CMIS Evaluation Fiction Focus

• Melina Marchetta is guest author on the OzProjects Beware of Books site next week. Students are invited to submit questions to Melina on the forum.
• House of Many Ways, Diana Wynne Jones’s newest title set not long after the events in Howl’s Moving Castle, is due here in August. This interview with the author sets the scene.
• A discussion guide has been released for Life as We Knew It, Susan Beth Pfeffer’s grim and scary tale of the consequences of a meteor hitting the moon. The sequel, the dead and the gone (the author’s preferred punctuation) has just arrived on our desk and will be reviewed shortly. It has been published here in paperback as The Dead and the Gone and the cover is not nearly as attractive as the American hardback. Pity.
• Literature teachers might like to follow this link from the Teaching Literature to Adolescents blog. Peter Smagorinsky, from the University of Georgia, is creating a growing list of titles to support conceptual themes such as Utopias and Dystopias, Conflict and  Justice. It’s a long list, and yes, the bias is American, but Smagorinsky is accepting suggestions for additions to the links, novels, poetry, drama, short stories, non-fiction titles, songs and films he is compiling for each theme.

Shaun Tan has hit the airwaves again, this time in conversation with Margaret Throsby on ABC Classic FM this morning. Listen or download the podcast here. The interview is punctuated with music selected by Shaun.

ALAN, the Assembly on Literature for Adolescents, has announced the 2008 Award recipient is Laurie Halse Anderson.

This prestigious US award honours someone who has made a significant contribution to young adult literature in whatever capacity, not just writing. In receiving the award, Laurie Halse Anderson is in the company of authors such as Robert Cormier (1982), Madeleine L’Engle (1986), Cynthia Voigt (1989) and Jerry Spinelli (2005).

Anderson’s titles include Speak (2001) - also a Michael L. Printz Honor Book - Catalyst (2002), Fever 1793 (2002) and Prom (2005).

There’s no need to call us Ishmael - we didn’t faint on Friday at Novel Ideas, the fantastic professional learning day organised by the State Library of Victoria’s Centre for Youth Literature. The brief was to talk about new titles for Years 7 and 8, so the suitcases were heavier than usual for the long trip.

Morris Gleitzman started the day by talking about his books and his writing rationale. A first person narrative enables readers to empathise with the main characters; the curve balls keep readers engaged and have them asking questions. And the three essential questions he believes all young readers should be asking in any text are:

• Who is telling us?
• Why are they telling us?
• What does what they are telling us really mean?

In the course of their stories, all of Morris’s characters undergo a process that he believes is a recipe for anyone’s successful life journey:

• When a problem or obstacle confronts them, they know how to find the information they need to look for a solution
• They take responsibility for the tasks, challenges and problems in their lives
• They know what questions to ask and to question everything they are told
• They are creative thinkers
• They know what moral choices to make, but these are not always clear-cut, and they understand that the choices they make could have negative consequences for others

Morris started the day with a thought-provoking talk that offered a useful context for looking at any of his books. His latest title Then, due to be published soon, is a sequel to the tough Holocaust story, Once.

More about Novel Ideas soon.

The papertigers site is currently celebrating Asian Pacific Heritage Month and has a terrific collection of authors talking about what it means to be a writer with what Laurence Yep calls an ‘ethnic qualifier’.

An interview with Linda Sue Park, author of the Newbery-winning A Single Shard, essays on topics such as breaking down the assumptions about books by ‘hyphenated Americans’ and book reviews make for some thoughtful reading, albeit with a distinct American focus. The pages will be up until the end of June.

And if you haven’t yet caught up with American Born Chinese, Gene Luen Yang’s award-winning graphic novel, make the celebration of this month the catalyst to do so.

All at the CBCA Conference last Sunday morning were transfixed by Neil Gaiman’s readings of his own poetry scattered throughout his keynote speech. Wonderful, dark and moody, the poems revisited fairytales and cast new light on familiar landscapes. Nothing can match Neil’s own telling, but Fiction Focus has received permission to link to the text of three of these poems that appear in the online Journal of the Mythic Arts, published by Endicott Studio.

So if you were there, reimagine the morning and Neil’s beautifully paced readings. If you weren’t there, you are bound to enjoy the poems in their own right.

• Locks
• Instructions
• Boys and Girls Together

Margaret Atwood and Jane Yolen are among the authors with poetry on the fairytale section of the site. Add some background reading of Jack Zipes’s Don’t Bet on the Prince or The Trials and Tribulations of Little Red Riding Hood and a challenging unit of work for senior students is begging to be written.

The clever people at UK charity Autism Speaks have come up with a great fund raising idea. Seventeen authors, including Louis de Bernieres, Jodi Picoult and Darren Shan, have agreed to participate in an EBay auction, with the winning bidder for each author guaranteed to become a character in their next novel. Hot bidding for Darren Shan saw 27 bids raise ₤1020. Somebody called Caroline is about to meet a grisly end in his next Demonata title, due to be published in October.

World Autism Awareness Day was marked on April 2.

The Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award 2008 goes to the Australian author Sonya Hartnett.

The jury said about her:
“Sonya Hartnett (Australia) is one of the major forces for renewal in modern young adult fiction. With psychological depth and a concealed yet palpable anger, she depicts the circumstances of young people without avoiding the darker sides of life. She does so with linguistic virtuosity and a brilliant narrative technique; her works are a source of strength.” More

For reviews of Sonya’s books and the awards she has won, check the Author entry on our website.

Brian Selznick is receiving extensive media attention after receiving the Caldecott Medal for The Invention of Hugo Cabret. This interview in the New York Times gives some background to the writing of the work, and the film influences that permeate it.

We reviewed this title in Fiction Focus, Issue 2, 2007 and pointed to the accompanying website which includes a screening of the world’s first science fiction movie, A Trip to the Moon, made in 1909 by Georges Méliès. Take a look - it enriches the whole Cabret experience.