I love poetry. I don't know if I read enough poetry. I certainly don't write about it enough, that is for sure. I appreciate the challenge of writing poetry during April promoted by Sarah Donovan and others.  With my current agenda, I just have to much work to do. I didn't want risk such a commitment. (Plus, it still terrifies me.) I did dedicate myself to the idea of reading poetry and sharing a poem each day through social media. I am just one day shy of finishing that challenge for the third year in a row (the last poem in this post is a sneak peak at tomorrow). I am sharing all of my choices in today's post. A few have been pulled out for easy reading. 

Dr. Bickmore's YA Wednesday has been a friend to poetry and  especially poetry in a YA context. I have pulled a few URLs for some of the past posts that have shared poetry, including what I posted last year at the end of the month and post that pays tribute to Bob Dylan upon winning the Nobel Prize for Literature. 

I hope you take a minute to read a poem. 

I hope you also revisit some of the older posts and add a book of poetry to your "To Be Read List." The authors of these post include: Lesley Roessing, Padma Venkatraman, Sylvia Vardell and Janet Wong.

1. http://www.yawednesday.com/blog/30-mgya-verse-novels-for-national-poetry-month-engaging-reluctant-readers-enriching-enthusiastic-readers-and-appreciating-story-form-language-by-lesley-roessing
2. http://www.yawednesday.com/blog/verse-novels-for-national-poetry-month-by-lesley-roessing
3. http://www.yawednesday.com/blog/better-and-verse-by-padman-venkatraman
4. http://www.yawednesday.com/blog/poetry-for-young-adults-finding-sharing-writing-by-sylvia-vardell-and-janet-wong-and-a-nod-to-bob-dylan
5. http://www.yawednesday.com/blog/saying-goodbye-to-april-and-a-month-of-poetry

Day 1: Gerard Manley Hopkins   https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44404/thou-art-indeed-just-lord-if-i-contend
Day 2: Robert Frost   https://allpoetry.com/The-Silken-Tent
Day 3: T. S. Eliot  https://poets.org/poem/love-song-j-alfred-prufrock
Day 4: W. B. Yeats  https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43291/sailing-to-byzantium
Day 5: William Wordsworth https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/52299/nuns-fret-not-at-their-convents-narrow-room

Day 6: Elisabeth Bishop https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=32380
Day 7: Mary Oliver  https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=39535
Day 8: Gwendolyn Brooks  https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/25174/the-children-of-the-poor
Day 9: Langston Hughes https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47559/mother-to-son
Day 10: May Swenson https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=29965

Day 11: John Keats https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44481/on-first-looking-into-chapmans-homer
Day 12: Edwin Arlington Robinson https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44985/villanelle-of-change
Day 13: Anne Bradstreet https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43698/by-night-when-others-soundly-slept
Day 14: Maya Angelou https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46446/still-i-rise
Day 15: John Donne https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44131/a-valediction-forbidding-mourning​

Day 16: William Carlos Williams https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=20222
Day 17: Wilfred Owens https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47393/anthem-for-doomed-youth
Day 18: Walt Whitman https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45478/vigil-strange-i-kept-on-the-field-one-night
Day 19: Ezra Pound https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/12588/middle-aged
Day 20: Phyllis Wheatley https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45467/to-a-gentleman-and-lady-on-the-death-of-the-ladys-brother-and-sister-and-a-child-of-the-name-avis-aged-one-year​

Day 21: George Herbert https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44360/the-collar
Day 22: Robert Lowell https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47694/skunk-hour
Day 23: H. D. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46541/helen-56d22674d6e41
Day 24: Sylvia Plath https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48999/daddy-56d22aafa45b2
Day 25: Randall Jarrell https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48392/eighth-air-force

Day 26: Theodore Roethke https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43330/my-papas-waltz
Day 27: Phillip Levine https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=29412
Day 28: Wallace Stevens https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43431/the-idea-of-order-at-key-west
Day 29: Robert  Penn Warren https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47705/evening-hawk
Day 30: Sharon Olds https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=36723

Until next time.

Once again we have a remarkable post from Lesley Roessing. I am always amazed at how many books Lesley seems to have under belt. If you need a great resource, I really think you should communicate with her. She has posted so many times it is hard to keep up. Take a minute and browse the Contributors page for her posts.

Memoir is writing that matters—for a variety of reasons. Because memoir is, in essence, narrative nonfiction, it contains elements of both narrative and informational writing and provides an effective way to bridge the gap between these two types of writing—and meet multiple state standards. In addition, one of the most important reason writers can write is to discover who they are and to reflect on the people, places, items, and events that made them the adolescents they are today and the adults they will become. The end of the school year—especially this particular year—lends itself to time to reflect.
 
As we hunker down in our homes, surrounded by family, we can transform time with relatives into memoir research as our students look through family albums and communicate with relatives and friends.  And writers can practice another type of research, experiential research, as they reflect on their personal experiences. As writers learn about themselves while “researching” and writing their memoirs, memoir writing becomes inquiry—and memoir writing becomes a journey of self-discovery.

​Memoirs appeal to all readers because they are available at all reading levels and lengths; on all topics from dancing to sports to survival and resilience; in many formats, including prose, free verse, graphic, multi-formatted, and even as rhyming poems. Memoirs are written in first and third person, and can be humorous, poignant, and enlightening. Readers can together read whole-class memoirs, participate in memoir book clubs or memoir essay clubs, and read self-selected memoirs individually. In addition to memoirs, there are novels, such as Front Desk, that closely follow the author’s life, and there are biographies written in the style of memoir in that they focus on a particular part of a person’s life or particular events based around a theme and emphasize personal experience, thoughts, feelings, reactions, and reflections rather than facts.
 
Below are memoirs which I have recently read and reviewed and also memoirs read by my own middle grade students and in secondary classrooms where I have facilitated memoir units which include memoir reading.

​Anderson, Laurie Halse. Shout. Penguin Young Readers Group, 2019.

When I think of Laurie Halse Anderson, writer, I think of well-told important stories—whether contemporary or historical, memorable characters, critical messages. When I think of Laurie Halse Anderson, person, I think of hugs, compassion, empathy, attention, and action. Now when I think of Laurie Halse Anderson, poet, I will ruminate on the power of words, the rhythm of words, the lyricism of words.
 
In this free verse memoir Anderson generously shares her life—the bottomless depths and the highest peaks—all that made her the force she is today. A challenging family life and the rape that “splits open your core with shrapnel,” clouds of doubt and self-loathing…anxiety, depression, and shame,” leaving “untreated pain / a cancer of the soul / that can kill you.” (69)
 
But also there were teachers, librarians, and the tutor who taught “the ants swarming across the pages” to form words and meaning, the lessons learned from Greek mythology, the gym teacher who cared enough to inspire her to shape-shift from “a lost stoner dirtbag / to a jock who hung out with exchange students, / wrote poetry for the literary magazine / and had a small group of …friends to sit with at lunch.” (88) and her home in Denmark which “taught me how to speak / again, how to reinterpret darkness and light, / strength and softness…redefine my true north / and start over.” (114)
 
She describes how the story of her first novel Speak found her and shares the origin of Melinda, “alone / with her fear / heart open, / unsheltered” (162)
 
Part Two bears witness to the stories of others, female and male, children, teens, and adults, connected through trauma and Melinda’s story, the questions of boys, confused, having never learned “the rules of intimacy or the law” (181) and the censorship, “the child of fear/ the father of ignorance” which keeps these stories away from them. Anderson raises the call to “sisters of the march” who never got the help they needed and deserved to “stand with us now / let’s be enraged aunties together.” (230)
 
And in Part Three the story returns to her American birth family, her father talking and “unrolling our family legacies of trauma and / silence.”
 
Shout is a tale of Truth: the truths that happened, the truths that we tell ourselves, the truths that we tell others, the truths that we live with; Shout is the power of Story—stories to tell and stories to be heard.

​Engle, Margarita. Soaring Earth. Atheneum Books for Young Readers, 2019.

I eagerly read Engle’s second memoir, a continuation of Enchanted Air which covers the years 1966-1973. For me, this was more reminiscing, than learning, about the lifestyle and events. As a reader of about the same age of young adult Margarita and possibly geographically crossing paths at some point, I am quite familiar with that time period.

Engle depicts a feeling of duality as she longs for Cuba, home of her “invisible twin,” now that travel is forbidden for North Americans.

Readers witness firsthand the era of hippies, an unpopular war, draft notices, drugs, and Martin Luther King’s speeches and assassination, riots, Cambodia, picket lines, as they follow 17-year-old bell-bottomed Margarita from her senior year of high school to her first university experience, fascinating college courses, books, unfortunate choices of boyfriends, dropping out, travel, homelessness, homecoming, college, agricultural studies, and finally, love.

At one point young Margarita as a member of a harsh creative writing critique group says, “If I ever scribble again, I’ll keep every treasured word secret.” (31). Thank goodness she didn’t. This beautifully written verse novel shares her story—and a bit of history—through poetry in many formats, including tanka, haiku, concrete, and the power of words.

When his friends all join the football team, Rex has no one to sit with at lunch. But finally, Rex makes a new friend at school, Ethan, a boy who may have seems a “total weirdo” at first but turns out to be a good person and true friend and have his own family problems, and Rex’s teacher learns to admit and face her own prejudices. Rex comes to the realization that “Mom didn’t sign me up for the Free Lunch Program to punish me. She did it so I could have food….Things are not as black and white as I thought. Maybe some things are gray, somewhere in between.” (188) As Ethan tells him, “…no one has a perfect life. There is no such thing as ‘perfect.’ It’s just an idea.” (195).

However, some lives are indeed less perfect. About 15 million children in the United States – 21% of all children – live in families with incomes below the federal poverty threshold. Forty-three percent of children live in households which earn less than necessary to cover basic expenses (NCCP). And Rex Ogle, author, was one of them; Free Lunch is his personal story.

Free Lunch, and other novels and memoirs about children affected by poverty, are necessary additions to classroom and school libraries so that readers can see their lives and the lives of their peers reflected and valued through story. 

Yang, Kelly. Front Desk.

Front Desk’s ten-year-old Mia moves to the head of my “Strong Girls in MG/YA Literature” list as she becomes an activist and champion of those who cannot, or will not, stand up for themselves [“You don’t get it, kid. I’ve been fighting my whole life. I’m done. It’s no use fighting—people are gonna be the way they’re gonna be” (105)], teaches others the wrongs of prejudice and injustice, and forms a community from her neighbors, patrons, and fellow immigrants.

Mia and her parents emigrated from China to the United States for a more “free” life. In China her parents were professionals; in America they feel lucky to find a job managing a motel. But the owner, Mr. Yao, is unkind, unjust, cheap, and prejudiced. He reduces their salaries until they are working for lodging and a life of poverty. And while this is a novel about Mia who manages the front desk and helps her parents temporarily hide other Chinese immigrants who have been mistreated, it is really a novel of culture, prejudice, bullying, community, and, most of all, the power of writing. “It was the most incredible feeling ever, knowing that something I wrote actually changed someone’s life.” (218)

In America there are two roller coasters, and people are born to a life on one or the other, but Mia and her friend Lupe, whose family came from Mexico, have decided to break that cycle. Although bullied in school and warned by her mother that she will never be a “native” English writer, Mia develops her writing skills to help Hank gain employment after a wrongful arrest, free “Uncle” Zhang whose ID and passport were being held by his employer, share her story with her teacher and classmates, and finally persuade friends and strangers to take a chance on her family.

Mia is a representative of the “nearly twenty million immigrant children currently living in the United States, 30 percent of whom are living at or below poverty.” (Author’s Note). As such, this book will serve as a mirror for many readers, a map for others looking for ways to navigate young adolescent life, especially in a new culture, and as a window for those who will learn empathy for others they may see as different. Author Kelly Yang also shares the autobiographical elements of the novel in her Author’s Note.
​
Front Desk, with its very short chapters and challenging topics would be a meaningful and effective 10-minute read-aloud to begin Grade 4-7 daily reading workshop focus lessons. I would suggest projecting Mia’s letters since they show her revisions as she seeks to improve her language skills and word choices.

​Lerner, Sarah. Parkland Speaks: Survivors from Marjory Stoneman Douglas Share Their Stories. Crown Book for Young Readers, 2019.

On the first anniversary of the shootings at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, I read the writings of the survivors of that unspeakable event. In this “yearbook,” students and teachers share their stories of grief, terror, anger, and hope, and honor those who died through narratives, letters, speeches, free verse and rhyming poetry, and art. As the editor, MSD English and journalism teacher Sarah Lerner, writes, “Watching my students find their voices after someone tried to silence them was impressive…. It was awe-inspiring. It was brave…. They turned their grief into words, into pictures, into something that helped them begin the healing process.”
 
“[The news] keeps coming in,
It doesn’t pause
Or give you a break. It keeps hitting you
With debilitating blows, one after the other,
As those missing responses remain empty,
And your messages remain unread.” –C. Chalita
 
“We entered a war zone.…I came out of that building a different person than the one who left for school that day.” –J. DeArce
 
“Somehow, through the darkness, we found another shade of love, too
 something that outweighed the hate and swept the grays away.
 A love so strong it transcended colors, something so empowering and true it couldn’t be traced to one hue.” – H. Korr
 
“I just don’t want to let go of all the people I love,
 I want to continuously tell them “I love you” until
 My voice is raw and my throat is sore” – S. Bonnin
 
“I invite you [Dear Mr. President] to learn, to hear the story from inside,
Cause if not now, when will be the right time to discuss?” –A. Sheehy
 
A look into the minds and hearts of those who experienced an event no one, especially adolescents, should ever expect to encounter as they share with readers in similar and disparate circumstances across the globe.

Thomas, Annie, ed. With Their Eyes: September 11th: The View from a High School at Ground Zero. HarperTempest, 2002.  

​“Journalism itself is, as we know, history’s first draft.” (xiii)
With Their Eyes was written from not only a unique perspective—those who watched the attack on the World Trade Center and the fall of the towers from their vantage point at Stuyvesant High School, a mere four blocks from Ground Zero, but in a unique format. Inspired by the work of Anna Deavere Smith whose work combines interviews of subjects with performance to interpret their words, English teacher Annie Thomas led one student director, two student producers, and ten student cast members in the creation—the writing and performance—of this play.  
The students interviewed members of the Stuyvesant High study body, faculty, administration, and staff and turned their stories of the historic day and the days that followed into poem-monologues. They transcribed and edited these interviews, keeping close to the interviewees’ words and speech patterns because “each individual has a particular story to tell and the story is more than words: the story is its rhythms and its breaths.” (xiv) They next rehearsed the monologues, each actor playing a variety of roles. Although cast members were chosen from all four grades and to represent the school’s diversity, actors did not necessarily match the culture of their interviewees. They next planned the order of the stories to speak to each other, “paint a picture of anger and panic, of hope and strength, of humor and resilience” (7), rehearsed, and presented two performances in February 2002.
 
With Their Eyes presents the stories of those affected by the events of 9/11 in diverse ways. It shares the stories of freshmen, sophomores, juniors, seniors, special education students, an English teacher, a Social Studies teacher, the School Safety Agent, the Building Coordinator, a dining hall worker, a custodian, an assistant principal, and more, some male, some female, some named, others remain anonymous. Written as a play, readers are given a description of each character. Read and performed as a play, readers will experience the effect of Nine Eleven on others, actual people who lived that day and persisted in those days that followed, sharing their big moments and little thoughts. With Their Eyes was written with the thoughts and pens of a school community.

​Winchell, Mike. Been There, Done That: Writing Stories from Real Life. Grosset & Dunlap, 2015.
Winchell, Mike. Been There, Done That: School Dazed. Grosset & Dunlap, 2016.
 
In these two unique memoir collections, popular authors show how and where they get stories. Each author shares a real-life experience and the original fictional short story that event inspired. Stories, relatable to readers everywhere, are divided into topics, such as dealing with peer pressure, putting others first, regret and guilt, change, morning school routines, class projects, and the dreaded school bus ride. Memoirists include well-known MG/YA authors Kate Messner, Julia Alvarez, Linda Sue Park, Lisa Yee, Alan Sitomer, Varian Johnson, Bruce Coville, and Meg Medina.

Bryant, Jen F. Feed Your Mind. Abrams Books for Young Readers, 2019.

“If you can read, you can do anything—you can be anything.”—Daisy Wilson

Frederick August Kittle Jr., the son of a white German baker and Daisy Wilson, a black single mother who left school after sixth-grade, cleaned houses, and taught her four-year-old Freddy to read, overcame racism and poverty to become a Pulitzer prize-winning playwright.

Freddy left school when prejudice from classmates made it evident that he, the only black student, was not welcome in Central Catholic High and teachers at the public high school doubted his writing genius. Besides his mother, only Brother Dominic had faith in him, “You could be a writer.”

Freddy educated himself at the Carnegie Public Library though the works of such black writers as Hughes, Dunbar, Ellison, and Wright and the conversations of the Hill’s tribal elders—“warriors who survive in this hard world.” His job as a poet, and later as playwright, was “to keep [these voices] alive” though a collage of black characters from the Pittsburgh that never left him.
​
Through Jen Bryant’s verse biography, readers follow Freddy Kittle’s daily life as he grows into August Wilson, influenced by black writers and collage artist Romare Bearden and supported by fellow playwrights. Feed Your Mind, a picture book for readers of all ages, but particularly MG/HS, is hauntingly illustrated by Cannaday Chapman and includes a Timeline, Selected Bibliography, and list of Wilson’s plays.

​Burkinshaw, Kathleen. The Last Cherry Blossom. Sky Pony, 2016.
 
All wars have two sides, but, as Winston Churchill said, “History is written by the victors.” Through history books and archives our students learn only one point of view, but we must disrupt the narrative with tales from the other side.

When our students study World War II—the war in Europe and the war with Japan, it is crucial that we help our students to see all perspectives and bear witness to the experiences of others. They need to learn that actions and decisions of governments have effects. One of those actions by the United States in 1945 was the bombing of Hiroshima, employing the first atomic bombs.

Through author Kathleen Burkinshaw’s poignant story, based on her mother’s childhood in Japan, readers can gain empathy and understanding for those innocent victims of war. This is the first-person narrative of 12-year-old Yuriko, her family members who are inundated with family secrets and shifting relationships, her neighbors who are sending their boys off to war, and her best friend. Through this important and well-written story, readers are introduced to Japanese culture, experience the strain of family secrets, and observe the war from the Japanese perspective. Not only a story of war, The Last Cherry Blossom is the story of family, heritage, and relationships.

​Shabazz, Ilyasah and Magoon, Kekla. X: A Novel. Candlewick Press, 2015.
 
This fascinating novel, or fictionalized memoir, of Malcolm X could have been titled “Before X” since it covers the time before Malcolm Little became Malcolm X or as written in the Author’s Note, “[it] represents the true journey of Malcolm Little, the adolescent, on the road to becoming Malcolm X.” (352)

Co-written by one of his daughters, Ilyasah Shabazz with one of my favorite writers, Kekla Magoon, X covers the years from 1931 to 1948 (the year Malcolm went to prison), focusing primarily on his teen years in Boston and New York City.

The reader experiences the significant influence of Malcolm’s father, a civil rights activist, and his mother who kept the family together after his father’s death, or murder, despite severe poverty until she was taken away to a mental institution and the children were divided among foster homes. The story also demonstrates the powerful influence of a high school teacher who, despite the fact that he was a top student and president of his class, told Malcolm that he could not aspire to be a lawyer and should aim for a profession as a carpenter. Taking that advice to heart, Malcolm drops out of school and renounces his father’s principles.

The timeline fluctuates from past to present which may be a little challenging for some readers; it might help to write in Malcolm’s ages next to the dates for readers. This novel is definitely for mature readers as teen Malcolm becomes involved in drugs and sex although there are no explicit depictions.

Through this well-written and an engaging text, the reader observes the changes Malcolm undergoes as he moves from a family life in Lansing, Michigan, to the influences of big-city life in the Roxbury and Harlem jazz neighborhoods of the 1940’s; from being Malcolm Little to signing first time he signed his name, on a letter to the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, Muslim leader, as Malcolm X. The extensive 6-page Author’s Note takes the reader through Malcolm’s transition, or “awakening,” during his prison experience. 

​Powell, Patricia Hruby. Loving vs. Virginia: A Documentary Novel of the Landmark Civil Rights Case. Chronicle Books, 2017.
 
Loving vs Virgina is the story behind the unanimous landmark decision of June 1967. Told in free verse through alternating narrations by Richard and Mildred, the story begins in Fall 1952 when 13-year old Mildred notices that her desk in the colored school is “ sad excuse for a desk” and her reader “reeks of grime and mildew and has been in the hands of many boys,” but she also relates the closeness of family and friends in her summer vacation essay. This closeness is also expressed in the family’s Saturday dinner where “folks drop by,” one of them being the boy who catches Mildred’s ball during the kickball game and “Because of him I don’t get home.” That boy is her neighbor, nineteen-year-old Richard Loving, and that phrase becomes truer than Mildred could have guessed.

​On June 2, 1958, Richard, who is white, and Mildred marry in Washington, D.C., and on July 11, 1958 they are arrested at her parents’ house in Virginia. The couple spends the next ten years living in D.C., sneaking into Virginia, and finally contacting the American Civil Liberties Union who brings their case through the courts to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The documentary novel brings the story behind the case alive, interspersed with quotes, news headlines and news reports, maps, timelines, and information on the various court cases, and the players involved, as the case made its way to the Supreme Court.
 
Students can learn history from textbooks, from lectures, or more effectively and affectively, through the stories of the people involved. Novels are where readers learn empathy, vicariously living the lives of others.

​Crowder, Melanie. Audacity. Philomel Books, 2015.
 
Many of the same issues appear throughout history, wearing different masks; oppression, intolerance, and mistreatment of refugees have not ended, and we still need people unafraid to stand for their own rights and those of others. Audacity relates the true story of Clara Lemlich, a Russian Jewish immigrant with dreams of an education who sacrifices everything to fight for better working conditions for women in the factories of Manhattan's Lower East Side in the early 1900's. Lyrically related in verse, the use of parallelism and the purposeful placement of the words is as effective as the words themselves.
 
The novel includes the history behind the story and a glossary of terms, a wonderful "text" for a social studies class. Readers not only learns the story of Clara Lemlich but experience the trials of the factory workers in NYC’s garment district and the obstacles Clara surmounted as she fought to organize the women to fight for their rights. Through the story of Clara Lemlich, a Russian Jewish immigrant who sacrifices her education to fight for the rights of factory workers on Manhattan's Lower East Side in the early 1900’s, readers will learn about the struggles which led up to the Triangle Factory fire.

​Engle, Margarita. The Lightning Dreamer: Cuba’s Greatest Abolitionist. HMH Books for Young Readers, 2013.

The story follows feminist Gertrudis Gomez de Avellaneda, known as Tula from 1827, from when she tells us that “Books are door-shaped portals…helping me feel less alone” to 1836 where she begins the first of her books to spread her hope of racial and gender equality.

As a girl, Tula reads in secret and burns her writings as reading and writing are unladylike. A13 she is nearing the age of forced marriage, and her grandfather and mother make plans to barter her for riches. The reader follows Tula through Engle’s beautiful verse as she writes plays and stories to give hope to orphaned children and slaves; refuses not one, but two arranged marriages; falls in love with a half-African freed slave who loves another; and at last independent, moves to Havana to be healed by poetry and plans the writing of “a gentle tale of love,” a story about how human souls are “free of all color, class, and gender,” an abolitionist novel written by the real Tula to spread her hope of racial and gender equality.

​To introduce a memoir unit or for more challenged readers, such English Language Learners, picture book memoirs may be a good fit and a bridge to longer memoirs. Patricia Polacco’s numerous memoirs work well with adolescent readers.

In Bridging the Gap, I discuss how it can be effective, before writing, to listen to an oral memoir and ask students to list what makes it a "good" or "effective" memoir. They then can create a class list to refer to when writing memoirs or critiquing memoirs that they  read.

Seinfeld, Jerry. Halloween.  Little, Brown and Company, 2002.
One oral memoir that works in classrooms of all ages is Jerry Seinfeld's "Halloween" (adapted into a picture book). Mr. Seinfeld shares Halloween experiences that are common to us all: the badly fitting costumes, being made to wear a coat over the costume (at least for us Northerners), trick or treating as a teen, and he ends with a reflection, the hallmark of memoir writing.
 
When working with adolescent writers, teachers can share a memoir from NPR's "Snap Judgment such as “The Garbage Man” about an adolescent’s first day at a new school.
 
One hilarious oral memoir I especially love and use with adolescents and adults is Carmen Agra Deedy's TED Talk "Spinning a Story of Mama".

With all the varieties of memoirs, this genre easily lends itself to Memoir Clubs. Full-length memoirs can be grouped for book clubs by format—prose, genre, or verse or each club could read a different format; by topic, i.e., sports, dancers, writers; by theme, such as resilience, immigration, mental illness; by cultural of memoirists; by time period; or other categories. Essay memoirs, in an author’s collection, such as Gary Soto’s  A Summer Life, or in a collection of memoirs by different authors, such as the collections listed above, each memoir club could read one memoir. Other types of Memoir Clubs can be organized around picture books or memoir-type biographies.
 
Memoir Clubs directions, strategies, and ideas for comparing/contrasting memoirs with other clubs or for club presentations to the class are described in Talking Texts: A Teachers’ Guide to Book Clubs across the Curriculum. 

                                                                                   ----------------------
A middle school and high school teacher for twenty years, Lesley Roessing is the former Founding Director of the Coastal Savannah Writing Project at Georgia Southern University (formerly Armstrong State University) where she was also a Senior Lecturer in the College of Education. In 2018-19 she served as a Literacy Consultant with a K-8 school and now works independently, writing, providing professional development in literacy to schools, and visiting classrooms to facilitate reading and writing lessons. She can be contacted at lesleyroessing@gmail.com or through Facebook Messenger.
 
Lesley is the author of

•  Bridging the Gap: Reading Critically & Writing Meaningfully to Get to the Core; 
• Comma Quest: The Rules They Followed. The Sentences They Saved; 
• No More “Us” & “Them: Classroom Lessons and Activities to Promote Peer Respect; 
• The Write to Read: Response Journals That Increase Comprehension;
• Talking Texts: A Teachers’ Guide to Book Clubs across the Curriculum
• and has contributed chapters to Young Adult Literature in a Digital World: Textual Engagement though Visual Literacy; to Queer Adolescent Literature as a Complement to the English Language Arts Curriculum, and to the upcoming Story Frames.

 
Lesley served as past editor of Connections, the award-winning journal of the Georgia Council of Teachers of English. As a columnist for AMLE Magazine, she shared before, during, and after-reading response strategies across the curriculum through ten “Writing to Learn” columns. 

Until next time.

This week's post deals with book clubs within a pre-service class and follows on the heels of the post written by Kelli
Sowerbrower. Her post focuses on how high school students define YA literature. Kelli's post doesn't deal directly with clubs, but many of the students who wrote participate in a book club at Kelli's school. Here, Leilya Pitre, one of my former doctoral students, provides a glimpse of how her students have incorporated  online book clubs as they have moved to online learning as part of the COVID-19 quarantine measures. I am excited about how she has outlined her YA course. I know that I am going to be moving some of these ideas into my courses.

This post was initially planned as a thematic approach to exploring young adult literature with the preservice English teachers, and then COVID-19 happened. First, we heard some distant news about people in China, and then Italy was hurt with staggering numbers of those who contracted the virus. Now it is in our house – the USA,—and daily updates of the numbers of infected and those who lost this battle are frightening. Thus, this entry still remains thematic, but is devoted to resilience, love, and hope—things that keep us going.

When I developed a course on exploring adolescent experiences in literature in December, I chose a dozen of novels that were published in chronological order, from The Catcher in the Rye (Salinger, 1945) to The Music of What Happens (Konigsberg, 2019). There was no specific, thematic order in mind. The plan was to let each student select a novel and lead a class discussion on it. So we read a novel a week, explored it through discussions in class, and completed a project, which my students could later employ in their own teaching. For example, we created a Character Web and a Theme Development Map with The Catcher in the Rye (Salinger, 1945), a Tree Activity with Speak (Anderson, 1999), a Novel in Sticky Notes with Freaky Green Eyes (Oates, 2003), Daily Masquerade Project with American Born Chinese (Yang, 2006), and Picking up the Pieces Activity with Hate List (Brown, 2009). If any of the readers are interested in these projects, I can email you the description and instructions, and you may modify it for your students. 

Since we are not in our regular classroom, Randy, this week’s novel presenter, emailed me the day before our Google Meet class session and suggested to “treat it more as a general book club type.”  Before our class meeting, he shared with me the presentation notes entitled “The QuaranTEAM Meeting” (you gotta love this boy’s sense of humor) and outlined the general rules for our Book Club. Explanations aside, they boil down to these four:

• Let others answer first.
• Make connections between comments.
• Occasionally direct questions toward quiet people. 
• Don't feel obligated to get through all the questions. 

It seemed like nothing major, but I greatly appreciated the very act of thinking about how to accommodate each of the classmates. Being respectful, keeping an open mind, and being free to express thoughts goes without saying in my classroom space.  

In a Forum response to the novel, prior the class discussion Reagan, one of my students wrote: “I don’t think we could’ve read this novel at a better time. Though we aren’t dealing with a terrorist attack, we are all currently experiencing a global pandemic. Much like 9/11, our country has never seen an enemy like this.” Echoing Reagan, Dominique expresses the same idea, admitting that “reading the novel, I could not stop myself from comparing it to the situation going on right now. There are many differences between the coronavirus pandemic and the terrorist attack, but something that the two catastrophic events share is the anxiety and uncertainty caused by them.” We all can relate to these feelings.

Responding to Dominique’s entry, Hannah’s comment demonstrates how we too, much like Polisner’s characters, have to adapt to the changed reality: “While the quarantine may not seem as immediate or terrifying, it is certainly impacting our world in ways we never expected, and we are having to alter our daily routines, similar to the ways the characters did in the story.”

Moving from the Forum discussion to a Book Club format via Google Meet, Randy led the session beginning with his peers’ first reaction to the novel. Most of them are 21-24 year-old young adults, who do not remember or have vague memories about September 11 of 2001; nonetheless, there wasn’t anyone who didn’t connect with the novel and its characters. For Louisianans, connections are easy to make—here we are frequently weathering heavy storms, hurricanes, and some are still dealing with a historic flood of 2016, which left thousands of families homeless. The locals know firsthand what a tragedy is. They also know how strong, caring, loving, and resilient our communities are. If you haven’t heard about the Cajun Navy yet, click on the link. (There is also documentary film produce for the Discovery channel.) You will see that our people will drop everything and rush to help the others who have it tougher at the moment.

My preservice teachers quickly noticed how Polisner’s The Memory of Things accentuated people’s nature to unite in times of trials, how New Yorkers came together to honor people who were lost, people they did not know, by hanging pictures and lighting candles. Strangers sympathetically smiled to each other through the heavy air filled with dust and ashes. Hannah also believes that “this book was written to show the resilience and perseverance of humanity to continue moving forward and to not forget tragic events, but to grow from them and to grow together.” 

It was that immediate connection and relevancy that drew my students’ attention to this YA novel. They wanted to discuss Kyle and H’s experiences because they felt they too encountered pain and loss in their own lives. Everyone could add something to what Caitlin shared: “I have had several tragic things happen. I watched one of my grandfather’s fade from this world because of Alzheimer’s. I helped take care of my grandmother after he passed until she passed from cancer five years later. We flooded in 2016. I watched my Aunt die from complications with Leukemia. Just like Kyle and H, I had to learn how to deal with all those losses.” This conversation steered towards emotional trauma, which might be invisible, but not less destructive than a physical wound.

Discussing trauma and how to heal, Reagan notes that “there is no rule book for something of this magnitude,” continuing: “That is why we have the trauma bonding that happened between Kyle and H.”  She further explains that if two or more people endure a traumatic experience together, they have a strong bond. People tend to cling to each other when they are lost and scared. In the novel, the two young people meet under extreme circumstances, have to stay together for a few days, and fall in love. The questions some of my students pose are: So, Kyle and H bonded and fell in love because of shared emotional trauma.  Does that make their bond weaker or less valid? Would they fall in love if it weren’t for 9/11 events? The answers vary, until Jade, one of the two graduate students I have in class, declares that H and Kyle’s relationship are not “less legitimated based on how they met and got close to one another. Unlike the couple in Hate List, they are bonded by grief, fear, and confusion, but not hatred. They are not compelled to each other because of the people they hate, rather they are drawn together by the people they have loved and lost.” Their love may not last long, just like the first teenage love of millions of other young people, but it is genuine, gentle, and real at the moment. This love helps them survive. 

Another intriguing question suggested by Randy to continue discussion was: Is Kyle helping H or is H helping Kyle? His classmates seem more agreeable on this one and believe that both characters need and help one another cope with personal tragedies coupled with the entire country’s catastrophe. “H helps Kyle in dealing with external conflict while Kyle helps H with internal conflict,” concludes Randy. Perhaps, Kyle needs help even more longing for sense of normalcy and occupying himself with mundane task as doing laundry, preparing breakfasts, taking extra care of his Uncle Matt, and protecting Hannah. The world, as he knows it, has broken into myriads of pieces, and being unable to fix it, Kyle does little things he can control.
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By the end of the novel, readers sense hope and know that our major characters are going to be okay. “Hope is the thing with feathers,” claims Emily Dickinson in her famous poem, and H, who is literally wearing feathers at the moment we meet her first, becomes Kyle’s hope in the novel. In his Forum response and later in class, Daniel thinks that “the girl represents blissfulness. She is innocent and her wings make her an angel who is just squeaky clean and innocent. Kyle views her as important but fleeting, like happy memories that we all wish to relive and relish when life is falling apart around us.” He wants to save her, so she can save him.

I would like to conclude this post with a couple of quotes from my students. They wrote an after-class journal entry responding to a question: How do we find hope when we are broken? Here is what Tyler wrote:

Every day we walk around putting walls up. We don’t want to be weak or hurt. Because that stuff sucks. Then why is it that inside of all that chaos and misery there is also happiness and connection? Who decided on that nonsense? I don’t know, but what I do know is that moving on is worth the risk.
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Whenever life feels out of control, off track, or just plain chaotic, know that you are more than those things. We are more than the sum of our intentions and the sum of our mistakes. We are the liminal. We are the doorway, and we get to decide what comes next. So let your heart out every once in a while. Take it out for a walk. Let yourself feel again. Let yourself heal and be vulnerable. 

Finally, there is Lisa Viviani, an exchange student from Italy (yes, that very Italy) in my class this semester. She is also a graduate student. In response to destructive events in her life, Lisa confesses: 

I cry a lot, I feel angry, I feel empty. But then I realize it's just life, and sometimes you cannot control it. So I keep moving on. Maybe starting from small daily things, like Kyle did, doing laundry or cooking breakfast. I know that, even when my world collapses, the world outside keeps moving on. I can find the way to keep moving on with it too.

The people of this country have survived the devastating aftermath of 9/11, will conquer the present pandemic virus, and will keep the memory of things, along with Gae Polisner and her heroes—H and Kyle—because we are “tethered,” tethered to each other. I also have a hope for my preservice teachers that one day they will walk into their own classrooms and bring these priceless memories to their own students. They will teach them to always hold on to hope.

Until next time.

We have another great post for a time of isolation and confinement. I hope most ELA teachers are primarily asking their students to read and write. If they do that, we can work with the rest. Who knows they might even discover a few things on their own.

Today's guest contributor is Kelli Sowerbrower. Kelli and I meet so long ago I can't remember when it was. I know that we immediately decided that our mutual interest in books and reading would make us friends and, indeed, such is the case. Like Kelli explains below, I was also always a reader. As the photo below indicates, Kelli was one of the presenters at the UNLV 2015 Summit on the Research and Teaching of Young Adult Literature.  She continues to engage students in the ELA classroom. 

We found each other. Meeting once a month to either talk about the suggested book, or any book, we met. Then this blog came up in our conversations, I knew it was a chance for my kiddos to write about their experiences. So, I posed this question to not only my book club readers, but to all my readers: Why YA Lit? Why read? What you will find below are several of the responses from high schools students ranging from sophomore to senior. This is an argument coming about why we need choice reading in our classrooms. Why we need current titles in our classrooms. Why we need diversity in our classroom titles. Why we should continue to move to a novel based curriculum where possible. Why we should always start a book club. ​

Issac Cox (junior): His current favorite author is Misa Sugiura or Becky Albertalli
YA literature is something that I’ve been reading even before I would consider myself a young adult. Although I have broadened my interest into other genres of books, YA Literature is something I will always hold near and dear. For me, discovering YA literature was the first time I could really form my own opinions and start discovering myself as a person. Throughout elementary and middle school the reading we did in class were only for educational purposes: the books didn’t challenge my growing mind. When I began to read on my own, I discovered a whole different species of books: Something I could connect with on a personal level. When I began reading YA novels, it was the first time these confusing emotions I had inside me had actually been put into writing, and became something I could translate into words. YA literature opened a whole new door in my life where I could suddenly describe complex emotions lik

It was pretty hard to make friends because even if I could communicate with them, my social skills were lacking, and they most of the time couldn’t understand me. So I would go to the library instead of being in class or at recess. I quickly realized that it was just easier for me to be reading constantly because then people wouldn’t bother me, and I would blend in more. It’s kind of sad, but that’s how I started reading.
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However, how I got invested in reading and literature was the Geronimo Stilton book series. These books helped me experience language in a new way because some words were displayed in a different font (ex. The word “cheese” was in a font that looked like cheese, etc). I found these books when I was in the 4th grade, and up until that point I kind of figured that words by themselves were meaningless unless put into a strand. It’s kind of hard to explain, but if A is an adjective and B is the rest of the sentence and C is the meaning to the story I figured that no matter what A was, B would always lead to C. This made me completely rethink how much individual words matter.

​This is also why I read because sometimes there are things that are inside of you that you don’t realize until you read them off a page. And I know that these experiences don’t always have to come from literature, some people feel this way about music or art, but for me, it was. That’s why I love story writing and reading because it helps me find myself.

Until next time.

First, I hope all of you are doing well. Today marks the beginning of the fourth week of being affected by the COVID19 pandemic. As Wednesday, March 11, 2020 rolled around I was packing a bag and getting ready to fly to Michigan for the MCTE Spring Conference. By the end of the day, the conference was cancelled, the flight was cancelled, and things across the country were starting to shut down in earnest. By the end of the day, there were 1,301 cases of the disease in the US. Last night the us marked 400,335 cases. The death total moved from 38 to 12,841. Okay, I think it is fair to say, Houston we have a problem. Clearly, we don't understand how this thing works or how quickly it spreads. It seems that most of the people I know are taking the issue seriously. Oh, sure, some are complaining, but people are being careful, staying home, keeping their distance when out and about, and checking on people in online formats.  So, stay safe, but keep in contact with the people you are close to. In fact, it might be time to reach out to some people you haven't talked with in awhile.

For the past several years. I have posted a poem a day during April. I have friends who try to write a poem a day during this month. I admire their efforts. You go Sarah J. Donovan. I can't wait to see what you come up with by the end of the month. As much as I like poetry, that just seems beyond me. Nevertheless, I like the notion of thinking about poetry every day for a month. I like thinking about my favorite poems and poets. Last year, I wrote a brief post about my relationship with poetry and about how I was posting a poem a day. You can read it here. In the post I provide links to some of the poets I admire and few YA novels in verse or verse novels. Other people with more expertise than I have talk about that distinction and you can find links to some of their posts in my older post. 

Today's post will be brief. While I am at home, I seem to be busy.  I am learning to teach online, I worry about my students (this semester most of them are graduate students who are teaching and have their own students), I worry about my family in different parts of the country and the world, and I think about my church community. I know some of them will be struggling with work issues. In addition, I am on the verge of deciding the fate of the UNLV 2020 Summit on the Research and Teaching of Young Adult Literature. We will have a decisions by next week. Cancel, stay the course, or move to an online platform.

Now for some poetry and YA literature

First, I had a messenger exchange with Kwame Alexander a couple week ago and he said I could use and build on something he wrote in a Facebook post on March 24, 2020. Here it is:

If I were stranded in the house indefinitely, five novels-in-verse I’d want to have on my nightstand are...
(Brown Girl Dreaming is a genius memoir-in-verse NOT a novel-in-verse, people. Same goes for Enchanted Air and Shout. I obviously did not include my books, well at first i did, but the list ended up being only my kid said that was kinda wack. Of course I’m gonna have a Versify title. It’d be irresponsible not to, y’all. These are in no particular order).
1. Out of the Dust
2. Love that Dog
3. The Way a Door Closes (pt. 1)/Keeping the Night Watch (pt. 2)
4. Long Way Down
5. White Rose
What are yours?

Consider the rest of the post a visual essay and series of suggestions for your further reading enjoyment.

Until next time.

I love this post! I have talked with Gretchen several times over the last few weeks. Working on projects together keeps you in contact. Among other things, we have talked about how the new "normal" isn't normal at all. I know that I resent the fact that some people seem to want teachers to sacrifice even more than they already do.

I do love that a single teacher drives by the homes of students. It seems to be a wonderful, spontaneous way to reach out and I am sure that her students appreciate the gesture. But, when a school wants every teacher in a school to host a parade through their boundaries, it gives me pause. Some of those teachers are overworked and full of anxiety as they try to conduct online instruction. Others might have several children of their own at home. In some cases, they might have a spouse that is still working or, heaven forbid, ill. Others might be seeking a masters or another advanced degree and are figuring our their own school work. The list goes on. If random acts of kindness become mandates do they have the effect we desire?
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Some say that COVID-19 has caused American the education system to fall apart. I say, not so. I agree with my colleague Dr. Kenny Varner who suggests that the situation has revealed the existing weaknesses. Many school districts are confronting the realities of the digital divide. Many students have limited or no internet service. Others may not have device that is adequate for the work they are asked to do. Or what if a family does manage to have the internet, but they have more than one child at home? Who uses the device? A friend of mine had four children at home and two of them were supposed to be in a ZOOM class at the same time. What are we doing? I could mention other disparities that I see, but on to Gretchen's post.

In the meantime, If you are lucky enough to have the internet and sufficient devices, be grateful. Read Gretchen's post and then read a book and/or watch a movie. Then in a spare moment, think about a kinder, gentler response to students, teachers, and your family members who may be struggling more that is readily apparent. Let's rest and recover and, once in awhile, ponder the educational inequities that exist. Money will help solve the problem, so let's keep talking about that. In addition, let's acknowledge that we to often assume that we can do things in the digital world easily and with equity. Well, clearly we can't.

Thanks Gretchen. Now, for some fun.

We need to be honest with ourselves about how we are faring in these times.  My therapist suggested that my phone alarm beep on each two-hour mark so that I could “check in” with myself: how am I doing?  how am I feeling?  where is the tension in my body?  Like before, every two hours can be an ambitious goal, but such intention is warranted; I hope this advice will spur on more regular self-acceptance and care.

With these check-in exercises, I find myself answering “How am I feeling?” with “Good grief, I’m tired!”  Fatigue can be a response to the stress of secondary trauma as well as the many life demands I’ve already listed, and it indicates a clear need for self care, especially rest. Antero Garcia reminds us that when a nation is sick, it rests. We do ourselves and others a disservice when we insist on “business as usual” over a necessary siesta.  Yet beyond the normal ways of self care--sleep, light exercise, meditation, taking breaks from media coverage--we can indulge our love for young adult literature with some worthwhile YA book-to-screen adaptations.  A series or movie marathon, complete with stove-topped popcorn and a comfy blanket, is good for the soul!  

Now, maybe I’m being ambitious again, but I’ve already outed my optimist tendencies.  We are all in this for the long haul.  Here is my worldwide pandemic YA watchlist, with network-provided descriptions:

​I realize that my list may cater to my girls’ realistic fiction interests--this pandemic is a family affair!  More inspiration can be found here. What is on your worldwide pandemic watchlist?

Until next time.