Fall 2011
CONTENTS
- Regional Advisor’s Message
- Tweet Tweet—Who’s There?
- SCBWI-Hawaii’s Annual Conference Set for February 25
- Members-only Critique Group Meetings
- Welcome New Members
- SCBWI’s 40th Anniversary Summer Conference
- My Experience at the SCBWI Annual Summer Conference
- Kudos
RA Message: “Paying Attention, then Drawing Attention”
By Sue Cowing
What do children’s book artists and book writers have in common?
“Art is seeing,” they say. I began to realize what that meant when I followed the left-brain-fooling exercises in a “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain” workshop years ago and made light-years of improvement drawing faces in just a day and a half. The key was to get interested in details and trust what I actually saw rather than what I expected to see. Writing is seeing, too—getting past the clichés and easy summaries to bring out the true, particular details of a natural or manmade setting, of people’s actions and gestures, of objects. We have to “see” with all our senses, though, not just sight, or the picture or language will be flat, and the story will be told, not felt.
Maybe it’s better to say that both artists and writers belong to the tribe that notices things. Art and writing are acts of attention. That is no small matter in an age of constant distraction that often keeps us too off-balance to notice anything but a blur in the moment.
Try this exercise. Poet Linda Gregg tells her students to notice six things a day and jot them into a notebook (for artists it could be a few quick lines in a sketchbook or even shots with a camera). Should be easy, right? Until you try to do it more than two days in a row. How often I find a day is suddenly gone and I have only three or two entries in my notebook. Or none. Too often I notice something all right, when I am busy being somewhere else, and promise myself I’ll write it down just as soon as. . . but when that time comes, I can’t remember what it was. Some of the best glimpses, feelings, ideas, and images whisper and then retreat.
What we do with the things we notice matters a lot. Through our stories and poems and pictures, we enlarge the tribe when we draw our readers’ attention to something and hold that attention for a moment, giving them the deep pleasure of experiencing something real within the blur. We stop the world. I believe in those moments we plant seeds of wonder and imagination in others. We provide re-creation. That, I think, is our common calling.
Tweet Tweet—Who’s There?
No, it’s not a little bird, it’s SCBWI-Hawaii on Twitter. Follow us at SCBWIHI – and we promise to keep our tweets to truly relevant information, like our upcoming conference and member book signings.
Speaking of Twitter, you might also want to follow SCBWI (the umbrella organization). Check out these recent re-tweets:
* “I know all scbwi members know this but just in case… @MarthaMihalick Don’t send submissions via facebook. Please. Just don’t.”
* From Kate McKean: “Just like ‘Hey, can I have a job’ is not a cover letter, ‘Hey, can you publish this?’ is not a query.”
Neither is exactly revolutionary, new info (and certainly none of us would ever do those things!), but the smiles they generate feel good anyway.
SCBWI-Hawaii’s Annual Conference Set for February 25
We’ve been hard at work planning for next year’s conference and are delighted to share the details of what we think is an excellent program.
 Kendra Levin |
 Peter Brown |
*Our featured speakers are:
Kendra Levin, editor at Viking Children’s books. Kendra will do a general session on Viking and the kinds of books they publish, and what she specifically is looking for, and she’ll also talk about current trends in children’s publishing. She’ll also lead a breakout session called “Meet Your Character: How Motivation Drives Story.”
Peter Brown, award-winning author/illustrator of The Curious Garden and Children Make Terrible Pets. Peter will do a general session on leading a creative life and a breakout session called “Illustration at Work.”
In addition, Kendra and Peter will lead a First Pages/First Look general session.
*Local author Sue Cowing and local author/illustrator Tammy Yee will lead a general session called “Book Promotion—a Do-It-Yourself Project.”
*As usual, we’re offering optional manuscript and portfolio critiques.
The conference will be held at the Ala Moana Hotel from 9:00 a.m. to 4 p.m. The cost is $95 for SCBWI members and $125 for nonmembers. For details and registration see www.scbwihawaii.org. or download conference and registration information at http/scbwihawaii.org/attachments/info_and_registraton.pdf.
Members-only Critique Group Meetings—your thoughts, please
By Sue Cowing
In 2011, we’ve had three members-only critique meetings instead of our usual one or two, and we’ve taken them “on the road.” The first was in Honolulu in April, the second in Mililani in July, and the third in Kahuku in September.
Why the increase? a) because members are always seeking feedback on their work; b) because members seem to like getting together to talk children’s books more often than once or twice a year; and c) because we want to offer free events to balance our necessarily expensive conferences and workshops. Why the three different locations? We wanted to bring the meetings closer to where our members live.
I wonder whether we should continue doing this. The attendance was good for the Honolulu meeting, smallish for the Mililani, and down to five people for the Kahuku meeting—and four of those also came to the Mililani gathering. Despite the small size, we had delightful and productive sessions, and now I’m asking myself questions about how we can share the pleasure with more of our members. Please help answer them.
–Would people actually prefer all three sessions to be in Honolulu, with members living elsewhere on the island happy to come in for them?
–Or should we have two sessions a year in Honolulu and one elsewhere?
–Would people prefer evening meetings instead of Saturday mornings?
–Would a Windward session draw more people if it were in Kailua or Kaneohe? If you think so, do you know a place where we can meet for free—your home? a school? (The Kailua and Kaneohe libraries no longer have public meeting rooms.)
–Could it simply be that the timing of sessions was bad? (Each meeting had some cancelations.)
–Is three sessions a year actually too many? If so, would you prefer one session or two?
–Other possibilities I haven’t considered?
Please send your thoughts to me at niuiki@hawaiiantel.net and help us take the guesswork out of our planning for next year.
Note to neighbor island members: We’ve tried several times over the years to help get critique meetings going for you, but those efforts didn’t lead to ongoing meetings, as we’d hoped. What’s probably needed is someone on the ground willing to organize and persevere. If that person is you, please let me know, and we can send you contact information for all members on your island. We’ll also help with guidelines and in any other way we can.
Welcome to New Members
We welcome the following new members who joined SCBWI since our last newsletter:
Oahu: Courtnie Chang of Kaneohe
Big Island: Kathleen West-Hurd of Naalehu
Maui: Elena Kamai of Wailuku
SCBWI’s 40th Anniversary Summer Conference
By Lynne Wikoff
First-time Summer Conference attendee Cynthia Surrisi does a great job conveying her overall feelings about the gathering (below), and I’d like to add to that some of the craft information I gleaned from the various presentations I attended.
*Bruce Coville’s first piece of advice in his talk “13 Ways to Make It as a Writer” was this gem: “Marry rich.” After we all stopped laughing (and wishing…), he went on to encourage us to take our work—but not ourselves—seriously and to work every day, put our hearts on the page, make up our own rules (each person, and each book, is different, he reminded us), take an occasional “vacation” from our work, and take acting or storytelling lessons to learn how to get into characters’ minds.
*Donna Jo Napoli’s breakout session was called “Building Tension—Turning the Screws.” She showed us, with audience participation, how to look at plot, character, setting and timing and make each of those elements more dramatic. For example, in a story where two boys like the same girl, what if the boys are twins instead of two random boys—isn’t that worse/more dramatic? Or say the main character’s friend arrives at his house with a keg of beer—isn’t that made worse if his parents are due home in an hour? And on and on… She concluded by saying that books are an emotional ride and it’s up to us to make that ride terrifying.
*Judy Blume said to start a book the day something changes or something different happens. For her, that sometimes means she writes many pages that she ends up throwing away. She considers a draft to be a like a jigsaw puzzle—first you find the edge pieces, then you make piles of matching pieces, then you piece everything together.
*Editor Krista Marino talked about the elements that add up to “voice”: diction, or the character’s vocabulary choices; perspective, or how the character views the world; characterization, or the process of converging information about the character; and dialog, or how the characters express themselves. In a capsule, voice is what shines through when everything that happens is filtered through who your character is.
For some of the details from the perspective of a first-timer:
My Experience at the SCBWI Annual Summer Conference
by Cynthia M. Surrisi
The current economic hard times have forced most of us to be discriminating about where we spend our money and commit our time, and going to the SCBWI Summer Conference takes a hefty chunk of both. That said, this year’s conference was worth every penny and every minute. I don’t think my impressions of it will completely coalesce for some time, but right now they are as follows:
Star Studded. SCBWI’s 40th Anniversary Summer Conference drew an impressive cast of authors I never expected to meet personally, but did: Judy Blume, Richard Peck, Donna Jo Napoli, Libba Bray, Ellen Hopkins, Gary Paulson, Jon Scieszka, Bruce Coville, David Small, and Norton Juster, to name a few. All were happy to chat for a few seconds, sign books, accept compliments, bask in adoration, etc. A significant number of prominent agents and editors were also there, participating in breakout sessions, panel discussions and critiques.
Core Principles. Most presentations were dedicated to craft. If you read craft books you are aware of the basics—plot, character, dialogue, scene, structure, and so on—but hearing about dialogue, for example, from someone who has anywhere from three to thirty-three published, award-winning books is quite another education. Some breakouts were structured as lectures, others bordered on stand-up comedy and yet others were biographical. The “How I Got My Newbery” soliloquies were my least favorite, but I confess that painful as it was to listen to Gary Paulsen tell his life story, I’ve retold it numerous times, and I’m glad I heard it.
Delightful Ambiguity. There is no better way to debunk a golden rule than to hear respected professionals give wildly inconsistent opinions about it. And thank goodness for that. We heard, for example: write what you know, write what you don’t know; don’t’ write to trend, here are the trends so pay attention—name a rule, we heard the pros and cons of it.
One Loud and Clear Voice. All speakers agreed on that we should write the book that’s burning in us, write it well, make sure it’s submission ready, and then send it to an agent or editor who accepts that type of work. Manuscripts that are not ready or are sent blindly, without researching the agent’s/editor’s interests, or don’t follow guidelines, waste everyone’s time.
Provocative. Donna Jo Napoli gave the most politically charged keynote address, propounding a reason to write about difficult subject matter: to reach the “unprotected” child. She argued compellingly for books that offer the solace of common experience to “disenfranchised” kids—and in the process completely changed my feeling about Out of the Dust, which I had previously wanted to unread because it left such a painfully searing impression on me.
Motivating. I attended breakout sessions presented by Donna Jo Napoli, Bruce Coville, Libba Bray, Ellen Hopkins, Bonnie Bader (editor of leveled readers) Jennie Abramowitz (editor of chapter books), and a few others. Each had useful advice, and they all made me want to run back to my room and write.
Memorable. If you enjoy the Hawaii region’s conferences, workshops and critique sessions, I guarantee that you will be blown away by the annual summer conference. It’s a boost to the writing spirit and a wonderful reminder that, we—all of us (both published and unpublished)—belong to a community of delightful, charming and sometimes curmudgeonly characters who are perpetuating the love of books we had as children.
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Kudos
Cynthia Surrisi has been accepted for the MFA program in children’s writing at Vermont College.
Tasiʻs Gift, A Tale of Samoa written by Tamara Montgomery was recently published by Calabash Books. The story has also been adapted by Aito and Jamie Simpson-Steele for this year’s Hawaii Theater for Youth holiday show. The play, at Tenney Theater, opens to the public November 27 at 7:30 p.m., with performances also at 4:30 p.m. on November 25 and December 3, 10, and 17.
On Vacation with Tutu, written by Lynne Wikoff and illustrated by Tammy Yee, was recently released by Mutual Publishing.
