Category Archives: real life

November 29, 2016   sharon   holidays, inspiration, literacy, real life  
1

#GivingTuesday

Today is Giving Tuesday, a five-year-old movement launched as an antidote to the commercialism of Black Friday and Cyber Monday at the start of the holiday season.

There are many fine organizations you can give to, and this year ones that work in immigration advocacy, women’s issues, LGBTQ rights, racial equality, and other human rights issues seem more worthy than ever. But because we’re in the business of stories, I wanted to take a minute to mention a few groups I admire that work to make sure folks of all ages can enjoy the power of reading and all the doors it opens–and are free to make their own voices heard.

 Girls Write Now https://www.girlswritenow.org/

Girls Write Now mentors underserved high school girls from throughout New York City’s five boroughs — over 90% high need and 95% girls of color — who must rise above the race and income-based inequalities of the city’s public school system and the nation’s workforce. Through one-to-one mentoring with professional women writers, writing and technology workshops, and leadership, college prep, and professional development opportunities, we inspire women to share their craft and empower girls to find their voices and tell their stories.

United Through Reading http://www.unitedthroughreading.org/

In more than 200 locations worldwide, United Through Reading offers military service members the opportunity to be video-recorded reading books to their children at home. Our program creates emotional connections between parents and their children, encourages literacy, and makes homecomings easier.

 PEN America https://pen.org/

PEN America stands at the intersection of literature and human rights to protect open expression in the United States and worldwide. We champion the freedom to write, recognizing the power of the word to transform the world.  Our mission is to unite writers and their allies to celebrate creative expression and defend the liberties that make it possible.

If you’re looking for more giving ideas, Book Riot offered a round-up with many more literacy organizations. And Electric Lit put a great list of places to volunteer your time and talents!

Do you have a favorite reading/writing non-profit that you support? Tell us about it in the comments or head on over to Twitter and share there!

October 05, 2016   sharon   children's books, favorites, maps, real life, Sharon  
8

Take a look, it’s NOT just in a book…

This afternoon one of my clients tweeted a link to this Atlas Obscura piece on the Real-Life Homes of the Heroes of Children’s Literature, and I was instantly entranced:

Some of my favorites are mapped here, including Betsy, Tacy, and Tib’s version of Milwaukee plus the author’s childhood home in nearby Mankato, Minnesota and, closer to the DGLM office, Lorimer Street where a tree grew in Brooklyn (Williamsburg to be exact, and a very different version thereof!). But some other favorites are missing from this piece, such as the Victoria and Albert Museum in London that Pauline, Petrova, and Posy walked to on wet days in Ballet Shoes. And, as the authors smartly point out, some childhood favorites can never be visited, like Narnia or Hogwarts. What wouldn’t I give to visit the Berenstain Bears’ treehouse!!

Funnily enough, I don’t think I’ve ever actually trekked to any of the altars I worshipped at as a childhood bookworm. And I wonder if it’s ever really worth it to see the places in real life that once lived so vividly in your imagination—wouldn’t some of the sheen be rubbed off when you view it with your own two experienced worldly adult eyes? Even if it’s not a place you go to physically. I’ve been very much enjoying this series on What Children’s Literature Teaches Us About Money over at The Billfold. The Little House on the Prairie world seems slightly less appealing once you reach adulthood and realize the real-world implications of twisting straw to burn for warmth and, oh yeah, Pa’s all-controlling patriarchy. And I loathed Marilla for refusing Anne her much-longed-for puffed-sleeves as sheer spite because the pragmatic view of fabric costs was somehow lost on me. On the other hand, when I first moved to NYC and was a starving, exhausted bookseller, I took heart in Claudia and Jamie’s example of thrift and ingenuity in The Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler.

So I’m not sure, in the end, if I am for or against making your childhood favorites come to life. I’ll think about it while I’m re-reading the works of Montgomery, Streatfeild, and Lovelace this long weekend.

What children’s book site would you most want to visit? Any great awakenings of a scene in a kids’ book that seemed totally different when you read it as an adult?

September 15, 2016   Erin   advice, books, memoir, reading, real life, writing  
3

Books Aren’t and Shouldn’t Be Like Real Life

I remember the first time I attended a lecture on writing memoirs. I was expecting this lecture to tell me all the obvious things, like how to write about sad or unbelievable events and make them seem as realistic as the moment they happened. Except that wasn’t at all what I learned. Regardless of what the lecturer was actually teaching us, it all centered around the same idea—books are not real life. Who wants to read about real life? Who wants fiction mirroring exactly what they do on daily basis that they hate so much because it has no significance except to get them from point A to point B? It’s the things that are important, and the little things that snowball into the important things, that we care about.

For instance, if I told you that I woke up this morning and walked my dog, got ready for work, and then I was in horrendous car accident (I wasn’t, I’m fine), you might wonder why I even started with walking the dog. You actually don’t care about the rest of my life. That’s fine, neither do I, except maybe when my dog does something cute that I can Instagram, but otherwise, this is all just run of the mill stuff. It’s exactly what people are trying to escape when they’re reading books. Now, if I told you I went on a walk with my dog and saw a man in a red mustang staring at me, the very car that eventually comes to hit me after the memory of those creepy eyes haunted me the entire time I got ready for work, THEN the dog and the shower and the color of T-shirt I picked out can take on a whole new meaning.

A lot of you probably think this is so self-explanatory, but let’s apply it to larger things, say your male character. He falls in love with someone, gets his heart broken, and doesn’t learn anything from it. This is the same thing as me not learning anything from walking my dog (I rarely look to see if weird men are following me…though that might change now…). Why would we want to read about your male character? Most of us have had those relationships, get in, get out, some weird stuff happens, but you’re basically the same at the end, except you’re wearing sweat pants more—or less depending on your level of self-worth.

So, I guess what I’m trying to say is that when you’re looking at your story, your plot, your characters, your side characters, you should be asking, is this something that people are going to want to read in order to procrastinate on doing the dishes or cleaning up dog poop? Or am I just writing about a person doing something with no real significance?

I guess I can take out that scene where my character dreams about muffins in the middle of trying to kill his uncle. No, that was really a scene in one of my unfinished novels… Actually, I think it’d be funny if anyone can give me a more insignificant scene they wrote before realizing. Impress me.