"What do you do?", "You should...", and other anxiety-inducing phrases.

In the last two years, there have been a lot of conversations in my life that start with, "so, what do you do?" If any of you are wondering, here are some answers I usually give.

Most often I say something like, "I'm here in Leiden because my husband works for the University, and I'm not working full time, and it's been nice to have one of us at home, handling the heavy lifting of moving and adjusting to a new place. But I do teach violin lessons, tutor English students, and babysit."

If they're a teacher or a student I might say, "I'm a bit of an academic out of water at the moment. I study English Literature, but here isn't exactly the best place for me to do it, so I'm working on my own for now." I might add, "I did get to present at a conference in Scotland last year and that was great, and last year I wrote about once a week for an online Shakespeare news source." or possibly, "I just got hired to teach Shakespeare online at a homeschool academy online, so that'll start this fall."

At church I sometimes answer, "Many different things. I am pretty involved in my church, I play in the praise band, help run several of the ministries, organize the church library, and things like that. I'm often lumped in with the moms, because I'm not working full time, but I don't have children, so it's an interesting position to be in."

I know I am not the only one who dreads this question, and hopes my answers don't invoke pity or fear. That would be a tragedy.

Sometimes I give answers saying that I've been looking for work. Mostly not, because when I say I am looking for jobs, I am so often flooded with advice. I tell the sad and laborious stories of applying for many jobs, following many leads provided by friends every one of which hasn't worked out, and respond to many, many, many sentences beginning with the phrase, "you should."

That word, "should" is such a tricky word. I've been tutoring a Spanish speaker who is hoping to improve her English, so we've been working together. She has many questions, often questions on how to ask questions, and I find myself using the word should again and again. "How should I get there?" "Where should I put my coat?" And she asks about it, and so I explain, "we use it as a polite word, to ask someone's opinion. What they think is the best thing to do." And I realize that when someone asks with that word, "should" as in, "Where should I" or "what should I?" one must value the other person's opinion. When I resent the "you should"s around me, I dislike them because I feel like other people are not appreciating my own struggle. If they don't know my difficulties, don't know what I've tried, of course they will not be as effective at helping me. I am a little ashamed of my dismissal of the quick opinions of well meaning people.

Ashamed and anxious. Ashamed because I don't want them to think that I haven't tried what they see as obvious solutions to my long term problem, but also anxious that I do the very same thing. This anxiety as raised a lot of questions in my mind and heart.

How much do I judge other people by their jobs, their accomplishments?

Am I looking down on people whose work isn't as intellectual or stimulating as my personal preference?

How much of my identity have I tied to my occupation?

Have I always been jealous of other people's successes?

When did I stop seeing free time as a gift? a joy?

In what other ways have I devalued the basic everyday work of people who serve others?

How can I broaden my respect and appreciation for the people around me?

These are all questions I'm still thinking about, but that last one I can answer at least in part. And it's something I want to answer well, because maybe in five years I'll have a more normal answer to the question "What do you do?" but I hope to have learned enough to ask different questions myself, so I can listen better and judge less. I think that we can grow in respect and appreciation for each other by listening. By asking questions about people's lives, not just where they'll spend their time this week, but what's made them who they are today. What they hope for, what their struggles have been, how different things affected them, or how their life might be different or similar to your own. If we build understanding, we can get to a place where we want to know people's advice in our lives. We want to know it because we are friends, we know each other and trust each other. I think that can be a beautiful thing.

Anyone else struggling with these same issues? Wishing your story was better heard? I'd love to listen.

Rotterdam Redeemed

—guest post by Owen

Until a couple of weeks ago, I had only negative associations with the name "Rotterdam."

• Rotterdam is the setting for the unhappy beginning of the Ender's Shadow series by Orson Scott Card. This series also led me to mistakenly believe Rotterdam was in Belgium.
• Our trans-atlantic shipment of household goods was held hostage in a Rotterdam warehouse for two months.
• Our trip to Prague fell through because our flight out of the Rotterdam airport was canceled.
• We were once nearly stranded in Rotterdam overnight because Dutch public transit stops at 8pm on New Year's Eve. (Kudos to my amazing family for being so chill through that unexpected part of the adventure.)
• And on top of it all, "Rotterdam" starts with "rot." (It doesn't actually mean "rot." In fact, the name "Rotterdam" comes from a word meaning "mud.")

But none of this is Rotterdam's fault. So I'm pleased to report that our latest intra-Netherlands excursion (incursion?) has lifted the mental stigma I've attached to Rotterdam in the past.

It started when a friend of Clara's noticed that one of the entries on a list of beautiful libraries was in the Netherlands. "Have you been?" she wanted to know. No, we hadn't, but a little digging turned up that it wasn't too far away, so we filed the idea away for later. A couple weeks ago, we had a Saturday free, and decided to go.

Photo from bustler.net

This amazing library—the Boekenberg, or "book mountain"—is in a suburb of Rotterdam called Spijkenisse. Here are some pictures from our trip:

Our first trip on the Dutch metro system we didn't know existed. It goes all the way from the Hague to Rotterdam!

The outside of the Boekenberg.

The top floor is a study area where we read Our Town together.

The inside of the mountain has rooms for reading, like this children's section.

Elsewhere in Spijkenisse, we saw our first example of yarn-bombing in the wild.

We also caught this beautiful rainbow.  Our cries of "Kijk naar de regenboog!" did not seem to excite passers-by, though.

We explored a bit of downtown Rotterdam as well.  The cranes are so beautiful.

The architecture is beautiful too.

That's it for today! Thanks for reading. Have you ever been pleasantly surprised by a place you'd put off visiting?

Some thoughts about Race and a list of picture books

Over the last few months I have been in near constant distress about the racial issues in this world. I was, I suppose, naively shocked by items in the US news with a police officer shooting the unarmed Michael Brown, and read story after story about protests and heavily armed police and struggled to look for hope as ugly events kept flowing in. Living in The Netherlands in November and December doesn't help much because of the "Zwarte Pieten" or "black Peters" the little helpers to the Dutch version of Santa Claus. I know this is a complex issue, with a lot of history and the tradition has changed a great deal for the better. But living in a progressive, tolerant, and beautiful country where it's normal to see children wearing blackface or hear them singing songs with the chorus, "dumme, dumme, dumme Zwarte Pieten!" (that's "stupid, stupid, stupid black Peter!") scares me for the future of this world. I had just convinced myself that the Dutch were more racist than the Americans when I heard more news that the grand jury had ruled that Darren Wilson, the police officer who shot Michael Brown would not even face trial. And somehow these things kept surprising me. Surprising me the way my classmates in Virginia grad school surprised me when I said, "but interracial marriage isn't a big deal anymore" and everyone in my class looked at me like I had lived in some kind of ignorant bubble. And perhaps, mercifully, I had? I had a fair number of friends from mixed families in my homeschool groups, and in music lessons. My white uncle married a black woman and if it was a big deal in my family, I had, in fact missed it. I felt like the kids reacting to this Cherrios commercial: 

I love that it surprises these kids, but I don't love that it surprises me. I don't want be ignorant about these issues of prejudice, because they are clearly still issues. I also want to be honest about my own unconscious prejudices, including my reluctance to seek out books/movies/media focused on or written by people who don't have the same color skin that I do. This has never been something I've consciously thought. I have never walked around thinking, "I don't want to read any books by Toni Morrison, she's black!" but at the same time, I haven't read any books by Toni Morrison, and I read a lot. So what you could call my new year's resolution is reading a whole lot. I want to read many works of classic literature that I've missed so far, especially books by authors of color or dealing with race. I also want to read some non-fiction, such as "The New Jim Crow," which has been on my reading list for a while. So far I've read MLK's Why We Can't Wait, and Alice Walker's The Color Purple. I started Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon this morning. 

But I also wanted to make a list of books for children, because I am passionate about the impact of stories and pictures on children. Children's books have become less and less diverse in the last few decades as budget cuts to schools and libraries put buying power into the hands of the largely white middle class consumer. The people determining what goes on a best seller list are therefore not librarians and teachers looking for diversity, but parents and grandparents who (totally understandably) don't automatically think about race when choosing books. So here are some picture books and some names you might consider adding to your list when you go to the library, or even when you buy books for kids you know and love. 

Kadir Nelson, author and illustrator
Nelson's clear writing and majestic paintings have won a pile of awards, and his work respected well outside the field of children's literature. He has written a staggeringly excellent book on the history of African Americans for ages 9 or so and up, a biography of Nelson Mandela and one of Harriet Tubman, and has illustrated the words to several Spirituals. Sometimes a bit difficult to search for (as books are listed under author, not illustrator) so here are a few of his works that you might miss just by searching.  

Please, Puppy, Please by Spike Lee
Abe's Honest Words: The Life of Abraham Lincoln by Doreen Rappaport
Ellington Was Not A Street by Ntozake Shange
Henry's Freedom Box: A Story from the Underground Railroad by Ellen Levine
I Have a Dream by Martin Luther King Jr. 

Jacqueline Woodson, author
Woodson writes for many different age groups, but the link above is for her picture books. It's a really nicely set up website where you can get a good idea about the books by just scrolling through. One of her most widely acclaimed books, The Other Side, is about a black girl and a white girl who become friends in an intensely segregated town. She says she wrote it because, "I wanted to write about how powerful kids can be. [...] They don’t believe in the ideas adults have about things so they do what they can to change the world. We all have this power."

Nikki Grimes, author
I'm not as familiar with her work as with some of these authors but I just read her early reader Make Way for Dyamonde Daniel and it was great. She's known for her biography of Malcolm X, and A Pocketful of Poems, and When Gorilla Goes Walking.

Walter Dean Myers and his son, Christopher Myers are also good to know. WD Myers mostly wrote for older children (his YA book, Fallen Angels shaped my understanding of Vietnam), but he teamed up with his son for the wonderful poem of a book, Looking Like Me. Christopher Myer's Jabberwocky is also fantastic. 

Langston Hughes, My People photography by Charles R. Smith Jr.
This sparse, glowing poem is set to stunning sepia photographs: 

The night is beautiful,
So the faces of my people.
The stars are beautiful,
So the eyes of my people.
Beautiful, also, is the sun.
Beautiful, also, are the souls of my people. 

Books by Ezra Jack Keats
Keats was not black himself, but he often populated his books with black children as they were the children who lived near him in NYC. The Snowy Day was the first book with a child of color to win the prestigious Caldecott Award.

Books by Patricia Pollaco
Pollaco is from Eastern Europe (Ukraine, I believe) but she, like Ezra Jack Keats, writes and illustrates books with black and white children. My favorite is Chicken Sunday which is a great story for Easter or any time of year. It includes Pusanky eggs, a beautiful hat in the window, and a gospel choir who sing like low thunder and sweet rain. 







These are just a tiny few! February is Black History Month, so there will be more displays and such in libraries and hopefully bookstores. I've just been focusing on books with black characters and/or authors and illustrators because it seemed appropriate to the prejudice I'm seeing in the news and MLK day on Monday. But here are a couple more lists which include more races than just the black and the white.

Cooperative Children's Book Center's list 
The Gaurdian's list
Cynthia Leitich Smith's list
The Coretta Scott King Awards These are two awards given out by the American Library association to black Authors and Illustrators of books for children and young adults.

Do you have favorite books by black authors or illustrators? Books with black protagonists? I'd love to hear about them. And thanks for reading. 

Why November is my Favorite: A Story about Dahlias

in case you forgot which ones are the Dahlias

In our Dutch class this week, we were all telling "our news" in three sentences. As my last sentence I threw in that "deze maand is mijn favoriete maand" which led to all sorts of other questions. Why is November your favorite month? And with my limited ability to communicate I gave some reasons I love November, including that I like the change in weather. In October and even September you can feel a bit of crispness coming into the air, but in November you know the change is not coming, it's come, and I love that. I love bundling up in wool sweaters, coats and scarves to go outside. Then coming in to make and eat hot soup, drinking hot tea. I love lighting candles as the evening comes earlier and earlier. In Rochester, where I grew up, often the snow first comes in November, and I love that too. When I was small I found the snow particularly compelling, so beautiful, so sudden, such a joy in its quietness and its immensity.

half killed by frost

I didn't really learn to love November though till college, when I went to Houghton, a beautiful campus set in "the middle of nowhere," where there is not a single stop light, and making a proper grocery store run is a 40some minute trek through farmland and forest. Coming off of campus there is a certain road, named "Centerville," where I would walk several miles nearly every Sunday afternoon during three of my years at Houghton. It was a special pleasure in the fall, as each week more of the trees would turn crimson or orange, and then the colors would all fade to ashy gray. After all that color, the browns and yellows and grays seemed so peaceful, so rugged even. Perhaps it seemed particularly peaceful in contrast to the increasing workload of the semester. In a conversation about the month years back one of my friends said that a November landscape in very romantic, in a harsh, wild, Bronte-esque sort of romance. Another friend wrote a poem about November as the glowing center of a hearth when the fire is burned down. We were very connected to the seasons at Houghton, and we liked to talk about these things.

struggling against the cold

What also happened in my undergrad years is that I learned that my Dad liked November best of all the months. This surprised me, as he's an artist so I thought for sure that May or October or something would appeal more to his eye, but he said that there were several reasons. He loved that the world changes so much, that without leaves on the trees suddenly a whole new world is visible past the foliage. He also loved looking forward to the holidays. I can relate, since Thanksgiving has always been one of my favorites, and these days it is an American holiday that I can feel whole heartedly proud of, not just it as a current reminder to gratitude, but also the history of friendship with the Native Americans so terribly abused in much of the rest of the history of the US. And I feel also that expectation holds much of the joy of the holidays, so November can be even more happy than December (which can feel like a perpetual party) but then he told this story.

When my dad was young, his mother grew dahlias in their yard in Detroit. And in November the flowers would still be in bloom so very evening before a hard frost he would help her cover the dahlias with newspaper to keep them alive until morning. They would do this many times during the month, each threatening night putting up little paper barricades against the cold. But there would always come a time when the weatherman disappointed, and the cold was harsher than he and his mother expected, or perhaps they would have covered the plants only to find them the next morning edged in frost. And for that little glimpse in time before the sun rose the dahlias were more beautiful than ever. He would run inside for drawing paper and then sketch the frozen blossoms with his chilly hands, quickly before they melted and turned brown.

I know that November can be harsh and dark and ugly, and people have good reasons for disliking it, especially here in Holland where the spring is such a feast for the eyes, but I still love it. The long shadows, the golden light in the cold air, the wool socks, the snuggling up with covers, or the smell of dry leaves, or their crackle underfoot. I love the raw skies with their long, blue-gray clouds. It seems there is always so much to be thankful for, and so much to love.

Heartfelt thanks to Frank Richards and Jennifer McCallum for allowing me to use their beautiful photos of dahlias. 

Video Blogging - video letters?

Dear Friends,

One of the projects that Owen and I have been doing is trading video letters online with a dear friend of ours. We thought the most recent video might be of interest to all of you readers as well, as it tells about 3 October, a big holiday here in Leiden, and our experiences this year. It contains footage of children zipped into inflatable balls and squirming around in a swimming pool, in case you're needing some encouragement to press the play button.



In case you loved this video and want to see all of them there's not a proper playlist set up (one where you can just watch them all without effort) but if you search YouTube for "5014 Miles" we should be the first half dozen or so to pop up.

Love,
Clara and Owen

Plantin-Moretus: a Printing Museum in Antwerp

Last month Owen and I went to Antwerp. A friend of ours was presenting at a conference and had sent us a strange little "I'm going to be really close to you but there's no way for me to actually come visit you, bummer" message on Facebook, and that seemed like the perfect excuse to take a weekend trip to Belgium, and so for an extremely reasonable train fare, and a happy couple of nights in a AirBnB apartment, we had an exciting adventure and a delightful time visiting a friend from home. There are a lot of things I could tell about Antwerp: it's beautiful central markets, its enormous and exquisite cathedral, its incredible train station, the excellent bike rental system, but the thing I most want to talk about is the printing museum.

the two presses in the back are the oldest in the world

Growing up I knew more about historical printing than most children. My father is an art professor and although it is not his specialty, he has taught both typography and printmaking from time to time. More than once I helped him print etchings, an impressive process involving soaked paper, an inked metal plate and an actual old-school press which rolls the sandwich of paper and metal through sufficient pressure to press the paper into all the inky scratches on the metal plate. It's a finicky job, and requires two people, one with clean hands to deal with the paper, and one with dirty hands to deal with the ink, and I loved it.

a bilingual printed text

In graduate school I learned a lot of things about the printing process, and the sale and importance of books in the time of Shakespeare. We folded up paper into quartos and sixteenmos, listened to Tiffany Stern talk about how the paper props were likely given separately from the rest of the script to the printers. We became familiar with secretary hand, got to know different printers and their particular stamps on their pages, we even had a project where we had to write a paper making sense out of all the books sold alongside a Shakespeare play at a bookstand in London in a given year, all things we can do with even a small library, thanks to the powers of the internet, and a few good resources. I wrote my MFA thesis about the power of books, paper and stories in their world and in ours.

geeking out

With all this love of books and their printing, I was excited to visit the Plantin-Moretus Museum, but not nearly as excited as I should have been. I do not know if I have ever enjoyed a museum so much, and if you've read this blog at all you may know I take inordinate joy in museums. The Plantin-Moretus told the story of a printing family business, a friendship with Rubens, enough wealth and hubris to make anyone laugh, (for instance, gilded Italian leather wall coverings) but also careful and meticulous insight into every step of the printing process.

uncut pages with editing marks in the margins

As you walk from room to room, you enter various places of work. There's the type room (where the type is, to this day stored in careful boxes) and the room for the setting of the type, and a full of presses. The room for the editing (big boothed table by large windows for the light), the shop where the books were sold, the foundry where the type was made, and no end of beautiful libraries. You can pour over books in Dutch, books in English, books in Latin or Greek, or printed Arabic scripts. Beautiful manuscript volumes, tall, narrow account books, a five language bible in many volumes, and giant atlases. This printing house put out some of the earliest of illustrated scientific works covering anatomy, botany, astronomy all studied like never before. It wasn't just the printing presses they own, including the two oldest presses in the world, it seeing all those tools for every piece of every task, which was just astonishing. The process seems so careful, so meticulous, with so many pairs of hands involved from start to finish.

Today's tools are so much more complex, and yet also so user friendly that even though I haven't any clear idea about the workings of my computer or even of this website, things are set up so that I can click the "publish" button whenever I choose. It makes me wonder, where is craftsmanship in online writing? Does it lie wholly in the writing style? And how to the material objects used to read text today (my computer screen, or a smart phone or whatever) affect the material read? What about laying text in a blogpost? Do people have more or less control over their words now? How does range of readership affect these questions? In the last week I've had more pageviews on my blog from the Ukraine than from the US, and I am very curious: who are you readers in the Ukraine? What do you find interesting in my writing? And to anyone reading, what do you find compelling about books? About the act of reading? It's been nearly a month and I am still wondering.

Books to Make Kids Laugh

The Atlantic recently put out an interview with B. J. Novak about his hilarious children's book, The Book with No Pictures. While I haven't been able to read it yet, (books in English can be tricky to get in hand in this country) the reviews from many sources have me confident I will love it. The humor of the book seems to come from giving children the power to get adults to read to them, even reading silly nonsense words or funny phrases, such as "I am a monkey. I am a robot monkey." What seems most interesting to me is how much work was put into the typography and font size and page layout to help the lay reader with comic delivery. For example, the font for the words "ROBOT MONKEY" looks all digital and robotic, encouraging the adult reading to use a "robot voice."

I had already been thinking of making another big list of kids books (in celebration of my friends everywhere having babies!), so here is a list of books that make kids laugh. Their parents, too.

Let's start with Mo Willems. This man used to write for Sesame Street back when the show was really good, and is now famous for his hilarious kids books. I particularly like the Elephant and Piggie books (you'll find them in the Early Readers section), Knuffle Bunny, Goldilocks and the Three Dinosaurs, Leonardo the Terrible Monster, and Naked Mole Rat Gets Dressed. The humor of his books typically comes from his understanding of the extremes of human emotion in all its quirks and absurdities. The illustrations are also rock solid, and even the early reader structure of the Elephant and Piggie books (simple words, limited vocabulary, extensive repetition) is used for comic effect, as the two characters get more and more anxious or excited or sad. We Are in A Book even has a little inside joke for the readers going through for second time in a row.

Jon Scieszka (along with Lane Smith as illustrator and Molly Leach as the brilliant but under-recognized designer) makes books that are hilarious in an entirely different way from Mo Willems. Scieszka's humor is mostly for a bit older kids than Mo Willems: many of his stories including those in The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales, are spoofs off of well known fairy tales, so if you don't know the story of the Gingerbread Man, you won't necessarily find it as funny as you could. His books are wacky and rule bending (with jokes on the end papers, the ISBN code, and even the author bio), but in as much as they are irreverent they are also very intelligently put together. Squids will be Squids is in the style of Aesop's Fables, and Math Curse laughs at the silly ways in which people put together math problems for kids, but also shows respect for the honest struggle of figuring out the hows and which ways of numbers.

Some authors that made me laugh as a kid were Steven Kellogg and James Marshall and Shel Silverstein. What I loved best about Steven Kellogg were the tiny details in his wild illustrations. Not only would the pictures be giant mishmashes of unexpected action, but you could see the tiny writing on the advertisements on the walls in the background. My favorite stories of his are Ralph's Secret Weapon (where a kid with a bassoon and a cake defeats a sea monster), The Three Pigs, and Pinkerton, Behave! 

While Kellogg's illustrations are notable for how much he includes, James Marshall's craft shines in how little he needs to put on the page (in words or pictures) to tell incredibly funny and lovable stories. You cannot go wrong with the George and Martha books, but I am also very fond of his Fairy tale/Folk tale retellings.

Shel Silverstein's Where the Sidewalk Ends, and A Light in the Attic kept my brother and me giggling for years, but A Giraffe and a Half was the one we wanted Mom to read out loud to us. It's a tongue twister and full of ridiculous combinations of roses and noses, gluey shoes, trunks filled with skunks and all manner of oddities.

King Bidgood's in the Bathtub (by Audrey and Don Wood) is a silly book with silly illustrations of a king who refuses to leave his bathtub. All the courtiers (in their hilarious fluffy costumes) attempt to make him leave with enticements of lunch, or dancing, or fishing, but only the little page boy can actually get him out of the bubbles.

The Monster at the End of this Book is the only book that a dear friend of mine would take with her when she went babysitting. It was all she needed because whatever children she was reading to, they'd just want to hear this one again and again. Like The Stinky Cheese Man and The Book with No Pictures, it uses the book itself as a tool for comedy, as Grover tries to get his readers to stop turning the pages so that they can continue to avoid the dreaded monster at the end of the book.

Bink and Golly are a pair of characters who now have three books full of the ups and downs of their friendship. They remind me of Calvin and Hobbes—their banter and their antics, even the illustration style, and they are outrageously funny. Although they do not technically qualify as "I can read" books (because of their extensive vocabulary and creative use of sentence structure,) these picture book/comic book mashups are great for kids starting to read on their own.

 

Those are some of my favorite funny books and authors for kids. What are some of yours?