June 14, 2010

• Interlude

  
  

  Wonders lie in words.  Whole entire worlds are revealed in metaphor and simile that are both true and untrue.  Lives, with exultant joy and limitless sadness, a given as a gift for the seekers of understanding.  To show children (and all people, for that matter) the power and importance of words is significant and essential.

   

  The life of Pablo Neruda is fictionalized in Pam Munoz Ryan’s The Dreamer and it is a read to be savored.  The rhythm of Neruda’s poetry (with which I am ashamed to admit I was not familiar before this book) lives in every sentence, every phrase, every question.  Ryan has absorbed his work and his world into her skin and it comes out through her fingertips in a style that is brilliantly hers.  There is not one false step here and our sympathies for Nephtali are never clouded with something as mundane as pity.  We applaud his victories and cheer him on in the losses.  Nothing can destroy the heart of the poet.

   

  As teachers and librarians we sometimes forget that writing is not just learning about punctuation and metaphor and simile.  Certainly those are important but most of the time it is more important to simply write your own truth, your own vision of the world and when you are an adolescent that truth is very close and very personal.  If we try to put it into the box of proper form we kill tiny pieces of the writer’s heart.  Patricia MacLachlan’s Word After Word After Word is the story of five fourth grade friends who explore and discover their own lives in a month long visit from a famous author.  Henry, one of the characters, says, “I write to save everything I have.” Yes.

   

  Find these at a library near you.  And it’s summer reading time so sign up for the adult/teen/children’s program while you’re there.

   

  And so it goes.

  • 8:08 am
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