The Cow in Patrick O'Shanahan's Kitchen, Little Pickle Press, Lesson Plan for Teachers, Kindergarten to Grade 3, by Diana Prichard

The Cow in Patrick O'Shanahan's Kitchen, Little Pickle Press, Lesson Plan for Teachers, Kindergarten to Grade 3, by Diana Prichard,

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Kindergaten,

KINDERGATEN, 

Kindergarte,

KINDERGRATEN,

teacher

Interview with Anne Sibley O'Brien (After Gandhi, Hong Kil Dong) Author Spotlight

 AUTHOR SPOTLIGHT

WITH

ANNE SIBLEY O'BRIEN

As an established writer and illustrator you’ve collaborated with other authors and editors on
books. How was working with your son different? What was your collaborative process?

There was no way to know before we started whether we'd work well together as a mother-son team,
but it turned out to be a real treat. We naturally evolved a process that worked well for us, and didn’t
encounter any conflicts or difficulties in becoming equal partners.

We divided the profiles and each took half to research and write. Perry was attending Cornell
University during the time we were working on the book, so I traveled to Ithaca several times where
we could collaborate in person, writing in his apartment, talking in coffee shops, or researching in the
public and university libraries. The rest of the work was done on Perry’s trips home to Peaks Island,
and by email and phone with each other and our editor.

We also benefited enormously and had a great time working with our focus team of middle-school students who called themselves “Gandhi Publishing.” Those conversations were critical in figuring out what we wanted to say and how we wanted to say it.

In early drafts we figured out a basic form for each profile, starting with a short, cinematic, you-arethere kind of scene, followed by an overview of the person and/or the movement, and ending with notes on the historical context. We exchanged and critiqued each other’s drafts of the individual
profiles before submitting them to our editor. Our writing isn’t usually similar in style, but perhaps
because we’ve been listening to each other for twenty-five years, we were able to easily find a
common voice. One of the fun things has been the discovery that people often can’t tell which profiles were written by Perry and which were written by me.

We valued and depended on each other’s strengths in areas other than writing. In addition to his
experience as a soldier who went through the process of becoming a conscientious objector, Perry is
an experienced and skilled researcher. I functioned as the project manager, keeping track of the
development of the book and making sure we had all the pieces we needed. I created the illustrations
after the text was completed, but we explored visual ideas throughout the process, so Perry had a lot of input in the content and style of the art.

Spending so much time focusing together on a topic about which we are both passionate was a rich
experience. We enjoyed it so much that we’re considering writing another book together.

After Gandhi profiles fifteen nonviolent resisters spanning one hundred years. Were you
affected by one particular person or event more than others in the book? Were there any that
you wanted to include, but couldn't due to space limitations?

I was particularly affected by Nelson Mandela, because in 1998 I had had the opportunity to travel to
South Africa and tour the prison at Robben Island. It was a vivid and deeply moving experience, like a pilgrimage. I learned that Mandela, though a remarkable human being, was simply one of many
heroes who endured that imprisonment and turned it into a transformative experience, and that the
extraordinary accomplishment of a peaceful transfer of power in ending South African apartheid was
the achievement of all of them.

This book only scratches the surface in telling the incredible stories of people who have chosen
nonviolence as a strategy for changing the world. We decided to narrow the book’s focus to specific
actions of nonviolent resistance which we could share as scenes. This meant we reluctantly left out
some very significant people, such as the Dalai Lama! We had hoped to include nonviolent resistance
in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, in the pursuit of gay rights, in Native American activism. Then there are all the people we haven’t even heard about yet; just the other day I heard about the amazing
courage of the Women in White who risked their lives resisting violence in Liberia’s civil war. Some
of these stories will be available on our website, and others will be discovered by young readers who
want to know more.

You were raised by medical missionaries in South Korea and your son, Perry, was an army
medic in Afghanistan before obtaining conscientious objector (CO) status. How did your
experience as a child, and later as a mother of an outreach worker abroad, influence you as an
artist and activist?

The core of my activism is the knowledge that, across race, culture, class, and all kinds of differences,
we all belong to each other. If we’re all connected, then any time one of us is suffering, all of us are,
whether we recognize it or not. I think compassion is a natural human emotion and only needs to be
nurtured in order to flourish. Responding to other people and trying to set things right serves the
helper as much as the helped, because it is a deep human longing to be useful and to be significant. I
learned this from my parents’ example of choosing to live and work as partners with Koreans, and
their passion for ending suffering and seeking justice. I learned it also from Korean friends and
extended family who welcomed and embraced me.

Another big influence of my years in Korea was the experience of being a white American there,
which made me very conspicuous and undeniably privileged. When I came back to the U.S. for
college, I felt compelled to explore my identity as a white person in America and as an American in
the world. I have spent decades examining racism, in myself and in others, how it affects people of
color and how it affects me. This has been an exciting and liberating process. The more I learn, the
more I’m filled with hope about our creative capacity to transform ourselves and our communities.

My Korean background also gave me a lifelong fascination with the wonder of human difference. As
an illustrator and writer, I try to show how beautiful people are, in all our glorious variation.

I keep learning about how much courage it takes to be true to yourself.

The journey that Perry has taken from joining the army in August 2001, through receiving his
discharge as a CO in November 2004, through working as an antiwar activist, continues to be a
profound one for him and for his family. I’ve learned so much more about my connections to other
human beings, from U.S. soldiers, veterans and military families, to citizens of Afghanistan and Iraq.

After Gandhi teaches children important lessons from history. What would you say to children
who ask how they can use these morals in their everyday lives?
I wrote an entire section for the book, “Living Nonviolent Resistance” which we didn’t end up
including but will be posting on our website (AfterGandhi.com) when it’s launched in January. Here’s
a summary of the lessons we learned from studying the lives of Gandhi and those who came after him:

• Start small.
• Follow your passion.
• The struggle is within.
• It’s not about one person.
• Nonviolent resistance is active and powerful.
• The leaders of nonviolent resistance are not saints, but ordinary human beings with faults and challenges.
• “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”
• Have a connection to something larger.
• It’s tough work, full of risk and sacrifice.
• Each person has an individual path.

Books by Anne Sibley O’Brien

• AFTER GANDHI:  One Hundred Years of Nonviolent Resistance  -  This book explores the work of Mohandas Gandhi and his legacy through fifteen profiles of activists who chose nonviolent resistance as the path to change. The book focuses on heroic individuals who were in direct physical danger and chose to respond with nonviolence.  $24.95 HC

• HONG KIL DONG:  The Robin Hood of Korea  -  Hong Kil Dong, the son of a powerful minister, is not entitled to a birthright because his mother is a commoner. After studying martial arts, divination, swordplay, the uses of magic, and the wisdom of the Book of Changes, Kil Dong sets off on a quest to discover his destiny and claim his rightful role as a wise and just leader. $16.95 HC $7.95 PB

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2015 Recommended Fiction Titles

The Short List
Four of the top recommended fiction titles this year


When Franklin Starlight is called to visit his father, he has mixed emotions. Raised by the old man he was entrusted to soon after his birth, Frank is haunted by the brief and troubling moments he has shared with his father, Eldon. When he finally travels by horseback to town, he finds Eldon on the edge of death, decimated from years of drinking.
The two undertake difficult journey into the mountainous backcountry, in search of a place for Eldon to die and be buried in the warrior way. As they travel, Eldon tells his son the story of his own life--from an impoverished childhood to combat in the Korean War and his shell-shocked return. Through the fog of pain, Eldon relates to his son these desolate moments, as well as his life's fleeting but nonetheless crucial moments of happiness and hope, the sacrifices made in the name of love. And in telling his story, Eldon offers his son a world the boy has never seen, a history he has never known.  (Hardcover $24)


 From the critically acclaimed author of "Atlas of Unknowns" and "Aerogrammes," a tour de force set in South India that plumbs the moral complexities of the ivory trade through the eyes of a poacher, a documentary filmmaker, and, in a feat of audacious imagination, an infamous elephant known as the Gravedigger.
Orphaned by poachers as a calf and sold into a life of labor and exhibition, the Gravedigger breaks free of his chains and begins terrorizing the countryside, earning his name from the humans he kills and then tenderly buries. Manu, the studious younger son of a rice farmer, loses his cousin to the Gravedigger's violence and is drawn, with his wayward brother Jayan, into the sordid, alluring world of poaching. Emma is a young American working on a documentary with her college best friend, who witnesses the porous boundary between conservation and corruption and finds herself in her own moral gray area: a risky affair with the veterinarian who is the film's subject. As the novel hurtles toward its tragic climax, these three storylines fuse into a wrenching meditation on love and betrayal, duty and loyalty, and the vexed relationship between man and nature.
With lyricism and suspense, Tania James animates the rural landscapes where Western idealism clashes with local reality; where a farmer's livelihood can be destroyed by a rampaging elephant; where men are driven to poaching. In James' arrestingly beautiful prose, "The Tusk That Did the Damage" blends the mythical and the political to tell a wholly original, utterly contemporary story about the majestic animal, both god and menace, that has mesmerized us for centuries.


For readers of "The Night Circus" and "Station Eleven," a lyrical and absorbing debut set in a world covered by water
As a Gracekeeper, Callanish administers shoreside burials, laying the dead to their final resting place deep in the depths of the ocean. Alone on her island, she has exiled herself to a life of tending watery graves as penance for a long-ago mistake that still haunts her. Meanwhile, North works as a circus performer with the Excalibur, a floating troupe of acrobats, clowns, dancers, and trainers who sail from one archipelago to the next, entertaining in exchange for sustenance.
In a world divided between those inhabiting the mainland ("landlockers") and those who float on the sea ("damplings"), loneliness has become a way of life for North and Callanish, until a sudden storm offshore brings change to both their lives--offering them a new understanding of the world they live in and the consequences of the past, while restoring hope in an unexpected future.
Inspired in part by Scottish myths and fairytales, "The Gracekeepers" tells a modern story of an irreparably changed world: one that harbors the same isolation and sadness, but also joys and marvels of our own age.


Spare and unsparing, "God Help the Child"--the first novel by Toni Morrison to be set in our current moment--weaves a tale about the way the sufferings of childhood can shape, and misshape, the life of the adult.
At the center: a young woman who calls herself Bride, whose stunning blue-black skin is only one element of her beauty, her boldness and confidence, her success in life, but which caused her light-skinned mother to deny her even the simplest forms of love. There is Booker, the man Bride loves, and loses to anger. Rain, the mysterious white child with whom she crosses paths. And finally, Bride's mother herself, Sweetness, who takes a lifetime to come to understand that "what you do to children matters. And they might never forget."
A fierce and provocative novel that adds a new dimension to the matchless oeuvre of Toni Morrison. 

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Cuba Straits ( Doc Ford Novel #22 ) by Randy Wayne White

Alice Hoffman's Nightbird Q&A

Tell us a bit about what led you to decide to write a novel for middle-grade readers. The books I read when I was ten and eleven and twelve were the ones that influenced me most. I wanted to write for that age group because I still love middle readers myself. These are the books that stay with us in a very deep, emotional way. You’ve stated that as a child, you felt that children’s literature speaks down to children, and that fairy tales tell the truth, though often in a disturbing way. What are some of the tales your grandmother told you that have stuck with you the most? My grandmother told me about her life as a child in Russia. As the oldest girl in the family, it was her job to go to the river early in the morning for water. She had to chop ice and carry it home, even though she heard the howling of wolves, and light a fire to melt the ice before anyone else in the family was awake. If that isn't the start of a fairy tale, I don't know what is! Twig, the main character in Nightbird, lives in a town that is rumored to hide a monster. Did your hometown hide any monsters when you were a young girl, whether real or imagined? Oh yes. All hometowns have monsters, and all children are wise enough to look under the bed. I think children can see more clearly than adults. Several of your books have been made into feature films. Do you see this in the future for Nightbird as well? Nightbird is so alive to me, and the characters, especially Twig, are so alive in my imagination, that I would love to see them brought to life in a film, either live or animated. I could "see" the book while I was writing it, and I think it would be great to watch it as a film. Are there any middle-grade or young adult authors who influenced you when writing for a younger crowd? Edward Eager's magic series are still my favorites. I love Lois Lowry's books. And I have been hugely influenced by Ray Bradbury—an author for adults, but best read during the summer you turn twelve. Everyone seems to have a “To Read” stack of books somewhere at home. Can you tell us what’s in your stack? I have so many books in my reading stack! I want to read Lev Grossman's The Magicians series and I want to reread the books I loved as a child, starting with the Mary Poppins series. What’s next for you—and your readers? I have a historical novel coming out in August called The Marriage of Opposites, about the mother of the great painter Camille Pissarro. Rachel grew up in St. Thomas—her family had been forced out of Spain and Portugal and France during the Inquisition—and she was a difficult, interesting woman who I grew to love. Then I hope to write another middle reader! buy books online shopping, fantasy fiction books, online book stores, science fiction books Privacy Policy • Contact Us • www.ingramcontent.com • ipage.ingramcontent.com ©Copyright 2015 Ingram Content Group. All Rights Reserved.