Kate McDowell on Storytelling

Revolution by Jennifer Donnelly is a tour de force YA novel.  It's realistic fiction most of the way through, but with just enough historical fiction and fantasy to make it a somewhat genre-defying.  At its heart, though, it's a problem novel about a girl, Andi, who loses her 10-year-old brother Truman to a freak accident, loses her father to an affair, and then loses her mother to mental instability following her brother's death.  When her father institutionalizes her mother for treatment, he takes Andi with him to Paris where she is told to work on her senior thesis.  She's just motivated enough to do that, because the thesis is about music, and guitar playing is the only thing that makes her want to live.  She chugs anti-depressants at near suicidal levels, and yet this does not keep her from being suicidal.  Go figure.  Donnelly's descriptions of the raw grief at losing so much so irretrievably in a single year are all the more moving because they...

It's spring break, and I'm taking the opportunity to catch up on a zillion projects, from work to house to filing.  In the filing area, I consolidated two folders today of conference information, dating back to 2006.  And, just for kicks, I'm listing here all the conferences/places I have (mostly) flown to or (less often) driven to in the past 5 years.  I feel very lucky to have travel be part of my work, and when I look at this list it confirms for me why I'm not typically keen on adding extra travel...  Not listed here are little trips to Chicago to the Newberry library.  So I just flew in from 3 countries and 14 confererences, and boy are my arms tired! Association of Library and Information Science Educators (ALISE), San Antonio, TX, Jan 2006. Center for the History of Print Culture in Modern America conference, Education and the Culture of Print, Madison, WI, Sept 2006.  [I don't seem to have the flyer for this one, but I'm in the book that got produ...

Teaching What You Don't Know by Therese Huston Among the things I haven't had time to do lately, I haven't had time to go to the annual U of I Faculty Retreat, the big one that brings people across campus together.  But I have been paging through this book by one of the keynote speakers. Huston argues that there are real structural aspects of how teaching is organized that lead to people teaching subjects they "don't know."  But the bar for "know" is ridiculously high for most academics, which is again an artifact of the extreme narrowness of dissertations and Ph.D. specialization in general.  In fact, most people teach things they are qualified to teach about (specialists in genetics can and should teach, for instance, biology), and her examples make this clear though the language around them is sometimes more dire, most likely reflecting the anxieties of her interviewees. And the world changes.  We can't graduate knowing it all.  When I too...

In honor of Terry Pratchett's Blue Ribbons Win for the last of the Tiffany Aching books (which I look forward to reading straight through): "Some humans would do anything to see if it was possible to do it.  If you put a large switch in some cave somewhere, with a sign on it saying "End-of-the-World Switch.  PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH," the paint wouldn't even have time to dry." --Terry Pratchett quoted in the March 2011 Funny Times

Two storytelling titles for various purposes.... Storytelling for Grantseekers by Cheryl A. Clarke More than anything, this is an accurate and accessible book-length metaphor for what a grant can be:  a gripping story of a need and a solution with a promise of another chapter to come.  The chapter titles alone give a sense of how this metaphor works.  A few examples are:  "The Proposal Narrative:  Introducing the Characters and the Place," "The Need or Problem:  Building Tension and Conflict into Your Story," and "The Budget:  Translating Your Story from Words to Numbers."  This last chapter, chapter 8, is now in my email in .pdf form (thanks Alaine!) for future use in 506.  The whole book might work, but I notice that the most frequent student mistake is to botch or, in rare cases, leave off the budget for their "facilitating change" projects.  A whole reading on the how-to of the topic can't hurt. On the Origin of Stories:  ...

 Lots of reading, but very little blogging, so this is a catch-up posting.  I suppose the guest lecture and keynote speech and the two classes I'm teaching and the writing do tend to get in the way.  Today I gave a keynote speech for a little regional conference of teachers interested in history.  It was my first time giving an hour plus talk with questions, and interestingly I found it really is about the amount that fits into any one of my 40-page-double-spaced history papers.  I did talk for about an hour about "Creating a History of Children as Readers," but then left time for 30 min or so of questions, and I think it went well, though the evaluations that they'll send me will be useful.  It was a pleasure to talk to such a great audience of intelligent history teachers with good questions.  In the meantime, I have been reading: Rose Daughter by Robin McKinley This retelling of Beauty and the Beast came to my attention years ago, when Bets...

First, a little context:  I've been asked to guest lecture in a class on sex in the media, and at the same time I've been asked to write an article on how LIS should envision young adults.  So I've chosen to focus on controversies and censorship of factual sexual health books for young adults, hopefully to bring the two together.  I may even be able to write about talking to this class of freshman in the article.  Some background on the central book I'll be looking at is here . Though nonfiction is the focus, I also opted to delve into a little YA fiction on the topic, thanks to the help of the always wonderful CCB GAs, A. and L.  Thanks you two!  This is the first of that pile that I'm reading.  Since the presentation and article are going to focus on books that support comprehensive sex education for young people, this may also be the last of the pile.  We'll see.  The Making of Dr. Truelove by Derrick Barnes I've read a lot of YA fi...