Author: Joy Murray

I'm a 60 year old artist in Memphis, Tennessee. I spend my life trying to catch stories, give them form, color and light, then send back out into the world.

It’s a Bunny Life: El Deafo by Cece Bell

Posted in Cece Bell, Deafness, El Deafo, graphic memoir, graphic novel, http://schemas.google.com/blogger/2008/kind#post, super powers3 Comments
Many of the books I review I seek out, but some come to me in unexpected ways.  Along with the book Fleabrain Loves Frannie, I was given one I’d never heard of, called  El Deafo by Cece Bell, a graphic memoir novel.  I flipped through it  — bunny characters, a deaf girl, school problems, and intriguing scenes like this:
I love seeing Spock with bunny ears
In this after school special, the character is deaf and some one calls them deafo, which causes Cece some soul searching.
I was hooked, started reading, and pretty much devoured all 230 some odd pages.  It tells the story of a girl who contracted meningitis and lost her hearing at age 4.  She gets a bulky hearing aid she wears in a pouch around her neck with wires and earbuds.  It’s only partially successful.  What she hears is not what people are saying. 
She learns lip reading, but that’s not easy either. 
At first she’s in a school with other children who have deafness.  Then she moves and enters first grade with a device called the Phonic Ear, another bulky device, this one strapped to her chest, with more wires and earbuds.  
The teacher must use a microphone, but with it, Cece can hear perfectly.  In fact, she can hear her teacher not just in the classroom, but anywhere her teacher is in the building — the teacher’s lounge, the bathroom.  When she get’s older, she finds that El Deafo, Listener for All can help mere mortals when the teacher’s out of the room:
El Deafo also urges her to defend herself against the indignities she suffers from bullies and manipulative friends.  But it’s harder to manifest her El Deafo nature outside her imagination. 
This is a funny and perceptive book and is a great read for anyone who has felt different growing up, but especially for those who have obvious physical challenges and impairments.  Cece often lives in a bubble.  Friends don’t seem to understand her.  The one close friend she has abandons her after an accident.   There are touching scenes of friendships gone sour, first crushes, and family interactions.  The drawings are so expressive — tender and sweet and melancholy like childhood itself.
 
In her author’s note, Cece Bell, says, “El Deafois based on my childhood (and on the secret nickname I really did give myself back then).  It is in no way a representation of what all deaf people might experience.  It’s also important to note that while I was writing and drawing the book, I was more interested in capturing the specific feelings I had as a kid with hearing loss than in being 100 percent accurate with the details….But the way I felt as a kid — that feeling is all true.”
Though it is her specific story, it’s got a universal feel.  We’ve all had to deal with shame and desires to fit in.  And in overcoming that, we find a source of creativity.  “With a little creativity and a lot of dedication, any difference can be tuned into something amazing.  Our differences are our superpowers.”
Marketed to children ages 8 and up, I think it will help anyone tap into their superpowers, even readers in their 50s like me.  
Cece Bell has written and illustrated several books for children, including the Geisel Honor book Rabbit and Robot: The Sleepover and The Sock Monkey Series.  She lives in Virginia with her husband author Tom Angleberger.
You can learn more about her at her website, click here,  and see some of the inspiration for El Deafo, including a picture of the Miss Bunn doll that may be the origin of Bell’s delightful way of telling stories through bunnies. 
Miss Bunn was a gift when Cece was 4 and still in the hospital
Thanks for reading my blog.  For a very different but equally as fascinating graphic novel memoir, click to read this review of The White Duck: A Childhood in China by Na Liu and Andres Vera Martinez,

 I’d love to hear your comments.  If you like this post, feel free to share it.  

How to Build a Robot

Posted in book review, Bridge Meadows, cardboard robots, crafts for kids, flying eye books, http://schemas.google.com/blogger/2008/kind#post, Welcome To Your Awesome Robot review1 Comment
Noah Tanatchangsang is a 10 year old boy who lives in my neighborhood, Bridge Meadows. We are set up to help children being adopted out of the foster care system.  He’s one of 4 brothers who regularly come to my all ages art class in the community center.  I’ll never forget the day he came to me with the idea of building a robot.  We were drawing at a table with his rambunctious 4 and 2 year old brothers. 

Noah jumped up and said, “I forgot to bring something!”

His brothers were a little alarmed, but he said he’d be back soon.  To console themselves, the brothers wandered over to the ping pong table and tried to figure out how to play, even though both of them were shorter than the table. 
About 5 minutes later, I heard a muffled knock on the door.  I opened it to find a tall box at the door.  The box shuffled in and bumped into the ping pong table.  The boys laughed and began to beat the box with their ping pong paddles. 

“Stop, stop!” cried Noah from within the box. 

I got the boys under control while Noah wiggled out. 

“We could make a robot out of this box.  My mom was just going to throw it away.”

The younger boys couldn’t leave the box alone, so we decided it was best to keep it in my apartment.  That was in the spring.  For the next few months, when Noah was free from school work, after school activities, camping and traveling with his family, soccer games and home work, we built a robot. 
It was a  project that engaged his mind and fired his imagination.  A few days after he delivered the first box, he was at the door with another smaller box with clear plastic panels, perfect for the robot’s head.  Again, he said, “My mom was just going to throw it away.”



I tried to explain that we sometimes have to throw things away because there isn’t enough room to keep everything, but he’s not entirely convinced.  But it’s truly inspiring to watch a kid build things from things what would otherwise be thrown away.  It lets them see the magic of transformation in a way nothing else can.  You can read a post about how Noah first became aware that things can be fixed and transformed here.  We made a prosthetic leg for his Godzilla toy.

So I hope I’m inspiring an artist and not a hoarder.  I had a bag of odds and ends including pill bottle caps we could use as dials, paper towel tubes for the rockets, and fabric scraps for the cape.



Just as we were getting close to the end of the project, I found the book, Welcome to Your Awesome Robot, by Viviane Schwarz, Flying EyeBooks, a book I wish we’d had when we started.  It’s both a story and a manual, and it’s perfect for creating a project with a kid.  I love that it features a girl.  Noah loved that it came with cut-out decals, and instructions on how to make fuel input additions and functioning dials.  




He didn’t want to cut things out of the book, although we could have.  He wanted to keep it intact for future use.  And it’s a lovely book.  It’s like a large Moleskine sketchbook with a gray paper flexible cover, and embossed print.  The illustrations are energetic and charming.  I’m so glad to have discovered Viviane Shwarz’s whimsical world.  Her website has a video of her reading her book, Is There a Dog in this Book, a fun one with foldouts and surprises.  She also has a place to post any awesome robots you make.  


Great End Papers


You watch a kid and her adult assistant build the ‘bot



We copied and enlarged the Death Ray decal and pasted it by the robot dials to warn off any enemies.

We made a magic wand with an old outdoor light and the light from another toy

We got to  make certificates, too!

While we were working on the robot, Noah became enchanted by my reading light.


He wanted to make an angler fish with it.  I was reluctant to give it up and on a trip to the hardware store to buy robot arms (dryer vent tubes) we found another light that would work even better.  We’d learned a lot about cardboard with the robot, but with the angler fish, we learned how to bend it and shape it. 

Making Teeth

to welcome little fishies in with gently smiling jaws





When Noah made his debut at the community Halloween party last week, we had a story about the robot going to the bottom of the sea to bring back the angler fish. 




Kids of all ages at Bridge Meadows Halloween party


Between our own projects and what we learned from the Awesome Robot book, we’re ready to teach other kids how to build their own robots.  We figure the best time will be in January. As long as the other kids keep the boxes that their Christmas presents come in, we’ll have plenty of material to work with.  Now all we have to do is convince the parents not to throw all those cool boxes away.


Reuse and recycle!


Special thanks to Flying Eye books for Welcome to Your Awesome Robot.  Check out their website, they publish lots of amazing books for kids.  Their committed to sustainable manufacturing and encouraging creativity.  They’re publishing new authors and helping children discover the joys of well made books.  

Thanks for reading my blog!


Small Fantasy, Big Dreams

Posted in Chalotte's Web., Fleabrain loves Franny, http://schemas.google.com/blogger/2008/kind#post, Joanne Rocklin, Jonas Salk, middle grade novel, Polio vaccineLeave a comment
The first book I read by Joanne Rocklin was The Five Lives of Our Cat Zook, which became one of my favorite middle grade novels.  It examines the power of stories, and that fine line between lies and illuminations, in the voice of one of the most charming whopper-tellers I’ve ever run across.  You can read my review of that book here. 
 
Rocklin’s new book, Fleabrain Loves Franny, is a very different novel.  It’s the story of a young girl, Franny Katzenback, who is recovering from polio.  It’s set in 1952, in a suburb of Pittsburg, where a sense of quiet optimism is surrounding the development of a vaccine.  One of the men who works with Jonas Salk at the University of Pittsburg, Professor Guttman, is Franny’s neighbor.  But for Franny, the vaccine comes too late.  Her dreams are of a cure for the neuromuscular damage that has left her unable to walk, a dream that will not be fulfilled.   
 
Confined to the upstairs of her house, she endures the treatment of a mean nurse who tells her she can walk again if only she follows her exercises, ice packs and heat treatment.  Meanwhile, Franny must adjust to life without the use of her legs.  She is only happy when she’s immersed in the book Charlotte’s Web, which also came out in 1952.  In wishing for an insect companion to cheer her and save her from feelings of helplessness and anger, she begins a fantastic relationship with a flea. 
 
Fleabrain, a pompous and erudite flea, lives on the tail of Franny’s beloved dog.  Franny is able to see him through the bottle cap of Sparky’s Finest Soda, which has a small magnifying glass imbedded in it – “so the about-to-drinker would have a magnified view of all the bubbles, like luminous marbles swimming up from the bottom of the bottle.”  
 
Fleabrain tries to be luminous, and Franny is the light of his life.  He’s multi-lingual, highly educated, super-strong, and often ridiculous.  He’s jealous of Charlotte, even though she’s a fictional spider.  In this book, all the lines between fiction, fantasy and reality are blurred.  The simplicity of the setting for Charlotte’s web and its pastoral view of childhood is not replicated here.  Fleabrain is as likely to irritate as to be helpful, but he’s a flea, after all.  And Franny seems only to be able to imagine such a creature.    
 
And this flea is a magic flea, so he leads Franny on adventures saving people from fires, visiting the Seven Wonders of the World and lighting Christmas tree stars. Franny is whisked away from the cruelties of her nurse and the even more painful interactions with her former friends. 
 
None of her neighborhood friends will get close enough to her that she could touch them and infect them.  They believe she’s contagious and wear bags of garlic around their neck to ward off her germs.  Franny has to endure their patronizing and pity. While she’s grateful for a March of Dimes Walk to help fund the search for a vaccine, she feels awkward and unhinged by it all. 
 
“Other kids were calling her name from across the street…People began to clap for her – Franny! Franny!  Franny looked up and at her father and saw tears in his eyes.  She didn’t want her father to cry.  Franny understood a little better then how a poster child must feel, relieved to know that others understood the difficulty of it all.  She was grateful to the newspapers and the March of Dimes for educating the public.  But they were clapping for her as if she’d done something.   All she’d done was get polio.   
“’We miss you, Franny, ‘ called Teresa. 
“But which Franny?  Franny wanted to ask.  Which Franny do you miss?  Because, actually, I’ve been here all along.  In the flesh.” 
 
As her world becomes more complex, and she gets more control in her real life, her adventures with Fleabrain diminish.  Though the interactions with Fleabrain make up a lot of the book, it feels like he’s a conduit for her to get her back to a healthy image of herself without his help, that is, without the help of fantasy.  At first, no one understand Franny but Fleabrain, but as she grows, she outgrows her need for him.  Even as Fleabrain’s prickly ways soften, she goes about fixing herself in ways that are brave and audacious but much bigger than the flea inspired fantasies she’d previously allowed herself.  
 
Joanne Rocklin is a wonderful writer and her descriptions make even the most audacious events come alive.  She’s added newspaper reports of a helper/angel that describe some of Franny and Fleabrain’s adventures, leaving the reader to ponder what is real and what is fantasy.  This is a unique portrait of a complex girl in a complex time.  You can see a book trailer about it here, and also a link to a PDF document of all the books, movies and cultural events that Fleabrain and Franny refer to. The book has a great “Author’s Note” describing the race to find a vaccine for polio.
 
These references make the book somewhat dense, and this might be better for a teenage reader or younger reader who’s quite bookish.  It made me want to re-read not only Charlotte’s Web, but Kafka’s Metamorphosis.  How many books can you say that about?

By the way, for a charming post about why E.B. White chose a spider for his heroine for Charlotte’s web, read this post on Brain Pickings, and altogether engaging and insightful blog:

http://www.brainpickings.org/2013/10/15/e-b-white-on-charlottes-web/
 

Thanks for reading my blog.  I appreciate any comments and shares. 



Tara Books: Slender Art Galleries on the Book Shelf

Posted in Alone in the Forest, book arts, book review, Following My Paint Brush, Gobble You Up, Hope is a Girl Selling Fruit, http://schemas.google.com/blogger/2008/kind#post, Night Life of Trees, Stories, Tara Books4 Comments
Ever since the internet and inexpensive computers and e-readers came into existence, people have been speculating on the death of the book.  From where I sit, though, books are flourishing.  Instead of killing off the book, I think new technologies have allowed more people to produce more kinds of books and find an audience.
One of the newer presses I’m particularly grateful for is Tara Books.  I’m pretty sure I would never have even found out about them if it weren’t for modern networking through the internet.  Tara Books was started in Chennai, India, by visionary publisher Gita Wolf over 10 years ago.  Here’s an excerpt from an article by the Christian Science Monitor, July, 2014:
“Over the past 10 years, she (Gita Wolf) has collaborated with women tribal artists to create award-winning publications. In doing so, she’s helped the women step across the gulf that divides preliterate societies from the modern world of arts and letters.
”She had a young son and was dissatisfied with the available children’s books. She wanted to see bold illustrations that showed children the world of India, and she enlisted friends who were writers and designers to help create them.
“She was also active in the feminist and anti-caste movements. Five years ago she turned Tara into a worker-owned collective.”
The first book I bought from Tara was The Night Life of the Trees, by artists Durga Bai, Bhajju Shyam, and Ram Singh Urveti of the Gond tribe.  It was a pleasure to read, touch and see.  The art was exquisite line work in bright colors on black handmade paper.  The ink had a presence: it had what artist Tom Sarmo calls a “thingness.”  The narrative was poetic and told tales that blurred the borders between trees, humans, and creatures.  It was true work of art, handbound, and I could purchase it here in Portland for about $30.  Anyone anywhere could purchase it from Amazon.

It’s almost miraculous that these beautiful books by tribal people from a remote area can be bought and treasured everywhere in the world.
Not all their books are silk screened and handmade, but all of them are beautifully presented.
The latest book I got from them is Hope is a Girl Selling Fruit by Amrita Das.  Das has painted in the Mithila tradition of art, which originated from women living in rural Bihar.  Das builds on traditional style and creates a compelling story.  Her art illustrates her personal journey and the journey she imagines of an impoverished girl she met on a train.  The story honors the traditions of women in her culture but also questions the confines of their lives.  Even the girl who represents hope is a mixed metaphor — the art beautiful, the life it portrays hard.
“This other girl was poor too, and her clothes were torn.  She had lost a leg, but she managed to push her cart around confidently.  Two boys pointed to her and laughed, but she wasn’t bothered….  She’s her own creature, I thought, she walking around, she’s earning and supporting her family.”
I learn more about human strength and dignity in a book like this than I can ever glean from the news or documentaries.  Tara doesn’t print books about artists, the artists speak for themselves.  And it turns out their personal stories are universal, with undertones of myth and magic.
In a similar vein, Following my Paintbrush by Dulari Deva, text by Gita Wolf, is done also in colorful vibrant Mithila art.  It starts out simply:
“I am an artist, but I wasn’t always one.  This is the story of how it happened.”
 She tells how she worked in rice fields, cooked and took care of brothers and sisters, sold fish, and washed other people’s dishes.  “Time passed and I grew up, but I still did the same work.  I had never gone to school, so I was not trained to do any other job.  Sometimes I wished I could do something else.  Everyday was the same, as it had been from the time I was a small girl.”
One day, she sees a group of children playing and makes a picture in her mind.  Next she paints a fish in the mud.  Then she finds out a lady she works for is an artist.  The artist encourages Deva and she begins to create not only gorgeous art but a new identity for herself
Tara publishes all sorts of stories.  They have both men and women artists and storytellers creating books.
Alone in the Forest, by Bhajju Shyam, Andrea Anastasio, and Gita Wolf, is a folk tale.  Musa has to gather firewood because his mother is sick.  “I’m grown up now, I’ll get the wood!”  But it isn’t long before the sounds of the forest convince him that he is being stalked by a wild boar.  His imagination runs wild as he hides in the hollow of a tree.
 The illustrations of his imaginings and fear are enchanting, even when they’re scary.  The text is integrated into the drawings and furthers the visual delight.  The colors are muted and natural; it feels like you’re looking into a forest. The style isn’t realistic but it portrays the chaos of feeling lost.  The trees and animals are highly detailed — imagination and traditional imagery are at play here. I love that a yellow cow comes to the rescue, in its peaceful way, and brings Musa home.
Gobble You Up,by Sunita and Gita Wolf, is another of Tara’s hand made books.  Printed on handmade brown paper with black and white drawings, it’s a captivating book in all regards.  An adaptation of an oral Rajasthani trickster tale, featuring a wily jackal who tricks and eats his friend the crane.  Then he proceeds to gobble up every animal he comes across.
Sunita is an artist from the Meena tribe in Rajasthan, who works in a traditional finger painting style called Mandna.  This book is the first time that this art form has been used to illustrate a children’s story.  To keep the feel of the art, it’s been silkscreen printed in two colors by hand on specially made kraft paper.  The drawings have a lacy, delicate feel that speaks of the transitory nature of all life.
I’ve loved introducing children here at Bridge Meadows to this book at Halloween time, when funny scary stories are in demand.  It’s a work of art they can touch.  They know a jackal can’t eat an elephant, but they also know greed can be insatiable.  It delights them to see all the animals in the bloated jackal’s belly and then see the animals come back to life. We love the off kilter rhymes and expressive texts.
And I, too, know that greed can be insatiable.  I feel insatiable about the books Tara is creating and encouraging.   I have to buy them rather than just check them out at the library.  I feel like they are little art galleries I can open and immerse myself in.  And when I’m done, I can slip them back onto the bookshelf in my small apartment, where they will wait til I need them again.  As I collect them, I’ll share what I find.
These books are available in some libraries.  The Multnomah County library has Following My Brush, Alone in the Forest, and, surprisingly, Gobble You Up!, a limited edition.  (They have #99 of 7000).  So, if you can’t afford them, check them out at the library.  Most libraries will help you get books from other libraries through their networking system.
You can learn more about Tara books here.
Here is a direct link to a video of their printing process: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=om6i3enGZ8c
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Thanks for stopping by.