VISITING AUTHOR RICHARD HOATH on Writing for Children and Teaching ‘Writing for Children’

 Today, we welcome my colleague, Richard Hoath. Richard is an author, an artist, a naturalist, and an expert on mammals of Egypt.

Welcome, Richard. Share with us your experience teaching university students to write for children.

I teach in the Rhetoric Department of the American University in Cairo (AUC). This summer I was informed by my Chair that in fall 2014 I would be teaching an upper-level course entitled Writing Children’s Literature 3420. I was at the same time both extremely pleased and rather apprehensive. I had written for children before and had two books published one entitled Sharks and the other Elephants on, well you can guess, sharks and elephants. These were educational books and I relished the challenge of writing factually accurate scientific prose for an audience using a very different vocabulary to the journal articles I had been used to writing or indeed books for an adult audience.

            I was apprehensive because, with the exception of three plays written for a series of Fifteen Minutes of Fame theatre festivals here in Cairo, I had not tackled writing fiction for anyone let alone children. This was outside my comfort zone which was probably good and I hit the books and milked my colleagues who were familiar with the genre and for their help I am incredibly thankful.

            This was all compounded by the fact that this was a Community Based Learning (CBL) course. My students would not only be writing fiction for children but they would be going out into the wider community and be talking with these children and ultimately reading their stories back to them.

            I chose a small school in southern Cairo for the project, the Maadi Community School (MCS) where I had lectured on several occasions on my own source of interest, Egyptian wildlife.. At AUC I introduced my students to the elements of writing fiction for a young audience (6-8) and by about four weeks into the semester my students had come up with project proposals and we went down to the school so that they could get feedback on their ideas not just from a university academic but from the school children – their real audience.

            The trip went incredibly well and over the coming weeks my students revised and re-drafted and fine tuned their stories taking into account my comments but more importantly what they had learned from the MCS visit.

            Last week we went back and my students got to read their stories to their original muses. That was exciting enough but there was more. Until then this had been an academic exercise for me, a conventional classroom assignment where I would take the drafts in and grade and comment and sit with the students in conference to go over their work. The final drafts my students brought to the school last week were different because for the first time they were illustrated. The students had done an incredible job. It was no longer an assignment; it was a living, morphing entity and I had the enormous privilege of watching and listening as my students read their stories to grinning, captivated 2^nd, 3^rd and 4^th graders. There was so much to absorb, to take in but if I have to pick just one image it would be of Nora reading her story to a group of eight year olds lying on their tummies legs in the air and arranged round her like the spokes of a wheel. O for an aerial camera! They were rapt.

Put simply it was the most rewarding teaching experience I have had in many, many years at AUC. And is teaching writing for children as rewarding as writing for children myself? That’s a very, very difficult call but it has to be right up there!

And now?  We’ve moved on to middle-graders, an older, perhaps even more challenging audience. As we battle through building characters, framing plots and inserting dialogue I am conscious of a more sophisticated, even savvy readership.  I will certainly not be treating this second stage as a ‘mere’ assignment. Rather I will be following the students’ projects as they morph and evolve almost like a living entity. I do not know where this will lead but I do know the journey will be wondrous...

- Richard Hoath

   Cairo, Egypt

WORDS OF A REVOLUTION by eden unger bowditch

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As I sit here from this side of the ocean, word from Cairo sounds as horrid to me as to everyone else here. But I know what it was like last time when the news was scary.

 We played games and read stories together. Families got together for garden parties. Yes, there were moments when the tanks rolled in that one could almost hear a violin being played among the gunshots. Were we all Nero while Rome was burning? Or were we simply trying to maintain grace under fire, literally?

Our neighborhood is an international community and a grand mix of many different people. We all bonded together during the worst of it and have worked together to come to terms with a very different Egypt. Now, my family and I are in the US. We plan to be here for the year, at least. But, ringing in our ears, we hear the sounds of a world uncertain and a future full of fear.

When we, as authors, write, we want to bring our readers on a journey. We want them to join us in our strange new worlds. Escaping into a book can be one of the most profound experiences in someone’s life. Enduring uncertainty and conflict may sometimes depend on escaping from it. Having books to share and, for each of us, having books to savor privately, was how my family managed to wake up each day, ready for whatever we had to face.

I want to take this moment to thank all of you, the brilliant minds who author the worlds we are privileged to experience whenever we step into the pages of your books.

MYTHS, FABLES, and STORIES WE KNOW by Eden Unger Bowditch

There are myths or fables that we know without even knowing how we know them. Lots of Aesop’s Fables are like that (sour grapes, singing donkeys, mama bullfrogs) as stories from Greek mythology (Achilles, Odysseus, Hercules/Heracles) and the bible (Jonah, Noah). We have films coming out that regularly revive old stories and myths (Snow White, Jack the Giant Slayer, et al) and let us not forget that Sophocles, let alone Shakespeare, took those old stories and ran with them. A good myth never dies.

Living in Egypt, I have discovered that many (if not most) of the stories I have heard from here are very close to many of the myths we know in the West. Some of the ancient stories, like the stories of Isis and Osiris and the Egyptian gods, have a familiarity all their own. But the later stories, from around this region, areclose to other stories we have heard, as well.  Here are some Middle Eastern stories that might seem familiar:

The Boatman and The Scholar

As the boatman rowed the scholar across the river, the scholar chided the boatman for his lack of learning. “Your life is nothing if you have not learned your letters,” he said. Suddenly, the boat was tossed and broken and began to sink. “I am drowning!” cried the scholar. “Your life is nothing if you have not learned to swim,” said the boatman.

The Smuggler and The Official

There was news that a smuggler was bringing in stolen goods. The official stopped a man who had a donkey carrying large bags of straw. Searching the straw, the official found nothing. Every day, the man came with a donkey carrying great bags of straw Every day the official checked. For months, this went on and never could the official find anything of value in the straw. Many years later, the retired official and the man met at a café. They sat together and shared tea. “I tell you, my friend, I know you were the smuggler. But I could never figure out what it was or how you did it. Please tell me, what were you smuggling?” The man smiled, “Donkeys.”

And there are stories of the Mulla (or Mula), the wise fool, like the story of the man who lamented that all he owned filled only a small sack. The Mulla snatched the sack and ran. The man began to cry and walked all the more sadly down the road. The Mula then left the sack in the man’s path. When the man came to the sack he rejoiced! The Mula smiled because he had made the man happy.

When we read these we say, Oh, yeah, I think I’ve heard that, because likely, you have. Remember the story of the blind men and the elephant? Each one touching a part of the elephant and saying “I know the elephant, it is very like a tree,” or “It is very like a rope,” depending on what each an held. This story is from India. There are fables from China, Ireland, Japan, France… and somehow the stories, and the lessons they teach, are familiar.

 

Does anyone else have tales from their childhood?