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A couple of weeks ago, I got a call from Adele Walsh, the new head honcho at the State Library's Centre for Youth Literature. For a number of reasons she explained to me, she was offering to bring the Teenage Booktalkers to us. Would we be interested?

Would we?!? I've taken my book club to the CYL for one Teen Booktalkers last year and to the youth day at Reading Matters this year, but this way ALL our kids could have the treat and no excursion forms to fill in or collect and no transport issues, just set up the library and welcome the guests. When I went to the evening session the night before, Paula Kelly, the head librarian, told me they were thinking of regionalising the youth days, taking the show to schools and letting other schools in the area come over instead of into town and this was going to be an experiment to see how it would work.

I chased up copies of the books The Comet Box, All I Ever Wanted and Five Parts Dead by the visiting authors and read them in a weekend - yes, all three of them! I got them processed and promoted, although by last Wednesday only one student was reading any of them (and loving it - the book was Five Parts Dead, the student Dylan). It didn't matter - after the talk, every last copy of all the books was checked out!

Wednesday morning, the first visitor, Adrian Stirling, arrived about 10.15 am as I was finishing my setup. We had a lot of students missing - an ESL excursion, that included half my tiny literacy class, the netball team, the Bridge-Building science team that included two of my book club members who would have loved to be there. So I'd invited a bunch of students from our Ardeer campus. I would also have invited students from another local school, but the teacher-librarian doesn't work on Wednesday and in the end, it was just as well, because we had a big audience for each of the two sessions and only just enough chairs for them all.

I got Adrian to use the remote control to bring the screen down - the computer was set up ready for the presentations, as it had been used the night before for a year 10 info evening and the principal kindly left it set up for me. Meanwhile I did the finishing touches elsewhere. I knew there would be an autograph session and thought it might work well to print out some book covers. Some of my book clubbers not on an excursion turned up offering to help. There wasn't much to do, it was all set up, but I introduced them and asked Dylan to set out the boo

A study recently published in the journal Research in Social Stratification and Mobility found that just having books around the house (the more, the better) is correlated with how many years of schooling a child will complete. The study (authored by M.D.R. Evans, Jonathan Kelley, Joanna Sikorac and Donald J. Treimand) looked at samples from 27 nations, and according to its abstract, found that growing up in a household with 500 or more books is “as great an advantage as having university-educated rather than unschooled parents, and twice the advantage of having a professional rather than an unskilled father.” Children with as few as 25 books in the family household completed on average two more years of schooling than children raised in homes without any books.

More here.

Randolph Stow, Western Australia’s great novelist-poet, passed away this week.

Randolph Stow’s life in writing is remembered here by Roger Averill.

Dennis Haskell, currently chair of the Literature Board of the Australia Council, and professor of literature at the University of Western Australia remembers Stow on Radio National’s The Book Show. Radio National produced a radio documentary on Randolph Stow that is currently unavailable but perhaps they will re-list it.

I don’t know if Randolph Stow’s Merry-Go-Round in the Sea is still required reading for Geraldton Senior High School students. It certainly was when I was a student there. It’s what we had before YA. I recently re-read The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea. What my 15-year-old mind made of it I can’t recall.Perhaps being required reading - virtually state prescribed - made me wary. But it remains a fascinating coming-of-age novel, one that richly displays the tensions of the period (roughly either side of World War II) and comes wrapped in Stow’s gorgeous language. He had a painter’s eye for landscape and poet’s ear for speech.

This exciting one-day seminar features Australia’s leading practitioners in visual storytelling in a series of presentations focusing on books for the middle years and older readers/ Build your own visual literacy and receive practical ideas and detailed notes for use in the classroom.

The program will feature, Lesley Reece, founder of the Freemantle Children’s Literature Centre, Meghan Brunet, Head of English as Pedare Christian College (South Australia), Juliet O’Conor, the author of Bottersnikes and other Lost Things and Terry Denton, the illustrator of Andy Griffiths Just books.

FRI 30 July

9am-3.30pm

$160 per person (includes GST: Morning tea and lunch included)

History has shown that you can’t build a sandbag wall against the tide of technological change, you have to either have a boat, build a boat, or get on someone else’s boat. Or be very clever and do something no one could have predicted … perhaps with my boat metaphor this would be to grow gills or turn into a fish.

Garth Nix adds some sound thinking on e-books and what the future might look like. As a former literary agent and now internationally published author, Garth is worth following.

Here’s Steph Bowe in The Age last weekend talking about writing for teenagers.

A lovely article about the pros of Facebook by author Cassandra Golds.

UK publisher Bloomsbury are launching an Australian arm.

Oh noes! Young people are all reading different books! Halp halp! It’s not like when I was white and male and middle class and going to Oxford in the Good Old Days! (and here’s some sensible commentary from Judith Ridge)

Also… Who you gonna call?

(all in honour of this)

Next Tuesday evening we present Dangerous Ideas, with David Levithan, Kirsty Murray, Craig Schuftan and Carole Wilkinson. Kicks off at 6pm with tasty supper (thank you, Mr Tulk!). 6.30 we get underway and wrap at 8.30pm.

The program of writers explores the ways we express big and dangerous ideas in fiction and in our lives. the venue is the Village Roadshow Theatrette at the State Library. You can book for this by contacting Jessica on 8664 7555.

More information here.

On Wednesday 2 June, (6pm for 6.30 start) Ursula Dubosarsky and Kate Burridge in conversation. This special event will be presented with The Age. Bookings here. The venue will Media House, the new Age building next door to Southern Cross station.

Kate Burridge is professor of linguistics at Monash University and a regular media commentator on language. Kate’s latest book is The Gift of the Gob. Ursula Dubosarsky’s latest book is The Return of the Word Spy, a book for middle years* readers about language, grammar and writing. the evening promises to be a lively exploration of language use -and abuse- today.

We’re looking for a few keen young folk to come and talk to us about our plans for a New and Improved Inside a Dog.

If you know anyone who might be free next Tuesday 18 May, at 4 or 4:30pm, then please get them to send me an email.

We will reward them with FREE BOOKS, an INSIDEADOG TSHIRT and TASTY SNACKS.

The Centre for Youth Literature presents Dangerous Ideas, on Wednesday 26 May with David Levithan, Carole Wilkinson, Kirsty Murray and Craig Schuftan.

You might recall David Levithan (pictured) is the author of Boy Meets Boy and co-author of Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist (with Rachel Cohn). David spoke out at Reading Matters in 2007 about the need for more representation of gay, lesbian and bi- characters in books and in libraries. You can hear that address here.

David joins Craig Schuftan presents Triple J’s The Culture Club and is the author of Hey! Nietzsche! Leave Them Kids Alone!. Kirsty Murray’s Vulture’s Gate imagines Australia 40 years into the future, when humanity can no longer conceive females. Last week the novel was shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Literary Award, Carole Wilkinson’s novel Sugar, Sugar is a journey of personal discovery through Afghanistan in the 1970s.

9.30–11.30AM & 12.45–2.45PM

VILLAGE ROADSHOW THEATRETTE

(ENTRY 3, LA TROBE STREET)

COST: $8 PER STUDENT

Bookings on 8664 7555 or [email protected]

Being a parent in young adult fiction is a dangerous game. Parents are bumped off and written out for all manner reasons. But chiefly off course, to let young people get on with sorting out their own lives.

Julie Just in the New York Times reviews the long tradition of disappearing dads and missing mothers and reflects on the ways this theme reflects changes in parenting over the decades.

Judging from The New York Times children’s best-seller list and librarian-approved selections like the annual “Best Books for Young Adults,” the bad parent is now enjoying something of a heyday. It would be hard to come up with an exact figure from the thousands of Y.A. novels published every year, but what’s striking is that some of the most sharply written and critically praised works reliably feature a mopey, inept, distracted or ready-for-rehab parent, suggesting that this has become a particularly resonant figure.

I recently read a manuscript in which two sets of parents, and indeed the teachers, were all pretty loathsome. I wondered out loud at the time as to whether this was appropriate. Sure, as parents we can have our failings. But is YA just too harsh on parents? Or is that simply their role in fictional life?

National Simultaneous Storytime! They’re trying to reach over 1000 locations this year - you should join in!

also…

BRONTE SISTERS ACTION FIGURES!

Text Publishing is calling for entries for the annual Text Prize for Young Adult and Children’s Writing, valued at $10,000.

Both published and unpublished writers of all ages are eligible to enter the prize with works of fiction or non-fiction. Submissions must be received between 3 May and 4 June 2010.

Judged by a panel of editors from Text Publishing, the winner will receive a publishing contract and a $10,000 advance against royalties.

So, what are you waiting for?

Horn Book editor Roger Sutton reflects on a trend in reading and wonders if it’s a good thing.

I’m reminded of Melanie Griffith’s famous elevator pitch in Working Girl, where she has the length of a short elevator ride to explain her thinking to moneyman Philip Bosco. Just forty-five seconds to be on point, catchy, convincing. In an era where our attention is not easily held and we are bombarded with competing messages, it makes sense that books try to make themselves look as shiny as possible as quickly as they can. But not all books are susceptible to an elevator pitch — I don’t think I could have ginned one up for Autumn Street — and those that are too frequently lack something on the follow-through. The pitch is supposed to make someone interested in your product; it’s not supposed to be the product itself.

Worth a look, as ever.

Rebecca Sparrow has some advice for teenage girls.

Librarians are a dying breed.

Ursula Dubosarsky in conversation with Kate Burridge June 2.

And Patrick Ness talks about the final book in the Chaos Walking Trilogy Monsters of Men, what it’s like writing for the YA market and his latest project. Here.

Bernard Beckett’s chilling novel Genesis, has garnered a major French prize, the 2010 Prix Sorcières for les romans ados, or young adult fiction as we might say.

More details, and chance to brush up votre francais, ici.

The award is made by the nation’s library association, Association des Bibliothecaires de France.

Allez, Bernard!

The Carnegie and Kate Greenaway shortlists are up. I was a bit surprised to see The Graveyard Bookand Nation on there… they were both been shortlisted for so many things last year that I was certain they were published in 2008!

A new report has some sensible things to say about letting kids choose their own books.

Fantasy - some of it is quite good, actually.

And here’s a little bit of John Green (with special guest David Levithan):

Graphic novels were in the spotlight this weekend at our new neighbours, the Wheeler Centre. The program was a mix of panels, workshops and keynote speech from Shaun Tan.

I got along to the final session on the Saturday, The Future of the Graphic Novel, curious to see what the big guys might say about books for young readers. Zoë Sadokierski made same insightful points about the emergence of hybrid forms: books that bring text and image together in new ways. She referred to Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close as one good example. There are many other examples in youth literature and I was disappointed that the panel didn’t spend a bit more time exploring books like Sherman Alexie’s Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian or So Punk Rock by Micol Ostow.

Blair Mahoney however spent the day there and has a fuller account of Drawing Out, Drawing In.

Speaking of text and image, tomorrow I am off to meet the 40 Year 7 and 8 students of Nathalia Secondary College who are taking part in an innovative project running over two school terms. We are calling it Text+Image and the program is funded by Arts Victoria and the Australia Council as an Extended Schools Residency. Text+Image is a collaborative project between the Centre for Youth Literature and Nathalia Secondary College.

During terms two and three, the students will develop their own illustrated stories after intensive workshop sessions with writers and illustrators including Sally Rippin, Bernard Caleo, Heath McKenzie, Terry Denton and Scot Gardner. The teachers have already had a professional development session with Pam McIntyre and have purchased a stack of great, innovative books for their classroom. Teachers Deanne Dewar and Sue Heberle, plus principal Andrew Harnett, are doing a stack of good work to get this happening. Some local writers and artists from the Nathalia district will also be involved.

The students will also come to Melbourne for a visit to the NGV to look at narrative paintings, check out the graffiti art in Hosier Lane, visit the Sticky Institute and more.

It will all end with an exhibition, launch and community workshops in Nathalia, giving the students a chance to show the world what they can do. And maybe what the future of the graphic novel can be.

Suzanne Thwaites, the Victorian judge for the CBCA Book Awards will be sharing her insights and thoughts about the books entered this year.
Venue: Vision Australia 454 Glenferrie Road Kooyong
Date: Tuesday May 4 at 6.30pm
Cost: $35 for CBCA members,$45 for non members with wine and finger food included.

To attend have a look at the CBCA Vic branch website at vic.cbca.org.au for the flyer or phone for further details on 1300 360 436.

Good news from Western Australia with $3million increase in funding for public library book budgets.

But does the headline form the local newspaper, The West Australian, strike you as odd,or is just me?

VCE English CONTEXTS: Exploring issues of identity and belonging

Robert Drewe, author of The Shark Net, will be in conversation with Tony Thompson, English teacher and one of the advisors on the VCE English panel.
Plus education specialist Karen Ford on the ten things students need to know for the VCE English paper.
Date: Wednesday 12 May
Time: 12.30-2.45pm
Venue: Village Roadshow Theatrette, Entry 3 La Trobe Street,
Cost: $8 per student
Bookings: 8664 7555 (or email: [email protected])

This is a unique opportunity for yuor students to get the edge in the VCE English exam.
Places strictly limited. Group and individual bookings welcome.

With ideas we make the world. Meet four writers  loaded with some big ideas.

David Levithan reflects the mixed up, shook up muddled up world in books including Boy Meets Boy, Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist (with Rachel Cohn) and Will Grayson, Will Grayson (with John Green).

Craig Schuftan presents Triple J’s The Culture Club and is the author of Hey! Nietzsche! Leave Them Kids Alone!, which uncovers the roots of rock ‘n’ roll in the Romantic movement of the 1800s.

Kirsty Murray’s Vulture’s Gate imagines Australia 40 years into the future, when humanity can no longer conceive females.

Carole Wilkinson’s novel Sugar, Sugar is a journey of personal discovery through Afghanistan in the 1970s.

WEDNESDAY 26 MAY

9.30–11.30AM & 12.45–2.45PM

Recommended for Years 8–11, group bookings welcome

KEY DOMAINS: THE ARTS, ENGLISH, PERSONAL

LEARNING

VILLAGE ROADSHOW THEATRETTE

(ENTRY 3, LA TROBE STREET)

COST: $8 PER STUDENT

Bookings at [email protected]

8664 7555

Here’re a few bits and pieces from the interwebs to spice up your Wednesday Thinking Muscles.

And my colleague was bluntly saying, “Well, it’s because children’s books are not real literature.”
I said, “Oh, okay. Explain that.” And he did.
He said, “Well, they are geared for a specific audience, and in literature, the author writes for himself, doesn’t have a specific audience in mind. But by definition, for children, you have to know who you are writing for and you have to take into account the limitations of your reader, and that makes it genre literature, not true literature.”

–from Oz and Ends.

Does a YA novel have to have a love interest? Does an adult novel? We thought of Bernard Beckett’s Genesis, but that’s a very atypical novel.

A teacher at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia set her students an assignment: illustrate a cover, title page and endpapers for The Wizard of Oz. See all the stunning results here.

Andrew McDonald interviews Penny Tangey about life as a nerd, quantum physics and her debut novel Loving Richard Feynman, shortlisted by the CBCA in the 2010 Book of the Year for Older Readers category. Read the interview here.

CBCA-shortlisted author Lucy Christopher will be speaking at The Little Bookroom next week about her novels Stolen and Flyaway.

Wednesday April 14, 6pm
The Little Bookroom
759 Nicholson Street
Carlton North VIC

please RSVP: [email protected]