Home Sweet Home READING for the Holidays!

Holy WOW, what a year! Today I have a moment to breathe and blog some highlights from the busy year I've had. And even with all of the conferences, school visits, and grandma time promoting READING, I've made sure that I made lots of time for reading myself.

Hear ye, hear ye! This year Bear Track Press went out on a huge limb to put 10,000 totally free PASSPORTS TO READING ADVENTURE booklets and free printable ebooks into the hands of Michigan kids for the 2016-17 school year when a school books a visit. For a small business, we're kinda proud of this gigantic accomplishment! We felt it was high time to celebrate literacy and promote the outdoors for Michigan kids after reading this statement from the Michigan State Fair's event coordinator:

"In little more than a decade, Michigan has gone from being a fairly average state for student achievement to the bottom 10 in key school quality indicators such as fourth-grade reading. Michigan is suffering systemic failure across racial, ethnic and socio-economic groups in early reading and middle-school math, according to a new report just released by the The Education-Trust Midwest..."
The Detroit News, May 31, 2016

The Michigan State Fair promotes literacy and
READING OUTDOORS!

Fifth Third Bank and the Michigan State Fair get funky fun
Little Free Libraries into the Detroit area! Find a library and fill it with books!

I LOVE my state and LOVE visiting kids to inspire them to get outside to read, write, and draw! 
From the tip of the U.P. to the cuff of the mitt, help spread the word, book an author visit and 
get my free Passport to Reading Adventure into young hands.

Our new super cool, Bear Track Press Passport to Reading Adventure booklet!
Every child gets one FREE when I visit their school. This passport gets kids to explore their 
Michigan home and download a free SUPER, SECRET HOLLY WILD Book!

Choose your own Holly Adventure! The FREE online book can be downloaded
onto tablets or PC or printed as a real book with cool writing and drawing activities!

2016 SUMMER READING FUN and AUTUMNAL ADVENTURES!

Gaylord's Oscoda Library uses my "The Young GeEK's Guide to Getting Outside" picture book
for their first STORY WALK event! Literacy + action + outdoors = Healthy Kids!

Summer grand-tween roughing it and reading in the Lumbermans's Monument National Forest!
Michigan state, national parks, and Huron-Manistee National Forests promote reading
and carry our books in their gift stores. 

Teachers getting creative making poetry books at Michigan Reading Association 's
super fun Summer Lit Conference at Shanty Creek Resrot in Belaire, MI. 
Art + poetry = FUN! Watch for their creativity in a classroom near you!

A family fall fungal hunt of exploration gives exciting stuff to write and draw about--a super 
way to get kids reading. FYI this four year-old grandtot of mine is reading books now!

Rooftop Reindeer Farm in Clare, MI promotes literacy while they thrill kids with
reindeer, Santa visits, hayrides, and an awesome gingerbread treehouse!

Happy READING Holidays to all of you!
Grab a book, a blanket, warm drink--and READ!

The year has taken me to rural librarian and rural school conferences, literacy happenings, schools, libraries and more! Now I'm ready to kick back and READ, WRITE, and DRAW until 2017!

Happy holidays and a warm BEAR TRACK hug from all of us to all of you! Thank you for your immense support and making our year great! Now, back to my books! :)

Finally, HOT TIMES Have Ended!

Finally, after 15 years, my story, HOT TIMES IN THE BIG CREEK WOOD, will be published!

(back cover) Bear Track Press 2015

I had rewritten and illustrated this story for the past 15 years. Time and time again, I was never happy with its outcome. Why? It wasn't ready to be born. I had to let the flames inside me go out. Extinguish strife and let the rebuilding happen.

It's never easy to write a children's book, and with the oodles of books out there most would think it an easy thing to do. Books and stories are personal. Sometimes they can sting. This story hit home. My home.

The story, Hot Times in the Big Creek Wood, is about my father. A good, hard-working, a caring man, passionate, yet hard-headed in opinion and hot-tempered. When crossed by anyone, like a misbehaving, inconsiderate neighbor--fur will fly, fences will be built.

My siblings and I were many years ago, party to my father's plan of building a "feudal fence" between his northern Michigan wooded property and that of his neighbor to the south. Both men were in their seventies and should have behaved as adults. But it was what it was and soon became a full-blown feud.

After the fence went up I watched and wondered about this situation. I noticed that my dad's behavior and characteristics fit those of the beaver--a diligent, non-stop builder, and those of his neighbor, well--a lumbering bear. It was after driving past the neighbor one day that I saw him sitting under an apple tree, eating apples in the shade as happy as a clam. He looked like a bear! Wearing bib overalls, bushy graying sideburns and all. I had my story characters. It rolled off my pencil like water!

Shanty-Bob Bear

Boomtown Jack, the beaver.

The place where my dad lived had been part of the Great Fire of 1881 and I researched that story online. I found fabulous and horrifying accounts of the raging blaze that ate Michigan. One particular event that was recorded was when a survivor of the blaze hopped into a lake and stood watching the fire all night standing next to another person in the water. All night, the two stood, silently as their homes were destroyed. In the morning, the man turned to his neighbor as the smoke cleared. The neighbor he stood next to all night in  the lake was, a black bear!

The story, Hot Times, centers around the feud between the neighbors, beaver and bear, where the beaver builds a fence so he won't have to watch his neighbor "shake his shimmy". Revenge becomes both neighbors' answers to the feud. They inadvertently bring hot times to the neighbor and if the bickering wasn't enough to affect the other's' lives, then the next thing that happened changes life for everyone.

I wanted to take and make this story a learning experience, for others and for me. My father never lived to see it published. Fences were built. Today I tore them down. He and I rarely saw eye to eye, nature and outdoor work was our connection. I added little phrases he used to say in the story. Hidden things that only my siblings and I would know. "Daylight in the swamp". "Arbeit macht das Leben suess!" (German for 'Work makes life sweet!') and "a dollar, 2.98". These little gentle touches helped tear my own fence down. I would like to say that the neighborly feud and my father's and my feud had had happy endings, but that just never happened. So I made it happen here.

At the end of the book I added how two people, different as night and day, can get along. I gave the story a positive spin and even added educational material. The beaver as a keystone species and the bear and his contribution to the environment help keep the neighborhood healthy and happy. It's all about seeing the value in the other and being tolerant.

The book originally intended to be a picture book is one of my graphic readers. The story although intense, has funny and sweet moments, with some cool information at the end on the Great Fire 1881 and Clara Barton, the founder of the American Red Cross. I am glad to finally put this file and all the versions of dummies and paintings away. It is done and turned out better than what would've come out ten years ago or three!

At long last, there is peace in the Big Creek Wood. After the fire, new green shoots sprout and grow, life continues, homes are repaired. And this is good for the Big Creek Wood.

Book Reorder, A 2014 Celebration!

Books I have illustrated and written! www.loritaylorart.com/publications.html

I remember as a child the day that Scholastic book order forms went home. It was always the highlight of my elementary school career and I quiver now when I see my granddaughter's book order form. When the Book Fair came to the school, my heart pounded at the sight of shelves of paperbacks waiting for me, and my heart pounds when I download books onto my iPad. Having a real, live author/poet visit the school in Clarkston was beyond excitement, and I still feel the same today when I visit with other author/illustrators. You see, I have always been a nut about books. A passionist you could say.

When I stop and think about it, I had the love of storytelling--both writing and illustrating--since I was in sixth grade. My teacher told me that is what I would do when I grew I up, which made my young heart ecstatic. And in middle school I won awards for art and a contest in writing. But then by the time high school rolled around, a REAL career was suggested to me by my father. A real career, like the medical field. Art was a hobby--not a real job.

Build a Holly Action Figure! Find it and
more on Holly's Hangout Page!
www.loritaylorart.com/hollywild.html

But I still hung on--no clutched on--to the dream of illustrating and books, even after high school graduation when I was gifted a Gwen Frostic book which inspired me to take a commercial art class at the vocational school where I had taken medical assisting. Funny thing that medical field thing--I every job I had in it someone always told me that I should be doing art. Huh?! Drawing pictures and not blood. Hmm! Finally after flailing around in the medical laboratory field of pouring urine, pipetting blood clots and serum, did I take the serious art plunge. I struggled, practiced and perfected, day-after-day, year-after-year, through raising children and taking care of grandchildren. 

Now after all that hard work, can I look back and see where I have been and where I want to go with my art and storytelling craft. It's exciting really--I have so much more to say and do. Working on a mid-grade realistic fictional series like Holly Wild, illustrating ebooks, and now branching out into Kindle, picture books and perhaps graphic novel chapter books I realize this is my job. I'm a passionist for books.

And so it is with great excitement that I begin 2014 off by ordering 1,000 more HOLLY WILD: Bamboozled on Beaver Island (Book 1) books. I can't wait to see what else will come about this year.

"Crazy Cat Chase That Rabbit" www.loritaylorart.com/illustration.html

Crossing Borders

November. Thanksgiving. What does this bring to mind? Falling leaves, frost, winter? Turkey, family, eating? Now add to the end of those pyschopompish words-school kids. Ah! Pilgrims and Indians (American or Native Americans or First Nations). Why is it that it seems at this time of year Native Americans are mentioned most? Does it have to do with that first Thanksgiving and stereotypes?

I attended the Crossing Borders 33rd Annual Mary Calletto Rife Youth Literature Seminar on Nov. 5. (See last post) and was interested in what the guest speaker, Cynthia Leitich Smith, a tribal member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, had to say and how that relates to my work as an artist, author and illustrator. The focus of the seminar was helping readers undstand, appreciate and relate to others--the crossing of borders--from racial ro cultural to economic and more.

The final speaker of the day, Debbie Reese, who is tribally enrolled at Nambe Pueblo in northern New Mexico, gave us all valuable information regarding American Indians in children's lit. For more information see her site:  http://www.americanindiansinchildrensliterature.net/.

This talk not only interested me as an author/illustrator, but as a Michigander, long influenced and inspired by Michigan Native tales. As a child, I traveled to Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore Park. The Odawa or Ojibwa legend, depending on who you talk to, sparked my 5 year old imagination as my brother and I posed in front of a gift shop next to a man in Plains regalia. (Notice that I said, "man", not warrior or brave, and "regalia" not costume.)




"Sleeping Bear:  The Legend" (detail) 2007, Lori Taylor

Since then, I have spent my life studying, reading, going to powwows, and talking and sharing with people about the Great Lakes Peoples and their stories. Heck, I grew up right here and spent my life running through the woods and waters of Michigan, how could I not try to understand the voices of the People and the land that I was raised on.

From artist, Frank Ettawageshick, to writer, Simon Otto, to a healing lodge in Ann Arbor and Ziibiwing Center of Anishinabe Culture & Lifeways, and more I have gleaned understanding from native teachings. Debbie gave us a great list of kid's books to read by Joseph Bruchac and Louise Erdrich and recommended the PBS, "We Shall Remain", for us all to understand their stories better.

I have studied the Sanilac Petroglyphs (I love the art there) and crawled across rock walls with Lake Superior at my back to see pictographs in Canada. These are images that speak with powerful emotion reaching out to touch others that witness them. As an artist, all art that speaks is art to be shared.

"Wisdom of the Elders: MAEOE Conference" 1993

Yesterday, I crossed the border--to Canada, to visit the Art Gallery of Windsor to see the Group of Seven exhibit of Canadian painters. Inserted in the exhibit was a piece from Canadian artist, Emily Carr. As I sketched her work, Yan Mortuary Poles, I realized that here was a Canadian artist, like me, with a strong desire to preserve the history or her home and the stories of its Peoples, as well as her love of the deep, dark coastal forests.

As a storyteller, I will continue to learn and tell these stories of my Michigan home in art and word. If these stories inspire and fire our imaginations for us to do great things for each other and care for our home--our land and waters--then is that not what those stories were preserved and intended for--to make a better place for all? I have learned alot in the past 30 years and I am thankful for the sharing of all Native stories of their home--which is my home and my grandchild's home.

November? Curling up at home--all of our homes, with good books and good stories!