Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast

This is little Casey Jenkins. He’s the the worst player in the Delmar Dogs, the underdog Little League team of James Preller’s new picture book, Mighty Casey, a re-working of Ernest Thayer’s Casey at the Bat, illustrated by Matthew Cordell (Feiwel & Friends; March, 2009). “It’s unkind to speak ill / of a batter who can’t hit. / So, um, gee . . . that Casey . . . / he sure could chew and spit!” writes Preller. Not only does Casey’s every at-bat end “not with a bang, but a whiff,” but his teammates aren’t faring much better: Omar scrapes a knee, Ronald relieves himself over in left field, Ashanti takes a nap, Tommy Maney’s climbed a tree, Jamal got stung by a bee, and Johnny Reel refuses to run. Eventually, things turn around for the boys, and above we have Casey up to bat there, during a crucial moment. He strides to the plate, as you can see. He really is a true-blue geek—a lovable one at that—so I love the seriousness with which he taps his cleats there.

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Jules: Author/Illustrator Selina Alko is visiting today, and I just have to open with her illustration of Tennessee from Sheila Keenan’s nonfiction title, Greetings from the 50 States (Scholastic). And that’s because Eisha and I are both from Tennessee (well, okay, I was really born in Kentucky but consider Tennessee home), even though I returned after a bit of time away from it but Eisha up and moved to Massachusetts and then settled in New York. (I think, however, that she’ll always be a Southern girl at heart, y’all. She can correct me if I’m wrong, but once you’ve lived in the shadow of those Great Smoky Mountains, as we both did for quite a while, the state quite firmly settles itself into a cozy corner of your heart. One with fiddles playing on the radio and a stash of MoonPies and Jack Daniel’s nearby.)

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Jules: As I mentioned yesterday here at 7-Imp, I’m happy to be involved in this week’s blog tour for and by the people who create and engage their readers: teachers, librarians, parents, and people passionate about literacy. Yes, a literacy blog tour: It’s a way to share ideas and celebrate everything reading has to offer our children. I love the idea, and I’m pleased to be one of the many voices this week in this literacy project. It’s called Share a Story — Shape a Future, and it’s the brainchild of Terry Doherty from The Reading Tub. Check out the project’s web site if you want to backtrack and read what you’ve missed this week and if you want to see what’s-to-come. Here’s a master schedule; Day One was devoted to “Raising Readers,” Day Two to “Selecting Reading Material,” and yesterday to “Reading Aloud — It’s Fun, It’s Easy.”

Today, Day Four of the tour, is a day devoted to “A Visit to the Library.” (Check the bottom of this post for today’s—and the rest of this week’s—schedule.) I am joined by public librarian Adrienne Furness. I already gushed yesterday about why I instantly thought of interviewing her for this literacy blog tour, so I’ll try not to make her blush today. Bottom line is that she’s an exemplary public librarian.

Adrienne is one of two Children & Family Services Librarians at the Webster Public Library in the Monroe Country Library System in Rochester, New York. She blogs at What Adrienne Thinks About That, as well as here at the Monroe County Library System and the wonderful Homeschooling and Libraries. She’s the author of Helping Homeschoolers in the Library, published by ALA Editions last year.

We’re here to talk about how patrons can best make the library work in their favor. Adrienne, isn’t it fun to be a part of this multi-blog project? I’m especially happy to be involved, since I am currently not working in a library, though I have the requisite degree and such. I’m working from home, part-time and in my jammies, yet I know from my previous experience as a librarian some of the misconceptions about library use. And I’m glad to play a part, I hope, in helping clear some of them up. (By the way, because I cannot stand to post without images, I’m going to throw in some book covers of titles about libraries. Just below is probably my very favorite one.)

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This week marks an unusual blog tour, Share a Story — Shape a Future, the brainchild of Terry Doherty from The Reading Tub. I meant to post about this earlier this week and was probably way remiss in not doing so, but I’m just coming up for air and uncrossing my eyes after the chock-full-‘o’-art Dave McKean interview.

We hear about blog tours all the time, but this is a unique—and wonderful—one, indeed. It’s a one-week literacy blog tour that is “for and by the people who create and engage their readers: teachers, librarians, parents, and people passionate about literacy.” You can head over to Terry’s blog to catch up on what’s been posted this week at all kinds of blogs, and you can also hit Jen Robinson’s site to take a gander. (That Jen with all her many passionate literacy efforts; I don’t know how she does it. She rocks, as the kids say. Terry, too, for that matter. Everyone behind this entire blog tour deserves a big ‘ol round of applause. I almost typed applesauce. Hey, let’s give ’em some applesauce, too.)

The project has its own site here, probably the very best spot in which to get caught up. (Here’s a master schedule; Day One was devoted to “Raising Readers,” Day Two to “Selecting Reading Material,” and today to “Reading Aloud — It’s Fun, It’s Easy.”) I’ll be involved in the tour tomorrow: I’ll be interviewing/chatting with public librarian extraordinnaire Adrienne Furness about how to make the library work for YOU — yes, YOU, the patron. Let me just say now—so that I don’t make her blush tomorrow—that one of the reasons I chose her to interview is that, seriously, don’t you wish all public librarians were as smart and friendly and fun and passionate about literature and library programming as she is? I made that “passionate about literature” irritatingly big, because I believe it’s fundamental to those who work with children and books. And Adrienne’s got it goin’ on something fierce.

I’m happy to be involved in such a unique blog tour. To celebrate, I’ve got my own pic up here of my wee’est one, reading one of her favorite books (Elisa Kleven’s The Apple Doll) in the sunlight (which is why the feline, Lyra, is also there).

See you tomorrow when I’ll have Adrienne over for coffee and one very possible discussion before breakfast . . .

Jules: Artist Dave McKean, whom 7-Imp welcomes this morning with a big, strong cup of coffee and all kinds of adoration and severely geeky fan-dom, is capable of way more than seven impossible things before breakfast, it’s safe to say. He’s an award-winning graphic novelist; author; photographer; designer; illustrator of hundreds of comic-book and book covers, as well as CDs; editorial illustrator; film designer; director; and jazz pianist, even co-founding the record label Feral Records with saxophonist and composer Iain Ballamy. I’m probably missing a whole slew of other things. Dave McKean is unceasingly inventive.

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Jules: Welcome to 7-Imp’s weekly meeting ground for taking some time to reflect on Seven(ish) Exceptionally Fabulous, Beautiful, Interesting, Hilarious, or Otherwise Positive Noteworthy Things from the past week, whether book-related or not, that happened to you.

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This is not a political blog. Or a current events blog. Or even a “here’s Jules and Eisha’s opinions on random stuff” blog. It’s supposed to be, as the byline says, a blog about books.

Okay. But.

Yesterday, as you may have heard, the Taliban bombed the shrine of Sufi poet Rahman Baba in Pakistan. They had warned the locals that the shrine would be destroyed if women continued to visit it, because doing so “promotes obscenity.”

I wanted to call attention to this evil by posting some of Rahman Baba’s poetry today. It turns out it’s hard to find much of his stuff translated into English online, and what I did find… well, honestly, it didn’t quite do it for me.

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See this fabulous spread? This is from a new picture book, entitled You Never Heard of Sandy Koufax?! (Schwartz & Wade; February, 2009) by Jonah Winter and illustrated by André Carrilho. And this title has the most exciting picture book art I’ve seen all year, I have to say.

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Here’s one of the best things about blogging: I get to chat with book-creators whose work I have admired for a long time. Illustrator Stefano Vitale is one of those people. His art work is a force of nature, and whenever I see that he’s illustrated a new title, I run to find a copy.

Even though I didn’t get to chat with him directly—this was one of those interviews conducted via his publicist (I’m sure he’s a very busy guy, so this is hardly a complaint)—I’m still thrilled that I was two degrees away from someone whose art work has brought me so much joy. Better yet, I get to either share it with fellow fans today OR introduce the uninitiated to his books and show you what his paintbrush can produce. Both things are big kicks, indeed.

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Jules: Can you believe it’s already the first Sunday in a new month? I can’t. But you know what it means when the first Sundays come along: We highlight a student of illustration or an illustrator otherwise new to the field in some way. This morning, 7-Imp welcomes Chantal Bennett, who . . . well, no introduction is necessary on my part, because when I asked if she’d like to say a few words to introduce herself, she ran with it and did a fine job, indeed, of giving us a bit of insight into her work and her plans. So, without further ado and with many thanks to Chantal for stopping by—especially for that enchanting opening image up there—here she is:

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