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Mo Willems on Raising a Reader

I love Mo Willems. His books are unique, even when they are part of a series. When I went to my library and asked for books like the Elephant and Piggie easy readers, which are massive favorites in this house, the librarian couldn’t find any. Write faster, Mr. Willems, please!

I was fortunate enough to get to hear him speak this past spring. Not only is he a fantastic writer, but he’s a great speaker and a funny guy, who managed to teach an entire auditorium of people how to animate a pigeon using a strip of paper and a pencil.

And so, as school starts and reading becomes a requirement, try to keep in mind that raising a reader means creating joy about reading, and playing with words, and check out his tips for raising a reader.

Posted on August 17, 2012 by , Reply

Some Interesting News From R.L. Stine

This year marks the 20th anniversary for the Goosebumps series by R.L. Stine.  In the world of children’s books, he is the author most adults think of when they think of “children’s horror”, if they think of “children’s horror” at all. I was in college when Stine started writing, so I missed the beginning of the craze over Stine’s books, but by 1997 I was working in my first “real job” as a children’s librarian. The demand for his books in 1997 was tremendous– I can’t remember how many times I walked kids over to the paperback spinners or sorted through beat up copies with a kid who was looking for one he hadn’t read. It must have been absolutely overwhelming when the books first came out. It’s hard to imagine that you could have missed out on it, if you were s a kid or worked with kids and books at all in the past 20 years.

Stine didn’t start out trying to be scary. He ran a humor magazine called Bananas for ten years (here’s an interview where he talks about that and a lot of other cool stuff) and joke books for kids. But then, according to this interview in the Boston Phoenix, he realized that “what kids really want is to be scared shitless”. And he’s been writing scary stories for kids ever since. Frequently. At one time he produced a book every month!

This fall, though, Stine’s second horror novel for adults, Red Rain, will be released, and in an interview with Publishers Weekly he said that it’s been a challenge for him, after writing middle-grade fiction for kids for so many years,

The kids’ stuff comes naturally to me now. When I write horror for kids, I have to make sure that they know it’s not real—that it’s pure fantasy and could never happen. Writing for adults, I have to do exactly the opposite. It has to be real or they won’t buy it. It was fun to turn it around in Red Rain and have the chance to be really horrifying. Some really ghastly things happen in this book!”

Stine also has a television show based on his books on The Hub right now, which has been renewed for the fall season. It’s the third television series to be based on his books– pretty neat stuff!

So… exciting news, if you didn’t already know it (you might have, since most of these interviews took place at least a couple of months ago, he’s active on Twitter, and he was recently at BEA). If you grew up with R.L. Stine, you might be buying his books for your kids, and now he’s produced a “grown-up” one for the kids who grew up reading his books. If you remember Goosebumps fondly, or even if you’re just curious, now is a great time to see what he has cooking!

Posted on August 12, 2012 by , Reply

Defining the Scary Story

In explaining horror fiction for reader’s advisory librarians in The Reader’s Advisory Guide, Second Edition, Becky Siegel Spratford defined it as

…a story in which the author manipulates the reader’s emotions by introducing situations in which unexplainable phenomena and unearthly creatures threaten the protagonists and provoke terror in the reader.

We argued with her definition of horror fiction in our review, because here we consider genres such as human horror and killer animals as subgenres in horror fiction, as do many, many readers.

When I talk about scary stories for kids, I’m talking about something a little bit different, though, because what I consider “scary” doesn’t necessarily easily fall into genres (and sometimes it’s not especially scary, but has a focus on Halloween, or on creatures traditionally considered scary). I decided to ask my Monster Kid what he thought about all this.

Me: Does a scary story have to have a monster in it to be scary?

Monster Kid: No, a dripping, dark wood where you are lost is scary. That can be a scary story.

Me: So there doesn’t have to be a monster for the book to be a scary story?

Monster Kid: No, getting lost far away from your village in the dark is scary even without a monster. Even when there’s no monster, that’s a monster.

There you have it. You don’t need the unexplainable, otherworldly, or supernatural to make a scary story a scary story.

Here’s a list of the kinds of things that fall beneath the large umbrella of “scary stories” in children’s literature, according to several scholars in the subject:

Nursery rhymes
Fairy tales
Where the Wild Things Are and other picture books
A Series of Unfortunate Events
The Graveyard Book
A Tale Dark and Grimm
The Vampire Diaries
Twilight
The Hunger Games

Whether all of these REALLY qualify as scary stories (or horror, for that matter), or whether I should include Halloween books and not-so-scary monster tales in the “scary stories” category here, is certainly up for debate. But that dark and dripping wood that emerged from the mind of my six year old son… well, he certainly scared me with that, more than any monster could.

Posted on August 8, 2012 by , 2 comments
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