E-Publishing: A Flash in the Pan?
E-Publishing: A Flash in the Pan?
By the Hanukkah Light.
Emma and the Silk Train.
The Fishing Summer
Worm Pie.
Dippers.
Three Against Time.
The Star Man and Other Tales.
When the Sugar Bird Sings: The History of Maple Syrup in Lanark County.
Overheard by Conifers.
Feature by Harriet Zaidman.
"Publish or perish" is the phrase that haunts most writers, but it's the publishers who may feel like they're perishing since the invention of the word processor. Writing is now easier for everyone, the good writer and the bad. The world of electronic publishing has created an even greater number of authors whose works can be read by anyone with a modem, anywhere in the world. The possibilities are limitless. An examination of the World Wide Web turns up a whole panoply of types and quality of writing.
Both original and previously published works are found on-line as well as on CD-ROM format. In the category of classics, the surfer can find anything from Shakespeare to the Bible to the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Inputting such heady material is no easy task, but groups like Project Gutenberg have taken it upon themselves to make important works available to the widest audience possible. Their noble goal is to give away one trillion text files by December 31, 2001. The availability of classics on-line is a wonderful way to introduce them to the uninitiated or for the researcher to access information or quotations. But these works are difficult to read from a screen. They are long and require slow, serious attention, and they do not lend themselves to being scrolled quickly. One of the drawbacks of Project Gutenberg is that the screens are slow to download even though the material is divided into chapters. Downloading them to your hard drive may be a long process and use up all your available memory. CD-ROMs come with their own specials needs. The illustrations on the CD-ROM often use up a lot of memory and make the CD operate slowly.
Web browsers can find writings on almost any topic: historic speeches, essays, writings about and from the Holocaust, by Edmund Burke, on various hobbies, home hints, cookbooks, and biographies, etc. North Americans looking for new types of literature can read books from Australia and New Zealand. Many scientific works are published on-line. This is a big advantage in a field that is changing constantly and which thrives on input from the international community. Some of these e-publications offer the user the ability to process data related to the subject matter, calculate models and analyze statistics.
One field of writing that has blossomed on the World Wide Web is children's literature. There are innumerable sites where children and writers for children can self-publish. The stories range from short paragraphs or poems written by the smallest of toddlers and transcribed by their parents, to serious writing efforts by school children. Teachers e-publish their students' works on school home pages or on literature sites. Many adults publish bedtime stories, or stories for each day on the WWW for anyone who chooses to access them. Some writers are now trying to market their writing without having to go through the time consuming process of approaching conventional publishers. The surfer examines an excerpt, and, if he or she wants to read the book, follows instructions for making payment in order to receive a password and be able to retrieve the full text. The quality of writing is generally mediocre. So, is the giant new world of electronic publishing a boon or a bane to mankind? Consider that there is potential in us all and that many great writers' first works were at best mediocre. The act of seeing one's own material e-published may be an inspiration for a writer to study the art of writing and improve his or her work. What is obviously often missing is the editing process, the act of criticism and rewriting to make the written work better. A completed story does not necessarily make a good story, but the solitary process of writing is made even more solitary if the writer is communicating to the world mainly via computer. Few people who are accessing these sites have the time or interest to send the writers critiques of their works. They just zip on to another site. As the use of computers and electronic information transfer has grown, many people have predicted that printed books will become obsolescent. But while electronic publishing has its place, it is doubtful the book will go the way of the dinosaur. Electronic works are interesting to browse - there are discoveries to be made and excellent research that can be done. But it is not pleasurable to read material off a screen, to wait 30 seconds or longer for the next page of a novel to appear. It is annoying to have to scroll back up to check a detail or a a bit of dialogue, or to exit a chapter to click on a previous chapter to reread a passage. Curling up to enjoy a good book is preferable to sitting transfixed in front of a glaring screen and is probably healthier, too. Reading from a computer in bed is possible but not yet that popular. Printing out the text of entire works takes time and is generally considered wasteful.
Electronic publishing is here to stay. It's up to the writers, themselves, to raise the standard of writing through conventional means - writing workshops, analysis and rewriting - that will draw readers to their sites again and again. In the meantime, don't throw out that library card.
Below is only a partial list of sites for those interested in checking out the new world of e-publishing:
Harriet Zaidman is a Winnipeg teacher-librarian.
Sheldon Oberman. Illustrated by Neil Waldman.
Honesdale, Penn: Boyds Mill Press, 1997.
30 pp., cloth, $21.99.
ISBN 1-56397-658-7.
Grades preschool - 3 / Ages 5 - 8.
Review by Dave Jenkinson.
**** /4
excerpt:
Rachel loves Hanukkah at her grandparents' house. She loves Grandma's and Grandpa's soft hugs and kisses, the smell of potato pancakes frying in the kitchen and the sweet taste of applesauce spooned from the jar.Oberman, author of the award-winning The Always Prayer Shawl, has returned to the theme of religious traditions and inter-generational family connections. While spending Hanukkah at her grandparents' home, Rachel asks her grandfather to tell the family the Hanukkah story, to "tell it the same way you do every year." After Grandpa recounts the "traditional" story of the recovery of the Great Temple by the Jews over 2000 years ago and the subsequent miracle of the Temple's lamp's burning for eight days on a single day's supply of oil, he is questioned further by another grandchild, Jacob, who wants to know if child-Grandpa celebrated Hanukkah the same way that he and Rachel do now. To the children's questions, Grandpa answers positively until asked, "Did you put the [Hanukkiah] in the window so everyone could see it?" To respond, Grandpa tells them a previously unshared "story of our family." The tale he relates is of his childhood experiences over 60 years ago in Europe when Jews were being persecuted and how his family had to flee, leaving behind everything, including their Hanukkiah. Many years later, however, he returned as a soldier and visited his former home, now destroyed. There, miraculously, in the ashes, he found the Hanukkiah, the very one that now stands in their window. The book concludes with Rachel's saying, "When I grow up and have children, I will tell them these stories the way you have told me."She loves helping Grandpa clean the Hanukkiah -
a silver candle holder shaped like a tree,
a tree guarded by a lion that stands at the roots.
The roots hold the tree trunk, a thick knotted tree trunk.
The trunk holds nine branches, nine heavy branches.
The branches hold nests, nine little nests.
The nests are for candles, nine colored candles.
And the candles are for lighting on each night of Hanukkah.
Although World War II is never directly mentioned in the text, in an interview, Oberman explained, "Hanukkah is very much connected to the Holocaust although people don't consciously connect it because it's supposed to be a happy holiday and you only remember the miracle moment. However, behind that miracle was a time of terrible suffering ..." It is Grandpa's second, contemporary story which powerfully separates By the Hanukkah Light from other children's picture books which simply provide the historical explanation of the eight day celebration.
Throughout the book, Oberman's text and Waldman's acrylic illustrations appear on facing pages with both being printed on marbled paper of various colours which generally match the story's changing moods.
Highly recommended.
Dave Jenkinson teaches children's and young adult literature courses in the Faculty of Education, University of Manitoba
Julie Lawson. Illustrated by Paul Mombourquette.
Toronto, ON: Kids Can Press, 1997.
U32pp., cloth, $15.95.
ISBN 1-55074-388-0.
Grades preschool - 4 / Ages 4 - 9.
Review by Valerie Nielsen.
*** /4
"SILKER'S COMING!" From the turn of the century to the early 1940's, silk trains roared across Canada transporting bales of silk from steamship docks in Vancouver to the silk mills of New York. As the silkers sped eastward, they set records for speed which have never been broken. Julie Lawson has written an exciting picture book set during the era of these legendary trains. In Emma and the Silk Train, eight-year-old Emma and her brother Charlie run to watch the silk train as it thunders past their home with its precious cargo. Emma is fascinated with the beauty and shimmer of her Mama's silk blouse and dreams of having a silk blouse of her own some day. When she learns that one of the silkers has been derailed and there are bales of silk floating down the river, Emma catches "silk-fishing fever." Not one to give up easily, Emma keeps searching for the silk further and further from home until one day she spots a length of red-gold silk floating in the water. As she reaches for the prize, she is knocked off her feet and swept downstream. Emma's dramatic rescue, due to her ingenuity in getting help from the crew of a passing silker, makes a satisfactory ending to an exciting piece of historical fiction.
Paul Mombourquette's lush, historically accurate paintings are a perfect complement to the author's simple, evocative prose. Emma and the Silk Train will make an excellent read-aloud for primary children, with Mombourquette's beautifully detailed paintings providing many opportunities for discussion. A historical note, pointing out that the story is based on the actual derailment of a silk train in 1927 only 170 km from Vancouver, will intrigue young listeners who are often concerned with whether or not a story "really happened".
Recommended.
Valerie Nielsen is the teacher-librarian at Bairdmore Elementary School in Winnipeg, Manitoba.
Teddy Jam. Illustrated by Ange Zhang.
Toronto, ON: Groundwood, 1997.
Unpaged, cloth, $15.95.
ISBN 0-88899-285-8.
Grades preschool - 4 / Ages 4 - 9.
Review by Valerie Nielsen.
**** /4
excerpt:
When I was a boy my three uncles lived in a big wooden house by the sea...On Sundays they would do the laundry and hang their white shirts out on the line, where they would flap in the wind like big raggedy gulls ... Every summer my mother would take me there for a visit.So begins The Fishing Summer, by Teddy Jam, nom de plume for a well-known writer and author of Night Cars and ALA Notable book, The Year of Fire. His latest picture book is a nostalgic account of a special summer in the life of an eight-year-old boy. Naturally the boy yearns to go out fishing with his uncles, and, just as naturally, his mother is afraid her son will fall in and be drowned. One night, too excited to sleep, our young hero steals down to the boat, climbs into the cabin and falls asleep. When he awakes next morning to the sound of hammering motors, he is teased by his uncles who call him a stowaway and threaten to throw him overboard. Despite a watery mishap, that first day out on the water is a glorious beginning to his summer of fishing. On the last evening before the boy and his mother return home, the uncles "...toasted me and said how I'd become a real fisherman. Uncle Thomas gave me a drink of his coffee. It was bitter and it was raw and it was sweet. It was the taste of that summer and I never lost it."
The author has passed on that taste to his readers, creating characters of humour and strength who are brought to life by the bold and bright portraits of artist Ange Zhang. In the same way, Zhang's beautiful oil paintings of the Atlantic seacoast capture the sights, sounds and smells of that part of the world. Both reader and young listener are in for a treat as they share this bittersweet memoir of a way of life that has disappeared forever.
Highly recommended.
Valerie Nielsen is the teacher-librarian at Bairdmore Elementary School in Winnipeg, Manitoba.
Beverly Scudamore.
Richmond Hill, ON, Scholastic Canada, 1997.
88pp., paper, $4.50.
ISBN 0-590-24978-9.
Grades 2 - 4 / Ages 7 - 9.
Review by Irene Gordon.
**** /4
Scholastic's "Shooting Star" series provide an excellent introduction to chapter novels for students in approximately grades two to four. In Worm Pie, Tara's third grade class is faced with having a substitute teacher when their regular teacher, Mrs. Jay, leaves to have a baby. Tara is upset because she had been very fond of Mrs. Jay.
The new teacher was a man. A yellow ball of frizz sat on top of his head. His eyeglasses had yellow lenses in the shape of hexagons. I couldn't stop staring because his eyes looked like two bees buzzing around in a honeycomb. And that's not all; his shirt had pictures of orange birds flying into each other.It didn't take long for me to figure out that the new teacher was a GEEK!
I sat at my desk hoping Mr. Stanley would walk out the door and disappear forever. But that's not what happened. Instead, he smiled and said, "Hi, gang."
No one answered.
That's because he was supposed to say, "Good morning, class."
"Before we begin," he said, "are there any questions?"
Jason Miles waved his hand in the air.
"Have you ever counted all the freckles on your face?"
"No, "Mr. Stanley said. "But thank you for noticing them. I'm quite proud of my freckles. I think they make a person's face look all dressed up."
Cory looked up and smiled. He had freckles all over his face too. (page 3-5)
Gradually, Tara gets used to Mr. Stanley, but she soon faces another problem. Tara is interested in bugs while her best friend, Tam Ho, who was born in Vietnam, hates them. When Tara finds an earthworm on the way to school, she and Tam have a terrible quarrel, and Tam refuses to make up. In the past, every time Tam had invited Tara for a meal, she had made an excuse because she was afraid Mrs. Ho would serve weird things like sheep's eyes and chocolate covered ants. Finally Tam's mother invites Tara to dinner to bring the two girls back together. Tara accepts because she will do anything to get Tam back as her best friend.
This is an excellent beginning novel which deals in a humorous way with accepting people's differences.
Highly recommended.
Irene Gordon, a teacher-librarian who retired at the end of June after spending the last 14 years working in the library at Westdale Junior High School in Winnipeg, Manitoba, presently co-edits the Manitoba School Library Association Journal.
Barbara Nichol. Illustrated by Barry Moser.
Toronto, ON: Tundra Books, 1997.
32pp., hardcover, $17.95.
ISBN 0-88776-396-0.
Grades 3 and up / Ages 8 and up.
Review by Lorrie Andersen.
**** /4
Who believes the publisher's blurb? Come on now! "A stunning tale of a forgotten summer full of magic." Indeed, surprisingly, that description does capture this rare book's essence. From the words on the pages there cascades a distinct air of mystery, a child's half-knowing, all mixed together with the atmosphere of hot, humid air hanging heavy - physically and emotionally - over the city, over the protagonists. And, like poetry, it speaks loudest in what is left unsaid.
"There was something they used to have to keep the dippers from your house and that was dipper bells. You'd hang them near the front door to keep the dippers away, and then you'd hear them any time you had a breeze. People said dippers didn't like the tinkling noise.Some people had them hanging all around their house and in the trees.
We had them because Aunt Benedict brought them up from Windsor.
But then some people said dippers liked the sound and would come to the bells instead of going away.
Maybe they worked and maybe they didn't. I don't know.
The dippers didn't want you going over to them. You'd see there would be people waiting for the streetcar and there would be a little crowd of dippers close by behind them.
But if anyone made out like they were going over to them, the dippers would just pick up off the ground to get away. You'd hear clickety, clickety. They didn't get up very high though. They'd go around something if they had the chance.When you moved away, then they'd settle down. They didn't want you coming over.
There was a fellow who used to be up in Riverdale park, where the zoo was. He'd be up there every day, and he would stand there and make a whistling noise. The dippers would go right over to him. They liked this noise he used to make. They'd come right up in front of his face. They called him Dipper Bill."
The dippers overlay a story of young Margaret and her family in the summer of 1912 in Toronto. Glimpses give readers the subtext of an absent father, an overworked mother, a sibling stricken with what seems very much like polio, limited financial resources, told, with the backdrop of the community, from a young child's perspective and a young child's knowing.
Like the finest of children's books, it speaks to child and adult alike. The story has poignancy, immediacy and a sense of graciousness in the acceptance of life with both stark realities and rich imaginings. It portrays the reality of unreality just as, at the same time, it presents the converse. Life swings up, swings down, yet keeps progressing: only the marks remain, just like the brace on Louise's leg: she "never seemed to bother too much about it. Once she could get around, she never seemed to take too much notice. She went on the same as usual."
The paralysis, the dippers, the heat - real and unreal - and all experienced.
Now, be warned that the front flap of the dust jacket reveals that "in the City of Toronto Archives, the fragments of a handwritten letter have been discovered" ... and remember that the work is fiction, if you can.
The illustrations, beautifully and warmly rendered, enhance the sense of the time period and evoke feeling inherent in the text. Readers will be just about be able to feel the heat of a hot, humid Ontario summer. A true marriage of "picture" and "book."
Highly recommended.
Lorrie Andersen is a librarian with The Instructional Resources Unit, Manitoba Education and Training.
Margaret Taylor.
Victoria, BC: Orca Book Publishers, 1997.
137pp. paper, $7.95.
ISBN 1-55143-067-3.
Grades 4 - 7 / Ages 9 - 12.
Review by Jennifer Sullivan.
***/4
excerpt:
His heart hammered, but only in anticipation. What was wrong with his brothers? He rattled the can of rocks he'd taken from Mike and waited for something to move. When nothing stirred he started forward. At the same instant, an overpowering sense of danger galvanized Mike into action. He lunged, grabbing Rob's T-shirt. "NO!" he shouted as his fingers caught at the fabric and closed tight. But the shirttail dissolved like gossamer as it and Rob melted into a black void.Margaret Taylor's first book is a conventional time-slip fantasy that takes place near Bowron Lake, British Columbia, in 1995 and 1868. Mike, Rob and Grant Smith are three brothers on a camping and fishing expedition with their parents. A leisurely yet uneventful holiday turns into an adventure when a gold-panning excursion leads the boys to a sinister looking old cabin covered in moss and weeds. The cabin inexplicably draws the boys into its dark recesses where they travel back in time to a period more than 100 years earlier.
The boys soon discover that the cabin is the dwelling of a friendly prospector, George Howard. Although Howard finds the boys' sudden appearance and unusual clothing startling, he is prepared to welcome them into his home. This is the beginning of a great adventure for the brothers who have little concern about how they will get back to the future -- they are happy to fish for their dinner and stake out gold claims with George. When the boys travel to Barkerville, a town that they have visited many times with their parents, they are amazed at all the changes that have taken place within the last hundred years. But while the boys are gifted with knowledge of the past--a dreadful fire destroyed Barkerville in 1868 - it doesn't occur to them to warn the mining town's inhabitants about the impending disaster.
Taylor employs many conventions of time-travel in her novel. A talisman, in this case the miner's cabin, ushers the boys into the past. When the boys are in the past, time stops, (their digital watches don' t work) and, when they return to the present, they discover that only an hour has passed. Typical of many time travel stories, the brothers are summoned into the past to solve a problem of today. Taylor successfully bridges the worlds of past and present when the boys, with the help of the knowledge they have acquired in the past, rescue George Howard's great grand-daughter from an untimely demise. But, while Taylor embraces many of the elements of time travel, she also ignores some of the genre's most important features. Journeys into the past allow kids the freedom to act without parental supervision, and to escape, temporarily, from the boundaries of reality. In this case, there is so much authorial intrusion that the fantastic elements of the story are lost. Readers know, for example, before the boys even see the cabin that something formidable and foreboding awaits them: "Yet within hours the brothers would be embroiled in a struggle for survival that would test their ability, and their faith in themselves to the limit against forces beyond their imagination." A further inhibitor to the fantastic are the descriptive passages which are interspersed throughout the story. These jarring references to Bowron Lake and its surrounding area read like a travelogue and interfere with the action and the development of the plot.
All in all, this is an entertaining yet predictable trip to an earlier time. The cover, which depicts the sinister stare of an evil claim-jumper, is sure to attract kids who enjoy being scared.
Recommended.
Jennifer Sullivan works within the Canadian Children s Literature Service of The National Library of Canada.
Basil H. Johnston and George Jonas. Illustrated by Ken Syrette.
Toronto, ON: Royal Ontario Museum, 1997 (Distributed by the University of Toronto Press).
62 pp., cloth, $19.95.
ISBN 0-8885-4419-7.
Grades 4 and up / Ages 9 and up.
Review by Dave Jenkinson.
*** /4
excerpt:
A long time ago, all the animals spoke to one another. Without exception, they understood each other. They also understood the Anishinaubaeck, just as the Anishinaubaeck understood the animals. (From "What the Dog Did")Ojibway (Anishinaubae) storyteller Basil Johnston, employed by the Royal Ontario Museum for a quarter of a century, has been charged by the ROM with recording and celebrating the Ojibway heritage, especially its language and mythology. The Star Man and Other Tales responds to that mandate by containing nine brief Ojibway tales. Four of the stories were told by Jonas George, a nineteenth century Chippewa storyteller whose narratives were recorded early in this century. Of the remaining five, a pair of stories are told by Johnston while the other three are ascribed to two other tellers but collected and translated by Johnston. Ranging in length from a single page of text to seven pages, with the norm being three, the stories' contents vary widely in content, mood, and tone, as well as accessibility to the larger Canadian readership. Some, like "Short Tail," which explains why the animals no longer fight with each other, and "What the Dog Did," which describes how the dog treacherously sided with humans and not the animals, would be fine read-to stories to younger audiences. However, because the book reproduces the storyteller's sparse style, some of the book's contents, such as "Mermaids" and "Thunderbolt," is not immediately available outside the culture in which these stories were originally told. Each of the stories is accompanied by a full-page coloured illustration, plus several black and white drawings, by Anishinaubae artist Ken Syrette.
Recommended with reservations.
Dave Jenkinson teaches children's and YA literature courses at the Faculty of Education, the University of Manitoba.
Claudia Smith.
Burnstown, ON.: The General Store Publishing House, 1996.
105 pp., paper, $18.95.
ISBN 896182-47-X.
Grades 5 - 12 / Ages 10 - 18.
Review by Lorrie Andersen.
*** /4
excerpt:
One of the jobs in many sugar camps was to run outside every five minutes or so to check that the dry shingles on the roof had not caught fire. Pokering the fire hard to stir up the flames caused lots of sparks and cinders to go up the smoke stack. At a sugar camp in Dalhousie, a young man who was a different sort of fellow, had the job of keeping an eye out for fires in the bush. One day, he ran into the camp to report that he smelled smoke but he couldn't find the fire anywhere. It became a familiar family anecdote because a spark had fallen on the fellow's wool hat. The smoldering wool on his head was what he could smell.The author, Claudia Smith, with the combined qualifications of elementary school teacher, native of the maple syrup making Eastern Townships of Quebec and current resident near Almonte, Lanark County, not far from Ottawa, has produced a book overflowing with the history and lore of the maple syrup industry. Black and white photographs, some archival, round out a thorough and intensive examination of the role of maple sugaring from pioneering days to the present. A lot of information of past and present practices interspersed with anecdotes around the maple sugar industry that will prove very useful for that class project.
Recommended.
Lorrie Andersen is a librarian with The Instructional Resources Unit, Manitoba Education and Training.
John V. Hicks.
Saskatoon, SK: Thistledown, 1996.
80pp., paper, $12.95.
ISBN 1-895449-61-8.
Grades 8 and up / Ages 113 and up.
Review by Willa Walsh.
*** /4
excerpt:
Apple PickerThis slim volume of poetry is engaging, accessible and replete with humor, vision, and the celebration of the senses. Cosmic metaphors predominate, and they enlarge the minutiae of human life and touch it with significance. The themes are the usual ones of poetry - the seasons, death, love, nature, etc. The natural world, the human world of emotions, and the immortal sphere all figure here. The title would be a good selection for grade 8 to 10 students and Creative Writing students. The cover design, unfortunately, is dull and misleading - the content is not.Love's apples dangling from her wrist,
a prize of pickings, plump, red,
bruise not at all against the thumping
thigh. Thwarted birds sing sharp-beak
requiems from their summer choirs
and cool leaf aprons. What is food
compared to her songs of victories?Go away, old woman with your patent
parer, competent to skin in sweeps
the succulent flesh. Core's coat of juice will sicken in sunlight that retreats
before the advancing dial's
shadow. There will be time to
taste. Wait, wait, I tell you.
Recommended.
Willa Walsh is a high school teacher-librarian in Richmond, B.C.
Copyright © 1997 the Manitoba Library Association. Reproduction for personal use is permitted only if this copyright notice is maintained. Any other reproduction is prohibited without permission.
Published by
The Manitoba Library Association
ISSN
1201-9364
AUTHORS | TITLES | MEDIA REVIEWS | BOOKSHELF | BACK ISSUES | SEARCH | ORDER | CMARCHIVE | HOME