Last year we spoke to Katie Smith Milway about her first solo children’s book One Hen: How One Small Loan Made a Big Difference, selected for the Spirit of PaperTigers 2010 Book Set; it’s great to welcome her back now to talk about her latest book The Good Garden: How One Family Went from Hunger to Having Enough, which promises to be equally life-changing and life-affirming as One Hen. The Good Garden is illustrated by Sylvie Daigneault and, like One Hen, is published by Kids Can Press as part of their superb CitizenKid series.

Katie is a partner at the Bridgespan Group, an advisory to nonprofits and philanthropy. She has written many books and articles on sustainable development and has coordinated community development programs in Africa and Latin America for Food for the Hungry International. She is also the co-author with her mother Mary Ann Smith of Cappuccina Goes to Town (Kids Can Press, 2002), as well as the non-fiction book The Human Farm: A Tale of Changing Lives & Changing Lands (Kumarian Press/Stylus Publishing,1994).

Katie lives in Wellesley, Massachusetts, USA.

In your interview with PaperTigers last year, while touching upon the then forthcoming The Good Garden, you said, “In an era of food crisis, any child can play their part in their home or school garden, or in supporting poor farmers through acts of giving.” How have you aimed at getting that message across in the book?

The Good Garden is based on true people and events, and portrays the life of a campesino family in Honduras. They, like so many small farmers around the world eke out barely enough to live on – in a good year – and are highly vulnerable to hunger and malnutrition, when weather or insects create havoc. This family’s life is transformed, however, when a new teacher, Don Pedro, comes to the village school and gets the family’s daughter, María Luz Duarte, to help him plant a school garden – which he not only uses to teach students their basic subjects, but moreover to teach simple, sustainable agriculture methods that they can apply using their innate human resources: their heads, hands and heart. Through the caring labor of composting, terracing the hillside, planting beans among corn to keep soil nutrients in balance, and even dotting the terraces with flowers that smell bad to bugs, students see their school garden thrive on land that they all thought was too poor to keep them going. María Luz and others bring the learning home to their farms, improve their crops and grow in confidence about taking their own produce to market as opposed to selling to unfair middlemen – called “coyotes” in Honduras – who scoop profits. The knowledge they glean in the marketplace triggers another cycle of learning and innovation. Most importantly, the way the family shares what they have learned – passes it forward – ultimately transforms village after village.

So on one hand, kids see many acts of giving within the story – from teacher to student, from student to family and from family to family. At the back of the book, however, we offer practical ways that kids can help local food banks and community gardens, or give to international organizations like World Vision or Heifer International that provide seeds, tools and farm animals to families that need them. On our website www.thegoodgarden.org, kids can learn more and join a national food drive.

What else do you hope children will find inspirational in the book, which is based on the true story of Honduran teacher Don Elías, who had a profound affect not only on his pupils, but also on the whole community, through spreading his practical knowledge of what was needed to create sustainable farmland?

I hope kids will feel empowered to apply their heads, hands and hearts to any problem to help themselves and others. And I especially hope The Good Garden interests them in combating world hunger – ideas for action are listed at the back of the book. I also hope we see even more school, community and family gardens sprouting up – so kids can identify, if only in a small way, with the billions of poor in our world who live off the land, and so they can experience the satisfaction and nutrition of self-grown produce.

As I was completing The Good Garden manuscript in spring 2009, two of my kids got interested in planting a vegetable garden, and so we’ve had a miniature farming experience ourselves. The kids worked their tails off planting, watering and weeding. They harvested corn, Brussels sprouts and cucumbers, but bugs and shade killed most of the peppers and tomatoes. This summer, Brendan (15) and Mary Kate (12) expanded the garden for maximum sunlight and planted marigolds to repel the bugs. We’ve had great peppers, tomatoes and eggplants, but a varmint got through the fencing and decimated the corn patch. All to say, we have learned how good home-grown food can be, but also the tenuousness of growing it. We would starve without groceries!

The Good Garden has only been out for a few months but have you already heard about schools using it as a springboard for their own projects?

Absolutely. Here are a few anecdotes: (more…)

First published in 2002 and recently reissued in paperback by Groundwood Books, Lessons from Mother Earth by Elaine McLeod and illustrated by Colleen Wood seems to be a perfect book to share with kids on Earth Day. I haven’t read the book yet (am about to head to the library to look for it), but judging by this recommendation (originally posted to Amazon) by librarian Laurie von Mehren at the Cuyahoga County Public Library in Parma, Ohio, it sounds lovely. It seems to convey two very important aspects of aboriginal cultures: a deep respect for nature and the role of elders as culture bearers:

This book by an author born in the Yukon and a member of the Na-Cho Nyak Dun First Nation is about respecting and caring for the planet. Five-year old Tess visits her grandmother’s mountain cabin and learns about her garden, which consists of nature itself. The first rule grandma teaches Tess is: “You must always take good care of our garden.” Following that, she tells Tess to say a prayer of thanks while picking fruits and vegetables; to harvest just enough and at the right time; and to take care not to trample the vegetation or leave rubbish behind. For dinner, they gather wild edibles-lamb’s-quarters, dandelion shoots, and blueberries.

Wood’s realistic yet impressionistic watercolors are glowing and lush, with dabs of color for close-ups of berries and woodland animals. This book would work particularly well for Earth Day or as part of a nature/ecology unit.

Lessons from Mother Earth is also mentioned in Paul De Pasquale’s article recently reprinted on PaperTigers, Imagining Home in Children’s Picture Books by Canadian Aboriginal Authors.

This year PaperTigers celebrates Earth Day by kicking off Jan Reynolds’ blog tour of Cycle of Rice, Cycle of Life: A Story of Sustainable Farming.

Author/photographer of Celebrate! Connections Among Cultures and the “Vanishing Cultures” series, Jan is no stranger to turning world cultures and natural environments into beautiful and educational books for children. With this new title, Cycle of Rice, Cycle of Life, she has put together a fascinating photo essay that explains sustainable farming by using the Balinese traditional system of rice farming as an example of “growing food while being conscious of the needs of other people and the well-being of the planet.”

The book shows us how rice farming in Bali has been practiced for a thousand years (“from seeds to rice-bearing plants to cut stalks that go back into the soil”), and how its cycle is closely connected to that of community life in the island. For the Balinese people, the natural rice cycle involves a hierarchy of water temples; community rituals performed by high priests to thank the goddess of water and the goddess of rice; careful planning of water-sharing schedules to meet everyone’s needs, allowing for a fallow period between growing cycles to keep the fields fertile; the help of ducks to eat worms and bugs and to fertilize the soil naturally with manure; and more. But in the end, the essence of the process, i.e the spirit of a connected community sharing water to ensure a rice harvest and a good life for all, comes through quite clearly (more…)

Marjorie and I weren’t quite part of the wheeling and dealing that is normally associated with the Bologna Book Fair (unlike Blue Rose Girls‘ Alvina Ling, Little, Brown publisher extraordinaire. See her photo of the fair’s agent center, with all the rows of numbered tables). We weren’t there to buy or sell rights, but to take it all in: we renewed old contacts and made new ones, we lined up interviews for the website and, most of all, we spread the word on PaperTigers. We spent the bulk of our time on three main halls, where most of the publishers of multicultural books were – and that was by no means a small feat – but we did have time for a few blood orange juice-breaks, and to attend authors’ presentations, gatherings at the Illustrators’ Café and an award ceremony or two. All very much worthwhile.

One of these inspiring, ‘off the beaten book aisles’ moments was the Bologna Ragazzi Award ceremony, which took place at the end of our first day – a day which had begun with the poetry panel Marjorie recently wrote about. The fair this year had a special section dedicated to poetry and a poetry category “to encourage the publication of poetry for children throughout the word” was especially added to its prestigious set of awards. Judged by an international jury, the winner of the poetry prize was the Polish publisher Wytwórnia, for “Tuwim: Poems for Children,” a celebration of the Polish poet Julian Tuwin‘s children’s poems (his work has been compared to Shell Silverstein’s) by seven talented graphic artists. I can’t read Polish, but I could pick up on Tuwin’s virtuose and the poems’ vitality just by looking at the expressive typographic lines and the exuberant graphs and whimsical doodles that accompanied them.

A gorgeous poetry catalog including profiles of renowned poets from around the world was created to accompany an exhibition that will travel to major Italian cities. The exhibit’s first stop was at the Palazzo dell’Archiginnasio in downtown Bologna, where colorful leaflets with poems in different languages were distributed to those attending the opening (and what better invitation to poetry lovers than to sail between all those languages!…). Among the American poems distributed was Karla Kuskin‘s “Words, and Words, and Words:”

What separates each one of us
from all the beasts and bugs and birds?
Well they have feathers, fur and wings
but we have words,
and words,
and words.

And since today, April 22, we celebrate “Earth Day,” I’ll end this post with another poem by Kuskin (the poem from Bologna introduced me – at last! – to her work, and the library books I borrowed upon returning home made me fall in love with it):

Dear Earth,
I miss your green and blue.
I miss my room and bear.
It’s dull and lonely here on this old star.
I miss your night, Dear Earth,
the moon above,
the cool dark grass below.
I miss each always-different, ever-changing day.
You know the way you are, Dear Earth.
Well, stay that way.