Out West

I've been Out West. That's wonderful for a New Englander, to go Out West - and to a town where I used to live, Omaha. I was at a conference where Ted Kooser read to us. His poems capture the Nebraskan landscape. He wrote Local Wonders with words of wisdom from earlier Czeck and German immigrants, and about beauty and grace in the every day. Out West, I also met people from The Minnesota Humanities Center. They published a booklist of Native American Children's Stories.
The books were chosen by parents in MotherRead/FatherRead of the Red Lake Nation in Northern Minnesota. Check out the list with guidelines for choosing good books about native Americans. It's good to come out west and see my old friends.

Gi' me 'tory gal! Give me story girl!

I fell in love with the language of What a Wedd'n
by Peggy Rankine. It's about the Jamaican courtship of a girl and a boy in the 1930s before the country's independence from England.

Ms. Rankine said she wrote to "preserve the Jamaican flavor." Listen to the girls and women talk by the river on washing day.
"Gi' me 'tory gal!"
(Give me a story girl.)
"Pop 'tory a me ears!"
(Tell me a story in my ears!)

They have plenty to talk about since a boy has just asked a girl's father if he can "fren" his daughter. (friend, or court) The father says okay but "Listen carefully, these are the rules:

"No hanging around my house after sunset,
No hugging and kissing in public,
No standing in the roadside with Ambro, Show her all the respect,
You can visit her on Sunday evenings before night service,
Don't give her any money or anything, we can maintain her."

Ms. Rankine recreates a culture of courtship and of the Jamaica of her youth with wonderful details (the wedding cake calls for "1 lb sugar, 1 lb butter, 1 lb. flour, 1 lb raisins, 1 lb. currants, 1 doz. eggs, 1 pint wine or rum") and love.

Illustration above by Mr. Paul Clayton is of younger sister Lucy who delivers a secret love letter from the boy to the girl.

You can order What a Weddin' from Johanna Young, jsoulnh@gmail.com
You can order many other books about Jamaica through Arawak Publications.

"Just a little bit magic"

You must go to this site - KidsLibs - a project to bring libraries to children in poor neighborhoods in Nairobi and also rural Laikipia in Kenya.
This is a boy outside a library in Sipili. Bikes are among items on the wish list for each of the four libraries that librarian Anne Moore has created so far.
Kids at the Mathare North center gathered with Susan Phillips to read stories, talk about the kinds of stories they liked, then created characters for their own stories which they wrote and illustrated. You can read a series of stories about Thomas and Queenventure: "Once upon a time in the city of Mombasa lived a beautiful girl named Queenventure." Read more.

You will also see poems, pin hole photography (the first photo above was created in Mathare North), and sunprints created by kids in library programs. "Just a little bit magic" was the way Susan described the pinhole photographs.
The libraries themselves are a lot of magic for Kenyan kids. Do you live near one of Kenya's kidslibs libraries? Would you write us a comment about books you like or what you like to do there?

Connections: children's books and adult literacy

Welcome to a Newsletter from Connections, a literacy program of the New Hampshire Humanities Council. Check out the stories in the newsletter - about a Night of Stories, a bilingual Somali-English folktale, Naomi Shihab Nye's poem, "Kindness", and haikus, too! Photos by Sue Butman of the New Hampshire Humanities Council. Thank you, Sue. Here are photos of people who gathered for Night of Stories to celebrate stories in books and music. On the left is Theo Nii Marty, a percussionist from Ghana. It was a wonderful night. Theo had all of us - people of all ages from all over the world - up there dancing.

"Tell Me a Cuento" Workshop for Teachers

I had the best afternoon with adult education teachers in Lawrence, Massachusetts. Sandra Chupkai and I presented a workshop on Tell Me a Cuento, a book club for ESOL students reading illustrated children's books.

Northeast SABES, System for Adult Education Support, hosted the workshop. The Lawrence (MA) Public Library and Mass Humanities made it possible for me to present and for each teacher to recieve a copy of Celia Cruz, Queen of Salsa by Veronica Chambers. We did a model discussion. Many teachers had actually met Celia in NYC or she sang at their graduations. The discussion was an amazing testimonial to the power of Celia's music to translate a culture and the pride in salsa music as a symbol of Latino cultures in counties around the world. Thank you to all the teachers who shared your stories. Sandra and I presented the workshop to give teachers ideas for running their own Book Clubs for adult ESOL students or for parent groups. I hope the handouts on Tips for Teacher-Led Discussions will inspire teachers to offer their own programs. If teachers would like support in presenting a Tell Me a Cuento program or variation on it, please e-mail me. We also spent some time talking about selecting multicultural books with cultural authenticity. I showed some slides of my powerpoint on multicultual books.

Mleta Hadithi

A group of twelve people from Amesbury are in Amesbury's sister city, Esabalu in western Kenya this week. Some of the visitors will work on the literacy project that several of us began the last time we were in Esabalu. The project is called Mleta Hadithi, Stories are Coming.
Wilson Reading funded the design and printing of this poster. Aron Fine, a new designer with Wilson, created the poster as his first project. The words in Swahili say, Reading Begins at Home. The book pictured is For You Are a Kenyan Child by Kelly Cunnane, illustrated by Ana Juan.
In Esabalu young women who have graduated from college but don't yet have jobs take books in Swahili, Luhya, the mother tongue, and English into village homes and read to children.
I will write updates here about how the Mleta Hadithi girls are doing in the village.

A Sewn Book Waiting for Her Own Words: Interview With Susan Kapuscinski Gaylord

"Living in this world of media saturation, it is easy to think that all the important things are happening somewhere else. Making books about our own stories and our own lives reminds us that we are the center of our own lives."

After Susan created The Elephant Rag logo, she told me more about her art, her passion for books, her exploration of the bindings and paper used around the world, and her belief in inviting others to make art.


Terry: Based on the number of workshops you do, you must think it’s important for kids – and adults – to make their own books, and probably fill them with their own stories.
Susan: I absolutely think it's important. When I started to make books on a regular basis, I knew that I wanted to be a teacher as well as a doer. Because I work with a lot of simple forms, the construction is simple and the materials are easy to gather (especially now that I focus on recycled ones). To me making books is the perfect introduction to art and creative exercise. I think it is important that we take the time to tell our own stories. Living in this world of media saturation, it is easy to think that all the important things are happening somewhere else. Making books about our own stories and our own lives reminds us that we are the center of our own lives and helps us to value ourselves and our families and friends. However I also have another sense of the book which comes more from the art side of things: the book as an object. I have books in my collection that are in languages I can't read and yet I take great pleasure in looking at them and turning the pages. It is the book as book and the pattern of the marks on the page that I find so beautiful. I like to think of books as celebrations. They can celebrate a memory or a story but they can also celebrate your particular interaction with that particular collection of materials at that particular time.


Read the full text of the interview.