{"id":21003,"date":"2017-04-06T07:00:58","date_gmt":"2017-04-06T11:00:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/?p=21003"},"modified":"2017-04-06T07:00:58","modified_gmt":"2017-04-06T11:00:58","slug":"sneaky-triangles-and-an-anniversary-that-sneaked-up-on-me","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/?p=21003","title":{"rendered":"Sneaky Triangles, and the Anniversary That Sneaked Up on Me"},"content":{"rendered":"

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The white hair caused by excessive blogging.<\/p><\/div>
\nLast week, I looked at the calendar realized something. Eight years ago today, on April 6, 2009, I wrote my first post for PW. Alison Morris was leaving the blog, and passed her bedazzled and intimidating baton over to me and the Flying Pig’s\u00a0then co-owner Josie Leavitt. We became\u00a0the new children’s bookselling bloggers for PW’s ShelfTalker, which was and is helmed by my editor Diane. I\u00a0had no idea that, nearly 500 blog posts and almost a decade later,\u00a0I’d still be at it. Come to think of it, I had no white hair when I started blogging, and now I have\u00a0two blazing streaks. Diane, I’m looking at you.
\nI’ve been so grateful for the opportunity to write about topics important to me, from the minute (a plea for series numbers on book spines) to the monumental (diversity in children’s books and in publishing). I still
\nlook back at a\u00a02010 post,\u00a0The Elephant in the Room<\/a>,\u00a0about the\u00a0overwhelming whiteness of\u00a0our\u00a0publishing field.\u00a0The article\u00a0featured amazing art created for the piece\u00a0by\u00a0Kevan Atteberry, Addie Boswell, Jerry Craft, Katie Davis, Nancy Devard, Elizabeth O. Dulemba, Laura Freeman, Erin Eitter Kono, Grace Lin, Claudia Rueda, Nicole Tadgell, and Sharon Vargo. I look at it and think of what has changed in the seven years since I wrote it (the creation of the\u00a0We Need Diverse Books<\/a>\u00a0movement,\u00a0the CBC’s Diversity<\/a>\u00a0initiative, #OwnVoices<\/a>\u00a0and more)\u00a0and what, shamefully and frustratingly, has not<\/a>.
\nAs I write this post on the eve of this anniversary, I’m basking in the glow of a lovely evening filled with book love. Tonight, at the HarperCollins dinner in Portland, Oregon, at Children’s Institute, I was among several\u00a0booksellers meeting\u00a0three writers who were all making book debuts of various kinds. Each author was warm, funny, smart, and beautifully articulate about what books had meant to them as young people, and what writing and art means to them as adults. I left the dinner truly energized and excited about all three of their books: Armand Baltazar’s gloriously illustrated blockbuster-to-be adventure novel, Timeless: Diego and the Rangers of the Vastlantic<\/em>, Tim Miller’s hilarious and irresistible picture book,\u00a0Moo Moo in a Tutu,\u00a0<\/em>and Liara Tamani’s\u00a0poignant\u00a0debut novel, Calling My Name<\/em>,\u00a0which explores\u00a0how one girl finds\u00a0her own way navigating\u00a0the complicated waters of family, spirituality, sex, and expectations while growing up in a loving yet\u00a0strict religious family
\n\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0
\nWhat better way to celebrate all these years of raves and rants than to write on an evening filled with book love? Which reminds me that the most fitting way to end this anniversary post is to share a little bit\u00a0of last week’s event with Mac Barnett and Jon Klassen, in celebration of their new book, Triangle<\/strong><\/em>. Mac’s exuberant\u00a0(and fabulously sweet) bravado and Jon’s deadpan (and artistically\u00a0hilarious) counterpoint to it, brought so much delight to school and public audiences that families can’t stop\u00a0talking about their visit last week.
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\nIf you haven’t read Triangle to a young child yet, stop reading this blog post and go do that immediately. You won’t be sorry. The DELIGHT they have in this story! It’s adorable, the amusement that springs from the simplest of premises: one friend, triangle, plays a funny sneaky trick on his friend (a square), and Square\u00a0tries to play a funny sneaky trick back on Triangle, with unexpected results. It’s all in the execution: the perfect text, the visually arresting and funny art (those eyeballs of Klassen’s! He really (re)invented eyeballs in picture books) — it’s a huge read-aloud winner of a book.
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\nAnd while the book is ‘meta’ and hip and funny\u2014the trifecta in picture\u00a0books these days\u2014it manages to hit the humor hard\u00a0while avoiding\u00a0snark and snideness or going over the heads of\u00a0its intended audience. Not too shabby!
\nAt their midday school visit, a group of 300 wildly excited K-2 children played a “sneaky trick” on Mac and Jon that they’d practiced with their teachers: as Mac and Jon were brought out from backstage, the children stood, faced the back of the auditorium, and clapped an enthusiastic greeting in the opposite direction of the author and artist. Then they turned around, made an O above their heads with their arms, giving Mac and Jon a standing O-vation. Pretty sneaky, Allen Brook School!
\nThe author\/artist team gave a fantastic presentation. The kids were so jazzed up, the school librarian keeps calling with more book orders from kids, two\u00a0weeks after their visit.
\nThen the pair of intrepid book creators came to Shelburne Town Hall, where they managed to compete with the first gloriously sunny day in a while to draw a crowd of about\u00a0100 kids, parents, teachers, and librarians. (You can’t see the rows of kids sitting on the floor.).
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\nMac and Jon gave another fantastic presentation, reading a couple of books, talking about their creative process together, and showing the kids how the illustration works:
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\nAs Jon revealed his first\u00a0slide showing\u00a0the characters in Triangle,\u00a0<\/em>one four-year-old shouted, “I know that square!” like he’d recognized a pal on the street. It was adorable. During the Q&A, a librarian shared\u00a0that her students had discussed which character they thought represented the author and illustrator. “For some reason, they think you (Mac) are the triangle, and you (Jon) are the square.” Jon thought for a second and said, “I’ll take it.” And Mac said, “Yeah, I’ll take it, too.”
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Mac the human, left. Jon the human, right. (Mac the triangle, right; Jon the square, left.)<\/p><\/div>
\nThe night before the event,\u00a0I found a Make Your Own Cookie Cutters kit in my kitchen, so I made a couple of familiar characters:
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Harder than it looks to make all those bends in the metal! I’m looking forward to their book about Circle.<\/p><\/div>
\nThe cookies (sugar cookies with cocoa for coloring) turned out funny-looking but tasty:
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\nAnd that, my friends, is where I’ll leave you: contemplating cookies and books, two of the best things in life. Thanks for reading my posts along the way, and especially for adding your own comments to the blog! That makes my day. My year. My eight years!) Thanks to Diane Roback for her unfailing wisdom, and her patience with my late-night scrapings up against the deadline, to Josie who was a fantastic blogging companion,\u00a0and to the current slate of marvelous, original, and FRESH bloggers Kenny Brechner, Meghan Goehl, Leslie Hawkins, and Cynthia Compton.
\nI realize it sounds as though I’m retiring from the blog, but I’m\u00a0simply in a reflective mood thinking of so much time spent writing about the children’s bookselling life. It’s a pleasure! And I promise that when I run out of ideas and inspiration, I’ll hand off the baton to the next generation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mac Barnett, Jon Klassen, cookies, and the astonishing number of blog posts I’ve racked up over the years.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21003","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21003","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=21003"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21003\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21003"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21003"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21003"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}