Picture Book-Storybook Hybrid? YES, Please!

Thanks for this…

WRITERS' RUMPUS

You say you love picture books, but you’re ready to venture into chapter books? Look no further! Princess Cora and the Crocodile, a picture book-storybook hybrid, just arrived and features the best of both worlds. The reader will not be disappointed by the Newbery/Caldecott winning pair of Laura Amy Schlitz and Brian Floca.

My first grade students love to read and find new books. As with every class, some children are revved up more easily than others.  I chose to read Princess Cora and the Crocodile aloud to my students, as I would with any picture book. Knowing that this story was structured in chapters, I was pleasantly surprised when one particular student begged for more upon each stopping place. Beyond that, he requested it at every transition.

“Are you going to read more of that crocodile book now?”

He couldn’t get enough! In fact, when I promised him…

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The Lego Batman Movie

OK – you’ve converted me. Although it’s not my usual – I’ll have to go see this now… 🙂

Film Mafia

***1/2

Enormously entertaining, inventive and visually spectacular, The Lego Batman Movie demands to be seen on the big screen. I can whole-heartedly recommend it; having, along with the rest of Australia’s reviewers, been ludicrously embargoed on reviewing it until six weeks after the rest of the world, I’m probably preaching to the converted. At this point, if you live in Australia, you’ve either been waiting for Lego Batman – delayed interminably to achieve a school holiday release, which must make sense from an economic standpoint – or you couldn’t care less about it.

The script has lavish fun referencing the Batman mythology from go to woe, and the deeper you are enmeshed in that universe, the more fun you’ll have. Whether its retroactively creating an origin story for the cartoon “POWS!” and “WHAMS!” that appeared in speech bubbles during the 1960s live action television series, running backwards through all the…

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Begorrathon 2017: Week Four

Congratulations on the ‘modest bow’ for both last year and this year, Niall.

The Fluff Is Raging

So here we, round the bend and the final leg, the finish line in sight.

With only a few days left in March, it’s time to get those Reading Ireland posts in.

Some housekeeping announcements:

The Hennessy Literary Awards take place tomorrow evening in Dublin. Congratulations and best of luck to all the shortlisted writers, including friend of the Begorrathon, Clare O’Dea. I attended last year’s ceremony as I was on the shortlist [modest bow] and it’s a lovely evening.

I had planned to go this year as well, but alas I won’t be attending as my invitation appears to have been lost in the post.

The lovely people at Banshee are launching their new issue later this week in Dublin. It just so happens I have a story in it [another modest bow] and the issue, which also features work by Stephanie Conn,

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Coots

Lakeside, I watch

the Coots bouncing

on top of the water.

 

They throw their heads

with intention and abandon.

Plunging – immersing themselves.

 

I want to bounce,

immerse myself.

Plunge into you…

 

Frances Macaulay Forde © 2001

*Coots: small black waterbird related to Moorhens: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coot

(1st Pub. ‘Hidden Capacity ~ a poet’s journey’, Ireland, 2003.)

 

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Dame Vera Lynn – 100 today.

Happy 100th Birthday to Dame Vera Lynn:  ‘I JUST WANTED TO DO MY BIT.’

Dame Vera Lynn turns 100 and opens up on singing during the Battle of Britain and beating Ed Sheeran to No. 1

Forces’ sweetheart Dame Vera reflects on her time singing for troops and the poignancy of her hit ‘We’ll Meet Again’ as she celebrates landmark birthday.

EXCLUSIVE  By Simon Cosyns 20th March 2017, 12:25 am

#WWIISweetheart    #BlueBirdsOver   #WhiteCliffsOfDover

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Shelf Awareness — Norman Jorgensen

Wonderful writer, interesting man. Been a Norm fan for quite a while now…

MAUREEN EPPEN -- WRITER

Children’s author Norman Jorgensen has been writing stories since he was in primary school, and his latest story, The Smuggler’s Curse (Fremantle Press), details the rollicking adventures of young Red Read, whose mother “sells him to an infamous smuggler, plying his trade off the north-west coast of Australia in the closing days of the 19th century”.

Norman’s first picture book, In Flanders Fields (with illustrations by Brian Harrison-Lever), set in World War One, tells of a homesick young soldier who risks his life to rescue a robin caught in the barbed wire of no man’s land. In Flanders Fields won the Children’s Book Council of Australia (CBCA) Picture Book of the Year Award in 2003 — the first of many awards for Norman. He has since written a dozen books for children and young people.

Born in Broome, in Western Australia’s tropical north, he now lives in a…

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Begorrathon 2017: My Ireland …

Wonderful, stirring stuff!

The Fluff Is Raging

Stephen James Smith

Poet Stephen James Smith was commissioned by the St Patrick’s Festival Festival to write a poem in response to the theme of this year’s festival.

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“Mr Bojangles”

MR BOJANGLES

 

Like Mr Bo…

my heart jangles

when your smile

misses your eyes.

The face of a clown

soft shoe shuffling

through my soul.

White hands clasped.

The generous frill

framing your mask,

flutters like a wing

across the circus tent

of my broken heart.

Funny shoes walk strong,

confidently skirting around

landmines of feeling

clothed in bright colours.

 

Frances Macaulay Forde © 2011

 

Poem written to the artwork of Jessica McCallum for her exhibition ‘All The Pretty Ones Are…” State Theatre Centre, Perth, West. Australia. 2011. 

 

#JessicaMcCallum  #MrBojangles  #Poetry

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Christy Moore, Jack B Yeats – Posts for St Patrick 2

Loved this! Thanks.

The Immortal Jukebox

The Home Place.

Never more real and vivid than when recollected in the imagination.

We are our memories.

And, our memories, particularly those which carry the most emotional charge, are constantly being selected, edited and recast.

The stream of memory is never stilled.

The genesis of a song, a poem, a story or a painting begins in an insistent whisper from the memory.

A whisper which cannot be ignored.

Such a whisper was heard in the 1930s by Jack McAuliffe from Lixnaw in County Kerry as he sat sat in a cottage near Dooneen Point.

In response he wrote a poem that became the ballad, ‘The Cliffs of Dooneen’.

The key duty of an creative artist is to closely attend to those whispers and make them real in words on the page, notes in the air or brush marks on the canvas.

And, the truth of the song or the…

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Interview: Jonathan Adams

And now, for something completely different…

Cinema Australia

Jonathan Adams (right) with crew on the set of Rough Stuff.

Director Jonathan Adams joins Cinema Australia to discuss his new film, Rough Stuff.

“I’d like to continue to make films that are transportive and exciting but also thoughtful and have something to say.”

Interview by Matthew Eeles

This is the most fun I’ve had watching an Australian adventure film in years. Was it just as fun to shoot?

Thats a fantastic thing to hear. I suppose shooting a movie is fun in the way that running a marathon is fun, or maybe climbing Mount Everest or something. Its exhausting and it pushes you far beyond your comfort zone. But its also thrilling and enormously gratifying. I look back on the shoot and I kind of smile about the sheer swashbuckling nature of it, even though I know at the time it was really just like climbing a…

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