Hey all, in case any of you prefer to read articles rather than listen to podcasts (or if, like me, you’d be happy to listen to podcasts if you weren’t trapped under a sleeping baby whose continued snoozing requires absolute silence, or driving kids to school who will start shrieking, “NO MUSIC MAMA!” if you even look at the radio), we’re going to put the episode transcripts here. Ideally we’ll post them with the show notes so all the info for each episode is neatly in one place, but we haven’t quite caught up with that yet.
tl;dr: Here’s the transcript to our Introduction.
Jennie: Welcome to the very first episode of the NewberyTart podcast. My name is Jenny Law and I’m with…
Marcy: Marcy Cornell.
J: We decided to do this probably months ago, maybe a year ago?
M: Maybe a year ago, I think, so it’s been a while.
J: So this is our very first episode, like I said, and we’re going to just do a little introduction to the project and to ourselves, so you know who you’re listening to and maybe why you’re listening to this.
J: So, Marcy, if you’d like to start?
M: Yeah. So, I’m Marcy; I am a bookseller at Little Shop of Stories. So I’ve been selling children’s books for a long time now – maybe eight years? And a lot of them tend to be Newberies. We do a lot of hand selling at the bookstore, so people want to know what the best books are for their kids or for themselves and a lot of times that just happens to be when I end up telling them because they’re all so interesting.
J: And I’m a librarian- this is Jenny – I’m a librarian. I, ah… I used to be a public librarian, and we got a lot of requests for the Newbery books, of course. And in my current position as a reference and instruction librarian at Georgia State there’s less requests, I would say almost zero requests, for these titles, but it’s something that I continue to go back and read. The titles that I missed as a kid and the ones that of course were awarded before I even was born; I find it fascinating to see- to read these books and think about the time that they were published, what was going on in the world, and kind of their bigger significance.
And I know that Marcy has been- how long have you been collecting Newbery books?
M: Oh, gosh, I don’t actually even remember when I started. Probably ten years ago? I really love collecting books in general, and I think it was gradual, but at some point I realized that a huge, huge majority of my very favorite books all had the same sticker on the cover. And I had no idea what it was – I mean, I know that awards go on the covers, but I had no idea what that particular award was until I looked it up and realized that, just, I had, I don’t know, fifty or sixty, already, of the books. And I love them all. I mean there are a few that are… not my favorite. But I really liked a lot of them and so I thought I would start looking into what others had won. And so at this point, out of the four hundred and eight Newbery [Medal and ] honor winners*, I think I’m missing fifty two.
J: Oh, wow.
M: I’m… I don’t have first printings of anywhere near all of them, but I get first printings when I can, and I get them signed when I can, but I have at least a reading copy of, of all but fifty two of them at this point.
J: Amazing. It’s amazing. I, a few years back, I had thrown my hat in the ring for ALA’s Youth Media Award nomination process for the Sibert award, which is the nonfiction children’s award, to be on the committee as a reference librarian. That’s something that endlessly fascinates me, nonfiction books for children. And I got a call from a member of the committee saying that they wanted to put me on the ballot for the Newbery. I really thought there’d been a mistake at first. I really did not- I really thought that there’d been a mistake on my application and I think I timidly asked about that. And the women that I spoke with said, “We saw your application for the Sibert, but we wanted you to be on the Newbery ballot. So I was thrown onto the Newbery ballot…
M: I felt like I knew a movie star.
J: …with fifteen other librarians from across the country and I actually didn’t get on the committee, which was fine. It was really interesting. It was a really interesting process; it was really interesting and wonderful to have so much support. Because my friends like Marcy who I told, who are huge, you know, fans of books and who know about the Newbery, were just so excited as well. But I actually got the lowest number of votes on the ballot. And they publish it. I got this very official letter with my name at the very bottom. At the same time – I am not just making this up or being cheesy – I got two hundred fifty one votes! And I don’t know that many librarians across the country, so it made me really excited that that many people – other than myself, so it would have been… two hundred fifty people – voted for me. Like they didn’t- they just voted on based on what they read or they liked my name or whatever. So that was exciting.
M: Well, even to be on the ballot is so massively exciting I can’t even-
J: It was something that I think happens, at least to me, a lot, where I kind of fall ass-backwards into amazing situations, and I’m very grateful for that. I would love to be on the committee at some point. I’ve always thought of that as something that would happen later in my career and so for that to happen relatively early, you know… it feels like a feather in my cap, even though I was the lowest.
M: So as you can tell, Jenny is coming at this from more of a professional aspect, whereas I’m just a hobbyist.
J: At the same time, Marcy, you have, what is it? Over three hundred and fifty of the books, or three hundred forty of the books? So you have a historian’s knowledge of the Newbery medal; you have an on-the-ground knowledge of the Newbery Medal, and I find that exciting. I’m so excited to talk to you about this stuff.
M: This is going to be really fun, I think.
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J: So we chose 1984 as the Newbery year that we were going to start with, and each season- we’re going to do this in seasons because we have small children, and if we can record a bunch of episodes all at once, we figure that would be better than trying to do it week to week and leave huge gaps. Huge unexpected gaps. So we decided to do one year’s winner and honor books as an entire season. I think we arbitrarily chose nineteen eighty four.
M: Yeah, It was random. No, I think we felt like doing Sugaring Time.
J: Yeah it was Sugaring Time. Because we had originally chosen books across several years – and Sugaring Time was the only one we kept hanging onto in our different incarnations of seasons, our different configurations of seasons – so we just chose the year that Sugaring Time came out.
M: It also felt sort of like a good omen, because the last author that we both met at the same time was the author of Sugaring Time-
J: That is true.
M: – at the last Midwinter Meeting, which is where they announce the Newbery winners, so that was kind of a nice little bonus.
J: And when we talk about Sugaring Time we’ll talk about meeting Kathryn Lasky. She was incredibly charming.
J: So, during each episode, we will read parts of reviews, contemporary reviews from when these books came out; we’ll also read from various Newbery guides and award guides, the citations for these books, as a way of describing the books. And then sometimes we will rip them to shreds.
M: Or sometimes we’ll be very boring and just love them and have nothing much to say, probably.
J: But it will always… when we’re talking about the books, we’re going to strive to just talk about the books, not- we may give information on the authors, but we don’t ever want it to be an attack on the author, or feel like, you know, like, “Why did they write this?!” or “Why was it chosen?!” kind of thing.
M: No, we just want to talk about the books, analyze them a little bit, just talk about what we like, what we didn’t like, and we’re also going to talk about books that we think are readalikes and read-better-thans that same book – so sometimes there’s a book that’s reminiscent, but does maybe a little better job at what we think that book was trying to do, or maybe sometimes there’s just a book that, if you like the Newbery book, is going to be probably right up your alley. And we’ll talk about all those books that come to mind.
J: And then at the end we will decide, out of the, in this case, five books that were that were honored that year, which one we would choose as the winner. And then talk about other things that were published that were not recognized that year, that we think could have had a place on the list, and our own opinions.
M: And then we’ll also, for each title, have an accompanying- probably, usually, drink, but sometimes not a drink; sometimes – for example in the case of A Solitary Blue, hot dog sandwich – or other snack, which we’ll tell you about. But it always relates to the book, and we’ll explain what it is and provide a link to the recipe.
J: And give a review of that food or drink item. I think, in the case of the hot dog sandwich – and we’ll talk more about this – that was the food item that stood out the most to me in A Solitary Blue. I think it’s the first food item that’s-
M: It came really early on.
J: Yeah. And in order to not get completely drunk, and do all these episodes and have a drink for each episode, we thought it would be good to break it up with food. (pause) I also think it’s pretty gross sounding.
M: It is a little gross sounding.
J: Especially made by a seven year old .
M: I’m not really a hot dog person.
J: …made by a seven year old.
M: That’s true.
J: Yeah, so- and there’s no talk of him washing his hands even though they describe everything else in that book that he ever does. So anyway, so that’s going to be our formatting, that’s a little bit about us… and we look forward to talking about these books with you.
M: Thanks for joining us!
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