The following blog entry was written by Meredith Matthews, the editor of Current Health magazine.

Happy Halloween! 

Amid all the decorating, last-minute costume-planning, and candy gobbling, hopefully you got a chance to watch the classic TV special, It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown. (If not, you can always rent it!)

This year marks the 40th anniversary of this childhood favorite, and if your childhood was anything like mine, Halloween just wasn't complete without watching Linus waiting in his "sincere" pumpkin patch for the Santa Claus-like Great Pumpkin, and laughing at Charlie Brown as he bungled his costume. Good grief!

Truly devoted fans of the show need to own this book. It is about the making of the program. It includes the entire script, artwork, and interviews with some of the people who helped make The Great Pumpkin happen.

Too bad the publishers didn't package the book with a DVD of the special, though. Somewhere Charlie Brown is still saying, "I got a rock."

Have you ever been in love with someone who was totally wrong for you? (It's a rhetorical question, don't think too hard on it.) If you've never experienced the uncertainty that comes with the territory, Walter Dean Myers' new book, Street Love will school you on the do's and don'ts of these emotional waters.

Written entirely in free verse poetics, Street Love is the story of Damien, a 17 year old basketball star who excels in school and seems to have a bright and shining future on the horizon. Enter Junice. Junice is a 16 year old woman trying desperately to keep her life together. While her mother serves out a 25 year sentence for selling drugs, Junice must do everything she can to protect and support herself and her younger sister, Melissa. Living a life of borderline desperation and urgency, Junice certainly has no time for boys. Enter Damien.

Who wants to read a book written as poems? Trust me, you do. This isn't the flowery romanticism of long dead authors (although you would do well to pick them up, too). This lyrical onslaught has a tempo all its own. It is the harmonizing of lovestruck characters set to the rhythm of the street. Here's a taste:

DAMIEN

Junice moves uneasily through the room
Her stops punctuated by a soft smile
That sends shivers of delight up my spine
My smile doesn't fit my face anymore
Clumsily I try to hold the space
She gives me between the yellowed curtains
And the darkly stained table where my legs
Cross and uncross searching out casual
The smell of food cooking in some other
Kitchen reminds me that we share the world

Junice moves uneasily through the room
I speak, and her quick mind catches the thought
And tosses it playfully at my feet
I am eager to laugh and she knows it
I talk nonsense and she nods, I babble
And she babbles back. I am excited
Yes, and afraid in her presence

In the faraway next room there are sounds
"Melissa's watching some kiddy program,"
Junice says. "I bribed her to waste her mind."

We are dancers, she with bare feet
And dangling bracelets, the native child
Burned by the copper sun
I am the explorer
Discovering that there are two sides to the ocean

"Damien, what are you thinking?" she asked.

"I am thinking that I am not thinking.
What are you thinking?"

"I am thinking that I am thinking too much,"
     she said

"Is that good or bad?" I asked.

"I don't know," she said, freezing the thought
I stood and put my arms around her

She put her head against my chest
In the long moment that followed
It was impossible to breathe
Too difficult to speak
We were rapt in each other
For a handful of heartbeats
Until, embarrassed, she pushed me away
We had shared more
Than we knew possible
Then I was standing, jacket in hand, at the door
Awkwardly we faced and wondered if Could
Would turn to Yes, her fingertips kissed
My face. My lips barely parted and quickly
Closed.
Down the stairs, and into the cool night
A half-moon floated
High above the jutting chimneys
Perhaps there were two moons
Perhaps a dozen

Street Love hits bookstores on Tuesday (Halloween!). Be sure to let us know what you think!

Monday is never good for anyone, is it? Let's not get in to that whole thing. Right now it's about 95 degrees in our office and I am suddenly troubled by the fact that there is no symbol for "degrees" on this keyboard. Let's not get into that whole thing either.

All that I wanted to say right now was that I was writing some web content for READ magazine today, and as I was going along, I found myself writing the word "disappoint" in a sentence. The exact sentence was "Here, in issue 5, we do not disappoint."

Disappoint? That can't be right. Surely, there are two Ss and only one P? A super quick glance at dictionary.com confirmed my original spelling. How disgusting. Shouldn't that be phonetically sounded out as - dis-uh-puh-point? Why does that word need two Ps? Am I crazy? I can't be the only one who sees how wrong this is? Am I?

Perhaps I am just tired. But sometimes, words just look ugly and wrong to me. Sometimes, I'll stare at a word like "disappoint" or "height" or "circus" and I'll go crazy. I'll just go absolutely nuts trying to figure out how someone originally thought that THAT was the best way to spell that word. And, being unable to come up with any logical conclusion, I'll completely flip out and totally scare away my co-workers.

"Bry, are you OK?"
"I'm disappointed. Disappointed. Disappointed. Disappointed."

Words can kill. Be careful out there.

The following stories are brilliant interpretations of the 1,000 Words image in the September, 2006 issue of Writing Magazine. This concludes our Froggy contest. Coming soon, more of your outstanding 1,000 Words interpretations from the October issue!

Fred the Frog - Coward or Warlord?
- Story by Alexandra Sobczak, Grade 7

Squish, squelch, squish. Fred the frog's feet hopped over the soggy canopy of trees as he hurried to seek shelter underneath the leafy Banyan tree. It was rain season in the Amazon rain forest and everything was wet. Wet trees, wet ground, wet leaves, wet animals, and wet amphibians. Pretty much anything that was in the rain forest was wet.

Fred had never really been very enthusiastic about being wet. Especially the wet animal part, animals always smelled funny when they got wet. His grandma Sophia always said that you can't have trees without rain, and without trees there would be no tree frogs, and without tree frogs... well, then Fred wouldn't exist.

As Fred sat and pondered this, he suddenly saw the orange, white, and black body of a toucan flutter overhead. Fred's heart jumped into his throat, there were many toucans in the Amazon but only one had that unique combination of orange, blue, and red on its wing--like a blood red sun rising up above the crystal, turquoise Amazon River. That toucan's name was Bill, and Bill had taken it upon himself to torment all tree frogs no matter how old, young, big, or small. He had become a regular living terror for all tree frogs everywhere--picking up unsuspecting frogs and dropping them amongst the rainforest trees or simply eating them for his own greedy pleasure. Fred hid under a leaf and tried to look as much like a leaf as possible, hoping Bill wouldn't see him. Fortunately Bill didn't, and he moved on.

"Isn't he just the most annoying bird you've ever met?" a voice said behind Fred. Fred jumped a mile into the air and turned tentatively around to face a beautiful girl tree frog staring back at him with her big, bulgy red eyes.

"Ummmm, yeah I guess," stammered Fred still trying to comprehend that a girl tree frog was actually talking to him.

"Oh I’m sorry," she said, "I’m just barging in on you and not even introducing myself, I'm Meg and I live in the tree with the pink hibiscus plant. What's your name?"

"My name is Fred. I live in the tree with the green vine around it," he answered, still a bit shocked.

- Story by Jennifer Abrams, Grade 8

Frank the frog sat on a skinny brown twig looking up at the big blue sky overhead. Raindrops were dripping all around him. Thank goodness he was covered by a large green leaf above his round head. Around him were green, yellow, red, and orange plants. Clear blue drops of rain were falling from the sky. Frank placed his hand up on the leaf. It was wet and had been dripping on his head. It made him realize just how much his head was throbbing with pain. As he looked down he noticed a large scratch on his slimy arm. Where did that come from? The cut had to be from just recently because he did not remember seeing it there before.

He took a breath and remembered how he had gotten there. Somehow he had fallen off his lily pad on the pond back home and into the water. He remembered the water in the pond. It was cold, slimy, and foggy. As he fell into the water, a fish swam right under his stomach. The fish rose up and slid right underneath Frank's round belly to give him a ride. They rode for a long time before the fish finally got to the shore and Frank hopped off his scaly back.

Frank jumped onto the ground and started to try to find someone who would know where he was. Before Frank got very far he noticed a big bird with razor-sharp talons and a beak that was two times the size of Frank's whole body. The hungry-looking bird swooped down above Frank's head and grabbed his chubby stomach with his sharp talons and carried him into the air. The bird was heading towards his nest. That could only mean one thing--Frank would be served as dinner to the bird and her family.

Frank started to become too heavy for the bird and he fell out of the bird's grasp. Her pointed talons scratched Frank's arm, leaving him with the scratch.

Frank fell through the sky. He caught himself on a branch just thick enough to support his weight.

- Story by Rachel T., Grade 8

Once upon a time lived a great frog in the capitol of Yardin. He had everything including all the cute girl frogs, money, and friends. Most of this was due to the fact that he was the great prince of Yardin. His father was the King who ruled the land and he was slowly getting older.

One day a girl frog that he was hanging out with, got very upset about a spot on the bottom of her hand. She stormed away and hopped into the forest never stopping to look back. The great prince went after her and knew that she would die if he didn't. It was going to rain so hard that if she went too far she would be swept away forever. He cried out to her to stop but she kept going so he followed her to a big road. He shouted, "No!" ... but it was too late. The girl frog had been run over by a human vehicle.

Some Mondays are worth looking forward to, and yesterday was one of them. That's because Sandhya and I went to see an author we both like tremendously, and the experience was better than we imagined. I'm talking about Marjane Satrapi, author of the two-part graphic novel Persepolis. We saw her speak at the State University of New York at Purchase.

If you've never read a graphic novel before--and I hadn't before Persepolis, other than thumbing through some of Neil Gaiman's Sandman series in college--then Persepolis is a great introduction. It's also an eye-opening look at life in Iran, one of the countries that U.S. politicians have labeled as part of an "axis of evil."

Persepolis is told over the course of two books, The Story of a Childhood and The Story of a Return. The books follow Satrapi from her youth in Iran to her education and coming of age in Europe back to her return to Iran as a young woman. It's hard not to fall in love with Marji (her nickname), who's inquisitive, opinionated, brave, and not afraid to admit her mistakes. In the first book, Marji describes how her life twists and turns from ages 6 to 14, including both the Islamic Revolution of 1979 that brought religious fundamentalists to power in Iran, and the eight-year Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s.

It's fascinating, as an American who never studied much modern history in school, to learn about these events. They help put the present situation in Iran and the Middle East in perspective. And seeing them through Marji's eyes lends them a human touch. Watching the news on TV or reading it in the paper, it's tempting to think that most people in Iran are just as dogmatic and religiously fanatic as their leaders, but Persepolis proves that's not so; there are good, intelligent, funny, open-minded people everywhere.

The lecture was a ton of fun and both Sandhya and I left with smiles. Satrapi is really smart and funny, not afraid to speak her mind, and her English is terrific. She talked a lot about why she chose to tell her story graphically, and how people always ask her why she didn't write a text memoir instead. "You wouldn't ask a moviemaker, 'Why didn’t you dance?'" she responds. Satrapi says she decided to write the books because she was sick of the preconceptions and biases that people in the West have about life in Iran.

One of the most interesting parts of the talk was her description of writing Persepolis. In other books, Satrapi uses a free-flowing style, but Persepolis is broken into short chapters made of small-framed panels; this approach allowed her to keep a necessary distance from the story. "My goal is to take the reader by the hand and say, 'I have a story to tell you, and you will listen to it, and I will never let your hand down.'"

Fans of Persepolis and people who've never read it are in for a real treat. Satrapi is working on an animated film version of Persepolis and hopes it will be released sometime next year. Yesterday was also the U.S. release of the English translation of her new book, Chicken With Plums, a really sad story about one of Satrapi's distant relatives. In the meantime, if you like her work and want to hear what she has to say, you can see if Satrapi may be coming to a city near you.

Have you read Persepolis? If so, what do you think? What did you like or not like about it? What did you learn?

Review by Steven Levine, Grade 11

Obie Trice was brought up like many rappers: in the ghetto of an industrial city, in this case, Detroit.  His hard knocks life taught him at a young age that hard work and determination could lift him out of his struggle. Marshall Mathers, a.k.a. Eminem, inspired Trice. Eminem's success in the underground scenes of Detroit encouraged Trice to meet and impress his role model. It didn't take long. Obie's career skyrocketed after a personal introduction to the Detroit rap legend himself. Eminem was so impressed by Obie's sampler, as well as his work ethic, that he signed him on the spot. Three years later, Obie released his first album, "Cheers," which received highly regarded praise around the world.  Trice just released his second album "Second Round's On Me," which clearly demonstrates the maturation and professional talents that Obie has at the microphone.

Obie Trice has a presence and style all his own. Plain and simple. Nobody with any experience with rap music could ever mistake Obie for another rapper. His incomparable voice has the ability to take center stage, but not overshadow the music. He can also blend into the music for a good boost. All rap sounds the same. No it doesn't. Obie Trice has proved that in 2003 and now again in 2006. 

Since 2003, Obie has matured as a lyricist as well as in production. As a boy, Trice always wanted to connect with his icons. Unsurprisingly, a goal he had on this album was to connect with his listeners.  He has successfully achieved this goal through unparalleled lyrics and song structure. His great flow and rhythm complement the beats of Eminem and his other qualified producers. Not only that, this album can stimulate anyone to feel all types of emotions. For example, "Lay Down" is a song designed to amp up the listener as Obie displays well his quick skills as well as his rhymes. The chorus contrasts Obie's quickness with a slower power-punched feature that can bring anybody's heart rate up. 

Trice brings down the curtain on his sophomore album with "Obie Story." The tone of this song goes from upbeat, to depressed, and then it tops off with an optimistic feeling.  What makes this song is how the mood changes when the lyrics and beats change, accurately showing how the music can affect a listener's perception of meaning just as easily as lyrics can.

Obie Trice was determined to avoid the curse of the sophomore slump with the release of his second album, and he has succeeded in style.  "Second Round's On Me" shows all the fine qualities that Trice possesses in the rap business. If you enjoyed "Cheers" then you are bound to love this album. Even if you have never heard the work of Trice, you should give this album a listen because it is truly phenomenal.

Every year, the National Book Foundation recognizes achievements in fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and young people's literature. Last year, the award in the young people's literature category went to Jeanne Birdsall for her novel The Penderwicks: A Summer Tale of Four Sisters, Two Rabbits, and a Very Interesting Boy

The 2006 National Book Award finalists were announced yesterday. For the first time ever, the nominees include a graphic novel--Gene Luen Yang's "American Born Chinese" which was nominated in the young people's literature category. (Other nominees were  M.T. Anderson's The Pox Party: The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Vol. 1; Martine Leavitt's Keturah and Lord Death; Patricia McCormick's Sold (listen to the author read an excerpt); Nancy Werlin's The Rules of Survival).

Here's a plot synopsis of American Born Chinese, taken from the book's website:

All Jin Wang wants is to fit in...

When his family moves to a new neighborhood, he suddenly finds that he's the only Chinese--American student at his school. Jocks and bullies pick on him constantly, and he has hardly any friends. Then, to make matters worse, he falls in love with an all-American girl ...

Born to rule over all the monkeys in the world, the story of the Monkey King is one of the oldest and greatest Chinese fables. Adored by his subjects, master of the arts of kung-fu, he is the most powerful monkey on earth. But the Monkey King doesn't want to be a monkey. He wants to be hailed as a god ...

Chin-Kee is the ultimate negative Chinese stereotype, and he's ruining his cousin Danny's life. Danny's a basketball player, a popular kid at school, but every year Chin-Kee comes to visit, and every year Danny has to transfer to a new school to escape the shame. This year, though, things quickly go from bad to worse ...

These three apparently unrelated tales come together with an unexpected twist, in a modern fable that is hilarious, poignant, and action-packed. American Born Chinese is an amazing ride, all the way up to the astonishing climax - and confirms what a growing number of readers already know: Gene Yang is a major talent.

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood
and sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveller, long I stood
and looked down one as far as I could
to where it bent in the undergrowth

Recognize this? Well, if you haven't read it yet, you will soon. Tell your teachers to get on that! It's The Road Not Taken, the classic Robert Frost poem that every student absolutely MUST read before he/she gets to high school. I'm not going to link it here because it's just so important that you have to go find it yourself. It's totally worth it and will take you about three seconds to find. At any rate, it is a poem about self-discovery, originiality, and yes, even anti-establishment. Oh, and it all takes place in the most pastoral of scenes. Ahhh.

Why am I talking about this poem? Well, to introduce you to Robert Frost for starters. He was a poet who, as a young boy, often heard voices in his head. His mother told him that he shared her "second sight", while his father continued to drink away the years.

What does any of this have to do with poetry? Hmm. Well, alot, actually. One of the best ways to appease the voices in your head is to write them out of you. I'm not saying that Frost wrote because of this. I'm just suggesting that you might.

Wow. ANYWAY.... we are here today to talk about a new Robert Frost poem (new to us anyway). Frost has been dead for nearly 40 years but since when has that kept the great ones from their art? His latest poem, "War Thoughts at Home" was handwritten in a copy of a close friend's book. That friend was Frederic G. Melcher, and the poem is partly about him.

According to the Virginia Quarterly Review, "War Thoughts at Home" embodies the stories of two great friends in Frost's life. The first was Edward Thomas--who died in the trenches during World War I--and the poem narrates Frost's ambivalence about the war that claimed Thomas's life. The story of the other friend picks up where the first leaves off. It is the story of a new beginning for Frost in his friendship with Frederic G. Melcher, a rising star in the book trade, and it was Melcher who preserved this lost passage of Frost's poetic thoughts about the war.

Here is a brief excerpt of "War Thoughts at Home"

On the backside of the house
Where it wears no paint to the weather
And so shows most its age,
Suddenly blue jays rage
And flash in blue feather.

It is late in an afternoon
More grey with snow to fall
Than white with fallen snow
When it is blue jay and crow
Or no bird at all.

The entire poem is printed in the current issue of the Virginia Quaterly Review. Pick one up today!

Wow, college is fun!  I'm taking my first college Creative Writing class -- "Intro to Short Fiction" -- and the 3-hour class goes by much too quickly.  Imagine, reading and writing short stories for "homework"?!  Those are things I love doing for fun! 

I've learned in my class that other people will always have different opinions about your writing.  There are eighteen students in my class, and each week, we critique two or three short stories submitted by our classmates.  Not surprisingly, each week there are eighteen different opinions on how to improve each story!  I've learned that if there is a suggestion about one of my stories that the majority of the class agrees upon -- maybe I need to add more character description, or tighten up the dialogue -- then it is something I should pay attention to.  But trying to please everyone will drive you crazy -- not to mention, it's impossible!  As my writing friend Elizabeth Berg wrote me in a letter, "First, please yourself." Good advice for any area of your life, I think. 

Time flies! Tomorrow will already be one week since I heard Donald Hall--the 14th poet laureate of the United States--read and discuss his work at the National Book Festival in Washington DC.

At age 78, Hall is a prolific and brilliant poet whose writings have been profoundly inspired by place. He spent his summers as a child at his grandparents' farm in New Hampshire. "I've always loved New Hampshire so much that I remembered it all the time when I wasn't living there. I wrote out of memory," he remembered. When he was in his 50s, Hall moved back there to dedicate his life to writing poetry.

Hall lives a life close to nature. Of his work, the former poet laureate Billy Collins has said:

"Hall has long been placed in the Frostian tradition of the plainspoken rural poet. His reliance on simple, concrete diction and the no-nonsense sequence of the declarative sentence gives his poems steadiness and imbues them with a tone of sincere authority. It is a kind of simplicity that succeeds in engaging the reader in the first few lines."

At the National Book Festival, Hall read several poems from his new book White Apples and the Taste of Stone, and talked about his life-long relationship with words. He started writing poetry at age 12 and his first poem was published when he was 16. "The first poet I loved when I was 12 was Edgar Allen Poe." Hall told us. "Then, at age 14, I discovered the modern poets--Hilda Doolittle, Ezra Pound, and Wallace Stevens."

As a young poet, Hall said that he wrote a lot of "very decorative verses" but didn't focus on "personal expression." Over time, he feels he has undergone a process of "gradual nakedness" on the page. He has poured more and more of himself into his work.

What is it about poetry that has made him keep writing all these years? "Poetry expresses a great multiplicity of feelings--it fills the human mind."

I had not read too many of Hall's poems before this event and was intrigued by his comment that when it comes to poetry, "first the sounds, then the meaning" are important. What did he mean by that? I've been pondering that question and it strikes me that the simplest way to explain this is to give you this example:

What is the difference between these two sentences:

The year endured without punctuation. - from Donald Hall's poem "Without"
The 365 days passed without any periods, commas, or exclamation marks.

Same meaning - different sound. The first one, however, evokes a strong feeling of the passage of time ... and the word endured stretches, just like time stretches when it passes slowly.

EXTRA:
* Listen to a podcast of Donald Hall talking about poetry at the National Book Festival. Download.
* Listen to Donald Hall read three of his poems out loud: National Public Radio

That's one small step for man, one giant leap for Britney Spears. ... Oops. I did it again.

What? OK, so it wasn't that garbled.

When Neil Armstrong first stepped foot on the moon back on July 20, 1969, he spoke the words that would forever remain in our memories: That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind. However, that phrase didn't always ring true with word enthusiasts and geeks everywhere (present company included). The problem with the grammar is that man and mankind are basically the same thing. When using them both together like this, it is repetitive.

Armstrong has always insisted that he said:That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind. Do you see the difference? This way, the correct way, means that the step he is taking is a small one for him but a great big one for everyone. Oy.

At any rate, new technology out of Australia has actually found the missing "a" in Armstrong's words. It was hidden by inflection, a slur, and about 8 bizillion miles of interference. So we can all sleep a little easier now. The boys at NASA have their A.

Oh, and the new Australian technology also deciphered what Armstrong said immediately after those famous words. He said, "I'm guessing there's not going to be a burrito stand up here. Man, do I love burritos."

I attended the National Book Festival in Washington, D.C. this past Saturday. The morning was dabbled with spurts of rain that were just long enough to cause some discomfort. But thankfully, by noon, the blue skies had at last moved in.

The event was held on the National Mall, a long, open park behind the Washington Monument. There were various, large tents set up for author appearances. The tents were split up by categories: "Fiction and Fantasy", "Poetry", "Teens and Children", "Home and Family", etc.

The first author I heard speak was Khaled Hosseini. I have heard from many people that his book, The Kite Runner, is a thing of beauty. I'd been meaning to pick it up for months but never got around to it. However, after hearing him speak, I marched on over to the book sales tent and, after an insane half hour of waiting in line, purchased his novel.

Hosseini told the audience that he originally wrote The Kite Runner as a short story. He submitted it to various magazines (including The New Yorker) and was rejected every time. He decided that his story was not as effective as it could be. It was too, well, short. Hosseini continued working on it, turning it into a novel.

The Kite Runner is a story about two Afghani boys living in their war-torn country of Afghanistan. When Hosseini was two-thirds of the way through the writing of his novel, 9/11 happened and the news emerged that Al Qaeda terrorists had been hiding out in Afghanistan. At this point, he gave up the writing. He didn't think that the world would want to read about a country that had produced the terrorists.

Luckily for the world, his wife convinced him to keep going. She told him that "the world needs to see Afghanistan in a different light. Now, more than ever." Taking her advice, Hosseini pressed on.

Hosseini said that his book has often been mistaken for a memoir. It is fiction. Although Hosseini was born in Afghanistan, he insists that the plot was derived entirely from his imagination (save for the setting of the novel and the politics therein, of course). Yet still, people insist that The Kite Runner's main character, Amir, is the author in disguise. Hosseini admitted that a few of the characters in the book are based on real people. For instance, the character Hassan was based on a servant in his childhood home. However, the author is adamant about the fact that Amir is not Hosseini.

"A woman once asked me," Hosseini told us, "How is Sohrab doing?" Sohrab is a character in The Kite Runner.

"Well," Hosseini told the woman, "It's a novel. Sohrab doesn't exist."

Then the woman looked at him with a knowing smile and leaned in to whisper to Hosseini, "You tell Sohrab, I said hello."

Of course, this got a big laugh from the audience and Hosseini laughed right along with us. That all too rare connection between author and reader was achieved. It's always a special treat when you get to share some behind-the-scenes insight with writers. I look forward to reading The Kite Runner, and I will, of course, give a review when the last page has been turned.

Come back throughout the rest of the week to read more coverage of the 2006 National Book Festival.