Oregon Reads Book Blogs

Deschutes County Library has a squadron of librarians, all eagerly promoting Oregon Reads 2009, distributing free books, bringing in authors to visit, making complex and workable arrangements, driving us about Central Oregon from school to school (oh, those bright, snowy mountains!), gathering us together in enthusiastic nests of readers, making way for ideas to converge, for kids to wonder and grow.

At Three Rivers School, High Desert Middle School, REALMS, Seven Peaks, Tumalo Community School, and Obsidian Middle School, the students greeted me with with hearty minds and voices. Red and green Barlow and Bear Creek Ridge softball caps went from head to head, and each team had inventive ways of performing, often catching me by surprise. (Oh, you Obsidian thespians!) Posters, poems, home-baked Irish soda bread, an Oregon Reads T-shirt, and even an original song appeared (you REALMS singers!). The verb "overwhelm" kept coming to mind.

Thanks to Deschutes County Library Director Todd Dunkelberg. And particular thanks to Heather McNeil, Chantal Strobel, Colleen Galvin, April Witteveen, and Linda Olson for their solicitous care and for all that driving and good conversation en route. Where in the world were teen librarians when I was a kid? (Answer: They hadn't been invented yet.)

Deborah Hopkinson, Lauren Kessler, and I met in Bend for the finale of Oregon Reads 2009, and the community welcomed us at a library reception with committee co-chairs June Knudson and Sara Charlton, who had traveled from Hood River and Tillamook to introduce the program.

Lauren Kessler's presentation at the Tower Theatre on Friday, April 25, was a moving and provocative exploration of "What is an American?" Portland Taiko gave a splendid show, a superb introduction to this Japanese art form for those who are new to it. (I've been a Taiko fan for a long time, ever since a surprise performance at a Rose Festival years ago.)

My very last and quite lovely visit was at the Multnomah County Library, Main Branch, in Portland on April 27. Sixth graders from Metropolitan Learning Center were very much on their toes with performance, questions, and commentary. Thanks to their teachers, Ned and Jeff. Thanks, too, to Kecia Welt and Ellen Fader for making the morning session possible.

And in the Making Possible category: We must all be grateful to the benefactors of Oregon Reads 2009, including the Starseed Foundation. We applaud your generosity.

Daunting questions have kept surfacing as the kids mine this Oregon book with their common sense and curiosity. That they are willing to grapple with the ambivalence that fiction lives in is heartening to me, as I go on trying to make stories that ask us to examine our brains, hearts, and consciences.

Thank you, Oregon. Happy Sesquicentennial.

Rebecca (Storyweaver) Cohen is a live wire. She and the energetic Newport Public Library Foundation treated Deborah Hopkinson and me to a full and entertaining schedule in their beautiful coastal community, including an evening at the library itself. The next day, students at Newport Middle School and Isaac Newton Middle School were ready with comments, questions, and a warm welcome, while Deborah visited with younger students.

Sadly, most of the teachers of the classes I visited had been called away to a writing seminar at another Newport school, so they weren’t able to hear their students’ perceptions and insights about the book they’d studied. Special thanks to P.J. Collson for joining in and helping his students grapple with a challenging question about free will as it arose from our book discussion. (Made me nostalgic for school teaching.)

Patti Littlehales’ guidance and versatile assistance through the day were wonderful; she was a splendid and effective co-worker.

Groups of volunteers performed the Bat 6 readers’ theatre for us. When one of the girls began to feel nervous before time to go on, her fellow performer urged her: “Channel your Inner Shazam.” I probably won’t be able to resist quoting her for years.

The ocean was thrilling, the sky eventful, the aquarium as exciting as ever, the local food was too delicious, our hosts more than kind. Thank you, Newport!

Looking back across the weeks and miles, I see what a lucky girl I am: Not only has the Oregon Library Asociation presented my Newport host, Rebecca, with its Distinguished Service Award for the year, but my host of just days ago, Gary Sharp of North Bend, has been named Oregon Librarian of the Year. Somehow, I seem to have been able to select superb company for my travels around the state.

My trip through the Umpqua River Valley to North Bend and Coos Bay introduced me to Bill Horning's vast collection of baseball memorabilia, which decorated the North Bend High School library on the day I visited with students there. Seeing historic team jerseys, autographed photos of some of the great players of all time, and the gigantic wooden bat, with the library staff dressed in baseball uniforms: It was a complete and delicious surprise. Bill is a dedicated baseball aficionado whose generosity enlivens the Coos County community. Thanks, Bill! Thanks, too, to Laurie Nordahl, librarian extraordinaire. Six volunteer girls performed the Bat 6 readers' theatre script to an attentive audience of their schoolmates, and even did double duty the following day, repeating their performance at the North Bend Public Library. Well done!

Students at Sunset Middle School met in their friendly library, where six willing and brave girls did a really good reading of the Bat 6 script, which they'd never seen before. Good going, girls! Thanks to Billie Chestnut for the decorations and to Ms. Kennell for bringing her students to our gathering.

Director Gary Sharp of the North Bend Public Library deserves a medal: the Virginia's Turn-on-a-Dime Gratitude Medal for March, 2009.

And the beautiful crowd of elk resting in fields at the Dean Creek Wildlife Area east of Reedsport were worth the trip. Well, the elk and the students were.

I'll make trips to the Newport community and to Bend in April, again meeting with students who are observing our sesquicentennial by giving their attention to this softball story. Traveling about, seeing more of what Governor Ted Kulongoski calls "the most beautiful state in the union," is a pleasure indeed.

Students at Wy'East and Hood River Middle School in Hood River County were beautifully prepared for my visit as part of Oregon Reads 2009. In both schools the readers' theatre girls added their own touches to the Bat 6 script, and the student audiences were alert, polite, and naturally curious. The Wy'East students had studied the book, made posters for every character, had their own photographs attached to a softball diamond, and their questions were informed and insightful. Hood River Valley High School athletes had visited with a demonstration of slow pitch and fast pitch softball, bringing the middle schoolers into closer touch with the physical story. Every student had read and considered the book, and they asked challenging questions. We took an informal vote about the story's ending.

The Friends of the Hood River County Library made these visits and study units possible, and are a bright example of the relationship that kids and libraries can thrive on.

My visit to the brand-new Seaside Public Library introduced me to students at the neighboring Broadway School, who, coached by their teacher, Mr. Habeker, performed the Bat 6 readers' theatre for a four-generation audience. Our discussion ranged across several of the hard questions that the book raises, and I was glad to meet with grandparents and great-grandparents who remembered all too clearly the harsh conditions of World War II. We were all gathered in one room whose walls displayed an exhibit of Japanese art. Poet and librarian Susan Firghil Park graciously hosted the program and helped everyone feel comfortable in discussing this uncomfortable story.

Sincere thanks to these Oregon communities for inviting me to join them in observing Oregon's sesquicentennial through books.

As Oregon's winter ebbs and we think about spring sports, the novel Bat 6, built around a postwar softball game, tends to make me feel more melancholy than it does during the rest of the year. The story was partly my personal response to Executive Order 9066, signed by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the winter of 1942. Are some students interested in researching First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt's feelings about that document?

By springtime of that year, "all persons of Japanese ancestry" living in the western United States were sent from their homes into improvised, unwelcoming relocation centers, and from there to internment camps, where most of them would stay, removed from their homes and imprisoned behind barbed wire, for the duration of World War II.

This part of our nation's history is bitter indeed. Those three words, "Executive Order 9066," bring up old resentments, fears, angers, guilt, providing an apt illustration of the truth that wars are never over when we try to think they are.

In visiting with young readers recently in Hillsboro, Lake Oswego, and at Dexter McCarty Middle School in Gresham, I've found that lots of kids have both curiosity about and respect for this complicated part of our history. They're willing to relive the school year 1948-49 with my fictional girls and their old- fashioned ways, their televisionless lives, their days and nights without iPods. During one of my Oregon Reads visits, I was privileged to meet the daughter of my childhood friend whose life was changed utterly by Executive Order 9066. As my friend's daughter and I shook hands and looked each other in the face for the very first time, history raced back and forth between us, challenging us to make sense of it at the beginning of the 21st century.

I'm not sure we human beings can make complete sense of our history. What we can do is keep telling the stories. And, luckily, we do just that. We keep trying to get it right.

Sunday, February 14, was Oregon's sesquicentennial, our very own Valentine. Our state's history is dramatic, fascinating, quite beautiful, and touched by ugliness in every era. Somehow we have to face this recurring ugliness and try to mend it.

Oregonians have a reputation of individuality. The notion of "standing up for what's right even if you're standing alone" is not specific to Oregon, but we do it. In the novel Bat 6, things go terribly wrong at the Bat 6 game. Everyone in the story is shocked, angry, confused. As I was writing the book, I had a note on my desk: "Someone is gonna have to do the right thing. Who will it be, and how will she or they do it?" I really didn't know.

As I looked through the characters, I found one who seemed to be ideally suited to do the right thing. She's an odd girl, one whom the others see as peculiar. But to her, her oddness isn't odd at all. It's who she is. (To me, my oddness is simply a part of who I am. Don't you feel that way about your oddness?) It is her oddness,her peculiarity, that enables her to do the right thing at the end of the story.

If I were to rewrite the book, I would treat the hero question the same way. I would still give the odd girl the privilege of showing us what bravery looks like.

The Oregon Reads discussions I've had with kids and adult readers in West Linn and Gladstone have been rewarding for me, and, I hope, for them. I'm looking forward to more of these discussions around our great state.

Happy Birthday, Oregon. And good reading to all of us. May we all find lifelong friends in books.

The year was 1949. Country kids didn't have TV, so they had to learn about life from their families and their communities. The USA was gleeful because the War was finally over. It was always called the War. Nobody had to explain which war; it had been so huge, so overwhelming, so deadly, all we needed to say was "the War." Even today, in 2009, when the word "post-war" is used, it refers to those years after the war of my childhood.

Why did I want to bring back the old war wounds, the old scars that the war had so cruelly left across the body of the USA? Partly because every generation of kids is just trying to live their lives, just trying to sing songs, invent games, learn social studies and math, form and re-form friendships, and play ball. And along comes a war. Most generations have these horrible interruptions. I wanted to tell a story of some kids just trying to have a childhood when things go horribly wrong. It turns out that when we think a war is over we might be mistaken.

In traveling to schools and libraries for Oregon Reads 2009, I've been delighted to see how the volunteers perform the short readers' theatre script that I've written for them. I selected small sections from the novel--sometimes just a sentence here and a sentence there--and put them together to form a mini-play for voices. The girls put on the team caps I bring along with me, red for Barlow and Green for Bear Creek Ridge, with the team names and the Bat 6 date on them. They've rehearsed the script with adult help, and they step gracefully up to the plate and deliver a dramatic introduction to the story. The audiences love it.

But there are questions, too. Always. Why is Shazam the way she is? Couldn't she be some other way? Why is Aki so nice all the time? With 21 narrators, do we have to remember who said what? Why didn't the characters see what was coming and make it not happen? What about the grownups? Why does the book end the way it does?

These are excellent questions and it's my privilege to help find some answers.

I've been treated to superb visits in The Dalles and in McMinnville. I'll be traveling to other libraries and schools in the next few weeks, meeting with readers who are willing to reach back 60 years to a time when it seems that things may have been simpler. Were things really simpler back then? What do you think?

Thanks for reading this book as we honor Oregon's sesquicentennial anniversary. And what a great anniversary we get to celebrate: our very own state at age 150. As Tootie in Bat 6 might say, "Hubba hubba ding ding!"