Trailer 1

I had an idea for some connected short stories that I was thinking I could try to hammer out for Nanowrimo. As usual though, as soon as I had some background characters for the main one to bounce off of, I fixated on them instead. It happened with the Besnicks. Marco and Yvette are the son of the trailer park landlady and the local tattoo artist, respectively. I got a friend who does research help me see what sort of imagery would be appropriate for them. Marco's grandparents came from Rimavska Sobota and Yvette' s great-great grandparents are from Haiti, but she's closer to her heritage than he is.

I tried to base their faces on Jennifer Hudson and John Leguizamo, but I don't think they look much like them. Marco was smitten at first sight with Yvette. He courted her with Victorian flower language, going to the tattoo parlor with symbolic flowers. He would tell her what they meant while she tattooed them on him. It didn't seem like he was getting anywhere until he realized she had tattooed on a rose leaf that he hadn't asked for . He had to look it up, but a rose leaf turned out to mean 'you may hope' and that was it. Marco had always been a mama's boy and pursuing a girl she didn't approve was the first time he had ever gone against her. Yvette got the blame for that, of course, but she let Marco name the twins after mom-in-law's parents and that soothed a lot of it. First draft of tattoo ideas for Marco before I got the idea to group the flowers into the skull image.

Starting Again

New year and soon a new job and I would be lying if I said I wasn't nervous about both. The first book of the year is So Dear to My Heart by Sterling North. Disney made a really sappy movie about it once upon a time, but I had already read the book before I saw it and was very disappointed. The movie doesn't have all the intrigue and otherworldliness of the Cat Hollow folklore that you get in the book. Most of the background plot was ignored to focus on the cartoon farm animals and the kid playing Jeremiah was working really hard to make sappily cute faces. Disney sugarcoated over a lot of Granny's hellfire and brimstone and her fear of anything outside her own little patch of a farm. It skims over how miserable Jeremiah was too, with nothing of his own, not even the truth about his parents, and always the threat of Granny taking what he does have away. (first the calf, then the lamb, the trip to the fair, the story of who his parents were and what happened to them.) The book is better. It brings the tiny little town and all the ghosts and legends it holds to life. There is more history and mystery and darkness and light in the book. The movie's cute enough, in a forced way, and I know that it's Disney and intended for kids, but I read the book when I was in grade school and really enjoyed the more complex story. Cartoon lambs are cute and Burl Ives can sing a little ditty with the best of them, but they are nowhere near as interesting as lovers running into fires to save each other, and ghostly violin music played by a mute hermit, a tree growing from the grave of the woman Granny thought was a witch, and all kinds of old mountain lore. It's just better.

Portraits in Crayola.

The kids I work with took to drawing me the other day. The first one is actually what I was wearing that day. I don't know where the Queen of Hearts down there came from, but I love the expression on the last one. There's some dispute over my coloration, but that may be the available markers more than anything.

The Eric Carle Project

We read Eric Carle books all week, talked about the illustrations, and painted sheets of paper in different colors. Once the paint was dry, we cut out our shapes to make our zoo critters.

A bird.

A unicorn.

An owl.

A horse.

Ostriches.

A peacock.

This was my first real project in the new job and I think they did pretty well with it, being four years old and all.

Building Tomorrow's Bookworms Today

Here's one of the projects I worked on with the first graders. The whole point was to encourage them to read on their own, so my spiel was about how no matter what they were interested in, there was a book about it. While we waited to go to the library to find one, they got a piece of paper to fold to decorate a book about something they liked.

They came out pretty cute! I like The Werewolf That Lived in the Dark.

A Picture May Be Worth 1000 Words...

But being there is worth an easy billion.

Pictures never do justice to a hike through the woods. They show the colors, the light and the shadow, the little pieces, but not the whole picture. We hiked to the Cascades and there's so much to see and feel. We were asked why we would jaunt over hill and stone and up the stairs for four miles in the heat of July.

Pictures don't always explain and most people who ask that question don't care to hear about the smell of the river, wet rocks and moss, and black earth under dead leaves, or how laser intense the sun is through the trees and how it lights up the whole canopy like stained glass, or how the temperature drops to a chill you can feel in your belly when the path takes you between two huge stones, how the roots and the moss cushion and trip your feet, how the wind sounds like a tidal wave when it roars over the falls and down in to the valley around you, or any of the reasons that take me back out to the falls every summer.

John Bauer Artwork

The first time I saw a book illustrated by John Bauer I was so struck that all I could figure was that I had seen the artwork long ago or had dreamed it or something even more magical. See for yourself. Beautiful, beautiful stuff.