Reading a Map--Introductions

I am terrible with directions. I often get confused about how to get out of parking lots and driving or walking I can almost guarantee that the way I think I should turn is the precisely wrong way. Thankfully, now my phone navigates for me so I don't have to test out my theory as often as I did 20 years ago when I spent a lot of time and gas on the other route. The one that never got me where I wanted to go. Hard to say those routes were scenic--stressed, late brains don't tend to notice the scenery. This blog is not about maps or places. But I will admit to being and feeling more than a little lost in ways that no GPS could fix, and the last year of a pandemic, my own personal reckoning with my own personal lostness, and the toxic politics, and profound brokenness revealed throughout society, including the justice reckonings that our Black, Asian, immigrant and other communities have asked us to... well... reckon with... have sent me looking for a map. And I believe stories and poems and art are sometimes the map I need. Also. I love stories. I have three sons and I love that excuse to read children's literature and look for the stories that can help me (oh, and help my kids) understand where and who we are, where and who our neighbors are, and sometimes, where grace or truth or joy itself might be. I don't just read children's literature. And I don't like many black and white rules for the sake of rules. So here on this blog I plan to mostly talk children's literature, but I suspect I'll also talk poetry, "grown up" fiction, my own writing process--as someone who writes poetry and stories, TV, movies (those are stories too) and whatever else I encounter that will serve in map making. You are making a map too. And it has served you well in many ways, I know. But if you find, as I often do, that you took a few wrong turns and a lot of the landmarks keep reappearing over and over without getting you closer to home, let me offer a place for you and I to work out little section of a new map together, one for our children, one for our neighbors, for our own dear selves.