Who would YOU like to meet?

Thanks to the Horn Book, Lisa Yee finally got to meet her favorite author.

When Jane got a train

In one of the group homes I lived in after college (not like it sounds, but too haphazard to be a commune) one of my housemates had placed in the bathroom an oversized children's paperback book called What Is a Girl? What Is a Boy?, affixing to it a note that said something like "this is for all you losers who can't tell the difference." The book was a photoessay showing boys and girls engaged in all kinds of anti-gendered behavior, and the last two spreads showed a naked boy and girl, then a naked man and woman, explaining that genitalia was the only meaningful difference between the sexes. By Stephanie Waxman, it was published in 1976 by Peace Press in California . (It was republished in 1989 by T.Y. Crowell. Had Us become Them?)

K. T. Horning's post "Retro Reads: Before Heather" makes me remember those days. I'd love to have the Horn Book take a good look at this era of leftist small press publishing for children--any takers?

We make dreams come true.

At least Lisa Yee's. My next editorial is about George Clooney.



(photo by Richard, taken at Joanna and Norwood Long's house)

I'm over

at Cynthia Leitich Smith's blog today and feeling cynsational!

Writing for the Horn Book: Field Notes

Field Notes is our column for essays about connecting children and books. Contributors can be librarians, booksellers, parents, publishers, teachers, writers--anyone who has seen children's books in action. It's not a column for tips on running a summer reading program or how to read aloud, but rather it's a place where we invite contributors to explore how real book-child interactions have made them think about children's literature or children's reading in a new way. Avoid the words "magic" and "treasure." Keep it short--1000 to 1500 words, and payment varies. Send queries or submissions to Assistant Editor Claire Gross, cgross at hbook dot com.

"factoid"

I would really like to get some agreement on this word or for people to give up using it altogether. I most recently ran across it this morning while reading Elizabeth Kolbert's review of some new Hillary Clinton biographies in The New Yorker:

Sympathetic and unsympathetic biographers alike tend to tell Clinton’s more recent history as a sequence of spectacular humiliations—first Gennifer, then health care, then Monica—followed by even more spectacular recoveries: an office in the West Wing, a seat in the United States Senate, a shot at the Presidency. Along the way, they offer some never before disclosed documents or factoids.

One of my first task with new editors or reviewers is to educate them in Horn Book usage of factoid, which we take to mean, following Norman Mailer's coinage of the term in his biography of Marilyn Monroe, something that looks and sounds like a fact but isn't. Our Guide reviewers particularly, faced with the mountain of nonfiction series books that splash random data about their subjects around usually hectic double-page spreads, want to use it to mean "small fact," a usage we immediately spank out of them. I can appreciate words with multiple meanings, but not when they can be used to mean two contradictory things: are these Hillary Clinton books giving us trivia or telling us lies?

"Deceptively simple"

and other book review tics are in my mind this week, as we wrap up editing the July August book review section of the Magazine and the first half of the Fall Guide. The Daily Telegraph offers a helpful list of words and phrases book reviewer love overmuch, but in what words do children's book reviewers, specifically, overindulge?

I came into the Horn Book late in the last century on a tear about the then overuse of "humorous" as a more respectable variant of "funny." I mean, when was the last time you told a friend to read a book or see a movie because "it's very humorous"? Later I got crazed about "artwork" to mean "illustrations." Deborah Stevenson of The Bulletin spotted a good one in an article she wrote for us some years ago: feisty, as an adjective to allegedly praise a heroine "who is nonthreatening and totally unserious."

Now I'm getting bugged by "endearing." Adults might feel "endeared" to a book or character, but kids' attachments tend to be more robust. And I think the term also holds the same kind of implied threat as those "Mommy loves you best books," that the book or character is somehow acting in a way that inveigles approval--rather than alliance--from the reader. Ick.

Got Pith?

We're looking for submissions for the "Cadenza" page in the Magazine. This is the last page of each issue, is usually (meant to be, anyway) funny, and has featured drawings (stand-alone only please, and in black-and-white), cartoons, poems, parodies and maybe a pop quiz or two. ONE Horn Book page--that's short. And unlike the New Yorker's cartoon contest page, any Cadenza needs to make sense. We pay, not much, but we pay. Send queries and submissions to Assistant Editor Claire Gross at cgross at-sign hbook dot com. (We've already got enough Viagra and Nigerian gold, thanks.) We've put some examples up on the website for your inspiration.

UPDATE: Thank you to all who've submitted. Claire has asked that any future submissions have the word Cadenza in the subject line. Sometimes it's hard to distinguish between submissions and spam. (No smart remarks from the editors here, please.)