It was a real thrill for me to meet not only Dashdondog Jamba at the IBBY Congress last month, having interviewed him last year, but also Anne Pellowski, who worked with him on the Libraries Unlimited edition of Mongolian Folktales.  Here’s a photo of us all:

Dashdondog was a member of a superb storytellers’ panel with Michael Harvey telling a tall tale in a mixture of Welsh and English and Sonia Nimr recounting hers first in English then in Arabic.  It was fascinating in both cases how much audience participation was possible, regardless of the language they were speaking, simply (and of course, not simple at all really) becasue they were such fine storytellers.

Dashdondog’s story-telling in Mongolian was accompanied by a slideshow that provided the necessary context and I loved his verse rendition of the work of the Mongolian Mobile Library that he founded in 1990 – the onomatopeia could be universally understood. You can watch part of it here. As well as his gift for storytelling, this part of Dashdondog’s presentation provided an indication of how committed the Mobile Children’s Library is in ensuring library books reach as many children as possible, regardless of the challenges of terrain, distance and weather conditions they encounter.

Do read Dashdondog’s article about the library here – and you can read some of his vibrant poems translated into English on his blog.

I’m still gathering my thoughts from the wonderful experience that was the IBBY Congress in London Thursday to Sunday 23-26 August.  Four days of inspirational speakers and meeting kindred spirits from all over the world.  I’ve now added a selection of photographs to our Flickr – you can see them here.  I haven’t quite finished tagging and describing yet, but I’m getting there… and here is a smaller selection for you to enjoy on the blog – again, I’ve numbered them so that I can come back and label them!

A London children’s theatre company Theatre Peckham helped the Opening Ceremony go with a swing with their delightful performance of an extract from the theatre adaptation of Kate DiCamillo’s The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane.  Then fuelled with a piece of Wally’s delicious 25th birthday cake (but where was he?  Answer: everywhere, in the guise of the very game Imperial College staff!), we headed back to the auditorium for our first plenary session – and what a line up!  Three UK Children’s Laureates – the current reigning Julia Donaldson and two of her predeceesors, Michael Morpurgo and Anthony Browne.

Each spoke about what particular passions they had brought to their role as laureate: Michael  described how he and poet Ted Hughes had first come up with the idea, and how Hughes had been instrumental in making it all happen; Anthony played the ‘shape game’ and showed how it appears everywhere in his work and outside it; and Julia talked of the three areas close to her heart: enhancing children’s experience of reading through drama; keeping libraries open (a big issue in the UK); and promoting stories for and about deaf children.

Julia and her husband Malcolm, on guitar, then showcased some examples of what theatre can do to enhance literacy, from the chorus of a very fast Italian pasta song written while on holiday in Siena, Italy, to a virtuoso performance of The Gruffalo in French, German and (its most recent language) Scots.  In between, we were treated to the song that inspired Julia’s book A Squash and a Squeeze with audience participation… and I say treated, well, it was a real treat for me as I got to be the hen!  Thanks to Australian author Susanne Gervay (yes, that was one of my top thrills of IBBY, meeting Susanne in person…), you will shortly be able to see it on Flickr too – don’t laugh too much!!

Well, that was just the first few hours of the Congress – I will certainly be writing more about it over the coming weeks.  In the meantime, hello to all those PaperTigers friends I got to meet for the first time in real life – Shirin Adl, Candy Gourlay, Dashdondog Jamba; and to old friends and new.  I’ll now be dreaming of IBBY Mexico 2014…  In the meantime, head on over to Flickr and enjoy my photos – and much better ones on the official IBBY Congress 2012’s photostream.

Abigail Sawyer regularly reviews books for us here at PaperTigers, and she’s also, in her own words, “a lifelong library lover and an advocate for access to books for all”, so who better to write an article for us about “unconventional libraries” and the children’s books they have inspired. Abigail lives in San Francisco, California, USA, where her two children attend a language-immersion elementary school and are becoming bilingual in English and Mandarin: an experience that has informed her work on the blog for the film Speaking in Tongues. I know you’ll enjoy reading this as much as I have.

On Traveling Libraries and Heroic ‘Book People’: Inspiring children’s books about getting books to people in remote places and difficult circumstances

My sons and I paid our first-ever visit to a bookmobile over the summer.  For us it was a novelty.  We have shelves of books at home and live just 3 blocks from our local branch library, but the brightly colored bus had pulled up right near the playground we were visiting in another San Francisco neighborhood (whose branch library was under renovation), and it was simply too irresistible.  Inside, this library on wheels was cozy, comfortable, and loaded with more books than I would have thought possible.  I urged my boys to practice restraint and choose only one book each rather than compete to reach the limit of how many books one can take out of the San Francisco Public Library system (the answer is 50; we’ve done it at least once).

The bookmobiles provide a great service even in our densely populated city where branch libraries abound.  There are other mobile libraries, however, that take books to children who may live miles from even the nearest modern road; to children who live on remote islands, in the sparsely populated and frigid north, in temporary settlements in vast deserts, and in refugee camps.  The heroic individuals who manage these libraries on boats, burros, vans, and camels provide children and the others they serve with a window on the world and a path into their own imaginations that would otherwise be impossible.

Shortly after my own bookmobile experience, Jeanette Winter‘s Biblioburro (Beach Lane Books, 2010), a tribute to Colombian schoolteacher Luis Soriano, who delivers books to remote hillside villages across rural Colombia, arrived in my mailbox to be reviewed for Paper Tigers.  I loved this book, as I do most of Winter’s work, for its bright pictures and simple, straightforward storytelling. Another picture book, Waiting for the Bibiloburro by Monica Brown (Tricycle Press, 2011), tells the story of Soriano’s famous project from the perspective of one of the children it serves, whose life expands beyond farm chores and housework thanks to Soriano and his burros.

I was moved, of course, by Soriano’s story, which got me thinking about another favorite picture book my children found at our branch library a few years ago: That Book Woman by Heather Henson (Atheneum Books for Young Readers, 2008) is a fictionalized account of one family’s experience with the Pack Horse Library Project, a little-known United States Works Progress Administration program that ran from 1935-1943.  The Pack Horse librarians delivered books regularly to families living deep in Kentucky’s Appalachian Mountains.  In this inspiring story (more…)

Over the last couple of months we have been gathering together a children’s literature feast from Mongolia: for, as Dashdondog Jamba, writer and founder of Mongolia’s Mobile Children’s Library puts it, “After eating candies there remains nothing. But after reading a book you will have it in your head.”

You will find:

…an interview with Dashdondog Jamba –

“I think that one of the most effective ways to ensure the availability of books translated into one’s own language is through direct contact with foreign authors. We have translated many books in this way. I translate books in the hope that children in different countries will meet each other and become close friends.”

– as well as the reprint of an article he wrote for Bookbird and a review of his recent book Mongolian Folktales;

…an interview with Dori Jones Yang, in which she talks about her recent YA novel, Daughter of Xanadu and more –

“The main message is that it’s important to get to know foreigners. In every country, in every era, it’s easy to slip into an ‘us-vs.-them’ mentality, to look on ‘them’ as sub-human so that we can wage war on them. But when you get to know someone from a faraway country as a human being with hopes and dreams, your worldview shifts. By learning how others see the world, you come to understand yourself and your own people better, and war no longer seems like a sensible option.”

…a peek at the fruits of the collaboration between award-winning artists/writers Ted and Betsy Lewin in our Gallery, including images from their book Horse Song: The Naadam of Mongolia (Lee & Low Books, 2008);

…Personal View “Taking a step into children’s books about Mongolia” by Marjorie Coughlan

…revisits to Bolormaa Baasansuren’s interview and Gallery; and to Helen Mixter’s Personal View

Our new theme for the coming weeks will be Children and their Grandparents – we have already begun our focus on books which explore this joyful, enriching relationship through our Week-end Book Reviews (a new, regular feature on our blog); in the coming weeks look out for authors and illustrators sharing some special moments with their own grandparents, as well as a Personal View from Swapna Dutta, who shares insight into Bengali writer Dakshinaranjan Mitra-Mazumdar’s story collections…

Come walk with us along the road of special stories from around the world – and maybe share some of your own memories with us along the way.

We are delighted to welcome author Dashdondog Jamba to PaperTigers. A few weeks ago I wrote a post about the amazing Mobile Library he founded in Mongolia some twenty years ago and we also featured a reprint of an article he wrote for IBBY’s journal Bookbird. Dashdondog has published more than seventy books, some of which can be read in English on the ICDL; he also has a blog, which includes translations of some of his poems, as featured in a recent Poetry Friday post. I’m grateful to Ramendra Kumar for putting me in contact with Dashdondog initially, and to Dashdondog himself for taking my inability to communicate in Mongolian in his stride – as well as for sending some great photos.

You have devoted your life to making it possible for children to have access to books. Can you give us some background to what Mongolia was like when you started out as a writer in the 1960s?

In 1958 the agricultural collectivization policy, which entailed handing livestock over to cooperatives, was almost completed in Mongolia. And even though my family didn’t like it, we delivered our livestock to the agricultural cooperative. It was a difficult time for rural herders to part from their beloved livestock. I clearly remember the moment when my grandma was crying about the “pitiable livestock”, and breeding lambs and kids were bleating and trying to run back to their shelters. Yet writers had written that herders had given their livestock to the agricultural cooperatives voluntarily. At that time my first book was published by the State Publishing House. I was 17 years old and in secondary school. From my first book you can only feel the heart of a boy who loves his lambs and calves. So I am always glad that I chose children’s literature as a career far from politics.

What changes have you witnessed, and indeed been instrumental in over the years?

For me who has been witness of two different societies there is opportunity to compare their weaknesses and advantages. I thankfully welcomed democracy, which brought us the freedom to think and have our own opinions. The freedom declared by socialism was limited, like wearing tight clothes. I can bear witness to it because I was considered as anti-communist and punished by losing the right to publish books.

What prompted you to start your now famous travelling library?

In 1990 Mongolia renounced communism and chose democracy with a free-market economy. During the privatization of property former children’s organizations were not taken over by anybody because they were considered as profitless and uneconomic. The formerly state-run children’s book publishing house became a private school, the children’s library became a private bank and the children’s cinema became the stock exchange.

Even though I had fought against it, my efforts didn’t work. Then I asked myself what we should be writing for children in this new society to read. It was unthinkable to present them with books written along the lines of the only way we had open to us under the socialist regime.

I felt the only place that could answer my question was the International Youth Library in Munich: so I went there. They gave me their list of the best children’s books. And I started to translate those books and published 108 books with my own money. Then I founded the mobile library and provided the rural children with those books. That is the most suitable activity for the nomadic life.

The mobile library was awarded the IBBY-Asahi reading Promotion Award in 2006. In your acceptance speech you shared something that you tell the children who come to the library: “After eating candies there remains nothing. But after reading a book you will have it in your head.” You said that, in the same way that children like to eat sweets from around the world, you would use the award to make it possible for Mongolian children to enjoy books written and published in different countries. Has that indeed been possible? (more…)

Renowned throughout the world as the founding head of the Mongol Empire in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, Genghis Khan’s legacy as “the first children’s writer” is perhaps generally less well-known. But the strong oral tradition in Mongolia means that many of his stories are still told today, and some can now also be read in English, thanks to a fine anthology of Mongolian Folktales published recently.

According to the National Library of Mongolia, at one time Mongolia’s “most popular slogan was ‘Everything for children'” and in 2003 the library opened its Book Palace for Children in Ulaanbaatar, which does indeed seem to provide everything in the way of books a young visitor to the Library could possibly desire. Meanwhile, author and publisher Dashdondog Jamba has spent his whole life ensuring that children in Mongolia have access to stories and the written word, taking his mobile library out to the remotest areas of the country, first by camel and oxen, more recently by truck. You can read his account of one of his journeys here.

Many children’s stories from and about Mongolia reflect its place in world history. The cultural heritage of those times remains strongly evident today, especially when you look beyond the urban areas towards the vast grassland steppe that consitutes most of Mongolia’s geography. This means that picture books with a contemoporary setting and the retellings of traditional stories merge to offer insight into each other that is relevant to today’s young readers, wherever they come from.

The list of books given below is not long, and I’m sure there are others to be found: but in the meantime, all of these are enriching and worth seeking out.

Picture books

Bolormaa Baasansuren, adapted by Helen Mixter,
My Little Roundhouse
Groundwood Books, 2009.

A delightful picture book, which brings the nomadic life of a Mongolian community to life through the eyes of one-year-old Jilu, who shares his experiences of all the roundness in his life, from the ger that is his home to the encircling love that enfolds him. There’s plenty here for young children to contrast and compare with in their own lives. My Little Roundhouse was selected as part of the 2010 Spirit of PaperTigers book set.

Demi,
Marco Polo
Marshall Cavendish Children, 2008.

Marco Polo’s adventurous life is relayed through compact text and sumptuous illustrations bursting out of borders that reflect the rich patterns and brocades of the Silk Route. We read about his many years working under Kublai Khan and the sceptiscism of his fellow countrymen back in Venice. A beautifully depicted map shows the extent of his Travels.

Demi,
Chingis Khan/Genghis Khan
Henty Holt and Company, 1991/Marshall Cavendish 2008.

Originally published as Chingis Khan in 1991, this classic title has recently been reissued as a Marshall Cavendish Classic with the slightly differently spelled title Genghis Khan.

A picture book biography (more…)

A couple of days ago I wrote a post about Mongolian writer and literacy advocate Dasdondog Jamba. Although at first glance his blog may seem unfathomable to those of us who don’t understand Mongolian, hooray – we are in luck! He does have one category devoted to his poems in English.

Here’s the beginning of a lovely children’s poem, evocative of the Mongolian Steppe and with a whiff of the promise of spring:

Five Colors

“Lambs, lambs, how come
you’re pure white?”
“We were born when the snow had fallen,
so we have to be pure white”

“Little goats, little goats…” Read the rest of the poem here.

Do enjoy a read of these joyous poems – and they’d make a great classroom resource too. Also, take a look at this reprint from IBBY’s Bookbird journal, With the Mobile Library Through the Seasons, in which Dashdondog charts one of his amazing journeys with the Mongolian Mobile Children’s Library.

This week’s Poetry Friday is hosted by Liz In Ink – head on over…

Our current focus on Mongolia would be incomplete without a full mention of poet, writer and librarian extraordinaire, Dashdondog Jamba, who set up Mongolia’s Mobile Children’s Library more than twenty years ago in order to bring books to children even in the remotest parts of the country. We are delighted to be able to bring you a reprint of an article from IBBY’s Bookbird: A Journal of International Children’s Literature written by Dashdondog, “With the Mobile Library Through the Seasons“. Do head over to the main PaperTigers website and read it for some fascinating insight into the Mobile Library service, through this detailed description of one of its journeys. Originally the library was transported by oxcart or camel; now there is a van which clocks up thousands of kilometers every year. The library won the 2006 IBBY-Asahi Reading Promotion Award and features in Margriet Ruurs‘ book My Librarian is a Camel: How Books are Brought to Children Around the World.

As well as ensuring that Mongolian children have access to books from all over the world, Dashdondog Jamba (sometimes also written as Jambyn) is himself the author of more than seventy children’s books. Not many are available in English but you can get a tantalising glimpse of some of them here, at the ICDL. A collection of his retellings of Mongolian Folktales was published recently and is currently our Book of the Month. Dashdondog was instrumental in setting up the Mongolian sections of both SCBWI and IBBY.

You can read an article by Dashdondog, “Children’s Literature in Mongolia Needs Renovation” written for ACCU in 2001, and his speech to IBBY’s 30th Congress in Macau in 2006. Indian author Ramendra Kumar recounts his meeting with Dashdondog here, including an unexpected prelude – and some great photos.

Retold by Dashdondog Jamba and Borolzoi Dashdondog, edited by Anne Pellowski,
Mongolian Folktales
World Folklore Series, Libraries Unlimited, 2009.

Ages 8+

Part of Libraries Unlimited’s World Folklore Series, Mongolian Folktales is an anthology of more than sixty myths and stories which form part of the oral culture still very much treasured and handed on in Mongolia today. The book also provides a concise wealth of detail about Mongolian culture, including such areas as a brief historical outline of Mongolia, holidays and festivals, sports, food (including recipes) and folk art. There are also selections of riddles, proverbs and triads, all of whose prominent roles in Mongolian oral culture are explained under “Other Folklore”.

The stories themselves are arranged by type (Animal, Humorous, Magical etc.). Some, such as “The origin of the Mongols” or “A Fiery Red Khan”, proclaim their Mongolian origins; others, like “A Tale of Friendship” or “The Foolish Man”, remind readers of the interconnectedness of folktales. Some stories are cited as originating from Chinggis Khan: for example, “The Snake with One Head and a Thousand Tales”, which serves as a warning to his children and grandchildren about the dangers of infighting. Readers or listeners (for following in the oral tradition of the original stories, the fine translations here beg to be read aloud) will be able to interweave these tales into the fabric of stories from their own culture, finding contrasts and similarities. Most of them are very short, making them ideal for dipping into; but some, like “Dreaming Boy” about a boy whose dreams get him into trouble but whose integrity wins through, have the satisfying depth of a fairy tale.

Photographs give the stories a contemporary context – as well as a glimpse at the famous Mongolian Mobile Children’s Library, winner of the IBBY-Asahi Reading Promotion Award in 2006 and founded by Dashdondog Jamba, one of the book’s authors. One particular photograph shows children playing “Wolf and Marmot”, a fun-sounding group game outlined in the “Games” section. Other drawings include maps and a fascinating diagram of the layout of a ger, the “round home of at least half of the Mongolian people.”

Many stories are robust in their retellings, reminding us that folklore is not just for children. Mongolian Folktales is a superbly collated book and one that no one young or old will ever grow out of.

Marjorie Coughlan
March 2011

Today the organizers of The Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, given annually to books and works that reflect the spirit of Astrid Lindgren, have announced the 168 candidates nominated for the 2010 award (to download the nomination list as a pdf, click here).

The list of writers, illustrators, oral storytellers and literacy-related organizations, working in various literary traditions and languages, represents more than 60 countries and is a treasure trove of talent and commitment to books and reading.

In addition to author Allen Say and author/promoter of literacy Greg Mortenson, proudly nominated by us, the list includes, among many others, New Zealander author Margaret Mahy; Australian Hazel Edwards; South African Niki Daly; Mongolian writer/poet/promoter of reading Dashdondog Jamba and Filipino illustrator Albert Gamos. And for organizations promoting reading and literacy, it lists IBBY International; Room to Read, in the U.S.; Filipino publishing house Adarna; La Fundación Riecken from Guatemala, and many more.

Considering all these strong candidates, it looks like the jury members have their work cut out for them. Their decision will be a hard one to reach—but reach it they will (and expertly so)! The winner or winners will be announced in Vimmerby, Sweden (the birthplace of Astrid Lindgren) on March 24, 2010, and the announcement will be broadcast live to the Bologna Children’s Book Fair, in Italy (which next year will take place March 23-25).