Using Jane's Books in the Classroom
Where can I find curriculum ideas for your books?
Answer: Look in the "book" folder of this website and on the page
for each book you will find some connections to ideas, collaborative
reads, readers' theater scripts, and other curriculum connections.
Also do not miss Jane's own biography and curriculum connections shared in Jane Kurtz and YOU by Jane Kurtz (Libraries Unlimited, 2007)
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Frequently Asked Questions
About Jane Kurtz and Her Writing
What were your parents doing in Ethiopia?
They worked for the
Presbyterian church, first in a remote area near a town called Maji and
later in the capital city of Addis Ababa.
When you were growing up, did you think of yourself as an Ethiopian?
No, even though I was only two years old when my parents moved to
Ethiopia, I knew I didn't completely belong, there. For one thing, the
people around me had skin from the color of honey to a dark black like
a shiny obsidian rock. I had skin the color of the inside of a custard
apple (if you know what that looks like) with brown dots, otherwise
known as freckles. For another thing, my family and a nurse and a
teacher were the only people I knew who spoke English. Everyone else
was speaking Amharic or Teshena or Magyinia or something else. My
family had some books that showed me what life was like "back home."
What I didn't expect, though, was that we would come back to the U.S.
for a visit when I was seven and I would feel even more of an outsider
there.
What kind of house did you live in?
The first house I remember (in Maji) was shaped like most of the houses
around--only bigger. It was round with a grass roof and a mud
floor with a mat to keep the dirt down. It had a pole up the middle.
Later, my grandpa came out, and he and my dad built a new house. This
one still had adobe (mud and straw) walls, but it was square and had a
tin roof. The rain was very loud at night on the tin roof. My mom would
sometimes let us roller skate down the hall, because the floor
was made of cement and there weren't any other hard, smooth surfaces
around to skate on.
What did you eat?
My whole family liked (and still likes) to eat wat and injera,
which most families around us ate every day. Wat is like a spicy stew,
and injera is a thin, spongy bread--like a tortilla, only with holes in
it like a sponge. When my daughter first saw injera, she thought it was
her napkin folded beside her plate, so that gives you some idea.
You scoop up the wat with the injera. We didn't have a refrigerator
when we moved to Maji, so my mom canned some meat. My dad also grew a
big vegetable garden. In that area, not many people got to go to
school, so some of the school boys, who were in their teens, worked
around our house for the money to go to school. They would kill the
chickens for some dinners or they'd go to the markato, once a week, to
do the shopping. Sometimes people brought eggs or bananas or something,
to our house. We could trade cans for eggs because the cans made a
handy utensil for storing or scooping water.
Can I find your books in my library or bookstore?
Every year, 5000 new children's books are published. There isn't
enough room on the shelves of bookstores (or libraries) for every one
of those books. So you can't assume you can find any book, except maybe
the award winners for the year or the ones by famous authors, in any
library or bookstore. Still, a bookstore will usually order any book
you ask them to order. And a library can usually order the book for you
or ask for it via interlibrary loan. Since my first major book just
came out in 1994, I'm still just starting on my writing career. Over
the next few years, as more and more books come out of mine, I hope
they will be in more and more bookstores and libraries! You can go to a
book store in your community or you can order books via computer on the
World Wide Web at places like www.amazon.com or Barnes and Noble.
Where did you go to school?
The local school only went up through grade 4 and it was taught in
Amharic. That wasn't too useful for us, since we knew we'd come back
and go to school in the U.S. eventually. So my mom taught us at home up
through fourth grade. After that, each of us (six kids) went off to
boarding school in Addis Ababa. Then we didn't get home except at
Christmas and summer vacation.
Weren't you homesick?
Yes. Later, when I came back to the U.S. for college, I was homesick
for Ethiopia for years. Homesickness is a feeling I know very well.
That feeling is one of the sad, empty spots inside of me that nudged me
to write my books.
What's your favorite book?
That's a little bit like asking a mom which one is her favorite child.
All of my books are a little like my babies. But if I had to choose a
very favorite, it would probably be Faraway Home.
The book was published in 2000. It's one of my favorites because that
one is MY story in sooo many ways. I'm like the little girl in the
story and I'm also like the dad in the story.
Do you have any children?
Yep! My kids are David (b. 1980), Jonathan (b. 1981), and Rebekah (b.
1983). David is the little boy that became Christopher in I'm Calling Molly.
Rebekah is the one of my kids who loves to read almost as much as I do.
Jonathan would rather play ball than read, but I always try to get him
to read, anyway. When my kids were little, I read tons and tons of
books to them, which is when I first decided that I would like to write
a children's book. Until then, I had only written things for grown-ups.
Was it hard to get published?
It
was very hard. I show students in schools a folder of my rejection
letters from just one year--all the times editors said"no." Sometimes,
it takes a lot of failure, a lot of "no" to get to yes. A story can be
pretty good and still not be good enough to get published.
How long does it take you to write one of your books?
This question, I always think, is the very hardest to answer. First of
all, I work on picture books, chapter books, and novels, so obviously a
longer book tends to take more time to write a first draft of. But the
truth is that picture books can be amazingly hard to get right. I
recently sold a picture book, for example, that I wrote 2/3 of and then
got stuck. (I had an ending for it, but I couldn't think how to get
there.) After I put the story away for almost a year, I saw how to do
it.
Even after I write a draft of a picture book, that's only the
beginning. I read it over and over again to myself--or out loud--and
listen to how the words sound. I think about how to pull the reader in,
to make the reader feel what I've felt or see what I've saw. In Pulling the Lion's Tail,
at the tense scene where Almaz finally gets close to the lion, I
struggled with how to make the reader be there with Almaz, right up
next to the lion. Finally, I decided to use the sense of smell. So I
asked myself, "What does the lion's breath smell like?" I had to try a
lot of different possibilities before the right one came to me.
Even after I revise and revise, my work isn't finished. When
my editors read my stories, they almost always see something I didn't
see. After Houghton Mifflin bought Miro in the Kingdom of the Sun
the editor wrote to me that it was "a lovely story, skillfully crafted
and full of the rich details and beautiful images that bring a tale to
life. It glows." Then she said she'd be sending a few suggestions. When
I received the letter with the "few suggestions," every page was
bursting with comments affecting almost every word.
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