National Book Festival

I have a few things I want to blog about, including some tags/memes, but I promised my personal journal on Sunday when I didn't spend much with it that I'd blog about the book festival then copy and paste into it.

So! I've attended the national book festival for the past three years, but for the first time this year I had a friend to go with! Yeah! My temporary roommate Kim. I'm so glad she came with me, too. We had a great time.

We left our apartment around 10:30ish and arrived 11:15, early for the first speaker I wanted to see, Neil Gaiman, so we wandered around the Pavilion of States for a little while. This is one place where it was good to have a friend with me because in years past I've gone to every single state booth with lofty ambitions about seeing where great books were coming from, find great new titles, and uh, getting the freebies. My first year I went late enough in the day that I actually got a free book from Alabama? Toning the Sweep by Angela Johnson--a really good book, too, that I'd read a few years previously and liked. Actually, this year we got free books, too, between the Metro stop and the festival a few girls were handing out books, but I don't know the author. Nice catch, though. I'll never complain about free books! At the Pavilion of States, though no free books, I did get this fancy-schmancy bracelet from Colorado! My first ever of these popular plastic/rubber things and from my home state. Yeah!

And thanks to Kim for not getting us caught up in the states, we made it to Gaiman's talk on time. Not in time to get good seats, but I'm not sure we would even have had seats if we'd tried sitting down half an hour early, when we arrived at the festival. He had a packed audience. We were in the back, as evidenced in my shot. I tried doing a zoom, but I couldn't angle the camera well enough, so that result was only a dark spot of canvas. Oh well. I was there, I promise!

One of the blogs I follow described his performance pretty well, so I won't try to top her: Read Write Believe . I will say that I'm pretty intrigued by The Graveyard Book, though. And it seems everyone else in attendance was as well, because it was sold out at the book sales tent. Oh well. I need to curb my book spending anyway, and although it was nice for him to cut some red tape to get the book sold at the festival a few days before it's release, I probably wouldn't have read it in those two days anyway, and even if I do buy it, I'm sure I can get a better price than full anyway--thank you Borders for your many coupons, and Amazon for "used and new" independent sellers.

After Gaiman, we went over to see Doreen Kronin and Betsy Lewin, the collaborating team who produced the Click, Clack, Moo! series. But we arrived early and saw the last bit of David Shannon's presentation, author of No David! series. He was pretty funny. He drew a picture of David, explaining the reasoning for the shapes and attributes of all of his facial features. Jagged teeth because he doesn't brush and eats too much candy, triangle nose because it's been broken too many times, and a naughty eyebrow and an "I didn't mean to" eyebrow. Very clever. It was no surprise, seeing the real David, that the pictures were drawn of himself by himself when he was little. Definitely some resemblance.

So, we didn't have seats for Shannon, but hoped some people would clear out. No such luck. Only a small handful moved. We did sit though, insistent upon it after standing for the past hour or so, on the grass with the kiddies. Pretty good seat for me, got some good shots, but I guess some of the kiddos were a little too wiggly for Kim. Woops.

So about Kronin and Lewin--

Although they indicated they see each other once a year, their performance made it clear to me they weren't accustomed to working with each other. This didn't surprise me too much-- typically authors just send their manuscripts to the publisher and the publisher then to the illustrator and the author rarely has anything to say about the illustrations. But the odd thing about their show was that they seemed to be trying to work together, but they weren't. Kronin was taking the lead and seeming to forget that she had a partner, so Lewin would step in to remind the kids that illustrators were important too, and that just like they were all writers (as was the platform of many of the children's authors), they were also all illustrators.

I'm glad Lewin did step in to say this, though--it's very important for kids and everyone to realize all of their talents are worth developing. But as for the "everyone" thing, the jury is still out on this one. It came across a little trite to me, and while I would encourage all children and people to write, I'm not sure it's really doing them a service to tell them they are something if they really aren't. Will they live a life feeling like a failure because they just can't muster very good creative stories? Well, not too likely, but still, the fact that some people never will muster a very good creative story is evidence enough that the line is just a gimick. Come on. It's just bad rhetoric. But I guess in this world of bad rhetoric all over the political landscape, it's not surprising to find it in all fields. Okay, so there's my platform for you. They did a few things well, however. They involved the audience in helping to create afun story about a pig and a tiger. It was funny to hear the kids' responses.

After that, we were pretty ready for lunch, and well, hadn't though about planning in advance so got the over-priced mall food, a 3$ hot dog for me. Sheesh! And 6$ chicken and fries for Kim. Hers was a little more reasonable, and more filling, but I only had 4$ cash on me. She shared her fries. So nice.

The next speaker I wanted to see was good ol' Jon Scieszka, but he wasn't speaking until 2:45, so we had about an hour to kill. Fortunately, Doreen Rappaport and Kadir Nelson were slotted in that time frame and for about that long. And they were pretty good. Rappaport repeated that "everyone's a writer" thing, but otherwise, she did fine--lots of enthusiasm, and I loved how she explained all the research she did to find the story of Abraham Lincoln, showing how research and "homework" can be fun, which Nelson reiterated when he took the mike, making a nice unified presentation, though they hadn't apparently planned that. That is, curiously, unlike the previous author-illustrator duo, they made no pretense about working together. First she spoke, ending with her gratitude for a great illustrator to help tell the story, and then let him take over.

His part was really fun, too. He started off a little dry, telling about the research --dry sounding voice that is, but he actually did intrigue me about the research and homework needed for illustrating. Made me think more about that as a fun continuing-education job, that I would appreciate. But then he got fun, calling for volunteer children to come forward to be his models--one as the horse and one as Abraham Lincoln. The kid who played Abe made comments and corrections the whole time, telling him the head was too big, or Abe Lincoln didn't really look like that. It was pretty funny.

Then, finally, the highlight of the day! Jon Scieszka, recently chosen as the first ambassador of children's literature by the librarian of Congress. Sara also wrote about his: Read Write Believe . But I'll add that he also pushed his book about Trucks, still presenting himself as a versatile writer of many genres. And he was indeed, as funny in person as on the page. You'll have to go to the Library of Congress webcasts when they're up.