Clare Hodgson Meeker, Author of the Month: Born to Love Animals

A few months ago, I wrote a guest post for Newbery Honor-winning author Kirby Larson’s Friend Friday blog about my latest book, Rhino Rescue!, and the amazing and risky work that animal-care specialists do to help endangered animals survive.

Shortly after the article was published, Dereck and Beverly Joubert, two National Geographic Explorers-in-Residence I interviewed for the book, had a close brush with death when a buffalo attacked Beverly near their camp one evening in the Okavango Delta. Beverly was speared by the animal’s horns, causing her serious injuries. Dereck was injured, too, but not as badly, and was able to rescue her. They then spent a long, perilous night waiting to be airlifted to a hospital.

Four surgeries later, Beverly has made a miraculous recovery and the couple was able to leave the hospital together earlier this month. Dereck’s comment on their Facebook page this week shows the true grit these Rhino rescuers possess as they look forward to getting back to work with Rhinos Without Borders airlifting these endangered animals to a safer home:

“You can anticipate more fire in our veins for this cause we appear to have been born to.”

Good News from the Online Author Visits Team!

Martha Brockenbrough will have a biography of Alexander Hamilton for young adults coming out next fall. Meanwhile, The Game of Love and Death made the International Literary Association’s Young Adult Choices 2016 list.

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New on the drawing table for illustrator Erik Brooks? His first board book project with Sasquatch Books! Stay tuned for additional news in future posts, but here is a cover sketch and some sample color for IF I WERE A WHALE by Shelley Gill:

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Dori Hillestad Butler skyped with classrooms in Texas, Maine and Hawaii this month and shared some behind-the-scenes stories about  Haunted Library #7: The Ghost in the Tree House (Grosset & Dunlap), which was published this Spring. She also learned that Japanese, Portuguese and Czech language rights have been sold to the first three books in the series and that book club rights to book 2 were sold to Scholastic.

Dori was excited to hear that the Washington Library Media Association has created a new transitional chapter book award (the Otter Award) and her Haunted Library #1 is on that first list. Washington kids will vote on their favorite chapter book starting in 2017.

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Joan Holub and Suzanne Williams are happy to announce that film/TV animation rights to their Goddess Girls series have been optioned to Universal Home Entertainment.

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Clare Hodgson Meeker‘s Rhino Rescue! just got a great review from Booklist (May 1, 2016). Here are a few excerpts:

“Featuring three stories of dramatic, inspiring rescues and rife with color photos, this National Geographic Kids Chapter series entry offers and engaging, accessibly written addition to animal-rescue-themed books….”

“…Word pronunciations, including locations, are helpfully embedded within the main text, and factoid-rich sidebars add helpful bonus information…”

“…Throughout, the featured animals provide a personalized account of the challenges facing endangered animal species while highlighting their human rescuers. The back matter includes information on rescue organizations.”

 

It was also chosen as A Junior Library Guild Spring 2016 Selection.

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At the end of April, Lisa L. Owens had the great pleasure of Skyping with Grade 5 students from Konawaena Elementary in Hawaii. At the students’ request, she discussed the making of her graphic novelizations of the classic tales Black Beauty and The Hunchback of Notre Dame, then answered the kids’ insightful questions about the writing life. In early May, she donned her editor’s persona to give an in-depth talk for the Northwest Independent Editors Guild on her extensive experience doing developmental editing in the children’s market. And, just last week, she learned that her forthcoming elementary-level biographies about explorers Hernán Cortés and Robert de la Salle have a publication date. Look for them from Lerner in Fall 2017.

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Laurie Ann Thompson is thrilled to share that Emmanuel’s Dream is a Notable Book in the Children’s Africana Book Awards!

It has also appeared on several more state lists, including being a Star North Nominee in the Minnesota Youth Reading Awards, a nominee for the 2016-2017 Black-Eyed Susan Book Award by the Maryland Association of School Librarians, a nominee for the the 2017 Children’s Literature Association of Utah (CLAU) Beehive Award, and a Transitional Non-Fiction Honor Book in the 2015 Maryland Blue Crab Young Reader Awards.

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Trudi Trueit is currently writing a pair of nonfiction books for the Detecting Disasters series: Detecting Avalanches and Detecting Volcanoes (ages 8 – 10). A former TV weather forecaster, she’s written a number of books about weather watching, storm chasing, and the water cycle for classroom and library use across North America. The disaster books will be published in the summer of 2017. In the meantime, look for her new nonfiction children’s titles later this summer, Mother’s Day Crafts and Birthday Crafts (both from The Child’s World). Trudi worked in a craft store through high school and college and loves all things crafty! For more of her nonfiction titles, visit her website at www.truditrueit.com

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Suzanne Williams had a great time speaking to K-5 students at Eastgate Elementary’s 27th annual Young Author’s Day in Bellevue on May 20th. She also signed 162 books!

Clare Hodgson Meeker, Author of the Month: Creating Nature Narratives in the Classroom

One of my favorite writing workshops for elementary school–aged kids is to have them create Nature Narratives, or fictional stories starring an animal they choose as the main character.

The first step: Find three facts about their animal that they can use in their story.

Every story has a problem to solve. In the natural world, there are problems of survival: finding food and shelter, dealing with predators, and raising a family. There could also be environmental problems humans have created in their habitat.

What’s the animal’s goal? Several years ago, I wrote a monthly series of nature narrative stories for the National Wildlife Federation’s Your Big Backyard magazine. These stories are now published in ebook form at schoolwide.com. One of them, Up and Away, is about a family of baby spiders that emerge from the egg sac and need to find new homes. Three facts:

 

• Baby spiders spin threads, which they let out into the wind to carry them to a new place.
• Birds are potential predators.
• Hundreds of baby spiders are holed up together in one egg sac.

What are three problems or obstacles along the way to reaching the main character’s goal? The idea here is that each problem provides dramatic tension in the story and every solution to a problem helped move the plot further along toward reaching the main character’s goal.

Using my Up and Away story as an example:

1. The first obstacle is getting out of the egg sac. The solution is that the baby spiders tear open the egg sac together and crawl out.
2. Now they are hungry. But their mother has conveniently left a dead fly next to the egg sac for them.
3. The third problem is that Wendy Wren is flying near where the baby spiders are. With a little help from Olive Opossum (the main character in the series), who distracts Wendy Wren with conversation, the baby spiders are able to scurry up to the top of a bush and balloon off into the wind.

One last plotting idea that really grabs kids’ attention is the darkest moment! Nature Narratives really lend themselves well to the idea of whether the character will survive to reach its goal. The darkest moment in the story is when the main character has a moment of doubt or fear about whether he or she can overcome the last obstacle. This is a great time to make a list of adjectives with the class that describe this emotional cliffhanger in the story.

The climax of the story is when the main character figures out a way to solve this problem and summons the courage to face this last challenge and reach his goal.

Let your imagination go wild and have fun writing Nature Narratives!

Clare Hodgson Meeker is the author of 11 books for young readers, including the Smithsonian Notable Book Lootas, Little Wave Eater: An Orphaned Sea Otter’s Story. Her new chapter book, Rhino Rescue! And More True Stories of Saving Animals is published by National Geographic KIDS and will be available in bookstores starting this month. She works from home on Mercer Island near Seattle, and teaches writing in schools through Seattle Arts and Lectures.

Author site: www.claremeeker.com
Blog: www.claremeeker.com/blog
Twitter: @ClareMeeker