Tag Archives: Weekend Write-Off

Ivan Negru
Weekend Write-Off, Writing

The Watermelon Seed

When I was pregnant with my second child and teaching English/Language Arts to twelve and thirteen year-olds, my belly grew in line with the progression of the kids’ knowledge and the school year. If they hadn’t figured it out at the start of the year, it soon became apparent.

One morning, a co-teacher came to me with a story about a shared student, very intelligent and matter-of-fact. She said that Paul had asked her in homeroom whether I was pregnant.

“I hope so, Paul. Either that or she swallowed a watermelon.”

With no hesitation whatsoever, he responded, “Well, I vote for the watermelon. Babies make a lot of noise.”

She turned what seemed to be an obvious question into a playful response; he turned it into a truthful commentary on raising kids.

Each summer when my young children would happily devour sweet cool watermelon, inevitably a black shiny seed would be ingested. Usually, they’d complain if they even spied one in their slice, but one always seemed to slip through. After repeated ignored attempts to explain their harmless nature, how they’ll only provide some fiber … I finally just responded with, “Uh oh, looks like a watermelon is going to grow in your belly.” After the shocked look of disbelief, I’d follow up with, “Yup, it’s going to sprout right out of your belly button.”

And that’s just what happens to the crocodile in Greg Pizzoli’s picture book, The Watermelon Seed!

On the first several pages, he pontificates on his love for the fruit:

I like it for breakfast.

I like it for lunch.

I like a big salty slab for dinner . . .

and I LOVE it for dessert!

But then the unthinkable happens – with a page as dark as the seed itself.

Crocodile is worried the vines will come out his ears rather than his belly button, but the look on his face is the same as my girls’ always was.

It ends up being only a close call for Crocodile and he is not scared straight from his obsession with watermelon. Neither have seeds kept my girls away from watermelon in the long run.

The Watermelon Seed is a funny, playful, relatable book for kids. Emergent and early readers will be able to access the language on their own, but toddlers, preschoolers, and early elementary will love the hilarity of it in a read-aloud. Even older children and students will be able to appreciate Crocodile’s conundrum and it can offer a bridge to childhood memories for discussion or narrative writing. Pizzoli’s illustration adds to the comedy with some pretty epic facial expressions from Crocodile. The graphic shapes and block letters as well as use of color give the entire story an accessible and universal feel.

Just as it did for me, The Watermelon Seed may conjure funny and happy stories – at the very least, sweet summer memories of chomping watermelon.

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Weekend Write-Off

Lost in NYC

I have a shirt with a bright red circle surrounding a big number one on the front.

Whenever I wear it, people (very often my dad) ask what I’m number one in.

I joke that I got it that summer I lived in New York so I would remember which subway line to take home.

But the truth is that I loved the MTA system so much. It, like the grid New York’s streets are laid out on, was so logistical and straightforward. It didn’t hurt that my lines, the 1 and the 9, were a straight shot up to the Bronx where I was staying.

I also fell for its graphic design. Bold primary colors, crisp black lines, and solid shapes.

Not only did I buy the shirt, but when I discovered that the transit authority holds a surplus sale each year, I signed up for the newsletter to be apprised of all events. I have yet to acquire a slab of subway station or signage, but there is the dream.

So when I accompanied my ten year-old to the graphic novel section of our library, Lost in NYC: A Subway Adventure leapt right off the shelf.

With story by Nadja Spiegelman and art by Sergio Garcia Sanchez (colored by Lola Moral), Lost in NYC details a beginner’s day on the MTA through the eyes of a child. Pablo, and his new friend Alicia, do some quick thinking on their feet when they are separated from their class field trip. Soon, they are even separated from each other, leaving Alicia, while a native New Yorker, to navigate independently for the first time.

Before the class leaves the school, their teacher gives a brief history of the city’s subway system, using the bedrock the Empire State Building (and their destination) is anchored in as a segue to its underground workings. The readers learn about express and local trains when Alicia and Pablo mistakenly hop the one opposite the class. We learn about different routes and exchanges as they separately make their way back to rendesvous with the class.

The subway adventure, while exciting on its own, is also a frame for another story within. While Pablo learns the transportation system of his new city, with Alicia’s help, he is learning how to trust and accept friendship and belonging in a new place. A seemingly small interaction with his parents on the sidewalk in front of the school in the morning, where he brushes off their hugs and help, sets the stage for his own acclimation to his new home, even if he was brought there by his parents. He relies on himself, bringing in help from Alicia and an adult he asks for assistance.

This graphic novel would be a fabulous read for someone visiting the city for the first time or readers who love big cities, transportation, trains, and/or maps. I would make it required reading before taking my own kids into the city – even the big ones. Several pages at the back of the book offer historical photos and facts about the creation of the subway system and the inner workings of the Empire State Building. I learned things after already visiting both. Setting and cities aside, this graphic novel is also a good read for children facing or acclimating to a move and making new friends.

A quintessential part of any New York experience, the New York City MTA is the perfect setting to paint a picture of life there. Given that it is presented in a graphic format is all the more fitting.

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Clement Proust Pexels
Weekend Write-Off, Writing

Independence as a Young Mother

“Discovering that you craved independence when you were a young mother was about as convenient and feasible as shooting a man in cold blood and then deciding you didn’t feel like being a murderer after all.”

MAINE, J. Courtney Sullivan
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Alfredo Marco Pradil Pexels
Weekend Write-Off

Guest for a Lifetime

"You have to understand," she said.  "Grief lasts forever."

     "Like death," I said.

     "Like death.  Except death is someone else's condition, and grief is all yours."

     "I feel worse now than I did shortly after she died."

     "And you'll feel even worse next year.  And worse the year after that, unless you find a way to
transform your grief."

     "We're back to that."

     "We've never left it," she said.  "Grief comes to you all at once, so you think it will be over all at 
once.  But it is your guest for a lifetime."

     "How should I treat this gift?  This unwelcome, uninvited guest."

     "Think of the one who sent it to you," she said.

The above excerpt is from a conversation Roger Rosenblatt shared in Kayak Morning: Reflections on Love, Grief, and Small Boats. See my post, Beside Myself, for my thoughts inspired by reading this memoir.

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How to Say Babylon A Memoir Safiya Sinclair
Weekend Write-Off, Writing

A Word That Leapt Aflame in My Mind

“I sounded the lines out aloud, feeling the rhymes growing delicious on my tongue.  Later I went to the Encyclopaedia Brittanica and looked up William Blake. I couldn’t believe it.  He died nearly 170 years before me, but his words grew a thriving forest in my head. A thought, I understood it then, and its incendiary mind, could outlive itself. A well-made word could outspan carbon, and bone, and halved uranium.  Until now, I imagined the world divided in two halves: the world of the spiritual, of my parents: Jah and levity, vibrations, energies, and chakras.  And then, there was a world of things I could measure and understand, visible and knowable.  Now, I felt there was another world just out of reach.  A gossamer wing flashed against the bedroom window.  I took out my journal and wrote my first lines of poetry in vines of cursive.  Wings in the sunlight, wings against my dress.  I pulled wing after luminous wing from my mouth. Watching them flutter alive with each word, my hands a vibrant garden. The poem was called ‘The Butterfly,’ the first to pull itself from the soft veil between all worlds, a seam to slip through to any place, any time. I knew then that as long as I had a word that leapt aflame in my mind, I would always be living in an age of wonder.”
from How to Say Babylon: A Memoir by Safiya Sinclair

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church window Job 6:37
Weekend Write-Off

To Again Become

When she can’t sleep at night, she tries to remember the details of all the rooms where she has slept: the one she shared with her parents until the age of thirteen, the ones at the university residence and the Annecy apartment facing the cemetery. She starts at the door and makes her way around the walls. The objects that appear are always linked to gestures and singular facts: in her room at the summer camp where she’d worked as a counselor, the mirror over the sink where some boy counselors had written in her red Diamond Enamel toothpaste, ‘Long live whores’; the blue lamp in her room in Rome that gave her an electrical shock each time she turned it on. In those rooms, she never sees herself with the clarity of photos, but blurred as in a film on an encrypted TV channel. Or she sees a silhouette, a hairstyle, movements – leaning out of a window, washing her hair – and positions – sitting at a desk or lying on a bed. Sometimes she manages to feel she is back inside her former body, not the way one is in dreams, but more as if she were inside the ‘glorious body’ of the Catholic religion, which was supposed to resurrect after death with no sensation of pain or pleasure, heat, cold, or the urge to urinate. She doesn’t know what she wants from these inventories, except maybe through the accumulation of memories of objects, to again become the person she was at such and such a time.

The Years, Annie Ernaux

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Weekend Write-Off, Writing

Italian Hospitality

Her kitchen is tiny – the size of a large cupboard – but perfectly arranged and stocked so that she has everything at hand when I drop by to discuss when we might make the said gnocchi. ‘Ora!’ she insists, unfazed by the notion of improvising a cookery class on the spur of the moment. ‘Now!’ She is already spooning coffee into the aluminum Moka pot and placing it on the stove: hospitality is, it seems, the first duty for every Italian.

A Year in the Village of Eternity: The Lifestyle of Longevity in Campodimele, Italy by Tracy Lawson

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Weekend Write-Off, Writing

One Pizza at a Time

Usually I use Weekend Write-off posts as a place to share an update on my own writing, thoughts on process, or an excerpt from the book on my bedside table, but today I am excited to feature a young writer with a wise outlook. Sometimes it takes the eyes of a child to put things in perspective.

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Weekend Write-Off

Collective Superstition

“Air-conditioning will give you kidney stones,” Luka said. I was gradually recalling those mundane moments – the ones that had until now given way to more traumatic memories – of a childhood governed by collective superstition: Never open two windows across from each other – the propuh draft will give you pneumonia. Don’t sit at the corner of the table; you’ll never get married. Lighting a cigarette straight off a candle kills a sailor. Don’t cut your nails on a Sunday. If it hurts, put some rakija on it.

I tried to think of a singularly American superstition. I’d learned a few from the Uncles – something about not letting one’s shoes touch the kitchen table – but those were all imported from the Old World. Perhaps a country of immigrants had never gotten around to commingling the less desirable pieces of their cultures. Either that, or life wasn’t difficult enough to warrant an adult’s belief in magic.”

Girl at War: A Novel by Sara Novic

https://sara-novic.com/girl-at-war
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