making space for creativity
I am not really a city girl. Outside of my infancy in San Diego, the only other time I’ve lived in a city proper before this year was the summer I spent in Paris after my sophomore year. I haven’t accrued a lot of hard-earned urban wisdom. But the lesson that I’ve…
The 1939 Newbery Medal winner, Elizabeth Enright’s Thimble Summer, was really lovely. It was one of my favorite early Newberies so far, and not just because it’s about a plucky Wisconsin girl named Garnet Linden—but that does help. Thimble Summer tells the story of a 1930s family in Southwestern Wisconsin one summer when…
It’s day thirteen of school. (Not that I am counting.) We’ve now been in Wisconsin for six months, and now these past three and a half weeks we have finally started doing (full time) what we came for: teaching and writing and caring for family. To be completely honest, it’s…
In a high-fantasy style, 1938 Newbery winner The White Stag, written by author and illustrator Kate Seredy, lays out the mythology of the ancestors of and prophecy surrounding Attila the Hun and his epic journey into his European promised land. In a tale that seems both like a tiny Wagner opera and Norse-Eastern…
I have nine first cousins, all on my mom’s side. I’m the fourth oldest, which puts me smack in the middle of admiration (boarding on adoration) for my cool three older cousins and complete acceptance and enthusiastic adventuring with my five younger cousins. As a child, I loved seeing my cousins. Comedian…
This week’s Newbery, Roller Skates by Ruth Sawyer, features feisty 10 year-old-Lucinda, who is a bit like if Anne Shirley (of Green Gables) got stuck in Manhattan with a pair of roller skates. Set in the 1890s, affluent and inadvertently-troublemaking Lucinda has a year of freedom when her parents go to Italy for…
When Evan and I went Paleo over two and half years ago it was sort of by accident. We didn’t read any books about the philosophy, or tips about how to transition. We did a hard-core, slightly sketchy medical elimination diet. It worked, and when we added things back in, what made me sick…
I do not know how I grew up not reading this week’s Newbery. It was great! Caddie Woodlawn by Carol Ryrie Brink is based on the life of the author’s grandmother Caddie. Caddie is the middle daughter of a miller’s family growing up near Menomonie, Wisconsin in the 1890s, and Caddy is a…
This weekend we stayed home and enjoyed Milwaukee. Milwaukee shows off in the summer. The whole city seems to linger on porches or backyards, sipping drinks to the sound of kids running around. Or if they aren’t home basking in the upper 70 degree weather, they are off to the state fair, or Summerfest,…
This week’s Newbery, Monica Shannon’s 1935 Dobry, follows a little Bulgarian peasant boy named Dobry, who loves the beauty of his farming community but longs to capture it in drawings and sculpture instead of just tending the fields. A cozy tale for the beginning of winter, Dobry has vibrant characters — a storytelling grandfather,…
This past weekend we drove down to Illinois for the third week in a row, this time for a wedding. It is, by my count, the 20th wedding Evan and I have attended together. The day we got engaged we went to a wedding, and every year since we’ve been witnessing the sacred vows…
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…