Guest Post, Anthony Varallo: Homage to the School Book Fair

book fairDo you remember your school’s book fair? Ours was held in the library, the tables transformed into merchandise displays, books facing out from cardboard stands shaped like Snoopy’s doghouse or Clifford’s gigantic bowl, books grouped by series, recognizable in an instant, the red and white Choose Your Own Adventure logo; the Garfield books arranged like long, squat bricks; Hardy Boys books a blue sky, Nancy Drew a field of yellow. Pricey hardback picture books, too, that always included, year after faithful year, Green Eggs and Ham and Where the Wild Things Are, even though this was elementary school, Dr. Seuss long since replaced by Gary Paulsen. Looking at the picture books a crime punishable by lunchroom teasing.

We would visit the fair as a class, our teachers instructing us that we had a few minutes to browse and make our choices, but not to bend the books, which seemed contradictory instructions. You couldn’t really make your choice without bending the book, at least a little.  We handled Garfield At Large and The Mystery of Chimney Rock and You’ll Flip, Charlie Brown as if they were the First Folio. We checked prices, added up sums, estimated how much money we could wheedle from our parents. But it’s for books, Mom. You’re always saying how important reading is, right? Everyone else is getting at least twice that much.  

It was strange to see the school library—the last word in free stuff—become a place of commerce. Two book fair representatives sat at the checkout desk, the place where our librarian, Mrs. Dougherty, usually stamped our copies of Baseball’s Greatest Plays or Shark Attack! weeks before we lost them on the bus, the representatives wearing nametags, oddly overdressed, a black cash box atop the desk, a key turned inside its lock. We weren’t used to buying things at school, and we certainly weren’t used to the library being a place where everyone wanted to go.  If the library got too noisy, Mrs. Dougherty would sometimes punish us by making us put our heads down and turning off the lights. After school, the library doubled as a detention center. It was thrilling to think about buying books at the library, as exciting as it would have been if McDonalds took over our cafeteria and served up Big Macs and fries.

Later, we’d return to the book fair, sometimes with parents or grandparents (and parents’ wallets and grandparents’ wallets) in tow. Look, we’d say, and pretend we’d just discovered a book we’d been bending all week, its contents nearly memorized, its cost already factored into our asking price. Can we get it? Our parents would regard the book skeptically. This? they’d say. Isn’t this a little young for you? Then they’d reach for a mass-market paperback, Where the Red Fern Grows or Call It Courage or Johnny Tremain, and say, How about one of these instead?  And, since we’d anticipated them suggesting something exactly like that, and since we’d already factored the price into our plan, we’d say, Sure, we can get one of those, too.

Nowadays, I am that parent at my children’s school book fair. I’m the one who tries to steer them away from books about puppies solving mysteries in France (note adorable beret-wearing pooch on cover), or TV show tie-ins, or the umpteen bazillion books about video games, video games, and more video games. Still, my children want these, and I want them to want books, and I’ve never been good at not spending money on books, so to the register we go, where all the other parents are waiting in line with their children and their children’s stacks of mostly terrible books. We parents give each other a look, as easy to read as any of these slim volumes: wish we could have gotten these on Amazon instead.

Intern Post, Amanda Strusienski: Taking Detours and Finding my Path Post-Grad

ROad TripI love road trips, especially unexpected ones. Recently, I decided to take a drive to check out the wildflowers that bloom around Phoenix in springtime. I had planned on just driving the 60 to Globe, but I ended up veering toward Superstition Mountain and Canyon Lake. Honestly, I wasn’t sure where I was heading as I drove down the road; I was letting the road lead me. It was an adventure that brought me to a quiet trail in the middle of the desert.

Much like my random road trip, my journey toward a career post-graduation has been filled with many different twists and turns down unexpected roadways. After returning from a post-graduation trip I had expected to land the perfect job. After all a degree promises a good job, right? Yeah, my reality check came in a little late. Like many new graduates I struggled with finding a “career” job. Through a series of events I ended up working three part-time jobs for roughly six months until a full-time one was presented. It was a librarian for an elementary school—a far cry from the editor or writer position I had desired.

Writing, by this time I’d almost forgotten what that was. Following graduation I had started two different blogs, both of which had a scattering of posts. It was as though college had removed the desire to write. The pleasure I used to feel when presented with a blank page was gone. Somewhere along the line the writer in me had disappeared.

So where was I to find my inspiration and desire again? Ironically, it was as an elementary school librarian. Before this job I hadn’t read children’s literature since I was a child. I found myself in the midst of book awards and authors unknown to me. In this position I instructed 31 classes per week, kindergarten through 6th grade. The lessons I presented varied in nature, but my favorites were the author studies, genre studies, and book awards. I had the opportunity to explain the difference between fiction and nonfiction. The best was discussing authors and finding what had been the inspiration of Mo Willems or Judy Blume. Though a different form of literature, I still had the chance to learn from these authors and teach it. That was the best. Being able to add a dimension to the lessons I presented because I knew what a writer thought, or could explain the writing process.  Along the way I found my love of literature grow and a desire to use my skills in the education field. I am so grateful for my time in the library because I found my passion for education.

A few months ago I was offered a position as a curriculum coordinator for the University of Phoenix. Given that this was the opportunity for a career position I was given the difficult task of leaving my little library for a “career” job.  It took nearly two years for me to land this position, but now I find myself using skills I gained with my English degree, such as research, proofreading, and analyzing text. I’m also fortunate that I help design education courses for teachers.  Additionally, I’m now doing freelance work for Green Living Arizona magazine; it’s wonderful seeing my name in print after all this time.

When I left the library my coworker told me that in her seven years she had never seen a librarian get the students as excited about books as they had with me. She also added that I got them interested in books that they never checked out. That was such a compliment to me. I’m convinced that my love of literature and writing was so evident that many of my 800+ students caught the same desire. I can only hope the desire will last as they progress through school.

Just like picking the random road to drive down, my road to a career has had similar twists, and detours. The road has been challenging and confusing on occasions, yet it has held the tenants of any true story. A professor told me the best stories are the ones where the characters face nothing but challenges, that those are the stories that we all want to read. Perhaps that’s part of my story, to not give in, despite the challenges. Maybe it’s cliché—but maybe it’s the truth that can strengthen us on all the roads we travel.

Guest Post, Heather Altfeld: Unpacking the Library of Childhood: One Poet’s Fleeting Thoughts

Mokelumne Wilderness“The only true voyage of discovery, the only fountain of Eternal Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to behold the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to behold the hundred universes that each of them beholds.”

—Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time

“What a tension of childhoods there must be, held in reserve at the bottom our being, for a poet’s image to make us suddenly relive our memories, reimagining our images by starting from well assembled words.”

—Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Reverie

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I went camping recently in the Mokulumne Wilderness, 8200 feet up in a remote region of Northern California. I had last been there with my three daughters and a boy who was fond of the eldest. He was the first of his kind, the first boy, to be invited on a family trip. His name was Magellan, which elicited no end to the commentary from friends and acquaintances. You let a boy named Magellan near your girls? But Sophie and Magellan were twelve, going steady, so to speak, banned by his parents from even the small gesture of hand-holding, and he was sweet with her, not-holding her hand as she climbed granite boulders six feet high and roasting marshmallows expressly for her as she lazed about in a camp chair by the trickle of late July snowmelt.

As the night grew frosty beneath the stars he began to tell us stories about growing up in Alaska. His father had taken him backpacking several times in the Alaskan wilds. His earliest memory of this was when he was about seven years old. “We didn’t take blankets, so when we got cold, we lay on the ground and covered ourselves really deep with leaves” he told us, with a mixture of apology and pride and embarrassment. He went on to say that he and his father also took very little food, eating what they found for sustenance. What they ate, exactly, he left vague and unspecific. “Sometimes we ate berries if the bears hadn’t gotten there first,” he said. This wasn’t a romanticized account; he was clearly grateful to be in the presence of such amenities as a campfire and not-dogs, to be “roughing it” with four girls who were more suited to the comforts of home.

I spent a good deal of that night imagining his seven-year-old self Christopher McCandlessing his way through the tundra, plucking berries of unknown origin, and I fed him the fare of a farmhand for the rest of the trip, trying to fatten him, I suppose, like a little Hansel. I’ve revisited his stories a number of times since, trying to crawl into his childhood for a while to see how it must have worked. What was the wilderness like to him, in that small body of his? How did its skies look from the spot where only his eyes showed through the autumn foliage, lying awake next to a father who was philosophically opposed to comfort, curled up in a pile of dry leaves? It is not unimaginable, of course; his experience was neither more memorable nor more terrible than the childhoods of Frank McCourt, or Jeanette Winterson, or the countless other orphans and refugees and neglected offspring who have given us their narratives as testimony to the infinitude of ways children can be both deeply vulnerable and deeply resilient. Even poetry seems to have developed a preference for the ‘true,’ the factual—the eyewitness testimony, the documentary footage—in place of the imagined. It is interesting to think about the impulses behind the ascendance of memoir in both prose and poetry, the prevalence of attempts to climb into someone else’s childhood, or back into one’s own, perhaps as a way of learning empathy, especially in an era that simultaneously whines about a lack of such emotion and demands it with a fervor that borders on militancy. Depicting childhood as a largely terrifying enterprise is common. The impulse seems to be to create empathy, and perhaps change, out of the recognition of suffering and grief.

But the imaginative landscape of the non-terrifying childhood, the sort of childhood that is shaped more by curiosity and exploration than by the kind of trauma and abuse that forces one to adopt a defensive posture, is also worth dwelling in. “Childhood is the well of being,” writes Bachelard, in his confounding, intriguing book The Poetics of Reverie: Childhood, Language, and the Cosmos. Richard Linklater’s film “Boyhood” does this amazingly well, and watching it with a large audience recently I was intrigued by the reactions to some of the scenes. We are so inured to injury and emergency, both as narrative devices and as existential certainties, that we forget, or else cannot believe, that most of the time life eases on without fanfare or tragedy. At one point in the film the girlfriend of the main character, Mason, passes him the cell phone while he is driving. She wants to show him a photo of a cute furry animal. Everyone in the theatre audibly sucked in their breath; a few people even murmured, “Oh God!” We were prepared for the Accident Narrative, the sudden swerve from the road, the sound of next scene’s ventilator capturing their breath. Earlier in the film Mason’s (second) stepfather, with a can of beer in his hand, volleys with him when he is late for curfew, and we brace ourselves for the Abuse Narrative. Indeed, we have already seen the child at the mercy of one beastly stepfather—it isn’t as if the film pretends such things don’t happen— so it is all too natural to expect more. We wait for the sound of his head to be knocked on the doorframe, and when we don’t hear it, the audible sound of breathing begins again in the theatre. As an audience, we seem most comfortable with the grand mess, the traumatic, than with the ordinary, with actual life.

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Much contemporary writing about childhood takes the form of memoir, and sadly, much of it feels like instructions for disaster, apocryphal childhoods that give us the bleakest views of the most painful experiences imaginable. This affords many of us perspective; the toils and griefs we face (my students refer to some of these as “first-world problems,” an expression that seems surprisingly apt) so often pale in comparison to the significant maelstroms known intimately by so many on a daily basis. I grew up in a home and during an era where the barometer of perspective for one’s ailments and sufferings was The Train—the one Train that stood in for what was really many trains, the trains that carried Jews from their homes and lives to the concentration camps. Like many Jewish children of the post-war era, I was instructed in Holocaust studies at a very young age, and learned that nearly any amount of suffering could be endured so long as you were not on the train. (My therapist since tells me that this isn’t a very effective strategy for rearing the young). It’s an interesting way to create endurance and self-reliance in a human being, though. On the other hand it can also be, and often is, a false crust whose main function is to disqualify any sorrow or grief that cannot measure up to the death camps.

When I was taking courses in Waldorf Education, our teacher training taught us to do “child study,” where we would envision a child in their natural “habitat” at night before sleeping, to try to understand their struggles in the classroom in the context of their lives. For a traditional Waldorf teacher, this involves lighting a candle and imagining the child surrounded by light in their home, as they are sleeping, and holding them in your thoughts for a few moments each night. Despite some of the more religious connotations of such experiences (Waldorf schools are founded on anthroposophy, and anthroposophy is described as the study of the soul) it is an amazing way to hear a child, to see a child, to go back into your own childhood, even, into the imagined and lived experiences of the self. I have even taken to doing this on occasion for my college students, whom I learn far less about than third-graders. The practice of noticing them, of being in their worlds, feels critical to the possibility of teaching them anything of magnitude.

Understanding someone’s childhood truly is entering a sort of portal to the lived experience, the locket of individuality. Poetry and film and literature do this for us. We get depth and perspective about our own lives and origins, transcending nostalgia with a kind of inherited memory. But so often we privilege the discourse of anxiety and awfulness over that of pleasure and hope and imagination, memorializing terror and trauma rather than imagining the inverse. This is a sensible reflection of our times in many ways, but privileging what is “true” over what can be imagined may be a miscalculation with grave implications for the poetic imagination. If we cannot envision anything other than what we have, it may seem we have no choice but to accept it, and as a result we actually can become inured to the pain of others. “We must admit there will be music despite everything,” Jack Gilbert tells us in his poem “A Brief for the Defense,”a beautiful piece that demands that the reader hear laughter even “in the terrible streets of Calcutta.” It makes me think of the moment in My Dinner with Andre where theater director Andre Gregory says to the playwright Wallace Shawn,

How does it affect them (an audience) to see a play that shows that our world is full of nothing but shocking sexual events and violence and terror? Does that help to wake up a sleeping audience? You see, I don’t think so, because I think it’s very likely that the picture of the world you are showing them in a play is exactly the picture of the world that they have already…so the play simply tells them that their impression of the world is correct, that there’s absolutely no way out, there’s nothing they can do. They end up feeling passive and impotent.

This is an argument I never quite stop having with myself, as a writer who works with, writes about, and sometimes writes for children. I do think that it is critical that contemporary writing stretch beyond the lived experience of memoir, and even beyond the ordinary experience of “Boyhood.” It is, for example, through the poetic prose of Joyce that his ordinary childhood is exalted in Portrait of the Artist. And often, the imagined lives of children are both instructive and important for writers and readers. Some of the most memorable childhoods are literary childhoods, lived by imagined children who live at the whims of their creators, imparting experiences and sensitivities that exalt childhood itself. Characters like Fern, in Charlotte’s Web, invoke a child’s ability to spend day after day in a farmyard, depicting the child’s relationship to a world that adults can’t often manage to see. Similarly, the worlds of slightly older books such as The Cricket in Times Square, with a cast of Manhattanite mammals living adjacent to a family’s newsstand, the young Mario privy to their world in ways that can potentially invite even the most cynical residents of New York (myself included, in the days when I used to live there) to revisit the crannies and alcoves of the tunnels with both curiosity and a kind of modest wonder, the sort of wonder that tells us that sometimes our impression of the world is potentially alterable. Many narratives describe the oddly seductive lives of orphans, who move through the world without the wisdom or love of parents and who, thrown thusly back on their own resources, often seem to find treasures the universe hides from others. Some are truly orphaned (the orphans of Narnia, to take one obvious example). Some are self-imagined orphans (for example, in E.L. Konigsburg’s From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler). Some are more ambiguously orphaned: think of Pippi Longstocking, in Astrid Lindgren’s stories, whose father exists, but as a pirate in the South Seas, king of a cannibal tribe. The orphans instruct us in worldliness, resourcefulness, thrift, thievery, and lonesomeness: qualities essential for both children and writers living lives scalloped by fear or promise and who are forced to inhabit the terrain in between.

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Wes Anderson’s film Moonrise Kingdom depicts both a true orphan (Sam) and a self-imagined one (Suzy). Sam has lived much of his life in foster homes, while Suzy at least in part aims to evade the bleakness that keeps Bill Murray and Frances McDermott awake at night in their separate beds, idealizing life without a family. “I love you, but you don’t know what you are talking about,” Sam tells Suzy, when she romanticizes his parentless life. He’s right, but so is Suzy: there is something magical about the idea of a childhood uncontaminated by the presence of adult surveillance, a surveillance that so often seems mostly intended to quell their (our) anxieties and to force the spontaneities of innocence into their (our) more rigid conceptual schemes. Some have argued against Anderson’s contrivances, against the almost candied atmosphere of the film. But do we have less to learn about the reverie of childhood from Moonrise Kingdom than from sober and strictly factual accounts? In many ways I believe Anderson has touched the essence of childhood. It is an imagined childhood that is in some ways privileged and idealized, with its lush settings, loving adults, art, music, and the overall sense of a trustworthy, benign universe—but I am unconvinced it is less worthy of attention or any less serious than less idealized accounts that insist on placing children in the underbelly of reality.

“I just imagined that I was a sleeping prince,” Magellan told us by the campfire, as he spoke of his sleeps in the wilderness. “Or someone who had to pretend that they were dead, because the bones of dead people are usually really cold.” Only a child thinks like that, in images that are both wholly metaphoric and entirely literal all at once. “It seems we only languish during maturity in order to tell the dreams of our childhood, and they vanish from our memory before we were able to learn their language,” writes Thoreau. Writing about childhood is trying to learn that language before it vanishes altogether from the conscious ear. It is the revelation of a tender and secret universe, one that teaches a child how to be a child, and reminds a reader how to hear and to see it, wearing those fresh and stinging eyes to look out at these strange lands.

Meet the Interns: Sarah Ladman

Nonfiction Editor Sarah Ladman is a senior at Arizona State University. She will be graduating in May 2011 with a degree in Literature, Writing, and Film, and a minor in Human and Family Studies. After graduation, she would like to break into the world of children’s literature, and hopes to begin writing her first book very soon. Her passion for children’s books and youth literacy has been nurtured by the years she has spent working with children as a preschool teacher. This is Sarah’s first semester with Superstition Review.

1. What is your position with Superstition Review and what are your responsibilities?

My position with Superstition Review is Nonfiction Editor. Some of my responsibilities include reviewing submissions, working with the other interns to vote on submissions, and get the word out about our spring issue launch.

2. Why did you decide to get involved with Superstition Review?

I’m interested in possibly pursuing a career in the publishing field, so I felt it would be an excellent experience to intern with the Superstition Review. Previously, I took a course in writing pieces to submit to literary magazines, and now I have the chance to see the other side of the equation.

3. How do you like to spend your free time?

In my free time, I enjoy reading, spending time with my boyfriend, family, and friends, and traveling.

4. What other position(s) for Superstition Review would you like to try out?

Many of the positions for Superstition Review sound very interesting, and I think they all offer valuable experiences. It would be interesting to try out the position of Fiction Editor, Open Submissions Content Coordinator, or even Advertising. Each of these positions differs from my current job, and I wouldn’t mind gaining experience in those areas as well.

5. Describe one of your favorite literary works.

It’s difficult to select a single favorite literary work, since there is such a massive collection of books I have loved over the years. Currently, my interest in children’s literature has led me to develop a love for the Series of Unfortunate Events collection of books, written by Lemony Snicket. Although these chapter books are intended for children from 9-13 years of age, the author takes a novel approach in his writing: he refuses to dumb down words or content. The plot follows a trio of siblings through their adventures as they try to uncover the mystery of their parents’ deaths, attempts to find a home, and discovering family secrets. The 12 book series is definitely a shining example of the type of children’s literature I would like to write in the future.

6. What are you currently reading?

Currently, I am just wrapping up Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters. It is a humorous re-writing of the Jane Austen classic, with plenty of adventure weaved in, and has been a very enjoyable read.

7. Creatively, what are you currently working on?

I’m in the beginnings of writing what I hope to be the first of many children’s books. At the moment, I am only in the very early brainstorming stages, and have a lot of work ahead of me. I’m hoping to have a work in progress within the next several months.

8. What inspires you?

I’m inspired by literature that seeks to be different, eclectic stories for both children and adults, and everyday events.

9. What are you most proud of?

At the moment, my proudest accomplishment would have to be so close to receiving my degree in Literature, Writing, and Film. It was a busy four years for me, especially since I both worked and attended school full time. I’m proud that I was able to pull it all off, and learn a lot from my variety of courses.

10. Where do you see yourself in 10 years?

In 10 years, I hope to be writing children’s books full-time, with a bit of freelance writing sprinkled in. It would be wonderful to be able to do my writing from home, so I can spend time with the family I imagine having by that time. Predicting specifics is tough, but I can only hope that I’ll still be busy reading, writing, and learning about life!

Meet The Interns: Sarah Stevenson

Sarah Stevenson is in her senior year at Arizona State University majoring in Creative Writing. She is currently writing and illustrating a children’s book for her Honor’s Thesis Project. This is Sarah’s first semester at the Superstition Review.

1. What is your position with Superstition Review and what are your responsibilities?

I am the Fiction Editor at Superstition Review and my responsibilities are to solicit work from 20 authors, read and vote on submissions, send acceptance/rejection emails and post bios and head shots for those authors we accept.

2. Why did you decide to get involved with Superstition Review?

I wished to gain some experience outside of a classroom, and Superstition Review seemed a perfect fit.

3. Besides interning for Superstition Review, how do you spend your time?

During the school year my life is pretty much consumed with school and work (at Starbucks), but I try and make time to read and paint and spend time with my friends and family.

4. What other position(s) for Superstition Review would you like to try out?

I would have liked to try the position of Art Editor, if only because my love of art is right up there with my love of fiction.

5. Describe one of your favorite literary works.

I am particularly in love with The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne because it raises some fascinating questions on morality and community and the foundations of this country. I could write paper after paper on that book and not get bored.

6. What are you currently reading?

These is My Words by Nancy E. Turner. It is another favorite of mine – partially because it takes place in Arizona around the 1880s but mostly because the main character is perhaps one of the most spirited, entertaining, and realistic characters I have ever read. It is part adventure, part history, part romance, and no matter how many times I read it, it still gets me every time.

7. Creatively, what are you currently working on?

At the moment I am working on my Honor’s Thesis Creative Project, which is to write and illustrate a children’s book. It is proving to be a great deal more work than the traditional Honor’s Thesis, but I figure if nothing else it is a wonderful diversion from the normal literary analysis, and an excuse to paint frequently.

8. Where do you see yourself in 10 years?

Honestly, I have no idea. At the moment I can see my life branching out in so many different directions that the future remains quite a mystery to me. All I can do is hope that in 10 years I am happy, and that I have no regrets about which branch I chose to follow.