Quercus, vol 1, no 4

Marsha Qualey and Vicki Palmquist, editors

September 2006: vol. 1, no. 4

Our quarterly drawing for $250 worth of free books happens again on September 30th. Linda Nelson, a first-grade teacher in Rochester, Minnesota, won the June drawing and received 14 hardcover books, some signed by the authors! Encourage your colleagues to sign up for this newsletter so they can be the first to know about new books, authors, and more ... and for their chance to win wonderful books.

Julie Jersild Roth’s first picture book, Knitting Nell, was published in July by Houghton Mifflin. Her second book is scheduled for 2007. She recently spoke with Quercus.

The First Book

interviewing author-illustrator Julie Jersild Roth (pronounced "wrote")

Quercus: So many people have an idea for a book rattling around in their head. How did you finally sit down and do it?

Nell was not a part of my messy, bulging file of ideas, story fragments, sketches and little book dummies. She simply popped into my studio one summer afternoon, knitting needles and dog in tow.

I had been gazing out the window at my desk trying to think of something to paint. I wanted simply to paint, to feel the wet brush against the paper with no agenda—just for the fun of it. And there she was. And she was fun. Goodness ... she could even walk her dog while knitting! Then I painted a second image of her with her three friends at the park. Within a few hours, I’d sketched a nine-illustration panel and added the text, “This is Nell. She knits a lot.” (The name Nell came easily. Not only is it pleasingly alliterative, but I think subconsciously I liked that the lowercase Ls look like knitting needles.)

Quercus: Did the visual image of Nell come easily, or were there many versions before you created the one you used in Knitting Nell?

In the book Knitting Nell, (visit Julie's website to see more of the book) the first image I painted is pretty much the cover of the book (Nell is smiling more now; she likes the spotlight, I guess). The nine-illustration panel and text is now the first page of the book and the friends at the park now appear everywhere throughout the book’s pages.

Quercus: You used watercolor to create the illustrations in Knitting Nell. Is this a favorite medium? What appealed to you about watercolor for this particular project?

Yes, watercolor is a favorite medium. Though I love different aspects of other media, watercolor seemed the appropriate choice for a story that starts out in the summertime. Everything stays lighter and brighter more easily with watercolor. In Knitting Nell, I also used gouache, gesso, and bits of colored pencil and black ink in the artwork.

In the News

William Durbin will be a featured author at the St. Petersburg Times Book Festival on October 28th. On the 26th, Bill will speak with Pinellas County students in a live teleconference, asking questions about his most recent book, El Lector. The Times has announced that it will serialize his book next spring. Set in Ybor City, El Lector was inspired by an NPR news story about men who read out loud daily to cigar factory workers in the 1920s.

We welcome Jane St. Anthony to the Winding Oak list. With a strong debut novel, The Summer Sherman Loved Me, causing buzz for its wholesome characters and its delightful, what-happens-next plot, Jane brings several decades of freelance journalism and book reviewing to her workshops on writing for children and teens.

Kate DiCamillo has another new book out, Mercy Watson Fights Crime. If you haven't already discovered the zany adventures of the pig who loves toast, hie thee to a bookstore. Third in the series, there are two more titles under contract. Reading about Mercy's (accidental? smarter-than-we-think? you choose) role in foiling a burglar at the Watsons' had us laughing out loud.

Author and illustrator Kelly Dupre is gearing up for a season of school visits with her husband, Arctic explorer Lonnie Dupre. Kelly's newest book of block printed art is The Lion's Share, a Somalian folk tale published by the Minnesota Humanities Commission. Read more on Kelly's just-finished website.

Marion Dane Bauer has just finished work on Killing Miss Kitty, and Other Sins, a collection of young adult all featuring the same character, a girl named Claire, all set in the cement mill housing on the edge of a small town in northern Illinois in the early to mid 1950’s. Read Marion's essay entitled, "What I'm Working on New," for more news about forthcoming book projects.

When On the Day You Were Born was released, no one expected that it would become a modern classic, beloved by teachers, librarians, and grandparents, but primarily children who clamor for its message about their unique place in the world. Well, Debra Frasier has released a companion book, A Birthday Cake is No Ordinary Cake, which "cooks up" (recipe included) a delectable tale of the earth circling the sun as it moves through the seasons. Register for her free author visit contest!

The crew at Winding Oak celebrated when Gennifer Choldenko's Al Capone Does My Shirts landed on the New York Times Bestseller list after being released in paperback. In fact, her book is on several bestseller lists!

For more information on Winding Oak and our clients, please visit our website.




	Julie Jersild Roth, author and illustrator

	Did You Know?

	Nell is a knitting fiend and yarn is her knitting medium. She happens to have a friend who is into seed art. Cross breed their passions and you might come up with something like the wonderful yarn art of the Huichol people of northern Mexico. There are no legends or myths about knitting or knitters. Ancient Greek has no word for knitting. The earliest Latin terms for knitting appear no earlier than medieval times, and even then they are not used exclusively to refer to the activity of hand-knitting with two implements. The oldest remnants of hand-knitting have been found in Egypt and date back to after the Islamic conquest of that region (AD 641); Arabic also has no true word for knitting. One of the problems in pin-pointing the emergence of knitting as a wide-spread craft is the word “knit” has multiple meanings in most languages. Shakespeare uses the word in his plays 38 times, but in only one play (Gentlemen of Verona) does the usage refer to the craft of two-needle hand-knitting. The earliest datable pieces of knitting that have been found are thirteenth century Spanish cushions and medieval Egyptian fragments. Caps and stockings were probably the first things to be knitted on a large scale in England. Early English specimens date to the early fifteenth century. The Victoria and Albert Museum has an excellent collection of knitting specimens and related research materials. References to knitting appeared in art before literature. Beginning in the fourteenth century painters occasionally depicted a “knitting Madonna” as a way to convey the human and domestic side of the mother of Jesus. Early knitting references in English literature include Ralph Roister Doister (c. 1553) a play by Nicholas Udall and Arcadia (c. 1577), the sweeping romantic narrative by Sir Phillip Sidney. By the latter half of the sixteenth century knit stockings were a common wardrobe item in Europe. Mary Queen of Scots wore a pair to her execution.



	Historical information from A History of Hand Knitting, by Richard Rutt. Interweave Press, Loveland, Colorado, 1987.