. She has an incredible range and is just so good at what she does. (In fact, I describe all her work as an ode to story.) This book got SIX STARRED REVIEWS and is my prediction for next year’s Newbery. WHAT A BOOK!

So, let’s get a picture of it: Duck is a member of the Crowns, a Oliver Twist-like street gang in medieval France. She’s been singled out by the gang’s leader, Gnat, to serve as a funnel for her rag-tag family. Duck will work as an apprentice to Griselde Baker, providing weekly bread and pilfered coins for the Crowns. Duck relishes the chance to help her clan, but she also comes to love the bakery and the baker herself. Griselde (a fabulous, warm-hearted character who reminded me of the kind priest in Les Mis) is devoted to Duck, trusting her completely. Who exactly is Duck and where does she belong? And how does the gargoyle (and secondary narrator) perched on the never-finished cathedral where the Crowns live fit in?

Fighting Words by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley

This middle grade novel opens with this dedication: For any child who needs this story: you are never alone. A heads up: it’s about sexual abuse and is handled in a way that is accessible and manageable for young readers. I finished this book days ago and haven’t stopped thinking about it. What Kimberly Brubaker Bradley has written is real, raw, compassionate, and needed. This isn’t an easy read, but it’s a book that’s hard to put down.

Ten-year-old Della and sixteen-year-old Suki have just entered foster care. For years, they’ve fallen through the cracks after their mother was sent to prison and they were left with her boyfriend who didn’t have custody of them. Foster care is a safe place for them, and it’s where they start to have some normalcy and begin to face the years they spent with their mother’s boyfriend. Suki is fiercely protective of her little sister. When she starts to pull away, Della is confused why her sister isn’t there for her. This is a story of sisterly love, of children having to be adults before they’re ready, of adults who do horrible things and others who are kind and supportive (and ones who have the potential to grow into the kind and supportive adults children need). This is a book I hope every school has available, as unfortunately, statistically speaking, sexual abuse touches lives in every classroom.

Any middle-grade titles you’d add to my list?

The post Quick Lit: Middle Grade You Might Have Missed appeared first on Caroline Starr Rose.

In my teaching years, no matter where I happened to live or what grade I was teaching, when I asked my students to define poetry they would all tell me the same thing: Poetry is about love and flowers. These upper elementary and middle school kids were saying more than they realized. They were revealing they’d already latched onto the message that poetry isn’t for everyone — just the people who are fans of sappy sorts of things.

Every year I tried to prove this idea wrong. I’d read my kids poetry about sports and vacuum cleaners, about growing into too big feet and laughing when you shouldn’t. We’d hunt down perfect poems to exchange with secret poetry pals, attend a “Poetry Gallery”, sing Emily Dickinson’s lines to the tune of Gilligan’s Island (Try it! It works!), and share memorized poems in our classroom version of a beatnik coffeehouse. In one of my favorite lessons, we’d read aloud Robert Frost’s “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening,” first scanning the poem then clapping out the beats as we chanted the words. Sometimes we’d add in some funky rhythm, and half the room would whisper train-like chu-chu-DU sounds that lined up perfectly with each clap. Then we’d swap roles, playing with the poem’s sound and meter again. One year a student pulled out his trombone and blurped along to the beat. It was a magical moment, our own poetry happening.

Those kids who’d said weeks before that poetry was about flowers and love? They weren’t buying it anymore.

That sort of transformation is what I experienced the first time I picked up a verse novel. It was Karen Hesse’s Out of the Dust, and when I closed the book I had changed. The story was raw and beautiful, its spare language a straight shot to my heart. I’d climbed into Billie Jo’s skin and left myself behind. Something similar happened when I read Sharon Creech’s Heartbeat:

Thump-thump, thump-thump
bare feet hitting the grass
as I run run run
in the air and like the air
weaving through the trees
skimming over the ground

In reading those first lines I was with my students again, our hearts-beating-hands-clapping. Verse novels pushed me one step closer to the world on the page. Each word spoke doubly — first telling the story, second helping me feel it.

My students were right about the love thing. Poetry heightens the emotions. And verse novels made stories come alive for me in ways they never had before.

For a genre like historical fiction that is often viewed as distant or hard to understand, verse becomes a beautiful fit. It strips away the unnecessary and gives readers an intimate picture of a book’s central characters. I stumbled into writing my first verse novel, May B., a survival story set in 1870s Kansas, when I realized my early writing efforts felt lifeless. Once I went back to my research and re-read the private writings of frontier women, I realized I could most honestly tell May’s story through mirroring their spare language. Instead of explaining, I could let the words speak for themselves. (I didn’t tell myself at the time that I was writing a verse novel. I had no idea how to do that. The only verse novels I’d read at that point were the two I mentioned above.)

I chose verse deliberately for Blue Birds, my historical novel about the Lost Colony of Roanoke. My favorite passages come from the poems Alis and Kimi share. Here are two girls from entirely different worlds who nevertheless become friends. The structure of these dual-voice poems speaks the story visually. The reader is invited to look and listen as the girls move from distrust to curiosity to mutual understanding. It was deeply satisfying for me to watch their friendship take shape upon the page.

Verse was the best fit for The Burning Season, a story that like May B. relies heavily on solitude, nature, and survival, a story that has large swaths of internal reflection and moment-by-moment stream of consciousness during the climax that couldn’t have happened successfully if it had been told through prose.

Poetry isn’t exclusive, as my students first thought, but sometimes it can feel that way. That’s the beauty of the verse novel, a succinct, condensed blend of poetry and story that flows from one word to the next. Those words sink deep and move with familiar rhythms we encounter every day. Verse novels cover so much ground. They can truly be about anything. The verse novel doesn’t just tell a story, it shows us how to listen, encourages us to linger. It changes us along the way.

***

I originally shared this post in 2019, the same year Afoma Umesi began digging into everything that is middle grade. If you aren’t familiar with Afoma, her website, Reading Middle Grade, is a wealth of information. I had already scheduled this post to run a second time (with a few updates) when Afoma sent (via Substack) an article called “Kids Know What They Hate” (it’s very much worth your time). In it, Afoma discusses survey results about kids and their reading preferences. She had one hundred responses to her survey, so while the answers are most likely skewed toward self-motivated readers, it is far more comprehensive (in my mind) than many adult interpretations or publisher-driven ideas we have about kids and reading.

There is a lot there worth thinking about and a lot to discuss. I have thoughts and opinions about many points that perhaps I’ll mention another time, but the thing I want to talk about today, in light of what I’ve written above, focuses on this portion of Afoma’s survey results:

Finding 5: Don’t conflate poetry and verse novels

Poetry hate climbs steeply with age: 0% at ages 7 to 9, 11% at 10 to 11, and 17% at 12 to 14. Verse novel hate rises gently across the same age bands, peaking at just 6% in the 12 to 14 group—about a third of poetry’s rejection rate at the same age. Same form on the page, very different reception. Verse novels are niche but tolerated. Poetry is actively disliked, and the dislike grows as kids get older…

The poetry hate curve also closely mirrors the school curriculum poetry exposure curve. Most US schools start ramping up poetry analysis around fourth grade, which is exactly when the kid data starts showing the rise in poetry rejection. I can’t prove the connection with this sample, but it’s worth saying out loud that the way poetry gets taught may be the very thing killing the love for it. Kids don’t hate poetry because it’s poetry. They might hate poetry because of how they’ve been forced to meet it. (emphasis mine)

Again, I have opinions. But the thing that absolutely slayed me was the “poetry hate.” I’m not going to pretend this isn’t a real thing. (You can see my former students’ biases in what I’ve written above.) But it doesn’t have to be this way.

Please, please, please, teachers. Please, parents and librarians. Expose kids to poetry in fun, inviting ways. Do not analyze poetry in fourth grade! Celebrate it! It is our job as the adults in their lives to offer them good things, to show them the beauty and fun and variety of various art forms and writings. And while yes, not all of learning is about choice, celebration, and self direction, my goodness, some of it needs to be. Some of it should be simply allowing kids to explore and experience wonder.

I am all for choice when it comes to reading, especially when we are trying to encourage children to become life-long readers. I’m about it for adults, too, who naturally gravitate toward what they already know they enjoy. And I’m for asking kids to try things beyond their already developed tastes. (I feel the same way about adult readers. I have some pretty strong feelings about the reading writers should be engaged in. Again, my opinion. Take it or leave it.) But I think (I hope!) that we can allow for, and even encourage, exposure to poetry that is no-strings-attached joyful so that “poetry hate” isn’t something that happens to ten-year-olds, so that we might keep the door open (a little longer? ideally forever?) to the idea that poetry is for everyone and can be about anything.

Please, let’s do better.

The post In Celebration of the Verse Novel…and Some Thoughts on “Poetry Hate” appeared first on Caroline Starr Rose.

Whether or not we recognize why we need story—and we usually read novels without asking that question—I am convinced we are drawn to fiction because story makes sense out of a chaotic world.  Much of the artistry in the creation of fiction is that of selection.  Writers choose.  They give us only what matters in the trajectory of this story, what will carry us to the final scene, what will give meaning to all that has come before.  They take the jumble of life and draw us through it in a way that allows us, not to be told, but to feel the meaning … at least the meaning that can be drawn from this particular set of events.
— Marion Dane Bauer 

The post Why We Read appeared first on Caroline Starr Rose.