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.”

Event photos: Bird Child takes flight

Nan Forler launched her picture book Bird Child (Tundra Books) on Saturday Sept. 19 at the The Great Hall in Conrad Grebel University College in Kitchener-Waterloo. Though the birds in the book (illustrated by Francois Thisdale) are more symbolic than literal, the event was a full on birdztravaganza, with bird-shaped cookies, bird crafts, and songs about birds playing in the background.

Some of the planned activities. (Is it just us, or do #2 and #4 seem a little off-theme?)

The signing line.

Peter Carver and Kathy Stinson get Nan Forler to sign their copies.

Forler, flowers, and frustrated-looking kid.

Bookmarks: Superhero Bill Cosby, scary Margaret Atwood, and the Poet of Swinging Suicides

Sundry links from around the Web:

• In honour of Leonard Cohen’s 75th birthday yesterday, 1 Heck of a Guy comes up with an incomplete list of Cohen’s many nicknames. Quillblog favourites: #22: Master of the Egg Salad Sandwich and #60: Poet of Swinging Suicides
• A 700-plus page “utopian fantasy” starring superheroes Bill Cosby and Yoko Ono? Yes, it’s Ralph Nader’s “quirky fiction debut” 
• Can’t get enough of Dan Brown mania? Here are 10 titles to tide you over after The Last Symbol tsunami 
• Philip Seymour Hoffman as The Giving Tree? EW‘s Shelf Life  picks classic children’s books they’d like to see given the Hollywood treatment 
• Margaret Atwood tells The New York Times why she scares herself 
• Despite previous concerns, the Philadelphia Free Library System is NOT shutting down  

Bookmarks: Britain’s most avid reader, library-themed ice cream flavours, and more

Some quirky bookish links from around the Web:

• Dr. Seuss’s The Lorax, arguably one of the most message-heavy children’s books, is being made into a 3D CG-animated feature film to be released in March 2012
• Most disturbing celebrity-turned-author news since Lauren Conrad: Jennifer Love Hewitt has two books on the horizon
• A 91-year-old Scottish woman has borrowed nearly 25,000 books from her local library since 1946 – all without incurring a single late fee
• MobyLives pulls out all the stops in a rebuttal to a Baltimore Sun article that suggests not buying books is a good way to save money
• Library-themed ice cream flavours? I’d like a scoop of Gooey Decimal System, please!

E-love you forever: website will read bedtime stories to your kids

From Your Local Guardian:

Hardworking fathers can still read their children a bedtime story in their absence, thanks to a new invention by a Kingston father-of-two.

Chris Coombs, 44, has come up with a personalised audio book that fathers can record through the internet and email to their offspring at home.

He came up with the idea in 2001, after being called away from Kingston to visit his father, who had fallen ill in Canada.

His daughter Mia, now seven, had been born the day after the September 11 attacks in America and Mr Coombs was about to board a plane.

He said: “I wanted to reassure my four-year-old daughter that I had to leave the country for a few weeks but everything was fine.

“As an audio mixer and dubbing editor I recorded myself reading a story and then added sound effects and prompts.”

He discussed the idea with four other friends who often missed out on bedtimes stories and fivedads.com was born.

Putting aside the absurd idea of e-mailing bedtime stories to kids, it’s nice to see utterly gratuitous references to 9/11 making a small comeback.

Jeremy Tankard in the L.A. Times

Grumpy Bird author/illustrator Jeremy Tankard recently chatted with Sonja Bolle of the Los Angeles Times. Here are some highlights:

SB: Is Grumpy Bird based on anyone in your life?

JT: I’d probably be in trouble if I answered that honestly.

[...]

SB: What kind of a reader are you?

JT: The irony was that [as a kid] I was not a big reader at all. There were a million things I’d rather do than read a book. I still love being read to, but it wasn’t until I was 30 or 31 that I started to enjoy reading. [He's 36 now.]

[...]

SB: What are you working on now?

JT: Possibly an illustrated novel, maybe a chapter book taking advantage of my love of comic books. My editor at Scholastic did The Invention of Hugo Cabret with Brian Selznick, so she’s open to doing something unusual. I’ve got a story mostly written.

The great thing is that what I thought would be a hobby to supplement my work turns out to be a viable career.

Tankard also lays out the genesis of the Grumpy Bird character and series, something he talked about in Q&Q‘s Jan/Feb cover story on children’s illustrators.

Munsch partners with eight-year-old publishing dynamo

A chance encounter between an eight-year-old schoolgirl from Guelph, Ontario, and mega-selling kids’ author Robert Munsch has led to the publication of Braids, a new book by the beloved storyteller. According to a report in The Toronto Star, Munsch met Grade 3 student Taya Kendall at a reading last January at the Guelph Public Library:

The famed Canadian children’s author was struck by the girl’s resemblance to a character in one of his unpublished stories, about a girl who reluctantly allows her hair to be braided but is ultimately pleased with the result. Munsch granted Taya permission to use the story in the school newspaper she had launched earlier that month at Sir Isaac Brock Public School.

Now, a new edition of the work, published in partnership with New Internationalist magazine, and featuring 28 illustrations by Taya’s classmates, is being sold for $10 through the magazine’s web site and at select retailers across the country, including Mabel’s Fables, Parentbooks, Ella Minnow, and Treasure Island Toys. Proceeds are going to the Children of Bukati, a charity that supports more than 650 AIDS/HIV orphans in Kenya.

The Star goes on to suggest that Braids could be the only new title from Munsch for some time. The 64-year-old author suffered a stroke last August and has yet to return to writing.

(Thanks to Canadian Magazines for the tip.)

Event photos: Nancy Hartry launches Watching Jimmy – and there’s cake!

This past weekend, author Nancy Hartry launched her YA novel Watching Jimmy (Tundra Books) at Swansea Town Hall in Toronto’s Bloor West Village. (Photos courtesy of Tundra Books.)

Hartry signs a copy of the book for a slightly out-of-the-target-age-range fan.

Cake!