10 January 2012

"Books to Unite the Digitally Divided Family"



On Books and Children and Modern Culture: "We gather to ask our annual question: “Can there still be books for the young?” Even now, in these darkening days, while Barnes & Noble eats independent booksellers, and Amazon eats Barnes & Noble. New problems to mask the old ones we never solved, since you can still sit out twelve years of school in the “remedial” program not because you’re “learning disabled” but because you aren’t home at night. Can our books still tell their stories in the age of the “digitally reduced attention span”? Can we still reach a generation whose own parents lost eye contact with them long ago? In the full knowledge that there is no app for eye contact…
Oh, yes. The answer is yes because never have the young needed us more. Never has a young generation on their way to adulthood lived this far from adults. Never has a generation needed an adult voice more, if only on the page and well disguised."
On Writing: "Writing is the most uncentering of experiences, and we really have nothing to say until we get ourselves off the page, off the stage, and let our readers become our characters, try them on for size. And so here is the sacred secret of what we do—and we need to share this with the creative writing teacher: a story is always about something that never happened to the author. E. B. White was never a mouse, or a spider. And Beatrix Potter was never a rabbit. J. K. Rowling did not attend Hogwarts. And Gary Paulsen was never dropped down in the wilderness with nothing in his hand but a hatchet. Stephenie Meyer was never bitten by a you-know-what. We write from observation, not experience. From research, not recollection. All fiction is based on research. We don’t write what we know. We write what we can find out. Every book begins in the library in the hope that it will end there."
From "Books to Unite the Digitally Divided Family" by prolific children's author Robert Peck, from the January/February issue of The Horn Book MagazineClick here to read the full article.


The Mom's favorite magazine: The Horn Book Magazine
Want to find the latest wonderful 
children's literature? 
Look no further!




Robert Peck stirs up a little animal fantasy 
with his latest Secrets at Sea,


Wonderfuly fun reading for 
the whole family!

2 comments:

  1. "Oh, yes. The answer is yes because never have the young needed us more. Never has a young generation on their way to adulthood lived this far from adults. Never has a generation needed an adult voice more, if only on the page and well disguised."

    I love this!

    Reading & Writing & oh-so-much-more!!

    Books for Walls family, you are a true inspiration! Keep up your incredible activism! I must get my hiney to the library so I have something to type about!! xo

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  2. Very interesting article. I especially love the little section on writing.

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