making space for creativity
This week’s Newbery winner was another surprise—the 1934 biography of Louisa May Alcott: Invincible Louisa: The Story of the Author of Little Women by Cornelia Meigs. Published a hundred years after her birth, Invincible Louisa traces the Alcotts’ many (29 in 28 years) moves across New England with their four daughters: Anna, Louisa, Elizabeth…
This past weekend we drove down to Illinois again to visit two of Evan’s cousins and their wives. We swam in a lake, grilled kabobs, played board games, went to church, and then let the men go into Chicago for a Liverpool Football Club friendly match. While the boys were away cheering at the…
I was surprised by how much I liked the 1933 Newbery winner Young Fu of the Upper Yangtze by Elizabeth Foreman Lewis. A Bildungsroman, or coming-of-age novel, the book follows Young Fu through his coppersmith apprenticeship in 1920s Chungking, China. Following the death of his father, Young Fu and his mother Fu Be Be…
On Saturday morning we got up and crept quietly out of the house, hoping that we could let my niece and brother and sister-in-law sleep past 7:30. I think the dogs foiled this plan, but I hope we slipped out without causing too much of a ruckus. We finally, after almost five months of…
This week’s Newbery winner from 1932 has us returning to the States, but this time we’re in the southwest with Laura Adams Armer’s Waterless Mountain, the coming of age tale of a young Navaho (the 1930s spelling of Navajo) boy named Younger Brother. The story opens when Younger Brother is eight and first begins…
Last Saturday Evan and I went to the sandy dunes of a Lake Michigan beach. It was our only Saturday home, sandwiched between our June in Atlanta and the next three weekends in Chicago. We had gotten the name of a great state park an hour north from friends who remembered it fondly. …
The shortest Newbery with so much emphasis on the illustrations, Elizabeth Coatsworth’s 1931 The Cat Who Went to Heaven, almost seems like a long picture book (something about the length of My Father’s Dragon or The Little Prince). It tells the story of a poor artist whose housekeeper brings him a lucky cat, Good…
I can hardly believe it is really mid-July. I think that perhaps this has to do with how the weather this early morning was in the 50s. The 50s, in July. Yesterday, there was a heat index of 100 in DC. But here we are with windows open 2 1/2 weeks before Evan starts…
The 1930 Newbery Award Winner Hitty, Her First Hundred Years, by Rachel Field follows a small wooden doll around the nineteenth century world as she is lost and found by an assortment of owners. The 5 inch doll Hitty begins her life when a wood-carver peddler takes refuge from a winter storm in Maine…
During our month in Atlanta, I continued to slowly work through (and very much enjoy) Alan Jacobs’ biography of CS Lewis, The Narnian. Like all good biographies, this one is also a great deal about the time and place of the person, and Lewis’ early 20th century England and Ireland are fascinating. One…
The last Newbery of the 1920s, The Trumpeter of Krakow by Eric P. Kelly, is a Polish medieval adventure. Outside of Dr. Doolittle, this week’s story finally had all the elements I would expect to be in a Newbery: young teens as the main characters, a vivid setting, a few sets of villains, and…
Eating well while traveling is a delicate dance between being flexible and proactive. On the one hand traveling is often hard on your body. You are sleeping in strange places, at strange times, and often not well or long enough. You’re exposed to different (and usually more) germs as you go through crowded airports…
There are a number of times reading Newbery’s from the 1920s where I think, “well, that probably wouldn’t be the way someone would write it now,” and the title of our 1928 book is one of those times. It’s about a carrier pigeon named Chitra Griva, roughly translated as iridescent throated, or a neck painted…
We’ve reached the half-way point of this month-long adventure in Atlanta. Right before we left, I had a sweet new Milwaukee friend ask me if I would mind working and writing from a hotel room for a month—did I need somewhere beautiful or nice to help inspire my writing? I assured her that as…
This week we come to the 6th Newbery Winner from 1927: Smoky the Cowhorse by Will James. It reminded me of a mix between Black Beauty set in the American West and a Nature Channel special about a plains horse narrated by a Cowboy. It chronicles the life of the semi-wild horse Smoky from…