Artists Tap into Their Memories

This week I visited Johanna Young's class in Concord. Her 35 adult students are from Bhutan. We came to get their help with spot illustrations to complete a bilingual Nepali English folktale. Ambika Sharma, our interpreter, read the story in Nepali and from the story we created a list of words - parts of the natural world that tell the story in symbols.  
In the story a young mother sings a lullaby as she returns to her crying baby. She passes a cow in the barn on her way and sings "Don't cry, don't cry, Mali cow,  I've come to feed my baby."  Kapil Dhungel, who helped to translate the story,  explained that a mali cow is a type of cow with black and white markings. Here a student creates a mali cow and we'll use his drawing in the book. 


Susan Gaylord, our designer, is designing the layout of the book for a second time, combining Dal Rai's water color scenes with spot illustrations. The student's drawings were very detailed, portraying a pumpkin with a web of vines as well as its roots.  I think that these new Americans who grew up on farms in Bhutan know every aspect of trees, fruits, and vegetable. We see they draw these details maybe from the memory in their fingers from when they worked the land.  When Kapil and his wife were reading the story with me they laughed and laughed.  "Terry, this is good," he said. "This is so enjoyable for my people."

"Once there was and was not." Lucine Kasbarian's tale from Armenia

Ever since I read Lucine Kasbarian's  folktale, The Greedy Sparrow, an Armenian Tale  published this year by Marshall Cavendish, I've wanted to talk with her. I wanted to understand her process of retelling a tale and how this tale holds the traditions of the Armenian tales she grew up hearing.  Then I heard that UNESCO named Yerevan, capital city of Armenia, as the World Book Capital for 2012.  So I wrote her.  Lucine and I are connected by publisher.  I also have a book coming with Marshall Cavendish, a small press in the limelight today since its children's book list was acquired by a new Amazon imprint. One thing Lucine and I hear from publishers and editors at Cavendish and the new Amazon imprint is that they  "believe in the craft of the book." 

The Greedy Sparrow is, indeed, such a book of craft. It's a wry comeuppance tale of a sparrow who tries to manipulate  a series of village folk and animals - and does pay. Lucine explained about The Greedy Sparrow, the Armenian folktale tradition, the city of Yerevan, and Armenia today. 

Offering Children the World in Picture Books

Picture books to teach about who we are? Yes!  Ambika Sharma from Bhutan and I talked to teachers at the NH Arts in Education Conference about two books, one set in the American south, the other a folktale from Nepal.  

Georgia Music by Helen Griffith, illus. by James Stevenson

They both tell stories about a child and an elder and led to a discussion about family customs and growing old in different cultures. We looked at picture books that support teaching history, social studies, and math. Tom Newkirk who directs the NH Literacy Institutes at the University of New Hampshire mentioned in a talk that teachers struggle to  have time  to teach social studies.  Through children's literature, students can have both: reading and social studies.  I love what a New York Times reviewer wrote in a review of Georgia Music.  "One way or another, the object for every artist - and certainly the children's book artist - is to make simple and luminous that in our lives which is profound and elusive."

I Doko by Ed Young

"This I think is quite hard."

Birkha Rai

Book designer, Susan Gaylord, and I go to the home of Dal Rai, the illustrator of the Nepali-English folktale we are producing.  It is October 7, the day of a Hindu festival.  Dal's neighbor tells us that the festival is about cooking and eating and all your family comes together.  In our few hours of work on the folktale, Dal's wife, Birkha,  cooks and we eat delicious, very spicy noodles.  We are sorting out the illustrations for a scene in our folktale-in-progress, The Story of a Pumpkin. In the scene is a palace kitchen and we spend a long time imagining the cooking tools Dal might illustrate that would be on wooden shelves. Then Birkha and the storyteller, Hari, fetch a long wooden utensil they use to chop up lentils - the one you can see here in the photo in Birkha's hands. Here's a site I found, Nepali Cooking  with recipes and even the names in Nepali of some of the cooking utensils that Dal will illustrate. Some of the missing parts of the story come together this night.  Dal asks Hari for details in the story.  We all imagine how the king's daughters will stand when they are all laughing at the pumpkin. Dal demonstrates with his face bent into his hand.  When it comes to the wedding scene,  which - not to spoil the story for you - in one in which the king's youngest daughter takes the pumpkin for her husband, Dal says,  "This I think is quite hard." Susan asks, "Does the pumpkin wear anything?" Yes, says Hari, who first told this story. He is wearing a wedding garland. And the bride?  Birkha shows the veil the bride will wear that partially covers her face. We all laugh at this image of the bride and the pumpkin that is taking shape. Susan and I have brought a real giant pumpkin to Dal and his family on this October night and the pumpkin brings us good luck and a good grasp of this story. We  have a sense that this book is coming together in just the right way.

Yellow Garlands and Preeti Files

Selling Fruit and Garlands for the Diwali Festival by John Pavelka/Creative Commons

 Narad Adhikari listened to the storyteller Hari Tiwari on tape as she told "The Story of a Pumpkin," the story we selected in our Bhutanese Nepali folktale project. He read the tale interpreted into English by Nilhari Bandari which I had transcribed. Then he composed the story in Nepali script. So now we have the text of our bilingual folktale. 

In addition to that, Narad gave us two gifts. The first was pretty simple. He give us a preeti font file so we could view the Nepali script.  Still trying to figure the preeti file out on my MAC, but I will. Here's the big thing he gave us.  He added these lines to the end of the story, saying that in Bhutan parents often end a story this way, even singing it to coax a child into sleep.  They close the story by singing, "And If you listen to a story you will get a golden garland."  I googled garlands in Nepal and found the photo above. Garlands of marigolds are a traditional part of Nepali festivals. Thank you, Narad.

The Next Life of a Wedding Sari

Storyteller Hari Tiwari and Ambika talk about the design in
Ambika's sari

Hoo - ray to artist Susan Gaylord who's joined Dal Rai, Hari and Ambika Sharma, and me and many others in the  NH Humanities Council Bhutanese Nepali Book Project.  Susan is now the book designer.  She created a  book dummy with the text of "The Story of a Pumpkin" (told by Hari Tiwari, left in this photo)  She has also scanned fabric Ambika (right) brought from Bhutan and Nepal.  From the scan she created a border around illustrator Dal Rai's first watercolor illustration.   She scanned Ambika's gorgeous red wedding sari for other borders.  You can see more photos and read Susan's account of the Nepali Book Project on  her blog.

Hari holds Ambika's nephew while they watch Susan scan the  fabric.

Susan Gaylord scans Ambika's fabric brought from Bhutan. 

In the midst of all this work and modeling, Ambika also made the best chai I've ever had.

A Long Walk to Water, and more books about Sudan

South Sudan is about to be born as a new nation.  Many Sudanese-Americans have returned to Sudan for the celebration on July 9.  Here are some books for young adults about Sudan's long journey through decades of war to the creation of an independent nation.


Linda Sue Park’s A Long Walk to Water is a fictionalized biography of Salva Dut, a Dinka boy separated from his family during the war.  He is among the “lost boys” who trek across three countries seeking safety, finally coming to the U.S.  Park also tells the story of Salva’s return to Sudan after the war in 2008 to begin to dig wells for people who spend hours a day carrying water.

My forthcoming book, The Good Braider,  Marshall Cavendish, spring 2012, is a novel in verse based on oral histories I gathered from Sudanese families in Portland, Maine.  It's a teenaged girl's experience of war and dreams and survival and the African art of braiding hair.

 Mary Williams with illustrator R. Gregory Christie tells the journey of the “lost boys” in pictures and words in Brothers in Hope. 

Home of the Brave by Katherine Applegate is a novel in free verse.   The main character, Kek, is a young boy, a keeper of cows  when he lived with his family in rural Sudan.  When he begins to care for a cow in Minnesota, it is a step to making American his home.  

What is the What by Dave Eggers and They Poured Fire on Us From the Sky by Benson Deng, Alephonsion Deng, and Benjamin Ajak are adult books young adult will be reading. Both tell the story of  “lost boys” from the Dinka tribe, the largest  and dominant  tribe of South Sudan.  Another adult history is God Grew Tired of Us by John Bul Dau.  Later Dau wrote a YA nonfiction book, Lost Boy, Lost Girl: Escaping Civil War in Sudan.  He us also featured in the documentary film, "God Grew Tired of Us."

There are memoirs of the horrific experiences and victories of boy soldiers, adult books often read by teens. One is  War Child: A Child Soldier’s Story by Emmanuel Jal, a “lost boy” from Sudan, now also a rap musician.  War Child is often compared with A Long Way Gone by Ismael Beah, a story of the war in Sierra Leone in the 1990s.

I know of two books that focus on  contemporary slavery in Sudan.  One is a middle grade novel based on a true story, Dream Freedom by Sonia Levitin about slaves in Sudan and American students who raise money to buy their freedom. Another is a memoir by Francis Bok, Escape From Slavery.

Another category of related books are nonfiction refugee narratives, many in the voices of young people.  One book is Making it Home: Real-life Stories from Children Forced to Flee with an introduction by Beverley Naidoo. It includes a short piece in a South Sudanese girl’s voice. Another is one of Brent Ashabranner’s beautiful photo journalistic books, The New African Americans.

Two books stand out as ones that tell girls’ stories of Africa, though neither is set in Sudan.  One is a YA/adult biography about a girl who survived the genocide in Rwanda called Over A Thousand Hills I Walk With You  written by her adopted mother,  Hanna Jansen.  

The other is totally different, the graphic novel Aya by Marguerite Abouet and Clement Oubrerie about 19-year old Aya in Ivory Coast in the 1970s and not about war at all. It's  set in a time of freedom and hope. It even includes a recipe for a love potion beginning with "Peel 4 pounds of fresh ginger." You have to read the  book.