Sister Fun in Indy

My sister and I have both been working hard all week: she's been preparing a major tax return for Eli Lilly; I've been preparing a major symposium on climate change for DePauw.  But yesterday at noon we launched our weekend of sister fun. My goal for our weekend is to visit as many of the sights on my must-see-before-I-leave-Indiana list as possible.

First up yesterday: the City Market, with its thronged customers lined up at booths and stalls offering every kind of cuisine that you can't get in Greencastle (plus those that you can). We wandered about, listening to the piano music played by a real human being piano player, and finally settled on mid-eastern, followed by gelato, eating each course at a different small table next to a window in the upstairs section of the market.

Next: walking to the James Whitcomb Riley home, where the beloved Hoosier poet ("Little Orphant Annie," "The Raggedy Man") lived for 23 years as the permanent house guest of its owners. Riley, almost forgotten today, was enormously popular in his time, earning over three million dollars from his verse, out-billing Mark Twain on speaking tours, and attracting 35,000 mourners after his death to view his coffin honored in the rotunda of the state capitol.  The house, situated in the charming neighborhood of Lockerbie Square, has been open as a museum to Riley since the 1920s and so is not a restoration but a preservation: all furniture, books, and other artifacts in the home are entirely original. 

Here I am on the steps of the house, after our fascinating tour:

Riley is still not my favorite poet, but these lines of his, reproduced on a notepad I bought in the Riley House gift shop, so echo the sentiments of my most-beloved philosopher Epictetus the Stoic that I'm sharing them here:

It hain't no use to grumble and complane;

            It's jest as cheap and easy to rejoice.—

When God sorts out the weather and sends rain,

            W'y rain's my choice. 

-----

 Yesterday, as I explored Indy's treats with my sister (below I'm posting the silly pictures the two of us took of each other in costume pretending to play guitars at the Eiteljorg Museum's history-of-the-guitar exhibit), it was sunny all day.  But if God or Zeus had sorted out the weather and sent rain, that would have been my choice, too.

 

 

The Next Big Thing

 Today I host the Next Big Thing blog campaign. The Next Big Thing is an awareness blog campaign that began in Australia and became international. It features authors and illustrators of books for kids and young adults and their recently published books and/or those that are slated to be released this year. The way it works is each author nominated then turns around and nominates a couple of other authors, who are all given the same questions to answer about their work. So it's a great big game of "Tag, you're it." So today I'm responding to The Next Big Thing's standard questions about my forthcoming book, Zero Tolerance, and I'm tagging two of my favorite fellow kids' book authors, Denise Vega and Troy Cummings, to go next.

What is the working title of your next book? 
It’s being published under the title Zero Tolerance, but it’s had different titles along the way. My working title as I began writing was the cumbersome (and suspense-spoiling) title: Honor Student Expelled: Details at Ten! Another title I used along the way, which I still like, is No Exceptions.

Where did the idea come from for the book?
This is the only time I ever got a book idea from a news item rather than from personal experience (drawing from my own childhood memories or the tribulations of my sons and their friends as they were growing up). A middle school near Boulder, Colorado, where I have my permanent residence, had a high-profile expulsion case a few years ago, when an honor student inadvertently brought the wrong lunch (containing a paring knife) to school by mistake and found herself facing expulsion under the school’s zero-tolerance policies for weapons.

What genre does your book fall under? 
Realistic middle-grade fiction.

What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition? 
Oh, I am so out of touch with movies! I hardly ever watch any.  So I’d have to go back to movie stars of the past. Maybe I’d pick the young Natalie Wood (Susan in Miracle on Thirty-Fourth Street) to play Sierra. Actually, Susan’s self-certainty and moral earnestness in that film would reflect Sierra effectively before her growth in the course of the story (though of course Susan is younger than Sierra).

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

Seventh-grader Sierra Shepard has always been the perfect student, so when she accidentally brings her mother's lunch bag to school, including a paring knife for cutting an apple, she immediately turns in the knife to the school office. Much to her surprise, her beloved principal places her in in-school suspension and sets a hearing for her expulsion, citing the school's ironclad no weapons policy, leading Sierra to question her understanding of herself and her world.  (Well, this was two sentences, but still. ..)

Who is publishing your book?

Margaret Ferguson Books/ Farrar, Straus & Giroux

How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?

This is my longest book – 230 pages, with almost 50 pages cut from the manuscript in revision – so it took me several months working on my hour-a-day, page-a-day system.  This is also the only one of my books that I wrote without knowing how the story was going to end. I wrote every day to find out what was going to happen, and that made me write faster, as I was dying to see how it would all come out.

What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

One of my earlier books for middle-grade readers, Standing Up to Mr. O, also features a seventh-grade girl who is confident about the parameters of her moral universe, only to find her certainties shaken.  In that book, Maggie McIntosh faces life-changing disillusionment when the teacher she idolizes refuses to support her conscientious refusal to dissect animals in her biology class.

Who or what inspired you to write this book?

Because of my day job as a philosophy professor specializing in ethics, I’m always on the lookout for subjects that are morally rich, inviting opportunity for ethical reflection on the part of the reader. While I don’t think it’s difficult to make an ethical case against rigid zero-tolerance policies, more nuanced ethical questions arise about how we respond to intolerant policies without becoming intolerant ourselves.

What else about the book might pique the reader's interest?
I had the pleasure of sharing the book, pre-publication, with a class of gifted and talented fifth graders in Greencastle, Indiana, where I am living this year, and I was pleased that they reported that the ending surprised them: “We didn’t see it coming.” Yay!

Next up on The Next Big Thing, a week from today:

Troy Cummings

Denise Vega

 

Planets in Alignment

My sister is here in Indy for a week, on Lilly business. We have plans for vast quantities of sister fun this weekend, but I was hoping for some mid-week fun together, too.  "Wouldn't it be pleasant to have dinner with Cheryl on Tuesday night?"I told my friend Keith the other evening as we sat together by the Prindle Institute fireplace after a stimulating session of the reading group on Elaine Scarry's book On Beauty and Being Just. Then I gave a sigh and said,"But it's such a long ride there and back, an hour each way, and I do hate driving in the dark."

"Why don't you spend the night with her at her hotel?" Keith asked.

I thought about that possibility.  "Well, that would be tons of fun," I replied, "but then I'd have to drive back to Greencastle the next morning in time to get ready to head off to work." I tried to remember what I had to get done on Wednesday morning.  "On Wednesday I need to . . . on Wednesday I'm planning to . . ."

Suddenly I remembered: On Wednesday I was going to do an author visit at a school right in Indy! At a school over an hour away from Greencastle, but just minutes away from my sister's downtown hotel!

Thus was launched my delicious plan.  I drove to Indianapolis last night after a lovely late-afternoon walk with my friend Nicki and her little dog, Henry, in search of any last lingering crocuses (and we did find a few).  I collected Cheryl at her hotel and whisked her off to Mass Ave for dinner at Bru Burger.  I wasn't able to make the parking meter work, apparently, because I got a parking ticket, but luckily it blew away and so all I got was the empty ticket envelope, and they can hardly expect me to pay not a ticket, but an empty ticket envelope, right?

After dinner, we had a cozy evening in her room at the Westin, with sister giggles galore.  The bed was extremely comfortable. The shower this morning had a lovely standing-outside-in-a-summer-rainfall effect.  We breakfasted together at the hotel buffet.  Then I drove Cheryl to Lilly and headed north to the school, Immaculate Heart of Mary, just off posh North Meridian Street with its gorgeous, stately old homes.  The students I spoke to, in grades K-3, were delightful: so bright and sweet and eager to participate. I sold a heap of books provided by the Kids Ink independent children's bookstore nearby.  On my way home, I stopped in the bookstore, then stopped in the cupcake store next door (yum!), and even found a branch of Chase Bank to deposit my check for the day (there is no Chase branch in Greencastle, so I save up my checks until I go to Bloomington, an hour away, or to the airport, which has Chase ATMs everywhere).

I got back to Greencastle in time to attend a Prindle advisory committee meeting, followed by a bioethics bowl team practice, followed by the next-to-last class of the quarter-credit course on climate change that I'm co-teaching in conjunction with the symposium that is taking place on campus next week.

So the moon was in the seventh house, and Jupiter aligned with Mars, and my day could hardly have turned out to be more lovely.

April Is the Cruelest (Half) Month

April tends to be the most stressful month of the year for people with academic positions, I think.  Faculty and students start the spring semester already drained from the fall semester, and by April, we're facing end-of-the spring-semester madness, with so many events crammed into the calendar before we head toward finals in May.  So in my trusty little notebook I usually make myself an extra-intense to-do list for this cruelest month.

This year I have an extra-cruel first half of April.  I'm the person in charge of a major symposium the Prindle Institute is hosting on the ethics of communicating about climate change, with six prominent speakers coming to campus for three days of talks (Tuesday, April 9, to Thursday, April 11), two talks a day (one at 4:15 and one at 7) and other surrounding events (lunches, dinners, classes for the speakers to attend).  And then the closing keynote for the climate change symposium is doubling as the opening keynote of our annual Undergraduate Ethics Symposium, which brings talented undergraduates from around the country (including some wonderful DePauw students as well) for a weekend of conversation about a wide range of ethical issues. I'm in charge of this symposium, too.

After that, the rest of my life will be easy.

But until then, I'm feeling, shall we say, a wee bit overwhelmed.

It isn't so much that I have heaps to do in preparation for both events, but that I have heaps to worry about. Will all the speakers get here? Will their talks be good? Will their talks be well attended? Will everybody on campus be thrilled with both events or will they have occasion to find fault with anything, and by extension, find fault with me?

Enough! Both events were planned over a period of many months with the input of a team of faculty from many different departments on campus. Both events will be organized with the assistance of Prindle's absolutely fabulous conference-planning team. It will all be okay. And if anything isn't okay?  Well, that is okay, too.

So on my to-do list for the next two weeks, the main item is to engage in every stress-avoidance technique I know. Exercise. Don't overeat. Take care of niggling Loathsome Tasks (LTs) right away rather than letting dread fester. Get plenty of sleep. Make time for fun: luckily my sister will be spending the weekend with me, and I have all kinds of Indiana outings planned. Take deep breaths. And hold onto the thought of how great the rest of my post-mid-April life is going to be.

The Day Before April 2013

Today is the day before April, the day for me to reprint my now-traditional day-before-April post,  It's also Easter Sunday, a day of joy for me and for Christians all around the world. Shortly I'm off to the sunrise service that Christopher helped to organize with the St. Paul's UMC youth group, followed by an Easter church breakfast, and then the glorious processional at the 10:15 worship service: "Christ the Lord Is Risen Today!" 

But first I need to celebrate the day before April.

My mother was an elementary school teacher as well as a writer of a few published stories for children. Her love of reading and writing is where I get my love of reading and writing. My sister and I were raised on poetry. One of our favorite collections was Silver Pennies, edited by Blanche Jennings Thompson ("A Collection of Modern Poems for Boys and Girls" - modern, meaning at that time, published in 1959). The preface to the book begins with the lines:

You must have a silver penny
To get into Fairyland.

The premise of the book was that poems themselves are these silver pennies.

Of all the silver pennies in the book, this poem was the one we loved best, by Mary Carolyn Davies:

The Day Before April

The day before April
Alone, alone,
I walked in the woods
And sat on a stone.

I sat on a broad stone
And sang to the birds.
The tune was God's making
But I made the words.

My mother, my sister, and I have long celebrated "the day before April" as a holiday, a Mills family holiday. A few years ago I hosted a "day before April" party, with my mother and my boys (who did think it was a somewhat strange party) as the only guests. I usually gave my mother flowers on that day.

I've dreamed of writing a book with the title The Day Before April. Maybe someday I will.

In honor the day, I'm going to go buy some flowers - daffodils, probably. Three years ago, when I first wrote this post, I took daffodils to my mother, who was in a rehabilitation center after a fall that broke her hip and arm; she died two months later. My daffodils today are in memory of her.

Happy Easter, to those of you who celebrate Easter. And happy day before April, everybody.

Creative Joy

I use envy as radar. When I feel a twinge of envy toward someone, I try to locate the source of the envy, and then I say to myself, "Hmm. This points me toward something I want to have in my own life."

Over the years I've kept track of the people I envy and why.  I don't think I've ever envied people for having money or any of the things that money can buy.  I don't need to envy people for good health, because I have enviable health myself.  I admit I'd like to have more recognition from the universe for my work as a writer, but I can't say that I envy fellow authors who win the Newbery or the National Book Award.  Maybe that's because I don't think of those things as genuine possibilities for me. And maybe I already know that those things don't bring lasting happiness.

Instead, the people I envy are those who fill their lives  with a certain kind of creative joy. They don't wait until they win a major award to give themselves permission to pursue lives that radiate creative energy. They prioritize creativity in their lives every single day.

Case in point: my friend Cat. She is a writer married to a writer; together they are parents of a three-and-half year old little boy, Max. Their house is suffused with creativity, as well as with love and laughter.

When I had dinner with them the other night, they took me right away to admire the display of peep-o-rama dioramas that they had made with the Easter candy Peeps.  The one they made for me is pictured below. Titled "Just me and my peeps," it represents the fun of my subdivision pool in summertime.  Another of the dioramas was captioned "The artist formerly known as Peep." The Peeps in that one were staged as a rock band, complete with vests and electric guitars. "Power to the Peeple" staged a Peep protest with the small marshmallow chicks waving appropriately indignant signs. Max had made his own peep-o-rama, theme uncertain, but creative joy in fashioning it unmistakable.

Now, I don't particularly want to make my own Peep dioramas. But I want to throw myself into my writing, as Cat and Doug do, and offer creative opportunities to the larger community, as they also do, in Cat's case by teaching writing classes on topics such as journaling during pregnancy and crafting creative monologues for performance. And I want more creative play - more "just-because" projects that have no point other than the fun of savoring that creative moment, bringing something new and strange and wonderful into being.

So maybe I DO want to make my own Peep dioramas. Until this week, that never existed for me as a creative option. Now, thanks to Cat and Doug and Max, it does.

Cleaning the Attic

I'm back in Colorado for spring break, cramming my time here full of the usual fun: church on Palm Sunday, walks with Rowan, watching Anna Karenina on DVD with Diane, lunch today with Maureen, my writing group tonight, play date with Cat and her little boy Max tomorrow, making my son Gregory watch Roman Holiday with me in preparation for his study abroad in Rome in May. (How I love that press conference scene at the end of the film when Audrey Hepburn, forced to return to the confines of her life as a princess after one beautiful day of adventure in Rome spent falling in love with Gregory Peck, is asked which of the capital cities she visited on her good will tour of Europe she loved best. She begins with the canned response that each in its own way was unforgettable, and that it would be impossible to choose, but then, with her eyes fixed on Gregory Peck, standing with his fellow newspapermen in the front row, she blurts out, "Rome!")

So these activities would have amply filled my days back home.

But then I decided to tackle the project of cleaning out my attic.  I bought my house five and a half years ago, and somehow in those years my good-sized attic moved from empty to stuffed: things I couldn't part with from cleaning out my mother's apartment, things left over from cleaning out two houses the summer before last, the extra-long twin bed sheets from Gregory's freshman-year dorm room, dozens of gift bags in perfectly good shape to re-use, cartons filled with author's copies of my books, huge quantities of green plastic grass for the boys' Easter baskets (yes, at 21 and 24 they still get an annual visit from the Easter bunny), boxes from Xbox game systems in case they break and need to be returned, and much much more.

I had planned to clean the attic this summer, as part of my launching my new back-in-Colorado life, but when I went in there this past weekend to retrieve something, I saw that the considerable amounts of roofing residue had fallen all over everything when the roofers installed new attic vents while putting on my new HOA-ordered roof while I was away in Indiana.  And it also occurred to me that cleaning an attic is much more pleasant during cool spring days (very cool! we've had ten-and-half inches of snow since I've been home!) than in the scorching days of summer.  And so I began.

Cleaning an attic is not an hour-a-day task.  It is an obsessive, all-consuming, completely absorbing task.  I worked yesterday like a woman possessed, dragging out everything so that my bedroom and office are almost impassable now.  I tossed, recycled, sorted, consolidated.  Today is the un-fun part of vacuuming up the roofing mess.  And then comes the bliss of putting everything back in apple pie order. Then I can walk into the attic and hug myself with happiness.

Next up: the garage!  I am a woman with a mission!  I am a woman who cannot be stopped!