Announcing Tenley Circle Press's newest book: WE GREW IT--LET'S EAT IT!

DC twins Annie and Veda learn about the White House veggie garden and want to grow fruits and vegetables, too. But how, if you live in an apartment? Watch the twins and senior gardener Ida work and play their way through planting, tending, and harvesting in a neighborhood Community Garden. Then comes the fun of preparing and eating simple, tasty, homegrown food!

A photo-essay/chapter book for early readers (ages 5-8)

by Annie and Veda, as told to Justine Kenin

Photos by Becky Lettenberger

Paperback, 56 pages, with full-color photographs, recipes, and books for further reading

ISBN: 978-0-9773536-4-4

8.5” x 11” / $15.00

Available at booksellers May 1, 2010

Order now at TENLEY CIRCLE PRESS

ADVANCE PRAISE:

“Annie and Veda show that, with the right mixture of love and work, children--like plants--can bloom where they are planted. Lively storytelling and Becky Lettenberger’s lush photos prove that every child can enjoy the glories of gardening and good, tasty, healthy food. You grow, girls!”

--Michele Norris. Host, NPR’s All Things Considered

“A welcome addition to the short list of hands-on children’s gardening books and a wonderful supplement to any child’s library. Without ever being overly simplistic, We Grew It—Let’s Eat It! is easy to follow, engaging, and informative.”

--Mark Rasevic, President, Rasevic Landscape Company.

“We Grew It--Let's Eat It! is a gorgeously photographed chronicle of fruits, vegetables, and inter-generational friendship growing happily in an urban community garden. The enthusiasm of the young gardeners is infectious -- after reading the book, I ran out and bought seed packs!”

-- Erica S. Perl, author of Chicken Butt!, Vintage Veronica, and more.

"Teaching kids about gardening teaches them richly about life. This book provides vegetable inspiration for a new generation."

-- Jill Nussinow, MS, RD, The Veggie Queen™ of Sonoma County CA, author of The Veggie Queen™: Vegetables Get the Royal Treatment.

“A delightful tale – instructive and charming! – that encourages young readers to enjoy fresh, local, and organic foods. It also offers topics for further study and discussion at home and school.”

-- Martha C. Cutts. Head of School. Washington Latin Public Charter School (DC).

“Becky Lettenberger's glowing photos show that, while gardening may be hard work, you then get to harvest and eat the most wonderful vegetables you have ever tasted!”

-- Penni St. Hilaire and Tommy Tomlinson, Friendship Community Garden Coordinators (DC).

Homage to J. D. Salinger

Why I Love to Knit: Part 3

These days I’m improvising a little boy’s helmet cap using many of the small balls of yarn that have accumulated in my work basket from prior projects. It’s a pleasure to handle these familiar yarns that tie me back to sweaters and scarves I’ve made over the last several years. My thoughts inevitably lead, of course, to the folks I’ve knitted them for. This project also reveals to me a palette that especially pleases me -- various intensities of natural unbleached wool, assorted hues of blue, green, and yellow, an occasional touch of orange or ruby. Worked together, the colors pulsate, come to life in surprising and satisfying ways.

I am reminded of my exciting discovery last fall at The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam of van Gogh’s red lacquer Chinese tea box containing small balls of different colored yarns wound together by the artist to test the visual effects of what his friend Emile Bernard called “unexpected interlacing tonalities.”

According to Debora Silverman’s Van Gogh and Gaugin: The Search for Sacred Art. (NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2000), “In studying the play of color tones with his colored yarn balls, van Gogh re-created the method used by Michel Chevreul, author of the most important books on color theory for 19th century painters. . . and director of the Gobelins Tapestry Works. . . . Van Gogh had read and absorbed Chevreul’s color theories while in Nuenen in 1884-1885, during the time that he studied the hand-loom weavers in his parents’ village and depicted them in 34 images of varying media. . . . THe months of daily observation of the weavers’ activities activated van Gogh’s interest in applying paint as threads and color as fibers, to be placed on the canvas [like] the warp and weft of woven cloth.”

In van Gogh’s April 30 1885 letter to his brother Theo, this fibre-art color theory has already taken form: “When the weavers weave those fabrics . . . they try, as you know, to get singular broken colours and greys in the cheviots — or to get the very brightest colours in balance against one another in the multicoloured tartans. . . . [R]ather than the fabric clashing, the overall effect of the pattern is harmonious from a distance. A grey that’s woven from red, blue, yellow, off-white and black threads, [and] a blue that is broken by a green and an orange, red or yellow thread, are very different from plain colours — that is, they vibrate more and make whole colours look harsh, whole, and lifeless. . . . [I]t’s not always exactly easy for the weaver or . . . the designer of the pattern or the colour combination, to work out his calculation of the number of threads and their direction — nor is it easy to weave brushstrokes together into a harmonious whole. If you saw the first painted studies that I made when I came here to Nuenen — and the present canvas — side by side — I think you’d see that as far as colour is concerned — things have livened up.”

For the rest of his life van Gogh incorporated this color theory into his work. Sometimes described as “troubled” and “frenzied,” his brushwork in the late 1890’s demonstrates the full, exuberant, joyful flowering of this fibre-art-based color theory.

Why I Love to Knit: Part 2

The simple answers to the question, “Why do you love to knit?” are my love for the finished, hand-crafted product and the desire to feel productive and keep my hands busy when I’m otherwise sitting still. What’s more, especially at times of particular stress, the rhythmic, repetitive action of knit and purl (like stroking a cat on my lap) mimics and steadies the heartbeat and calms the nervous system.

Then again, knitting is woven into the fabric of my life. It ties me back to my memories of childhood. Not unlike the strands of my DNA, it answers the questions, Who am I? What has made me who I am? My father worked at Emile Bernat & Sons, Inc., a famous old Massachusetts yarn company, for most of his working life; he and my mother met in the 1930’s because her father was the shop carpenter when Bernat was located in Jamaica Plain. When I was a child during the 1950’s, my mother knitted countless hats, mittens, and sweaters for me, my brother, and my father from yarn that my father salvaged from the remainder boxes at Bernat. My mother taught me to knit in those years. I still have all her Bernat pattern books from that era, and I can still see in my mind’s eye the tiny jackets I made for my dolls in yarn left over from a maroon and aqua vest she made for my father. In the 1960’s during my college summers, I worked at Bernat, too, after they moved to an old textile mill in Uxbridge, Massachusetts, at a machine that made the sample color charts -- cards with little bits of yarn threaded through tiny holes labeled with all the yarn weights, colors and stock numbers. When my father died in 2006 I could hardly bear to give to Goodwill the vests my mother had made for him over the 50 years of their marriage. The memories spool back to me with a sweet nostalgia as my needles make their tiny click click clicking, as the wool runs through my fingers working on a winter cap for my grandson.

Bernat Yarns was founded by Emile Bernat, who brought the craft of tapestry color matching and repair from the Austro-Hungarian court to early-20th century Boston. Tapestry restoration was his calling, and he was very proud of the work he did for curators at the Boston Museum Fine Arts. The yarn mill he founded was his livelihood, a business he passed on to his sons Paul, George, and Eugene. Thanks to the Google digitizing project, I recently had a look at Emile Bernat’s 1919 monograph on tapestry curation and repair, The History and Care of Tapestries, a copy of which resides in Harvard’s Fogg Library.

Last summer I bought a yarn called Berroco for a sweater and hat for my granddaughter. The brand name Berroco is one of the last relics of the old Bernat yarn label, which was one of the most respected labels of 20th century American knitting. I gathered from my father that back in the 1970’s or 1980’s the third and fourth American generations of the Bernat family were no longer interested in running a yarn business, so they sold the company and its name to Warren Wheelock, a scion of the family that owned Stanley Woolens, another old New England textile mill. Mr. Wheelock's yarn company, Berroco, maintains its headquarters in Uxbridge and preserves the first syllable of the old Bernat name in his company name. The Bernat Mill in Uxbridge is gone now, lost to a 10-alarm fire in July 2007.

I’m afraid that Bernat yarns nowadays aren’t as old-timey as I remember them. If I have my druthers I buy hand-spun, hand-dyed yarns from country folks like Betsy Viola of Quaking Maple Farm in Horse Shoe Run, West Virginia, whose wool has the color and texture redolent of the good old days.

The Armchair Art Lover

The next-best thing to seeing the current show at Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum is an armchair visit to the free, open website, the Van Gogh Letters Project, an enormous, beautiful, and remarkably easy-to-navigate online compendium of the entire Van Gogh oeuvre, both image and word. Or maybe it’s a draw.

Beside its phenomenal collection of paintings, the Van Gogh Museum holds the great majority of Van Gogh’s correspondence. The Van Gogh Letters Project is the result of the Museum’s 20-year collaboration with the Huygens Institute of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, whose forte is the scholarly publication of literary and historical texts, to produce and disseminate a new, complete, annotated edition of the artist’s correspondence. The Van Gogh Letters Project is now complete and available to scholars and amateurs worldwide.

The original intent was publication in book form, but the Project’s magnitude and the rapid advances in electronic media convinced the Museum and Institute staff to publish the entire Project electronically. As the Project website’s introduction explains, electronic publication “does greater justice to the immense volume of material and the complex of interrelated layers of information, and gives visitors to the site more options and more ways to use the edition.” For those who “prefer to study or enjoy the letters by reading them in the ‘traditional’ manner, there is an accessible, fully illustrated [five-volume] print version [in English, Dutch, and French], with brief notes, the content [of which] comes directly from the scholarly web edition.”

The electronic version of the Project consists of full facsimiles of all the Dutch and French letters, full transcription into modern Dutch and French, and full translation into English (as well as translation into French of the Dutch letters and Dutch of the French letters). Also undertaken was a comprehensive annotation of the letters, including commentary, and cross-references to the entire Van Gogh oeuvre and all the art, literature, events, places, and individuals to which the artist referred in his correspondence.

According to the electronic version, the Project is intended for “Van Gogh specialists, art historians and literary scholars . . . and students of art history, the history of literature and allied disciplines.” The internet is, however, accessible to amateurs as well, so that anyone with access to a computer and the worldwide web can experience the Project to his/her heart’s content. This means that all of us armchair art lovers can freely examine Van Gogh’s correspondence, consider his personal expression of his working intentions and his intimate conversation with family and friends. In our era of digital messaging we can recall the special pleasure of writing and reading letters, almost feeling the texture of the paper between our fingers, seeing the inky trail of character and emotion in the handwriting.

The Van Gogh Letters Project permits us to imagine that we are on the receiving end of the great master’s extraordinary gifts as an artist, art theorist, and prose stylist. The letters can be read as a chronological stream of highly literate prose, a memoir, if you will, on the evolving work and mental state of arguably the greatest painter of the late 19th century.

The letters can also be read topically. If, for example, one wants to know everything that Van Gogh ever wrote about, say, the little house he rented in Arles, the subject of his "The Yellow House", one has only to click on CONCORDANCE and then WORKS OF ART MENTIONED/ILLUSTRATED and UNILLUSTRATED. Here, for example, is Vincent’s 1 May 1888 letter to Theo, his first reference to the house. Again on 9 September 1888 the artist writes about the house in Arles to Theo and to their sister Willemien.

Five weeks later, in another letter to Theo, Van Gogh takes us with him through that beckoning blue-green door of the Yellow House and into his bedroom, into his thought process as he structures the painting and begins to apply color to the canvas.

Imagine! One of the greatest painters of human history has invited us to accompany him into his inner sanctum as he plays out the thread of his thought process, as his mind, eye, and hand work in splendid synchrony!

Why I Love to Knit: Part 1

I never buy yarn on the internet. There is no substitute for touching the fibers, feeling the yarn between my fingers before I work it, imagining how the colors and stitches will take the light and look against the skin. And I rarely buy yarn in shops here in DC, preferring instead to frequent yarn shops when I’m away from home. That way knitting becomes a form of armchair travel. I do buy yarn in the towns where my children and grandchildren live. That way, when I make them scarves, hats or sweaters I can imagine that I’m in their company, in their neighborhoods. In Brooklyn NY where we have a daughter and a granddaughter, it’s Maxcine DeGouttes’s Stitch Therapy in Park Slope. In Durham NC where we have a daughter and grandsons, it’s Cozy on 9th Street.

Visiting Vermont in September I scooped up some yarn and a pattern for a little pullover for my Brooklyn granddaughter at the Whippletree Yarn Shop in Woodstock to work on during a European trip in October. By then I expected I’d be done with the first sweater I’ve made for myself in years, soft natural shetland kimono with the most complex cable pattern I’ve ever tried.

On my flight to London I finished assembling my sweater and started my granddaughter’s. On the Eurostar to Paris I was working my way down from the neck on a size-two no-seams pullover in a soft multicolor combination of raspberry, navy, olive, pumpkin, wondering how the colors, which looked quite fetching close up, would look at a distance.

The train attendant -- stunningly glamorous to my eyes, given that I usually travel on Amtrak between DC and New York -- paused during her fresh-brewed coffee service and caught my eye. “You are kneeting?” she purred. “Do you know La Droguerie? The best yarn store in Paris?” She drew a little map and made a notation in my day planner -- rue du Jour, 1er Arr. en face Cathedral St. Eustache, Metro Châtelet-Les Halles. “The shop is small, but leave a good hour. There’s always a line.” And she disappeared with her café cart into the next cabin.

My husband and I had a good hour the next morning before meeting friends for lunch. After a visit to the gem of a cathedral that perfectly illustrates the transition from Romanesque to Gothic, we crossed Rue du Jour to La Droguerie, entering at 10:33, three minutes after opening time. A line had already formed in what seemed like a narrow hallway lined on both sides with sample skeins, ceiling to floor. I had to touch them all. Above was a sign in four languages. NO PHOTOGRAPHS. I stationed my husband at the back of the line of a dozen elegantly suited women, all clutching knitting directions. Peter was the only man in sight except for the fellow in the tiny cashier’s cabin, which probably unchanged since the 1930’s. An elderly woman sat by the doorway to a side room, knitting furiously, faster than I’ve ever seen anyone doing continental stitch.

Wearing my newly finished kimono, I lurched from wall sample to wall sample, selecting finally a beautiful alpaca heather in four shades, two each for light-weight scarves for our daughters -- one in Brooklyn, the other in Durham. Peter had advanced one place; now there were three more women behind him and the line reached the sidewalk. I had time to peep into the adjacent room, twice the size of the yarn hall, that was lined, also floor to ceiling, with jars of buttons and ribbon spools.

An hour later we reached the front of the line. More fluent in French than I, Peter began speaking for me. Our sales clerk, an elegant woman holding a tiny pad of paper and a pencil, regarded me and my Anna Zilboorg kimono. “Madame and I can speak for ourselves,” she said in perfect English. I explained that I wanted to replicate the cable pattern on my kimono onto a scarf of alternating lengthwise stripes of the heathers. To indicate the length I outstretched both arms, almost touching the two sides of the shop. The clerk scribbled on her note pad. “Single or double strand?” Single, I said. “Bien. Attendez.” And she disappeared behind a door in the back of the shop. Peter sat down to read next to the furious knitter while I selected beads to decorate the scarf ends. Ten minutes later my new best friend emerged from the back room with four perfectly wound balls of yarn. She examined my bead choices, then revised them entirely. “Bien,” she repeated, assembled the yarn and beads into a packet, scribbled on the tiny slip of paper, and steered me to the cashier. She handed him the tiny note, then shook my hand and Peter’s. “You will be happy, Madame, Monsieur,” she said. “Enjoy the rest of your stay in Paris.” We paid and plunged back out into the Paris sunshine to admire the gargoyles on the west face of St. Eustache.

On publishing children's books

Some of you know I’m now a children’s book publisher. Founding and building Tenley Circle Press has taught me much about the business, and publishing my two picture books, Ben, the Bells and the Peacocks (2006) and A Book for Elie (2009), has readied TCP to publish two more books this year, Mary Jane Mitchell’s Witchful Thinking! and Sue Ruff’s Artie and Merlin, both due out in early fall 2009.

Along with many of you, I’ve been following the scary downturn of the book business in general. At the same time I’ve been alert to positive signs that assure me that the love for new children’s books persists.

There have always been naysayers, even among the proponents of the best in children’s literature. Witness Jill Lepore’s fascinating New Yorker piece, “The Lion and the Mouse: The Battle That Reshaped Children’s Literature,” about the genteel 1940’s flapdoodle between New York Public Library’s Children’s Librarian Anne Carroll Moore and E.B. White over the publication of Stuart Little.

Nevertheless, children’s book publishing is ingrained in the American experience. For a comprehensive and gripping chronicle of this national compulsion, read Leonard Marcus’s Minders of Make-Believe: Idealists, Entrepreneurs, and the Shaping of American Children’s Literature.

Some argue convincingly that America’s real love affair is with capitalism and the commodification of all things, childhood and creativity included. They insist that what matters is mainly expressible numerically, in the form of quantifiable outcomes. In the book business the critical quantifiables are print-run size, per-copy cost, expenses, receipts, sales volume, inventory, profits, losses, and bottom line.

But many of us believe that happiness and its pursuit lie less in measurable outcomes than in immeasurable ones.

For me the pursuit of such happiness lies in making books in the company of others and putting them into the waiting hands of young readers. This belief was confirmed recently at a meeting of the Children's Book Guild of Washington, D.C., at which longtime editor and publisher Richard Jackson explained his decision to defer retirement in order to publish more new and beautiful books for children. At its core, Jackson insisted, the children’s book business isn’t about business. “It’s what the story wants,” Jackson said. “Not what the market wants.” The province of writing for children and reading with them, he said, is “moral imagination,” a place where the “Luminous meets the Numinous” and the writer and reader meet over the music and poetry of words and the beauty of moving illustrations. Jackson based much of his talk on Moonshot, Brian Floca’s forthcoming book about the Apollo 11 mission, which Mr. Jackson edited for his own eponymous children’s imprint, a division of Simon & Schuster.

With compelling watercolor illustrations and a text that is both good science/history and good poetry, Moonshot perfectly exemplifies why many of us cannot get enough of children’s books. Writing, Richard Jackson explained, is all about making readers "feel the facts." When writers “let loose the anchor" of research and information, those facts will “come to the reader as a story." Art, he said, has the power to “deal creatively with reality” and more importantly to evoke "the rhapsody of experience."

Here’s "to feeling the facts," to “letting loose the anchor” of the everyday, to creating the meeting place for writers, artists, and readers at the convergence of the Luminous and the Numinous, at the intersection of creativity and reality, to evoking “the rhapsody of experience”!