Julia Glass Picks Favorite Children's Books

National Book Award winner Julia Glass, who visits us on Thursday, April 3rd, picks her favorite underrated children's books in   Entertainment Weekly.

Here are two out of ten:

Life Story by Virginia Lee Burton: “For the precocious science nerd, page past the can-do life lesson of Burton’s Mike Mulligan to Life Story, a proscenium-stage drama that travels through time from the birth of the sun to human existence the way it looked about fifty years ago.”

Uncle Elephant by Arnold Lobel: (Pictured) “Frog and Toad can laugh at the Caldecotts; they’ve been on Broadway. Equally enchanting among Arnold Lobel’s characters, however, is Uncle Elephant, a perfect novel in miniature.”

More in EW:  http://shelf-life.ew.com/2014/03/17/julia-glass-criminally-underrated-books/

More about Julia's upcoming visit:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/glass_julia14.html

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On Losing a Child

No writer has confronted the reality of losing a child more bravely than Ann Hood, whose 2007 novel, The Knitting Circle, and 2008 memoir, Comfort: A Journey Through Grief, seek meaning and healing where both would seem unattainable-- in the death of her five year old daughter, Grace.

Hood, who visits the Writers Institute on 2/26, explores grief and loss and paths to emotional survival in all of her subsequent work, including her new novel, The Obituary Writer (2013).

Here is a 2011 article from Salon, "What I never told anyone about her death":  http://www.salon.com/2011/05/17/ann_hood_daughter_mortifying_disclosure/

More on her visit:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/mirabelli_hood13.html

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The Literature of Bullying-- Replies, Rebuttals, Confessions, and Catharsis

In addition to her work as poet and playwright, Magdalena Gomez (who visits UAlbany tomorrow) is the coeditor of a new anthology written by survivors of being bullied:  Bullying: Replies, Rebuttals, Confessions, and Catharsis (2012, with Maria Luisa Arroyo). The book features a variety of original essays, poetry, plays, and commentary by parents, teachers, children and assorted adult survivors on how bullying has affected their lives.

Gomez will participate in two events on Friday:

Conversations with Diasporican Writers — 2:15 – 3:45 p.m., Assembly Hall, Campus Center, Uptown CampusModerator: Tomás Urayoán Noel, University at Albany
Guest Writers: Magdalena Gómez, Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes, Jesús Papoleto Meléndez, and Edwin Torres

Diasporican Café: Performing Voices of the Puerto Rican Diaspora — 5:30 – 7:45 p.m., Campus Center Ballroom
Guest Writers: Giannina Braschi, Magdalena Gómez, Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes, Jesús Papoleto Meléndez, and Edwin Torres

Five internationally known U.S. Puerto Rican writer-performers will discuss their work in an afternoon panel discussion and present readings/performances in the evening. Both events are part of the 20th Anniversary Conference of the Puerto Rican Studies Association, which is being held at UAlbany October 24 – 27. For more information on the Conference go to: http://www.puertoricanstudies.org. 

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Alison Lurie, on being "too clever for her own good"

Alison Lurie, our new official New York State Author who speaks tonight at Page Hall, writes about being "too clever" as a little girl, and about coping with a birth injury that left her with facial atrophy and deafness in one ear.

"All young children, we know, are imaginative and creative; and while they remain young these qualities are usually fostered. The grubby but delightful paintings and naïve verses are extravagantly admired, shown to visitors, tacked to the kitchen walls. But as children grow older, encouragement of imaginative creation is often quietly replaced by encouragement of what have begun to seem more important traits: good manners, good marks, good looks; athletic and social success; and a willingness to earn money mowing lawns and baby-sitting - traits that are believed to predict adult success. Children who seem unlikely to do well along these lines sometimes find that their work stays on the kitchen wall longer than usual; and so it was with me. I was encouraged to be creative past the usual age because I didn't have much else going for me. I was a skinny, plain, off-looking little girl, deaf in one badly damaged ear from a birth injury, and with a resulting atrophy of the facial muscles that pulled my mouth sideways whenever I opened it to speak and turned my smile into a sort of sneer. I was clever, or, as one of my teachers put it, 'too clever for her own good,' but not especially charming or affectionate or helpful. I couldn't seem to learn to ride a bike or sing in tune, and I was always the last person chosen for any team."

More in the New York Times.

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Children: A Partly Savage Tribe

"There exists in our world an unusual, partly savage tribe, ancient and widely distributed, yet until recently little studied by anthropologists or historians. All of us were at one time members of this tribe: we knew its customs, manners and rituals, its folklore and sacred texts. I refer, of course, to childhood."

So writes Alison Lurie in a 1990 New York Times essay, "A Child's Garden of Subversion." A scholar of children's literature as well as a Pulitzer-winning novelist, Lurie will be inaugurated as New York's newest official State Author, tomorrow, Thursday, Sept. 20 at 8PM in Page Hall on the UAlbany downtown campus. She will share the stage with New York's new State Poet, Marie Howe.

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"Hurry"-- A Poem About a Young Child

Marie Howe, our new State Poet, was inspired by her preschool age daughter to write the following 2008 poem:

Hurry

By Marie Howe b. 1950 Marie Howe

We stop at the dry cleaners and the grocery store

and the gas station and the green market and

Hurry up honey, I say, hurry,

as she runs along two or three steps behind me

her blue jacket unzipped and her socks rolled down.  

Where do I want her to hurry to? To her grave?

To mine? Where one day she might stand all grown?

Today, when all the errands are finally done, I say to her,

Honey I'm sorry I keep saying Hurry—

you walk ahead of me. You be the mother.  

And, Hurry up, she says, over her shoulder, looking

back at me, laughing. Hurry up now darling, she says,

hurry, hurry, taking the house keys from my hands.

 

Marie Howe will be inaugurated as New York's official State Poet on Thursday, September 20 in Page Hall on the University at Albany's downtown campus.

 

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Writing Life: I Wake to a Screaming Toddler

Lauren Groff, who visits the Writers Institute on Tuesday, March 27, describes her normal day in a 2010 New York Times interview:

"I wake to a screaming toddler, go for a run to keep the screaming toddlers who live in my head at bay, eat a hasty breakfast of eggs and coffee, and go out to my wee little space that my husband carved out of the back of our garage. We call it a studio, but that’s being kind. I have very indifferent temperature control back there. It’s a swamp in the Florida summer, and in the chilly winter I lose the use of my hands after two hours. So I take many, many trips inside for coffee or popsicles, depending on the season. Once in a while, I’ll look up to find skittering across my desk a palmetto bug — which, as everyone knows, is just high-euphemism for cockroach. And skinks! There are tons of skinks in my studio. I love their little pulsing necks." More.

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