When I Was Your Age, Volume One: Original Stories About Growing Up
When I Was Your Age, Volume One: Original Stories About Growing Up
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Overview
Perfect for literature classes and beginning writers of all ages!
"Tell me a story of when you were little" is something children love to ask. Now ten award-winning writers: Mary Pope Osborne, Laurence Yep, James Howe, Katherine Paterson, Walter Dean Myers, Susan Cooper, Nicholasa Mohr, Reeve Lindbergh, Avi, and Francesca Lia Block tell young readers stories drawn from their own childhood memories. The authors have also contributed notes about why they chose particular memories to write about and what in their lives led them to be writers. In this way, the extraordinary stories in When I Was Your Age bear witness to the origins of a writer’s art--and honor the courage, tenderness, and fragility of children.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780763680626 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Candlewick Press |
| Publication date: | 08/04/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Lexile: | 850L (what's this?) |
| File size: | 4 MB |
| Age Range: | 10 - 12 Years |
About the Author
Avi is part of a family of writers extending back into the nineteenth century. Born in 1937 and raised in New York City, Avi was educated in local schools before going to the Midwest and then back to NYC to complete his education. He started out as a playwright while working for many years as a librarian. He began writing books for young people when the first of his kids came along.
His first book was published in 1970. Since then he has published more than seventy books and won many awards, including the Newbery Medal, two Newbery Honors, two Boston Globe–Horn Book Awards, a Scott O’Dell Award for Historical Fiction, and many children’s choice awards. Avi frequently travels to schools around the country to talk to his readers.
Among his most popular books are Crispin: The Cross of Lead, The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle, Nothing But the Truth, the Poppy books, Midnight Magic, and The Fighting Ground. His other books with Candlewick Press include What Do Fish Have to Do with Anything? and The Most Important Thing: Stories About Sons, Fathers, and Grandfathers. Avi lives in Clark, Colorado, with his wife.
Susan Cooper is the author of the classic five-volume fantasy sequence The Dark Is Rising (including the Newbery Medal winner The Grey King) as well as many other books for children and adults. She has contributed selections to two anthologies produced by the Candlewick and the National Children’s Book and Literacy Alliance: Our White House and The Exquisite Corpse. Her latest book for Candlewick is The Magic Maker: A Portrait of John Langstaff, creator of The Christmas Revels. She has two Writers’ Guild awards for television films, was co-author of the Broadway play Foxfire and is a board member of the National Children’s Book and Literacy Alliance. She lives on a salt marsh island in Massachusetts.
Reeve Lindbergh grew up in a household where writing was a way of life. Her mother, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, was a well-known author, and her father, Charles Lindbergh, was as respected for his writing as he was as an aviator. “I can’t recall any time during my childhood when one of my parents was not engaged in writing a book,” she says. “This made us believe that the best thing you could do with an interesting idea or experience was to write it down.”
Following this example, Reeve Lindbergh drew on her childhood experience to create many of her memorable books. Inspirational words from her past infuse In Every Tiny Grain of Sand: A Child’s Book of Prayers and Praise, a collection of seventy-seven treasured poems and prayers from many cultures and faiths. “It is a joy to see familiar and beloved words from my own childhood come to life for other children in the presence of such beautiful paintings by four remarkable artists,” she says of the book’s illustrators, Christine Davenier, Bob Graham, Anita Jeram, and Elisa Kleven. About The Circle of Days, an adaptation of the “Canticle of the Sun,” she notes, “I have always loved the simple, strong voice of Saint Francis of Assisi giving thanks for life itself and celebrating everything in existence.” And On Morning Wings, luminously illustrated by Holly Meade, is a gentle adaptation of one of her father’s favorite psalms, words from which he chose to have inscribed on his gravestone.
Reeve Lindbergh’s My Little Grandmother Often Forgets, illustrated by Kathryn Brown, was inspired by her experiences as an adult, watching her mother and her son together. It is a deeply personal and lyrical tale about a grandson and a grandmother affected by memory loss. “When my mother came to live with us on our farm in Vermont, she was old and fragile, with the kind of memory loss that caused her to feel disorientated often,” the author explains. “It was really disconcerting and troubling for my son, as it was for her and for all of us, for a while. Thank goodness, as time went on everybody relaxed and gave up on all this organizing and reminding. Then it was possible to spend time with my mother, just to be with her quietly in a family, all together. I thought this story might mean something to other children and other families confronted by memory loss in an older family member, though I altered it a bit, and made it a rhyming story. I really wanted My Little Grandmother Often Forgets to be fun to read— not a lecture for children on Alzheimer’s disease and dementia, just a story, in rhyme, like all the others I write.”
Reeve Lindbergh, who also wrote Nobody Owns the Sky and My Hippie Grandmother and contributed to When I Was Your Age: Original Stories About Growing Up, an anthology of works by ten award-winning writers, now lives in the remote Northeast Kingdom area of Vermont on a farm with her husband and youngest son.