Children’s authors and illustrators sign proclamation demanding better picture books

A group of U.S. children’s authors and illustrators have found an eye-catching way to demand better quality picture books from their peers.

A manifesto, signed by 21 members of the kids’ publishing industry, appeared as a full-page ad in the November issue of Horn Book Magazine and on the website thepicturebook.co. The coalition is spearheaded by Mac Barnett, a San Francisco author who sits on the board of 826LA, the non-profit writing and tutoring centre founded by Dave Eggers. Vancouver-born artist Carson Ellis handlettered and illustrated the document. Other authors and illustrators who have signed the letter include Laurie Keller, Lemony Snicket, and Jon Scieszka.

The manifesto begins with a proclamation: “We are tired of hearing the picture book is in trouble, and tired of pretending it is not.” The group calls for titles that are “fresh, honest, piquant, and beautiful,” and asks authors to “cease writing the same book again and again.”

Barnett says he wrote the document on a former professor’s advice. He told Publishers Weekly:

“The target audience for ‘A Picture Book Manifesto’ is quite sweeping.… It is really an exhortation to everyone – writers, illustrators, editors, publishers, art directors, booksellers, librarians, and parents – that we could all be doing better. The only people who are doing fine are the kids themselves. I really believe the rest of us should be doing better.”

Children’s bookstore launches multilingual short story contest

Rainbow Caterpillar Bookstore, a Toronto-based bookseller of children’s literature in a variety of languages including Italian, Spanish, Gujarati, Farsi, Arabic, and Chinese, has announced its first-ever writing contest. The Rainbow Caterpillar Award for Writing for Children recognizes short fiction (up to 500 words) written for kids 5–10  in a language other than English or French.

In a press release, Rainbow Caterpillar co-owner Happie Testa says the multilingual contest aims to encourage “vibrant literary production for children in foreign languages, but with a uniquely Canadian perspective.” Testa’s colleague Hanoosh Abbasi adds: “We hope ultimately this award also helps parents pass their mother language on to their children born or raised in Canada … We feel that it is important for parents to have access to good books from their countries of origin, but also to put their ancestral culture in the context of our shared Canadian culture where many people speak more than one language on a daily basis.”

The winning author will receive $750 plus publication in a collection, which will also feature 10 pieces that receive honourable mention. The deadline for submissions is Oct. 6. The award will be presented at the Canadian Ethnic Media Association’s annual awards gala in November.

Event photos: Second Story Press launches Splish, Splat! at Mayfest

Second Story Press launched Splish, Splash!, written by Alexis Domney and illustrated by Alice Crawford in Toronto on May 13. The picture book, about a boy who meets two deaf house painters, is the winner of a contest sponsored by the Canadian Cultural Society of the Deaf. The launch was held at Exhibition Place during Mayfest — Toronto’s annual celebration of its deaf community. (Photos courtesy of Second Story Press)

Crawford and Domney sign copies of Splish, Splat!

Crawford demonstrates the collage technique she used to illustrate the book.

How e-books break poems

Poetry rarely makes the headlines, but an Associated Press story about the unsuitability of verse to the e-book form has been making the rounds. The story notes the dearth of major poets being published digitally.

Major poets not yet in e-form include Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Sylvia Plath, W.H. Auden and Robert Lowell, Langston Hughes and C.K. Williams. No e-editions of poetry are available from this year’s Pulitzer Prize winner, Rae Armantrout; from Pulitzer winner and incoming U.S. poet laureate W.S. Merwin; or from such recent laureates as Charles Simic, Robert Pinsky and Louise Glueck.

While the assertion that poetry is “so far the least adaptable [literary form] to the growing e-book market” may be overstated (surely, illustrated children’s books have proven even more difficult), it is certainly the case that the design and formatting issues that afflict e-books are more pronounced in verse, often distorting a poem beyond recognition. Former U.S. poet laureate Billy Collins puts it this way:

The critical difference between prose and poetry is that prose is kind of like water and will become the shape of any vessel you pour it into to. Poetry is like a piece of sculpture and can easily break.

The bad news is that the problem seems intractable, at least for now:

A leading developer of e-reading technology, eBook Technologies, is working on improving the formatting for poetry, although no major breakthroughs are expected before 2011. Company president Garth Conboy said that for now the most realistic options are either to keep a long line intact by scrolling horizontally across the screen — “A really bad experience,” he says — or to find a way to “better communicate” to readers that a line broken in two was meant to be a single line.

“Neither are perfect solutions,” he said. “I’m not sure what the perfect solution is.”

Daily book biz round-up: battle over The Shack; FOX News attacked; and more

Check these out:

• The bitter legal battle over proceeds from The Shack
• Kitty Kelley’s Oprah to be turned into TV movie
• A Chicago librarian rips into FOX News library exposé
• Seth brings new look to CNQ
• A secret writer’s retreat, right in the middle of NYC
• B.C. author John Vaillant talks to PW about The Tiger
• Video: first look at an upcoming doc about children’s books

Way to Display! Chester at Mabel’s Fables

As part of Quillblog’s ongoing commitment to filling our site with ephemera, sundries, and both flotsam and jetsam from around the book world, we are instituting a semi-regular feature entitled Way to Display!, in which we feature striking and eye-catching window displays (or, indeed, interior displays) from bookstores around the country. If you have seen a great display (or have just made one yourself), feel free to send it our way. (Dropping them in our Flickr pool is one way to get the pictures to us, or you can mail them directly to nwhitlock at quillandquire.com)

We kick things off with this fat cat display for Mélanie Watt’s Chester’s Masterpiece in the window of Toronto’s Mabel’s Fables. (Photo courtesy of Kids Can Press)

The ashes of Tasha Tudor and the wisdom of Solomon

Anyone who’s had them knows that children are greedy, ungrateful, little creeps. Especially so when they are all grown up and bickering over a recently deceased parent’s estate.

This is what happened in the case of Vermont children’s illustrator Tasha Tudor, who died in June of 2008 at the age of 92, leaving a $2-million (U.S.) estate . Her will stipulated that the bulk of the money go to her eldest son, with only small amounts going to the rest of the children, who are contesting the will in court.

Tudor, who lived a very proto-hippie existence with a number of beloved animals, had a few other stipulations in her will: she asked to be buried alongside the remains of her favourite dog and rooster. Even this fairly simple request got muddied, however. From the Canadian Press:

When author Tasha Tudor’s ashes were finally buried, it wasn’t in one place. Her bickering survivors couldn’t agree on when, where and how, so a judge ordered her cremated remains divided in half.

On Oct. 17, sons Seth Tudor and Thomas Tudor and daughters Bethany Tudor and Efner Tudor Holmes buried some under a rosebush she loved in her garden and the rest on Seth’s neighbouring property, where her precious Pembroke Welsh corgi dogs were already buried.

“(Seth) got the ashes, we went outside and he gave us half the ashes and he went down to his property and scattered or buried the ashes there and we scattered ours,” said Thomas Tudor, 64. “It was really an unpleasant situation.”

That’s right: they even fought over the ashes.

Despite all this trouble, things still appear bucolic on the Tasha Tudor and Family website, though it’s worth nothing that the rooster’s bio appears before any of the kids.

Event photos: Evan Munday, Natalie Ghent, and Mélanie Watt teach the children well

Illustrator Evan Munday (who sunlights as Coach House Books’s publicist) and YA author Natalie Ghent ran the Test Pilot edition of Small Print’s Volume One Project, a new writing workshop series for pre-teens and tweens, at Humber College in Toronto on Nov. 22. Above (from left): Munday and Ghent, along with the Test Pilot participants and their newly created books. (Photo by Chris Reed)

On Nov. 24, Mélanie Watt dropped by Indigo’s Bay and Bloor location in Toronto as part of Kids Can Press’s partnership with Indigo’s Love of Reading Foundation, which aims to get books into the hands of needy kids. Above: Watt shows the assembled elementary school kids how to draw her best-known character, Scaredy Squirrel.

Caillou’s mom won’t let it go

Though the long and bitter custody battle over Caillou, that loveable and very bankable little character, has long been settled, it’s clear that bitter feelings remain. Though Hélène Desputeaux, who first drew the grapefruit-headed munchkin, and Christine L’Heureux of Éditions Chouette, who wrote some of the early stories, agreed to split royalties back in 2005, after being told by a court-appointed arbitrator back in 1997 that each could claim to be the boy’s “mother” (Caillou has two moms!), Desputeaux still takes every opportunity to make clear the  boy is hers.

Q&Q recently received a press release from desputeaux + aubin, the company Desputeaux set up with her husband, Michel Aubin, to publish her books, trumpeting a new, 20th anniversary edition of the first Caillou book. In it, we counted no less than 10 references to Caillou’s “genuine” lineage. Fun activity time: see if you can find them all!

Scholastic [U.S.] tries to censor kids’ book with same-sex couple characters [UPDATED]

Publishers are often called upon to defend their books against people and organizations (parents, school boards, governments, self-appointed morality squads, etc.) who attempt to ban or suppress them.

In the case of a new tween novel by Colorado author Lauren Myracle, however, it’s another publisher that is doing the censoring:

Don’t expect to see Lauren Myracle’s new book Luv Ya Bunches (Abrams/Amulet, 2009) at Scholastic school book fairs this year. It’s been censored – at least for now – due to its language and homosexual content.

Luv Ya Bunches, about four elementary school girls who have little in common, but bond over the fact that they’re all named after flowers, is the first installment of a four-book series. But Scholastic says the book, released on October 1, failed to meet its vetting process because it contains offensive language and same-sex parents of one of the main characters, Milla.

The company sent a letter to Myracle’s editor asking the author to omit certain words such as “geez,” “crap,” “sucks,” and “God” (as in, “oh my God”) and to alter its plotline to include a heterosexual couple. Myracle agreed to get rid of the offensive language “with the goal – as always – of making the book as available to as many readers as possible,” but the deal breaker was changing Milla’s two moms.

UPDATE: Under pressure, Scholastic U.S. has released a statement saying it will include Myracle’s novel in its middle school book fairs (though presumably not its elementary school fairs), and furthermore, that the company “does not censor books.”