Oct. 20, 2017 "Hippos, birdies, T. rexes and pigs": Today I found this interview by Ellen McCarthy in the Edmonton Journal:
Sandra Boynton lives on a farm in Connecticut. She works out of a converted barn, surrounded by pigs in overalls, frogs wearing cowboy hats and a few skeptical sock puppets.
Because this is Boynton’s world, and in Boynton’s world, animals do whatever she wants. The charming creatures have sold tens of millions of children’s books and hundreds of millions of greeting cards, recorded six albums, nabbed a Grammy nomination and costarred in a video with B.B. King.
She is both ubiquitous and anonymous. She’s one of the bestselling children’s authors and card designers of all time, yet is rarely recognized in her own town.
This year marks the 40th anniversary of her first kids’ book, and has released her latest record, Hog Wild! A Frenzy of Dance Music, which includes a Laura Linney/“Weird Al” Yankovich duet.
Boynton is 64. As a four-year-old in Philadelphia, she was hospitalized with encephalitis. She doesn’t remember much except it was scary, and Bruce, a slightly older boy, always looked out for her. But she knew, somehow, he wasn’t going to make it.
Somewhere around the same time, she illustrated a short paper book.
Her intention then? And now? “I think,” she says, “trying to create safety.”
Boynton grew up Quaker. Her mother was a funny homemaker, she says, and her father a brilliant English teacher and headmaster of the school she and her three sisters attended.
She enrolled at Yale to become a theatre director. To help pay for university, she painted the cartoon-style animals she’d been sketching since childhood onto gift cards and sold them to shops.
Then she was introduced to the founders of a Chicago upstart called Recycled Paper Greetings. Mike Keiser and Phil Friedmann offered to pay her $50 a design. “I want a royalty,” she remembers saying. “They said, ‘It’s just never done.’ ” But in the end, they agreed.
When Boynton signed on, the company was doing about $1 million a year in sales. Within five years their annual revenue topped $100 million, almost all because of her.
Her bestseller was a twist on the birthday song: Hippo Birdie Two Ewes. Boynton’s designs made them all multimillionaires.
When Boynton was at Yale, her mother nudged her to take note of a classmate who’d won a bronze medal for slalom canoe in the 1972 Olympics. “I said, ‘Mom there are 1,200 people in my class,’ ” Boynton remembers. “And she said, ‘I’m sure he’s more interesting than all of them.’”
Boynton’s senior year, she wound up in an acting class with the handsome paddler, and by the end of the first semester, she and Jamie McEwan were in love.
Publishers passed on a children’s book she’d written, so in 1977, Recycled Paper Greetings published Hippos Go Berserk! It sold 50,000 copies and got the publishing world’s attention.
Boynton and McEwan married in 1978 and bought an early 18th-century farmhouse in the Berkshires, where McEwan could continue his training.
Here, for the past 35 years, Boynton has shifted attention between her great loves: Jamie, their four children, and those spirited little animals that keep scampering out of her psyche.
Read through a bunch of lists of “best books for toddlers,” and Sandra Boynton is, well, often not there. She’s not frequently mentioned in the same breath as Dr. Seuss or Maurice Sendak, who was one of her professors at Yale.
In Boynton’s books, there’s no overt moral messaging. There is only joy. But for parents of tiny humans — perpetually on the verge of collapsing into tears — joy is everything.
Darcy Boynton, Sandra’s youngest, says: “We hear a lot from parents whose kids have been really sick or who had really tough times as babies and young children and talk about how my mom’s books helped them get through that time.”
Sandra Boynton is warm and funny, with a throaty voice and a soft, easy smile.
Wendy Lukehart chooses children’s books for the D.C. public library. And to Lukehart, Boynton deserves a rank beside Seuss and Sendak. “I just think she’s brilliant. The wonderful thing about her books is that you can use them to develop children’s sense of humour.”
In 2015, The New Yorker published a review of Boynton’s works. The author, Ian Bogost, wrote that Boynton’s books are “rich works that all of us can and should enjoy far longer than the tiny sands that slip between crawling and preschool can measure.”
She’s said no to an awful lot: licensing agreements, television series, tchotchkes at grocery-store checkouts.
One idea she said yes to was making music. The list of names to appear on her albums is jawdropping: Meryl Streep, Alison Krauss, Ryan Adams and Kate Winslet, among others.
Jamie was always her sounding board, “just my best editor and check,” she says. He was also “the greatest person in the world.” Jamie died of cancer in 2014. She doesn’t believe in the idea of grief passing. “To me, for a healthy person it never ends,” she says.
For her, the act of creating feels like “a place of not existing — of being in a kind of zone.”
“I’m obviously creating a world that in certain ways is simpler and more benevolent than it can be,” she says. “Except I think that’s a kind of truth about the world, too. The world is so many things. Why not posit a kind of benevolence? And humour.”
Aug. 12, 2017 "Not just kids' stuff": Today I found this article by Shannon Ozirny in the Globe and Mail:
For most bookish adults, the actual reading of a teen book – decoding and comprehending the content – is easy. So it’s natural for the assumption to follow that any controversy that arises in the world of books for young people must also be easy, too.
But the controversies of YA publishing shouldn’t be considered the toddler tantrums of the grown-up literary world. They often bring to light tough, complex questions that readers, writers, publishers, librarians and educators debate passionately, with seemingly no grey area to be found.
The latest controversy – an article published this week by New York Magazine – is being debated even more passionately than usual. It’s a subject that is has become so inflammatory that even an attempt at a neutral description will likely offend some.
Luckily, in this case, the article’s headline and byline do most of the work: freelance writer and YA author Kat Rosenfield wrote a long piece titled “The Toxic Drama of YA: Young-adult books are being targeted in intense social media call-outs, draggings, and pile-ons – sometimes before anybody’s even read them.”
Rosenfield focuses on the prepublication social-media reaction to The Black Witch, a debut YA fantasy novel by Laurie Forest about a teen girl living in a kind of caste-based society.
Rosenfeld argues that the buzz before The Black Witch’s release was positive until an adult book blogger deemed it flagrantly and irresponsibly racist and made condemning the book a “clarion call for YA Twitter, which regularly identifies and denounces books for being problematic [an all-purpose umbrella term for describing texts that engage improperly with race, gender, sexual orientation, disability and other marginalizations].”
Rosenfield uses this, in addition to quotes from several anonymous sources, as evidence in her argument about “a growing dysfunction in the world of YA publishing.”
Not surprisingly, the backlash was intense. The backlash to the backlash was intense. Even Roxane Gay got dragged into the fray after retweeting Rosenfield’s article, with some accusing her, simply by retweeting the piece, of stepping into a debate she has no business entering (Gay doesn’t need a reason to retweet anything, but it’s relevant that she has a YA book coming out in 2018).
To be clear, I’m not here to offer an opinion on whether or not The Black Witch is racist. I haven’t read it yet and I didn’t review it in my column on YA books, which runs in this newspaper, for a few reasons, including the fact that it didn’t seem to have an obviously new or inventive premise, nor was it by an author from a marginalized or underrepresented community – all things I keep in mind when deciding what to review.
In my work as a youth librarian, I often do school visits for groups of very young children and when I ask if anyone has a question, a kindergartener will inevitably raise their hand and scream out, “I have a dog!” This spawns a gentle conversation on the difference between comments and questions. I come to this latest controversy in the spirit of the questioner, not the screaming canine commenter.
What I do have to offer is the observation that this kind of intense, emotional debate on books for young people springs, in part, from an age-old, core question for anyone working in this field:
What is the role of the adult in creating, disseminating and recommending books for teens?
Because it’s trickier for teens than for any other audience.
Most accept that books for children require some sort of adult gatekeeper to physically put enriching, inspiring books in the hands of infants and to help steer older children toward what is developmentally appropriate. Most also accept that books for adults have, if not gatekeepers, tastemakers to help folks wade through the sheer mass of what is published in a given year.
But what about teens? How involved should adults be in deciding what’s worthwhile, and what is so offensive that it could be permanently damaging?
This is something that repeatedly comes up in the graduate course on children’s materials that I teach at the University of British Columbia. It can be frustrating and divisive – everyone in the room was a teen once, so aren’t we all experts?
And we’re not alone in our dogged questioning; for decades – if not centuries – children’s and YA scholars have attempted to figure out what to do about the inescapable influence of adults in books for young people.
One of the most well-known, Dr. Perry Nodelman, professor emeritus at the University of Winnipeg, wrote a seminal book back in 2008 called The Hidden Adult: Defining Children’s Literature. To condense his 300-plus-page book into one sentence, Nodelman argues that adults inevitably have their influence all over books for children – as the creators, evaluators and buyers, it’s impossible for their shadow not to loom large.
And that adult shadow, as Rosenfield demonstrates with ample evidence, can become overpowering when social media is involved. But I don’t believe that Rosenfield has uncovered a singular problem labelled “YA Twitter.”
Her article details far larger debates that those of us working with kids and teen books struggle with every day:
Am I guilty of censorship if I withhold this book?
Where is the line between intellectual freedom and hate?
How can I passionately and productively disagree when I think a book does harm?
Am I being influenced by social media in my appraisal of this book and, if so, how?
An article – or a series of articles – delving into these questions with multiple perspectives would have been less inflammatory and, more importantly, given a fuller picture of the YA Twitter community. My Twitter feed is full of YA authors, editors and publishers. I check it approximately every 19 minutes. Rosenfield’s article was the first I ever heard of The Black Witch controversy. I missed it completely. The discourse around YA on Twitter is not all mouth foam – far from it.
So the Coles Notes version of this controversy should neither read “YA people are psychos” nor “Rosenfield is a hack.” Rosenfield wrote a piece about a series of debates and tough questions – some new, but most very old – framed and executed as an exposé rather than a discussion.
And that’s fine. But just as you shouldn’t form an opinion about all of YA literature after reading just one book, Rosenfield’s shouldn’t be the one article you read to get a sense of today’s YA publishing climate.
Shannon Ozirny is head of youth services at the West Vancouver Memorial Library. Her column Grown Up-ish appears monthly in The Globe.
Editor's Note: In an earlier version of this article it was stated that Dr. Perry Nodelman’s book The Hidden Adult: Defining Children’s Literature was published in the late 1980s. In fact, it was published in 2008. Nodelman’s book Words about Pictures: The Narrative Art of Children’s Books was published in 1988.
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