Marty McGuire Digs Worms!

Next month the second of Kate Messner’s Marty McGuire books comes out, Marty McGuire Digs Worms! The first book was about frogs; the second one, as you may have guessed, involves worms. I’m not sure how far down the food chain we can go with these books but I hope all the way; illustrating Kate’s characters and stories is great fun.

(A side note: I thought of the frog-loving Marty last week when I read that scientists have identified a new frog — a brand new frog — right here in New York. Read all about it here. Will a new New York worm follow? If it does, would you really want to know about it?) 

Good news for the new book comes in the form of its first review, a starred notice from Kirkus Reviews: “Third-grader Marty and her classmates are given a challenge by a visiting environmentalist: to develop Earth-friendly projects that she will then judge…. Floca’s cheery black-and-white illustrations match the upbeat theme of the tale, and with at least one per brief chapter, they break up the text pages nicely. Marty’s first-person commentary, sometimes just a tiny bit sarcastic, splendidly conveys the eroding innocence of middle graders. A quick, amusing read with an easily digestible environmental message; it is a perfect match for its young intended audience.” The full review is here. Thank you, Kirkus! Marty McGuire Digs Worms! is available April 1 in hardback and paperback from your local independent, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Powell’s.

Moonshot news

Some recent nice news regarding Moonshot: 

First, the magazine Time Out New York Kids has just published a list of the 50 Best Books for Kids, and it’s great to see Moonshot clocking in at number 38. See the list here. 

Second, this weekend, in conjunction with NASA’s Destination: Station exhibit opening at the Tech Center in San Jose, California, several astronauts will be speaking in the Bay Area. Among them will be Rex Walheim, who flew on the final shuttle mission to the space station, and who on Saturday will read excerpts from Moonshot and talk about his own trips into space. That’s on Saturday, March 10, from 1:00 to 3:00 P.M. at the Oakland Public Library, 1021 81st Avenue, Oakland, CA. Details are here. 

Thank you to Time Out and to the organizers of the Oakland Public Library reading!

Slow Train Coming

This was apparently the take-away message from a school visit I did a couple of years ago. It was true then, and it’s truer now. I’ve been working on my current author/illustrator project, Locomotive, for longer than I care to say. 

What happened? 

The book started off simply enough a few years ago, when I pitched a picture book about a steam locomotive to Atheneum/Simon & Schuster. The idea was simple: to show a locomotive going from Point A to Point B, and in the process to show how one of these marvelous machines worked. After a couple of false starts, I sold a draft of the book, and everything seemed, as they say, on track.

What I had not really figured out yet, though, was exactly what and when Points A and B would be. Eventually I settled on a ride on America’s first transcontinental railroad. I set my engine on that line of track, in the summer of 1869, and pointed it west—and then the trouble began. The amount of information I was handling expanded like steam in a boiler. With hindsight I realize that I had imagined, naively, that the choice of setting would affect only the finishing touches of the book—the views outside the window, that sort of thing. Instead it meant rebuilding the book from the foundation up. It took me a while to figure that out, and then it took me a while to figure out what to do about it. 

And now, finally, I am painting, painting, painting.

I’m working toward a May deadline, aiming for a Fall 2013 book. 

Let the following illustration say something about my pace, but also let it show that the book is underway. My hand is on the throttle, my eye is on the rail!

A shot across the bow

Here’s part of an email I received recently from someone who picked up Lightship as a gift for a young reader:

“As I was reading the book, I came to the page with mail being delivered from an anchored ship W227. I know of a steamship lightship tender Lilac and she is in NY City also....  In 1933 my grandfather captained the Lilac, and the book will go to a family member. I was just wondering if I could truly say that was the Lilac.”

I was happy to be able to answer yes! (Are you surprised? Would I be blogging about this otherwise?) Anytime somebody catches a detail like that in a book it’s rewarding, but I certainly never expected to hear from the Lilac’s captain’s granddaughter. I’m grateful she took the time to write. More about the Lilac — and current efforts to maintain and preserve her — is here.

Turkish Delight

Yesterday this arrived in the mail: a paper bag, stapled shut, stamped, postmarked Turkey. The bag arrived in great shape, and got more roughed up by my walking around with it for an hour in the rain than it did in getting here from the shores of Eurasia. Inside were brand new Turkish editions of Ragweed and Poppy, by Avi. The publisher, Hayykitap, took their design cues from the American editions, and so these books are strikingly similar to their domestic kin. Inside, the paper is nice and the printing is good; the drawings have a nice pop to them. Thanks for the great job, Hayykitap!

Hell on Wheels (and Hurdy-Gurdy Dancing)

AMC premieres a new television series tonight, “Hell on Wheels.” Before I began work on my current project, Locomotive, I knew the phrase “hell on wheels,” but I didn’t know its origin. I think I associated it with motorcycle gangs. Incorrect! It comes, instead, from the 1860s, from the rowdy, ramshackle, dangerous towns — hell — that would spring up alongside construction of the eastern half of the transcontinental railroad and then, as construction moved on, pack up, pick up, and move down the tracks — wheels — to keep up with the workers who kept the town’s bars and brothels running at a profit. 

(This was a phenomenon only of the eastern half of the line, where the workers were largely Irish immigrants and Civil War veterans. The western half of the line, built largely by Chinese immigrant laborers, progressed without benefit of the same quantities of liquor, murder, and prostitution.) 

Here are two good bits on hell on wheels towns, both of which I first read in Dee Brown’s Hear That Lonesome Whistle Blow: Railroads in the West. The first is a contemporary description of Benton, Wyoming, by publisher Samuel Bowles. The town was, he wrote, “a congregation of scum and wickedness…almost everybody dirty, many filthy, and with the marks of the lowest vice; averaging a murder a day; gambling and drinking, hurdy-gurdy dancing and the vilest of sexual commerce, the chief business and pastimes of the hours,—this was Benton. Like its predecessors, if fairly festered in corruption, disorder and death, and would have rotted, even in this dry air, had it outlasted a brief sixty-day life. But in a few weeks its tents were struck, its shanties razed, and with their dwellers moved on fifty or a hundred miles farther to repeat their life for another brief day. Where these people came from originally; where they went to when the road was finished, and their occupation over, were both puzzles too intricate for me. Hell would appear to have been raked to furnish them….”

(An aside: It’s hard, for me, at least, to think of George Lucas ever writing the lines “wretched hive of scum and villainy” without Benton and Bowles having paved the way.)

The second story is set in the new city of Cheyenne when the line has just reached it, one hundred forty miles after leaving the town of Julesburg behind. Dee Brown writes, “The next day, the first passenger train arrived, and from it poured a considerable portion of the gamblers and dance-hall girls of Julesburg. A few hours later, a long train of flatcars rumbled into the station. Every car was loaded high with knocked-down buildings, storefronts, dance-hall floors, tents, wooden sidings, and entire roofs. According to legend, as a brakeman dropped down onto the station platform, he shouted to the waiting crowd: “Gentleman, here’s Julesburg!””

Sadly, none of this material will quite make it into Locomotive, which will be (someday, I promise) a picture book for the 6+ crowd. “Heck on wheels” just doesn’t have the same ring. It makes a fellow want to get into YA.

West Virginia Book Festival

I’m heading to Charleston, West Virginia this weekend to give a presentation Saturday at the West Virginia Book Festival. I look forward to flying into Yeager Airport, and am remembering the bit from Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff in which he theorizes that airline pilots across the country speak in a sort of emulation of West Virginia’s own Chuck Yeager:

“Anyone who travels very much on airlines in the United States soon gets to know the voice of the airline pilot . . . coming over the intercom . . . with a particular drawl, a particular folksiness, a particular down-home calmness that is so exaggerated it begins to parody itself (nevertheless!—it's reassuring) . . . the voice that tells you, as the airliner is caught in thunderheads and goes bolting up and down a thousand feet at a single gulp, to check your seat belts because 'it might get a little choppy' . . . .

Well!—who doesn't know that voice! And who can forget it,—even after he is proved right and the emergency is over.

That particular voice may sound vaguely Southern or Southwestern, but it is specifically Appalachian in origin. It originated in the mountains of West Virginia, in the coal country, in Lincoln County, so far up in the hollows that, as the saying went, ‘they had to pipe in daylight.’ In the late 1940s and early 1950s this up-hollow voice drifted down from on high, from over the high desert of California, down, down, down, from the upper reaches of the Brotherhood into all phases of American aviation. It was amazing. It was Pygmalion in reverse. Military pilots and then, soon, airline pilots, pilots from Maine and Massachusetts and the Dakotas and Oregon and everywhere else, began to talk in that poker-hollow West Virginia drawl, or as close to it as they could bend their native accents. It was the drawl of the most righteous of all the possessors of the right stuff: Chuck Yeager.”

I’ll be listening for it. Meanwhile you can, should you choose, listen to me, sounding as if I’m calling from the far side of the moon, in conversation with Mona Seghatoleslami of West Virginia Public Broadcasting. We discuss Ballet for Martha and the themes of the presentation I’ll be giving. The interview is online here. 

And if you’re in range of Charleston, I hope I’ll see you this weekend. I’m looking forward to the trip! Festival details are here and details for my presentation are here.

Above: Aaron Copland at work on Appalachian Spring. Not that Copland knew that was going to be the title; Martha Graham surprised him with that.