Category Archives: Young Adult

To Read, or Not to Read

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To Read, or not to read – that is the question. I think of vital choices like Shakespeare’s poor Hamlet who uttered, “to be or not to be….” while he considered whether to live and suffer life’s slings or die and possibly be at peace. Hamlet was unsure about life after death, so it wasn’t a “black or white” choice for him, but we can be surer about the “not to read” choice. When it comes to education, insight, and exposure, the result of a vital choice about whether or not to read is “black or white.” It is reflected in our culture. The abundance of schlock choices is increasing in direct proportion to the substantive choices decreasing. How many people do not read anything at all?

Alas, if only I had one-zillionth Shakespeare’s brilliance at causing individuals to see themselves through the mirror of his complex characters! Of course, Shakespeare didn’t have to compete with TV, movies, or video games. As it is, the optic nerve and the auditory canals have often become the pickup route leading to the largest human garbage dump of all – the brain. Even if I could manage to dash off a few breathtaking lines, the kind of thing which, doubtless, would dazzle with the force of its impact if only it might penetrate the gray matter, there would still be the need to market it effectively enough to garner sufficient notice. Writers’ tools consist of the basics, just ink on paper. No exploding paint balls, whistling rockets, peephole activity, pulsating flashes of free-falling bodies, or dizzying camera angles. Not even any red blood or purplish green ooze. None of it. Just the power of language, the music of thought, the connection of ideas jumping synapses; not following trends blindly with trite buzzwords, but taking control of the thought process. A lot of how this is accomplished comes about through reading/thinking or thinking/reading, then acting. In the case of writers, reading opens thought and feeds creativity. Imagine no polls, no comparisons with neighbors, or no political correctness, but just brave logic. It would be as liberating as morphing an overpopulated rat colony into a bevy of butterflies.

Everyone wants to fly, to be free. Reading has a way of doing just that by unleashing minds and voices. It takes us over the world, back through time and forward into the future. It validates ones’s thoughts or offers new insights. Instead, too often we stare and distract at computer and phone screens, searching endlessly, lured by excess, failing in our quest to quench the thirst. We resist most the work that is hard, effort that is demanding of our minds and bodies. Reading teaches, comforts, compares, reveals, provokes, engages, inspires; it does all this while exercising and revealing the many layers of the mind.

Reading the stories of other lives and writing the stories from our own experiences forms a human link through ages of time. People say, “I don’t have time to read newspapers, books, or magazines. I get all the news from TV or my phone or computer.” It’s true that we are flooded with soundbites from over the globe. What seem like nanoseconds of information constantly bombard us and are shoved aside for even more breaking news so that our heads are reeling. There is too much repetition and too much selective sensationalism. Ignorance is directing intelligence. What to do?

Limit the noise. Decipher the competition for attention. Think for yourself. Assess the information. Do some research. Read history, read about cultures and places, read lives, loves, and outcomes of real people. Feed your own mind rather than allow the clamor to deceive, spew random opinions, and exert control. That familiar sequence in Act III, Scene I of Hamlet states it best: “Madness in great ones must not unwatched go.”

If we lose our love of reading and get caught up in the treadmill of speedy words going nowhere, we’ll lose what made great thinkers unique. There are so many books with treasures to unlock. They were freely given to future generations and exist long past their authors. The founding fathers of our country were readers and writers. Their thoughts became our basis. We can’t all write books, but each person can leave something written which expresses free thought and individual ideas. It can be a recipe, a poem, a hand-written letter or note. No time? Give up one phone call, one snack, one TV program, one Facebook scrolling session, and you’ve got it. It can mean the world to someone who will read it.

Read and write go together like fingers on the same hand. They have a direct line to the brain. To read or not to read is an individual decision, but I cannot imagine an existence without it. It turns my motor, is my barometer, connects me with humanity. It is a way to satisfy insatiable curiosity about everything. The summer between fifth and sixth grade found me diligently building a neighborhood newspaper where I wrote every feature article, opinion piece, and ad. There were interviews with all the neighbors, human interest stories about their pets, announcements about lost dogs, recipes generously provided by my grandmothers, garden tips from my mother, and much more. I clipped headline letters from our regular newspaper and glued them into place for my column titles and drawn illustrations. It was a daily labor of love that I hoped would help everyone love to read as much as I did. It was shared with those who seemed to enjoy reading about themselves and there was a lot of kind interest in my early journalism. The Secret Garden, Heidi, and Black Beauty were favorites among dozens of books which inspired my childhood attempts to create stories for others.

READ! Encourage your children to read and entertain themselves. Let them see you read. Laugh, cry, and talk together about stories. You never know where it will lead, but lead them, it will. Here’s my grandmother, Emmie, reading in 1928 to my mother in her lap, and my two aunts. This led to some very great things!

    From Black Bears to Bumblebees

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    In an earlier post, I said that one thing always leads to another along the reading road, a.k.a., my life. Mental meandering has so often become fascination, so “over the river and through the woods” from black bears to bumblebees seems natural. Good science requires time and patience; getting to the last page isn’t exactly instant gratification. It’s more like a treasure hunt where you have to dream, delve, and, often, literally dig in the dirt. Complicating all this is the fact that I have a family, with all the maintenance, surprises, holidays, advice given and taken or not, and daily love which often present detours around any other project underway. During all the stirring of pots and bandaging of bumps, thoughts and curiosity tug and won’t leave, ever.

    A few years ago, I returned to academic life and jumped into a course in environmental literature. While reading and researching, I began to think about black bears with their history and their present state. Their decline affects so much more than the bears, themselves. A phone call put me in touch with a wildlife biologist who introduced me to a couple of experts studying bears in other states, and we began a five-year discourse, including particular details of radio-collared bears and others in the wild. I tried not to be side-tracked by more creatures, like birds and bees, but habitats in two states were a big playground/discovery center for me. I couldn’t know that this would lead to a rare invitation to accompany biologists into the field one summer to capture a black bear. Armed with hundreds of facts and years of study, I joined them in Tensas National Wildlife Preserve in northern Louisiana. My husband, Jim, carried my cameras and field equipment, and off we went.

    Our ATV rumbled along through dense brush beneath towering old giants of oak, American elm, green ash and sweet gum. Palmettos had been grouped to form a path to a brush-covered foot snare that would not harm the bear. A nearby paw-paw tree yielded its melon-shaped fruit as well as a sack of raspberry scent (visible in the photo below). The coup de maître were honeybuns hung from trees and scattered in the brush just beyond the snare. With five traps laid, would luck be with us?

    Anticipation was palpable that early morning. After finding the first trap empty, we moved on toward the second a few miles away. We found bear tracks crisscrossed with raccoon tracks parallel to a row of randomly bent corn stalks and nibbled cobs along a corn field bordering the woods. Around a bend, suddenly, “There she is!” A female black bear had flattened a 15-foot circle of brush permitted by the length of her snare attachment and sat in the middle registering typical displeasure by an intermittent snapping of the jaws and blowing with the lips. Then noises in the brush directed us toward a huge elm about 20 feet into the dense embankment above a crook of a tributary of the Tensas River. We watched a fuzzy cub heed its mother’s guttural signals and scamper to a vantage point on a limb about 25 feet up the trunk. A small, solid black head would alternately peek and retreat behind the limb, tiny ears at attention. We judged it to be about five months old, and approximately 15 pounds – about the size of a cocker spaniel.

    Female black bear secured by foot snare. Note raspberry scent sack in tree.

    Black bear cub

    We needed to work fast so Mother Bear could return to nursery duty. We tranquilized her with a dart, examined, weighed and measured, and then outfitted her with a radio collar for tracking and further research. Care was taken to allow for any weight gain before the collar would wear away in a year or two. A glance up to the leaf canopy revealed a fast-asleep cub stretched out full-length, squirrel-fashion, belly flush and four legs limply dangling from either side of the limb. I knew there were yet a couple of fleeting minutes for me to rub the head and back of this wild creature in repose — silent minutes eloquent enough to convey to the most skeptical the value of preserving its kind, indicator of the well-being of so many other species of our forests and, ultimately, man. There is much more about this day, and my longer account was published in the Louisiana Conservationist magazine.

    Me, with female black bear

    Not letting go of black bears, and that one special black bear, fast forward a few years through new technology and new ways of communicating and publishing. One sleepy spring morning along the Mississippi Gulf Coast, I opened the back porch door and was overcome with the fragrance of blossoms, the incessant hum of an undulating halo of bumblebees around our Meyer lemon tree, the music of water spilling over the fountain bowls. I forgot breakfast, grabbed my camera, and that’s how my first ebook was born. The words wrote themselves in my head, and I forced myself to turn back to the house to write the story for children, to help them understand. They need to know that without these quiet, ongoing activities underfoot, out of sight, on the wing, here and gone in the space of moments, we would not exist. It really wasn’t such a stretch from black bears to bumblebees. It was logical/magical.

    I hope you’ll let yourself enter the world with new eyes. Grab a book about what catches your imagination, really see, walk and hunt, poke under things, ask questions and find answers. There are friends connected to those answers. You will be comforted, surprised, thrilled. It works. Whether black bears to bumblebees, or anything else, you’ll see how everything is truly connected. You’ll make sense of your happy unlikelihoods!

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

    We Have a Winner!

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    The Reading Road Writing Contest for July has now come to a close after introducing a terrific group of entries. Competition was strong, but after careful consideration and a lot of milk and cookies, lemonade and cookies, tea and more cookies, the panel of judges has awarded the first place prize to a young lady, Logan D., age 12. Her imaginative photo really made us curious, and her story lines “hooked” us and made us want to find out what would happen next! Check out her winning entry below:

    I was stricken with fear. It used to be only the animals knew  where I was hidden. Now that some human found me, I was in danger every step, every movement, I made.

    My hiding place was a secret tunnel through the bushes and into a hole in a willow tree. I used to be the only person who knew that amazing place I call home. But that stupid boy, whatever his name is, knows my hiding spot now and is probably going to tell everyone. What, dude? Am I in some kinda zoo? Come see the amazing forest girl! She has wings, too! Yes. By the way, I am a mix of an elf and a wood sprite. I call myself a Grelfling. But if that kid comes back again, I’ll be called “doomed.”

     

    There were entries which made us laugh, wonder, admire, feel inspired, and want to sit right down and finish the story. It was a tough decision to select a winner, and we munched far too many cookies trying to decide. But we had so much fun and much more wonderment than we could have guessed over the talent we discovered.

    My congratulations to Logan, and bushels of thanks to each of our budding writers and photographers who made my first contest such a joy. Logan will receive a T-shirt with The Reading Road logo and motto, “Let your heart speak and the world will hear your voice,” and some other treats to encourage her writing.

    I hope that you will visit The Reading Road “Just for Fun” page for future contests – and most of all, keep exploring, imagining, reading, and writing!