There’s an easy cliché, broadcast with unthinking frequency, which says that books are a thing of the past, that today’s kids, their vocabularies crippled by “text speak,” have swapped their chapter books for iPads, and that the bright gadgetry of now has swept away the old values of deep attention and imagination. And so on.
But to have attended the 17th annual Allen County Young Authors’ celebration dinner Friday night is to encounter evidence of a very different kind.
According to the program’s chairman, elementary school librarian Deb Greenwall, this year’s Young Authors season was in many ways the most fruitful.
The program, launched in 1999 on the wings of a grant from the Sleeper Family Trust, invites elementary- and middle-grade students — with the help of participating teachers, of course — to write, illustrate, edit, assemble and “publish” books born of their own imagining. The books are then judged, awarded and, eventually, feted at a banquet at which two nationally recognized children’s authors are invited to speak.
“This is our 17th year and we have never had statistics like this,” said Greenwall, with a grin strung ear to ear. “We have never had 92 percent of our students participating in this program and, in all of our 17 years, we’ve not had 100 percent of our teachers in this. It is just outstanding. There were 772 books written this year…and 13,211 books written since the time we started.”
A SAMPLING of this year’s catalog was arrayed on a long table at the back of the recital hall — thin, bound books with laminated fronts and plastic spiral bindings with titles like “The Purple Shoes,” “My Best Friend,” “Bling Bling Can’t Find His Pants,” “The Hamster in Space,” “The Awesome Prairie Dog,” “A Trip to Kansas City,” “A Blast in Colorado,” “My Cat Grew a Mustache.”
One girl told a true tale, called “The New Beginning,” about her long struggle with cancer. “The day after I found out I had cancer, my family had lots of fun. We played and spent time together.” There’s a drawing of her family huddled close together, with a small angel hovering in the corner of the picture. The young author touches on her chemotherapy and many hospital stays — she’s drawn a picture of herself alone in a medical bed, all the walls painted black — but then writes “Let’s get to the great part and skip all this sad stuff.”
The book ends with the girl returning to school, where she is welcomed back warmly but confesses that she still feels a little different. But that’s OK, she reasons: “What’s the point of being born, if you’re not different.”
THE FIRST SPEAKER was Deborah Hopkinson, a multi-award winning writer of more than 45 books for young readers — picture books, short fiction, non-fiction — most of which dramatize some aspect of British or American history.
“When I talked to [local elementary school students] today who can gasp in awe at pictures from the 1930s or a death certificate of a 5-month-old baby in 1854, I realized that although many students read and enjoy fantasy, they are still open to learning about the past.”
WRITER OBERT SKYE, a warm and witty talker — and the evening’s final speaker — traced his own origins as a writer of fantasy not to the dragons that wheeled through his dreams as a child but to the continuous wonder he encounters every day in the real world.
“I’ll tell you a story about why I’m a writer: When I was a little kid my parents took us on a trip to a place called Carlsbad Caverns, which is an amazing series of underground caves in New Mexico. … You hike miles and miles down this path into what feels like the center of the earth. You walk and you see these stalactites and stalagmites — I don’t know the difference; one is up, one is down,” said Skye, which prompted snorts from a couple of the brainier kids in the room. “Farther and farther down you go. And as a little kid, every step you took felt like you were going closer to the center of the earth. And at the bottom — I think it’s a two-mile hike — something even more impressive happened: They serve you a little box lunch of chicken nuggets and ranch dressing. And, as a kid, that’s magical. I loved that. Here I was at the center of the earth, dipping nuggets into ranch and thinking ‘What is going on in my life, this is so fantastic.’
“That night we stayed in a little town called White City. It’s next to Carlsbad. Kind of a ghost town then and probably still is now. There was just a motel and an old Dairy Queen, and across the street from the motel was a little hill and on top of that hill was an old broken-down Ferris wheel that had a chain-link fence around it. When we stayed there that night, it felt like a ghost town. There was nobody else around. It felt like just our family. We went to Dairy Queen and had dinner. After we had dinner, we stepped out to the curb and I stood next to my father. We looked across the street at that Ferris wheel that was chained off. There was a full moon behind it, lighting it up. Thoughts of being in the middle of the earth and of chicken nuggets and ranch dressing filled my head, and as I stood there with my father, he looked down at me and said something that made it even more magical.
“He said: ‘Two weeks ago, a person was murdered here.’
“Now, murder,” laughed Skye, “is bad. But as a child, I couldn’t contain those emotions. ‘What is going on!’ I ran to our motel room and I flipped open my brother’s coloring book and I went to one of the back pages and I started writing. I wanted other people to feel that moment. … I wanted, somehow, for people to share in it.
“The next day we drove the car to Albuquerque , N.M. In between Albuquerque and Carlsbad, it’s nothing but Pinyon trees and dust. But, about halfway there, we turned off the freeway to a little town called Santa Rosa, and in Santa Rosa there’s a place called Blue Hole, which is a lake no bigger than the surface of this room. It’s 80-feet deep and it’s crystal clear water, fed by a spring. And it’s always the same warmish temperature. Divers from all over the world come to practice scuba diving in that little blue hole in the middle of the sandy desert. … My father and I stood on the side of that hole and you could see all the way down, see some divers practicing. It was so clear. And at the bottom of that hole, there was a grate, a big metal grate. And we were standing there when an old man came up to us and said ‘You see that metal grate down there?’ And of course we could. He said: ‘Beyond that grate are thousands and thousands of miles of watery caves.’ He said: ‘They used to have it open and let divers go down there and explore.’ He said: ‘But they just recently closed it off, because a couple weeks ago two divers went down there and they never came back.’
