From the Park Bench (it's coming!)

“When we reject the single story, when we realize that there is never a single story about any place, we regain a kind of paradise.”

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

OMG, it's coming.

The publisher (Red Giant Press) said the hard copy proof is in the mail.

This manuscript has stretched and grown over 20 years.  From my time as Public Information Officer at the Cuyahoga Metropolitan Housing Authority through an uncountable number of school visits and conversations with folks, I have taken a lot of notes.  A whole lot of notes. 

There is never just one side to any story, there are always at least two and usually many more.  A fact we have seen playing out on our televisions over these past months (and years).   I don't pretend to have answers to the misunderstandings, I have just listened to the stories.

So has evolved these short poetic dialogues, two voices looking at the same subject from diverse viewpoints.   Democracy, politicking, mother instinct, privatization, welfare, and getting schooled are among the topics.  

For those who read my children's books, I thank you heartily, but advise that this is not the book for you.  This is a book for adults, and hopefully high school students.

For those who have heard my adult poetry, you will hear a familiar line here and there.  I have not borrowed from those poems, rather those poems borrowed from this manuscript, the mother-ship, that has been festering on my hard drive for years, gnawing at me.  As I recently observed to an audience at YALSA, you don't have to be crazy to write poetry, but it does help if you hear voices.

I have never been so excited to go looking for typos.

Heads Up Publications and By Definition: Poems of Feelings

Why are you doing that?

No one else does it that way.

What’s the matter with you?

Creative people don’t like to be told what to do. We can be annoying. Distracted. Non-compliant. Misfits, who at our worst clog systems and at our best make up new and better systems.

So what is the choice? Creatives can either rebel and go places where no one else has been or fall in line and be unhappy.  Not that going your own way is a guarantee of happiness. Hardly.  It pretty much assures that you will be justifying your actions for the rest of your days, but the alternative is emotional and intellectual suicide.

Creatives don’t fit well in schools. At all. Schools put students in boxes based on how well kids can fill in boxes.  Creatives don’t like boxes unless they welded them together themselves, designed them in Photoshop, or turned a refrigerator box into a pyramid with a razor blade and duct tape and renamed it “box with a point.”

The successful creative kid learns to multitask early on. Hold her breath and make a quick pass at what is required before letting the mind go out to play. The less successful creative kid gets parked with the Welcome Back Kotteresque meatheads, a room that is harder to escape than a prison lockdown. Sitting for 12 years among The-Most-Likely-to-be-Incarcerated can be hard on a person’s sense of productive worth.

Go Back While There’s Still Time:

When I quit my job as a vice president of an ad agency to be a poet, turned in the paperwork for the company car, trashed my rolodex, and went out into the cold (it was actually a sunny, Indian summer September day), I remember the panic on the face of a co-worker, “You did what? Go back, there’s still time. Tell [the boss] you changed your mind. He’ll take you back. He’ll take you back.”

Part of me knew he was right. I was a single mom with a mortgage, two kids poised on the edge of the diving board ready to take the plunge into college and two dogs in need of kibble. But I just couldn’t hold my breath any longer. It was 1990, the last decade of the 20^th century. I was running out of time, and I needed to breathe.

I started out self-published because education isn’t the only place that wants to put people into boxes. Publishers were looking for the next Shel Silverstein in the early nineties when I came along with my “I Hate My Body” poems for middle readers and there was no category for adolescent poetry in those days. Zero.

With the support of classroom teachers, I sold 43,000 books, and then at least one publisher was willing to talk. Boyds Mills Press. Grateful, I knew I should be compliant.  Only that’s not my nature and I had sacrificed a whole lot of security to be able to breathe. I quickly developed a reputation for being difficult to edit (I wore out three editors on the first book).  BMP and I have had a 25 year relationship and I continue to be forever grateful that they were willing to take a chance on me.

By Definition: Poems of Feelings (BMP) came out in 2004. In my mind, the art and the poetry in this book were a mismatch from the start.  I was writing for middle readers, the artist was drawing for primary kids.  Bad fit.  Last year, the book went of out print and the rights returned to me. 

I decided to repurpose the poems into a power point presentation for classroom use. 

Why are you doing that?

No one else does it that way.

What’s the matter with you?

Research based response:

Michael Salinger (my partner-in-rhyme) and I have been so jazzed about projecting poetry in classrooms, with everyone’s head up and ready for discussion.  No one is hunched over text, pretending to be reading, doodling, drooling or any of the things I used to do when asked to read in class. Projected text, particularly when it is combined with a fetching image, gets kids’ attention just long enough to engage. 

If you are looking for research to support this, this is the research:  We tried it about 600 times.  Projected poetry engages better than printed text. Try it, you’ll see.

So is born our idea of Heads UP publications.  These are not books that are conceived to be cradled in the arms and consumed alone. These are books designed to be projected and shared in a classroom situation, with a teacher leading the discussion.  We may even include a discussion starter question or two.

The next question we had to confront was, how do we best market a Heads UP publication?

Trade or Professional?

Teacher professional books are research based with the text divided between a few new ideas and citation after citation after citation of old ideas hand selected old ideas to support the new ideas. It’s a tedious process to write these books (been there) and (I fear) the audience for them has been dwindling, distracted by the PD offerings from YouTube, TedTalks and Twitter. Our product is what is called "classroom ready," or not research based. Teacher professional publishers are not equipped to market a product like ours (so we hear). Besides, poetry is a tough sell.

Trade books are books kids check out of the library. Trade publishers are still coming to grips with ebooks and have no conveyance method to sell books designed for projection.  They are busy trying to reformat texts so that that they are as close as possible to books with covers that can be held in the hands. Trade publishers are not equipped to market a product like ours (so we hear). They are too busy conceiving of increasingly obscurely themed poetry books (40 poems on tiddly winks? Anyone? Anyone?). Besides, poetry is a tough sell.

Every Poem is a Mini lesson:

Still, teachers are always looking for poetry and new ideas.  Every poem is a mini lesson.  Want a quick lesson on point of view, descriptive or figurative language? Poems are at your service.

“When heading off to a conference, I always dare to dream that I will be heading home somehow made new,” began a teacher in a recent email. And then she kindly added that our presentation of using words and images in the classroom had done just that for her.  Michael and I consider ourselves to be teaching artists, we spend a great number of days in the classroom each year, but don’t have to do the grades or the staff meetings.  It’s a good gig, we realize that. And we want to efficiently and economically give back to the people we most love to support. . . entrepreneurial and mostly financially strapped teachers. 

This had led us to the site: Teacher Pay Teachers to host our products.  We are in the process of converting some of our projectable lessons and Head UP publications to this site.  You can find us here: link.

Here are our first three offerings: All $6 or under (cheap).

Poem for Last Days of School

©2010 Sara Holbrook, Zombies! Evacuate the School!

All Rights Reserved Boyds Mills Press

TWO MORE DAYS?

It's not the last day. It's not the first. It's not the 100th, President's Day, Valentine's Day or even crazy sock day. Everyone from the bus drivers to the kids to the teachers and the class hamster is worn out. The pencils have exhausted their points and take home notebooks are just barely holding it together.

What do you do for the SECOND to the last day of school? Grandson Dan told me at his school, the kids get to teach the teachers, so I shared a poem for him to teach.  Every poem holds a built in mini-lesson!

TWO MORE DAYS!

Two more days of school,

of lockers slamming in the hall,

of "class please find your seat,"

and "turn your chairs to the back wall."

Then, no more

who sat where at lunch,

no more giggles by the bunch.

No more watching Wilma's wiggle

when she writes up on the board.

No more trying to look interested

when classes are a snore.

I can't wait!

To go without a pass,

and not count seconds till the bell.

No more hunting for a pen

or hearing stressed-out teachers yell

at some poor slob who just forgot

where he was supposed to be.

No more handing out detentions,

especially not to me.

When summer gets real boring,

I'll be ready to come back.

But now,

two days is two too much.

If it were three 

I'd crack.

©1996 Sara Holbrook, The Dog Ate My Homework

All Rights Reserved Boyds Mills Press

Wanted in Michigan

No one climbs aboard a bicycle and proclaims, “I want to crash and fall on my head.  Bring on the broken bones.” No one puts a cake in the oven hoping it will come out burned black and tasting like a hockey puck. Likewise, people don’t get married because they want to get divorced.  If they did, American Tuxedo would rent helmets. 

When a marriage crashes or turns into a hockey puck, it isn’t because the partners want it to happen.  Divorce is like volunteering for amputation without the anesthetic. Who would ever wish for that?

My parents were divorced. I was an adult when it happened, but that doesn’t mean it was easy on me. My marriage also ended.  Didn’t want either one of these things to happen. Just did.  Today I can say, I am pretty glad things turned out as they did.  I like my life.  But, I can’t say, could never say, that I wanted divorce to be part of who I am.

So this knowing was the impetus for my poem, Wanted.  Today, that poem is wanted by teachers in Michigan as it (unpredictably) is a component in their state standards.  The state didn’t choose to provide the poem to teachers for classroom use, they just assigned it.  Unfortunately the book that originally contained the poem has gone out of print.  So teachers have been writing to me (apologetically) asking for the text of the poem. 

Some would say (and have) that divorce is no topic for kids’ poetry.  Kids’ poetry should be about balloons rising, spinning till you fall over, or castles in the air, in ancient times, in Spain. Anywhere and anything except the dismemberment of the castle in which a kid currently resides.  It’s true that the poems that pop out when pulling your finger out of your nose are funny (perfectly okay with editors) and a (ick) represent a pretty universal experience, it’s also true that divorce happens. 

In my world, real happenings are the stuff of poems. I spent about 15 years writing poetry in my kid voice before I had anything published.  I had never been to a book fair or teacher’s conference where children’s poetry was discussed.  I didn’t know writing kids’ poetry came with a set of rules having nothing to do with iambs, quatrains or free verse.  I didn’t know there were topics that kids’ poets just didn’t write about, like divorce. Death and war are okay topics, but only if they are old news, not breaking news. 

My first editor suggested I divorce all my divorce poems from the others and make a book of poems just on that topic.  My response was a big no to that idea.  I mean, seriously.  Who would check that book out of the library? After I wore that first editor out, the second one suggested that since she had an intact marriage and so had her parents (lucky her, exactly the opposite of my experience) that only certain kids would be able to identify with the topic of divorce and therefore, poems on divorce should not be included in any collection.  “You have a skewed perception based on your experience,” she told me, “Most kids are happy.”

“Not in my neighborhood,” I said.  True, I may be a little askew, but what do I have except my own perception?  From what I could see, divorce had touched the lives of every kid I knew, if not their own parents, then a friend had moved away, a cousin got squirrely, a friend wound up in tears at school, even grandparents have been known to split up.  Besides, nobody as in NOBODY is happy all the time. I got a third editor.

One reviewer suggested when my book Am I Naturally this Crazy was published that I was making light of kids' feelings because I used rhyme in this particular poem.  No rhymes allowed when speaking of divorce to kids?  Who wrote that rule?

Crazy even got banned in one district that I know of because not only did it contain a poem about divorce, but also about a current war (double whammy).  Writing about divorce, a rather tight-lipped librarian explained, meant I was “anti family values.”  Did she mean I didn’t value my family because we spread ourselves over two houses? Where do people get these ideas?

Funny how a few words arranged in shortened lines can take on a life of their own. Since the book this poem first appeared in is out of print, this particular word collection is hard to find.

I may never have wanted to know about divorce, but I do want teachers and kids to have access to this poem.