Misrule

I've been enjoying watching book trailers since they emerged in the past couple of years, and I think they could be a terrific project to work on with young people. I'm wondering if anyone has done this, if they have guidelines or "how tos" or even any ideas about what you think makes for a good, effective book trailer. Also, where do people get the music from without breaking copyright? I'm really keen to start collecting and developing resources on book trailers, so please use the comments section to voice your thoughts on the topic, or if you already have resources you're willing to share, please email me: judith dot ridge at gmail dot com

I think I've linked to the odd book trailer before, and I'm going to again here. Kirsty Eager, who wrote what I think is one of 2009's most over-looked YA novels, Raw Blue, has her second novel, Saltwater Vampires, due in September. Kirsty has a terrific book trailer for Saltwater Vampires, which had me as soon as I read the word Batavia*. But even if you don't know the history of that terrible shipwreck (and Kirsty tells me she has taken some liberties with the history, as you might expect from the title), I think the trailer works fantastically well as an extremely atmospheric and creepy teaser for the novel. I for one can't wait for the book. And I am entirely confident there's not a sparkly vampire to be found!

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*While we're on the subject, which one of you lot borrowed my (signed) copy of Gary Crew's Strange Objects?

Over the past year or so, as part of my day job, I've been partnering on a number of Paint the Town Read projects in western Sydney. Paint the Town Read is a community reading and early literacy initiative, developed more than 12 years ago in Parkes by the dynamic Rhonda Brain, then the principal at Parkes PS. Rhonda was concerned about the literacy levels of the schools' students, and so decided to put all their resources into literacy programs for the K-2 students (Stage 1 in NSW).This made a difference, but they were still only getting about 85% of their kids up to benchmark, and what the teachers determined was that the children who were falling behind weren't coming to school with the required degree of literacy-readiness—they were coming from text-poor home environments, where they weren't read to or exposed adequately to language through books, talking, singing, rhymes and so on.

So Rhonda decided a community education and awareness-raising project was needed, and so Paint the Town Read was born. 12 years later, the project's mascot the Reading Bug turns up at all community events; business around town carry posters and coasters and flyers about the importance of reading to your baby, tips for reading with your children, there's an annual community reading day, and it's just generally been absorbed into the fabric of community life. According to Rhonda, a local police chief said something to the effect of "In [insert name of another large western NSW town here] they steal cars; in Parkes they read books." Men in singlets in the local RSL club can be heard extolling the pleasures of reading with their children. And when the Reading Bug had a baby bug, the entire town turned out to welcome the new arrival.

(I wish there were a central site to link to, but there's not as yet, although Rhonda is busy working to make PTTR a national strategy for early literacy and I imagine a website is now just a matter of time. In the mean time, if you search for Paint the Town Read you will find a range of links that go to resources and a variety of local community PTTR projects.)

Paint the Town Read is taking off all over the place in western Sydney. In the Blue Mountains, Paint the Blue Read has been working effectively for more than a year. Launches for the St Marys area were held last year at Oxley Park  and St Marys South Public Schools, events were held in Riverstone and Mount Druitt and the program is starting as we speak in Blacktown, Auburn and Parramatta. In time, I'm hoping it might spread across to south western Sydney as well. The projects are being driven by community workers from Mission Australia and the like, and I've been helping to provide resources and authors for events, and sitting on some of the steering committees.

Oxley Park PS has become something of a hub for the project in St Marys,and has established a weekly reading morning at the school, where parents are encouraged to read with their children before school begins. (I was able to donate a box of the many review copies of picture books I receive at work for Oxley Park's reading tent.) To launch this new addition to the school calendar, they held a special reading day a couple of weeks ago, and I was invited along to be one of the guest readers. We were asked to bring along favourite books from our own childhood to share with the students. (Other reading guests included the Canteen Lady and groundsman, I believe, so I was in excellent company!)

I took along three books, not knowing what age I'd be reading to—Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh, Ruth Manning-Sanders' A Book of Ghosts and Goblins and a favourite picture book, Firebrand—Push Your Hair Out Of Your Eyes by Natalie Scott and Sandra Smith.

I started with a Year 2 class, and so the choice was clear—it was Firebrand for these kids. Now, I adored this book as a child, largely because, like Firebrand, my mother was always at me to push my hair out of my eyes. (Although my hair was nothing like Firebrand's gorgeous thick, deep red hair, alas.) My memory is that we used to borrow the book every year from Gosford Library when we were on the Central Coast for our annual summer holiday, although my friend Cassandra Golds remembers it being available from the Katoomba library (or it may have been the school library) when we were both children there in 1969 or so. (The book was published in 1968.)

I really didn't know how the children would respond to it—it's very much a moral tale, with naughty, bad-tempered Firebrand learning her lesson about tying her hair back neatly when she falls out of a tree (which she's climbed and discovered how much she can see when the wind blows her hair back, and she falls, of course, when her hair falls into her face as she looks down as she descends). I remember feeling a little put out at Firebrand's reformation myself as a child, but even so, the book clearly resonated with me—so much so that my parents eventually bought me my own copy.

The other thing I wasn't sure they;d respond to was the illustrations. The book is almost hilariously 60s psychedelic in its illustrative style and colours. (You can see a small low-res image of the cover here. Alas, I have since packed my copy and can't scan any of the pages to show you.) And of course, being published in 1968, the palette is limited by the printing technology of the day.

Well, they hung off every word. Laughed, shivered, loved it. Asked questions, pointed at the pictures—everything little kids do when you read to them. They particularly seemed to like Firebrand's four aunts, for those of you who know the book and remember them. I didn't expect them, of course, to reject the book openly on the grounds of its period look, or slightly old-fashioned morality tale feel (actually, much as I warn my students off writing them, I suspect very young children rather like plainly stated morals in their stories!), but I did wonder if a 42 year old book would hold their attention. And it did. A story is a story, and a good story will always find an audience. And a shared good story is perhaps the best of all.

The next class I read to was a Year 5 (or maybe 6?) class, potentially a tougher audience, but they were great too. (Oxley Park, it must be said, is a fantastic school and has a wonderful, strong but kindly and warm principal in Karen Maraga.) I told them about Harriet the Spy—they didn't know the book, and only a couple had even seen the movie—and read them a few of my favourite of Harriet's notebook observations ("If Marion Hawthorne doesn't watch out she's going to grow up into a lady Hitler") and showed them the illustration of her classmates after they have found and read that notebook. 

I decided, though, to read them a story that has stayed with me—dare I say, haunted me!—for more than thirty years. She's perhaps not all that well known or remembered these days, but Ruth Manning-Sanders was one of the most popular authors among my friends. I remember whenever we'd go to the Auburn Library, we'd go straight to the M shelves to borrow (and re-borrow) one of her wonderful collections of folk tales. I loved A Book of Folk and Fairy Tales, A Book of Princes and Princesses—I love all of them, but I especially loved A Book of Ghosts and Goblins and in that book, I most especially loved the story "Golden Hair".

"Golden Hair" (from Corsica) is the story of an evil Count who falls in love with a peasant girl named Golden Hair—or rather, falls in love with her cascade of beautiful hair. Golden hair's lover kills the Count and must flee—and when he sends word to her for a year later, it is instead the wicked, dead Count who comes for her.

As he rides with Golden Hair to the City of the Dead—and Golden Hair does not realise at first it is not her lover with whom she rides—the story repeats this refrain:

Patata, patata, patata, go faster go faster, go faster!

It was utterly thrilling. And I have had that refrain in my head (not permanently, you understand...) for decades...

So I read "Golden Hair" to the kids at Oxley Park and I can tell you—this ghost story has not lost a shred of its power to enthrall. And that actually doesn't surprise me. Manning-Sanders was an extraordinary writer, with a fantastically eccentric and effective way with language*. It was as much the power of her language as it was her stories that captured our imagination as children—and the children in that classroom at Oxley Park, far from Wales and the west country of England where she lived and worked her days.

I should also say that a big part of the appeal of Manning-Sanders' collections were the wonderful illustrations by Robin Jacques. Unfortunately, my scanner is suddenly playing up, so I can't scan the back cover of A Book of Ghosts and Goblins, which features the illustration for "Golden Hair", but if you look at Jacques' Wiki entry (linked above) there are links to plenty of sites showing his illustrations, and I'll try for the scan again later. However, here's a smallish image of the cover:

I've been steadily collecting copies of the Manning-Sanders collections. Most of them are ex-library copies, which is fitting, given I discovered her in the library, and I am pleased to have them. Oh, for a Jacques original!

So—stories that straddle the ages, the generations, that transcend period and fashion and place—so many stories! It's such a delight to get to share them with kids. I forget that, because I don't often personally get the chance. I need to do that more often. Paint the town read.

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(*I didn't think of that as a child reader, but I discovered it from the inside years later when I was working at The School Magazine and discovered, to my astonishment and delight, that we had unpublished Manning-Sanders stories on file—and I got to edit some of them! Not that you'd dare do much more than a light run-through for fear of disrupting her delicately, yet complexly constructed prose. Apparently the long-lived Manning-Sanders had an similarly long-living daughter, who sent her mother's unpublished stories to the School Magazine—and I'll leave it at that for Jonathan Shaw to fill out the story in the comments!)

Last time Neil Gaiman swept the awards with the fabulous The Graveyard Book, I did my damndest to track all the online coverage. Idiot. Gaiman must be one of the net's highest profiled and followed authors, and I just couldn't keep up. So this time I'm not going to try. He has won the Carnegie medal for The Graveyard Book and you can set up your own damn google alerts.

(Or else you can just follow his blog, and read this post where he describes his delight at winning and his frustration at stoopid vampire-obsessed media coverage. Also, he has a new dawg. Nice. Congrats, Neil. I can well imagine how treasured this particular medal is to you.)

Equally or perhaps even more exciting is the news that Our Own Freya Blackwood has won the Greenaway Award for illustration for the beautiful Harry and Hopper, written by my dear friend and one-time colleague Margaret Wild. Margaret is without question Australia's most distinguished picture book author, and I am thrilled that her lovely book has received this recognition, but the Greenaway is for illustration, so full kudos and Woot! Woot! to Ms Blackwood. Her work has always been beautiful, and it has perhaps never been better than in Harry and Hopper.

I have been holding off (for weeks!) writing my final post about Sydney Writers' Festival as I've been hoping the recording of my panel session with Melina Marchetta and David Levithan might become available. And I never got word it was, and I kind of forgot to chase it up, and then life went on...

And then today, before the Penrith Migrant and Refugee Stories launch began, my friend and colleague Libby Gleeson said to me, you know you're on Radio National? Well, no, I didn't know that, and I was a bit discombobulated, because only last night a friend on Twitter said to me, have you seen the meanland article you get a mention The incalculable cultural significance of The Library, and no, I hadn't seen the MeanLand article, and when I read it I discovered that the author assumed I was a librarian.

Now, I have often been assumed to be a librarian, but I'm not. And then when I make the correction, the assumers apologise. And there's nothing to apologise for. I kinda wish I were a librarian, but I certainly can't lay claim to a qualification and a profession I do not have. Thus my correction (which is not remotely a disavowal).

Anyhoo...

So Libby said to me, you know you're on Radio National, and no, I didn't know that, but it turned out that an edited version of the Sydney Writers' Festival session with Melina and David, which, as you know, I chaired, was being broadcast on Radio National's Book Show.

Which was jolly decent of them, given how often I have taken the Book Show (and its presenter) to task over its track record on discussion of children's and youth literature.

At the end of the Penrith launch, I checked Twitter, only to find a veritable plethora of tweets about the panel being on RN, which was kinda exciting.

So here, in case you missed it, is the link to the broadcast. (I'd love to get a copy of the recording of the full hour, so the search continues...)

edited to note: Much as I am mistaken for a librarian, I have oft been called Judith Wright, and so the Book Show has mistook me. Alas, no, Ms Wright has not been resurrected as a YA lit fangal. It's just little ole me.

I was a bit naughty posting the link to the video the other day. The filmmaker, University of Western Sydney Communications student Andres Rios, didn't mean for the rough cut to be made public, and he's now taken it down so the link no longer works. However, we now have a finished cut of the video, which was shown at today's launch of the anthology of stories that came out of the project.

I'm afraid I don't have any photos, but the launch was lovely. Erin Vincent, who led the workshops with the students, wasn't able to be there, but she sent a lovely video message to the students. Dr Stepan Kerkyasharian AM, Chair of the Community Relations Commission, launched the book, and his speech was wonderful. He'd done his homework about the Penrith region and its history of migration (Henry Parkes was an early migrant resident of the area) and referred to some of the stories in the anthology as examples of the hardships and losses, but also the joys experienced by those who choose—or are forced to choose—to leave their homes and move to another country.

It was lovely to see the students again (although unfortunately one school couldn't make it—we're planning on organising an assembly at the school to present them with their books) and to see the students and their storytellers reunite.

We're hoping at some point that the stories will be available online. In the meantime, hard copies of the book will go into libraries and community centres in Penrith, and I will also organise for a copy to be sent to both the Mitchell Library and the National Library of Australia.

And now, here's the finished video. Apparently a longer version will be screened on community television station TVS, so if I hear when, I'll post. (And apologies, I can't figure out how to post this without the code showing. I used to be so good at this...)

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This is very short notice, but Libby Gleeson will be on Margaret Throsby's show on ABC Classic FM at 10 am tomorrow morning (23 June 2010). She is hoping to find a opportunity to talk about the Western Sydney Young People's Literature Project, which would be excellent. (Libby is chair of our advisory group.) If not, she'll just be fabulous on her own terms as a writer, teacher and children's and youth literature advocate. And if you miss it, you'll be able to listen later online. Cheers!

Usual apologies for silence, only this time, as some of you will know, I have an EXCELLENT excuse. I am in the middle of real estate shenanigans, having bought this gorgeous place (OK, paid a holding deposit, but it's all moving along as it should) and am busy getting the Ashfield flat ready to sell. So it's all been vair vair busy here. (De-cluttering a flat you have lived in for 11 years—longer than you've lived anywhere—plus getting all sorts of maintenance jobs done that you should have had done years ago, is very time consuming!)

Meanwhile, work continues to tick over busily enough, and here's some evidence. It's the rough cut of a video documenting a project the Western Sydney Young People's Literature Project (me!) has partnered on since last year. The Penrith Migrant and Refugee Stories project involved students from 5 schools in the Penrith LGA interviewing older residents from refugee and migrant backgrounds. My main involvement in the project was to coordinate and fund (via the Western Sydney Young People's Literature Project's budget) workshops led by author/journalist Erin Vincent. Erin's first workshop gave the students guidance on interview techniques, and the second, after the interviews were conducted, gave them a range of approaches to writing up the material they collected during the interviews.

The teachers and the students alike really loved Erin's workshops, and I'm proud that my project was able to contribute to Penrith Migrant Stories in such a practical way. But really, the work came down to the amazing young people, and the adult storytellers, who, with very little by way of preliminary introductions, courageously strode in and sat down and talked to one another, shared their stories.

There will be a book. I edited it, so take this for what you will, but I do think that the stories are remarkable, not just in content, but in style.

In the meantime, here's the video.

Still catching up on blogging this year's Sydney Writers' Festival. Sorry to be so slow, but note, I never finished blogging my UK trip last year, so think yerself lucky, missy!

Anyway, much as I tweeted and then blogged the Sydney Writers' Festival School Days, I also tweeted a panel of Indigenous writers I helped coordinate with my colleagues at the Blacktown Arts Centre.The panel featured Indigenous writers from Australia and Canada, who write across different genres and for a range of audiences. The evening also featured a group of local Darug writers reading their poetry and stories, most for the first time. Please check in at the link for information on the panelists, and here are my tweets:

Getting ready for Sydney
Writers' Festival Indigenous Writers panel.

Welcome to Country from Aunty
Sandra Lee, secretary of Darug Tribal Aboriginal Corporation. #swf2010
Indigenous writers' panel.

Anita Heiss has introduced
panel. First speaker Richard van Camp from Dogrib Nation in Canada, talking
about his heritage. #swf2010

Richard says when he heard
George Littlechild was to ill. his 1st kids' book he fainted. Great artist
shows respect for Indig ppl. #swf2010

Anita asks Boori to talk about
writing memoir Maybe Tomorrow & transition to writing children's books.
#swf2010

Boori tells anecdotes from
school visits as performer, this is where Maybe Tomorrow began. He's hilarious,
of course. And touching. #swf2010

Boori tells story of kid who
saw him take ochre off, get dressed after performance: 'I liked you better as
an Aborigine'. #swf2010

My Girragundji to be a film.
Currently a play at Riverside Theatres Parramatta. #swf2010

Boori discusses collab w
non-Aboriginal writer (Meme McDonald). Gives you reaction to respond to rather
thn looking thr same prism. #swf2010

Cathy Craigie talks about those
who mentored her as a storyteller (family) and her role now mentoring emerging
Aboriginal writers. #swf2010

Cathy talks about love of
reading as a child-Ruth Park, Allan Marshall-but something missing. Looked to
Black US writers, Oodgeroo. #swf2010

Cathy Craigie: Importance of
working with other Aboriginal women. #indigenouswriting #swf2010

Cathy talks abt importance of
Maria Locke story--she's mentoring ML's 4x greatgranddaughter Leanne Tobin in
writing play about ML. #swf2010

Leanne speaks about not knowing
about her Aboriginality growing up. Play has theme of being pale-skinned and
Aboriginal. #swf2010

Leanne says when she tries to
move away from western Sydney she gets sick. Aunties say she's supposed to be
here. She's staying. #swf2010

Leanne telling Maria Locke
story: had her illiterate convict husband indentured to her so she could send
him back. Women like this. #swf2010

Leanne's mum didn't know she
was Aboriginal until she was 58. Her mother kept it secret for protection.
#swf2010

Leanne decided to write Maria
Locke's story as a play to reach more people. I want her to write it as a
children's book. #swf2010

Anita suggests Maria Locke play
could be the Indigenous Cloudstreet. #swf2010

Richard says all 7 publishing
houses he's worked with value his Indigenous voice & encourage him to go
deeper in cultural stuff. #swf2010

Richard: if you want to be a
writer you have to read. Travel. Get yr work out there: try diff journals, mags
etc. #swf2010

Panel talking about finding
your own style and voice. Importance of a love of words, having a story to
share. #swf2010

Just sold a stack of books, now
Darug poets are reading their work. #swf2010

Darug poets reading their work,
some of them for the first time in public. Very moving. #swf2010

O irony: driving home from
Indigenous Writing Panel at Blacktown Arts Centre for #swf2010 @702sydney
played this horror http://bit.ly/bGr9vU