When I Was Your Age, Volume Two: Original Stories About Growing Up
When I Was Your Age, Volume Two: Original Stories About Growing Up
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Overview
"Ehrlich offers more of a good thing in this second volume of memoirs of adolescence by renowned, contemporary YA authors." – Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Tell me a story of when you were little," children everywhere love to ask. In this acclaimed collection, ten award-winning, well-known writers comply by reaching across their own childhoods to those of their readers. Whether telling of growing up in Japan or upstate New York or the California coast, recalling The Great Depression or World War II or the 1950s, describing children’s victories or heartaches, the writers of these stories make it clear that despite the difference between one childhood and another, all children share a complex humanity and a deep capacity for joy.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780763680633 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Candlewick Press |
| Publication date: | 08/04/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| File size: | 5 MB |
| Age Range: | 9 - 12 Years |
About the Author
“Step into the wood-shingled house I grew up in, and into the past. You find us gathered in the living room, listening to my writer father, Sid Fleischman, reading his latest chapter aloud. Outside, the breeze off the Pacific, ten blocks away, streams through the fruit trees my parents have planted and rustles the cornfield in our front yard — the only cornfield in all of Santa Monica, California.”
Scant surprise that Paul Fleischman grew up to write Weslandia, about a grammar-school misfit who founds a new civilization in his suburban backyard, built around a mysterious wind-sown plant. A taste for nonconformity and a love of the plant world run through many of his books, including Animal Hedge, in which a father uses a clipped shrub to guide his sons in choosing their careers.
“My mother plays piano, my father classical guitar. From upstairs that evening comes the entrancing sound of my sisters playing a flute duet. The house resounds with Bach, Herb Alpert, Dodgers games, and Radio Peking coming from my shortwave radio.”
From that musical, multitrack upbringing came Joyful Noise: Poems for Two Voices, winner of the Newbery Medal, and Big Talk, its sequel for a quartet of speakers. It’s also the source of the author’s madcap play, Zap, a theatrical train wreck of seven simultaneous plays, the result of a stage company’s attempt to compete with TV.
“My father’s interest in things historical has led to the purchase of a hand printing press. We’ve all learned to set type. I have my own business, printing stationery for my parents’ friends. I read type catalogs along with Dylan Thomas and Richard Brautigan.”
History has informed many of Paul’s books, from the colonial settings of his Newbery Honor book Graven Images, inspired by his years living in a two-hundred-year-old house in New Hampshire, to the newly updated Dateline: Troy, which juxtaposes the Trojan War story with strikingly similar newspaper clippings from World War I to the Iraq War.
“An old issue of Mad magazine sits on a table, along with a copy of the Daily Sun-Times and Walnut, the satiric underground paper I started with two friends, which landed us in the dean’s office today—again.”
What better education for the future author of A Fate Totally Worse Than Death, a wicked parody of teen horror novels,? Or for the visual humor of Sidewalk Circus, a wordless celebration of how much more children see than their elders?
“Thirty-five years later, I still draw on Bach, living-room theater, the look of letters on a page, and still aspire to the power of a voice coming from a radio late at night in a pitch-black room.”
Norma Fox Mazer (1931–2009) published more than thirty books, including two collections of her short stories, a novelization of a movie, and three novels on which she collaborated with her husband, Harry Mazer. She co-edited a poetry anthology, Waltzing on Water, and has published original short stories and numerous essays and articles in anthologies and magazines ranging from Redbook to Child Life to English Journal.
Her books are often on the American Library Association Best Books for Young Adults lists.She has received a Newbery Honor, the Edgar Allan Poe Award, the Christopher Medal, the California Young Reader Medal, the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award twice, the Iowa Teen Award twice, and the ALAN Award and has been nominated for the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Book Prize. Her books have been published in England and Australia and translated into various languages, including German, French, Spanish, Dutch, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, and Japanese.
Through his writing, Michael J. Rosen addresses some of the issues that matter most to him—“but sideways,” he says. “I can’t begin head-on, just writing about a cause or a problem. Even though I try to talk about human predicaments and human wrongs—toward animals, the earth, or one another—I need to start with a single image, one odd turn of events, or a particular remark.”
An acclaimed author, editor, and illustrator of some forty books for both adults and young people, Michael J. Rosen draws much of his inspiration from his lifelong experience with animals, whether as a college zoology major, a bird watcher, a dog trainer, or the founder of a granting program to help humane societies care for less fortunate cats and dogs. Don’t Shoot!, for instance, follows the reaction of an animal-loving teenage boy who is horrified to encounter a culture of deer hunting when his family leaves Columbus, Ohio, to live in a house in the country. “When I moved from the major city where I’d lived most of my life to a rural community, the changes were monumental,” the author notes. “And I often thought, What if I hadn’t actually chosen to live here? I wrote Don’t Shoot! not only to imagine this new way of life from a teenage point of view, but also to consider the complicated (and always teetering) balance we try to achieve, living, as we all do, amid an ever-diminishing natural world.”
When he’s not writing, editing, or drawing, Michael J. Rosen likes to garden, cook, and collect—dog paraphernalia, of course. “I have lots of old dog books, sculptures, and pictures that kids and folk artists have made of their dogs, dog toys, old wooden dog-shaped door stops, and vintage dog pillows,” he says. “My office is just a kennel of drawn, carved, modeled, sewn, and colored dogs.” Born and reared in Columbus, Ohio, the author now lives with his family—which of course includes dogs and a cat—on ninety forested acres in central Ohio.
I was born on February 11, 1939, in New York City. My father was a journalist, writing for the New York newspapers. My mother was a psychiatric social worker until I was born. I went to PS 93, where I was a gold-star kid, writing a lot and singing with my pals. I took piano lessons, and I studied ballet at Balanchine’s School of American Ballet. Then I got into Hunter Junior High School and discovered that there were a lot of gold-star girls all over the city. What a shock! I had to work hard just to stay in the middle of the class.
At Smith College, I discovered (again) that many of the gold-star girls were there. I had to work hard just to stay in the middle of the class. But by the end of my four years, I was president of the Press Board, won the poetry and journalism awards, and wrote the lyrics to the class musical as well as starring in our senior show. I wrote a book of poems, many of which were published in small journals like the Grecourt Review and the Chicago Jewish Forum.
After college, I moved to New York City and became an editor, writing during lunch breaks, evenings, and weekends. I considered myself a poet and a nonfiction writer. But to my surprise, my first book was for children, selling it on my twenty-second birthday. It was called Pirates in Petticoats.
I have written more than three hundred books since then.
The first man I married, David Stemple, is the only man I married. He and I had three children and six grandchildren. Alas, he died of cancer in 2006, after forty-four years of a wonderful marriage. I live in western Massachusetts next door to my marvelous daughter, Heidi (the little girl in Owl Moon) and her two daughters. My sons live far away with their families: Adam in Minneapolis, Jason in Charleston, South Carolina. I also have a house in Scotland where I live four months of the year. The rest of my life is all book talk.
My Candlewick books are pretty varied, as are all my books. There is Soft House, a picture book about how on rainy days my children used to make a house out of sofa cushions and eat chocolate chip cookies in there, accompanied by the cat. This Little Piggy is a compilation of lap and clapping songs, finger games, knee-bouncing rhymes, and songs (with music by my son Adam), many of the games were ones I use to play with my children when they were small. Our special favorite was “Trot, Trot to Boston,” a raucous knee-bouncer. Then there is Here’s a Little Poem, an anthology of a child’s first poems that I collected with my British friend Andrew Fusek Peters and that includes (among other poets) my daughter Heidi’s poem about ice cream. The book has won a number of awards and citations, including the Bank Street Children’s Book Award. Switching on the Moon, another anthology done with Andrew, concentrates on night poems and lullabies. Take Two: A Celebration of Twins, created with J. Patrick Lewis, is a collection of poems and images for the twins of the world.
And there are two rhymed picture books called Creepy Monsters, Sleepy Monsters, and Romping Monsters, Stomping Monsters.
Three Things You Might Not Know About Me:
1. I lost my fencing foil in Grand Central Station on a date. And no—I don’t remember who I was dating, or why we were in Grand Central Station, or why I had my foil with me.
2. I have ridden Lipizzaner horses, been on a dogsled ride in Alaska, and gone white-water rafting down the Colorado River, but the wildest thing I have ever done is to sing blues with my son’s rock-and-roll band!
3. Mr. Rogers shook my hand and told me he was a big fan of my books and I almost passed out with excitement.