Manifest(o)

All right, The Universe, listen up. I need a new job. It needs to be near a place that I can live, and feel at home, and not have to move for a few years at least. It needs to be a place that I can love like a home all day when I'm at work. This is going to happen because I am making it happen. I will not settle for being unfulfilled or unhappy. I don't settle for things. I seek out what I want until I can achieve it. I have been cranky and worried and felt like no one would want to hire me because the phone isn't ringing and the email isn't emailing, but not right now. Right now, I believe that I will have what I want.

Look, Universe, and other people, and probably potential future employers because you can definitely find this blog if you decide to follow my Internet presence down enough links, there are things you should know about me. Yes, I'm young. I have not had many years of experience yet, but I learn fast. I am already a much better librarian and teacher after just one year of a full-time job. I engage completely with a job. I am a fantastic team player and well-liked by my coworkers. I believe in collaboration. Information Literacy cannot be taught in a vacuum, it wants context and context needs to align with curricula if we have any hope of finding enough time to teach everything that we need to cover in a year. I know that this is possible, no matter what the frameworks say, no matter what tests our students have to take, in the midst of this we can still teach them how to find and interpret information if we work together.

I believe in libraries as centers of all kinds of literacy and community. Literacy means reading information, not just books, not just databases, not just websites, or films, or advertisements or magazines or newspapers- it means reading and thinking critically about all of these things and more. There are nearly constantly being invented new kinds of information that people are going to have to deal with in the future. And community means more than just a physical place today, it means having access to all of the information that is going on online and having the ability to make connections with our fellow humans all around the world. At the same time as all of this expansion, libraries still need to provide traditional access to traditional information: books and comfortable spaces for productivity that may be the productivity of a classroom or a computer lab or individual productivity, which can mean homework, or research and can definitely mean reading a good book in a comfy chair. A library must have light and an engaging atmosphere, even if it is in a school and thereby a place that students will occasionally be required to be, it must still seek to draw people in. The creation of this atmosphere is joyful work.

I believe in imagination. When we give children literacy, we open doors. We open doors to fiction and all of the lives and minds and places and tropes and stories and words a person can visit, real or make-believe. We open doors to discovering our own world through books and media. We open doors to creating content and creating the future. I want to be there, I keep picking up keys, and I want to be someone who opens these doors, and someone with an ear to listen to young travelers who come back with all of the myriad things they will find- treasures and horrors and puzzles alike.

This can happen. I work hard. And I believe.

Reader's Advisory List: Webcomics for Teens

A by-no-means-complete, but awesome list of webcomics for teens, (and people who like webcomics) compiled by me, with help from the YALSA blogger army. All of these are free from their creators to you, the reader. How cool is that?

Gunnerkrigg Court
A boarding school fantasy with robots and faeries, magic and science. The art has evolved from simple to really beautiful. Neil Gaiman has called it his favorite webcomic an endorsement that should tell you just what kind of comic this is- dark, lovely and magical.

Digger
"A wombat. A dead god. A very peculiar epic." is how author Ursula Vernon describes it. I couldn't put it any better.

Kukuburi
Delivery girl Nadia stumbles into an alternate reality, but when things start to look terribly familiar, she wonders if this new place is made from her own dreams and nightmares.

The Red String
This manga romance focuses on a bunch of high school friends and acquaintances. It has a bit of mature content, but a good balance of drama and sweetness.

Order of the Stick
Follow the escapades of a comical fantasy role playing party. A must for fans of tabletop gaming.

Girl Genius
This steampunk fantasy promises "adventure, romance, Mad Science!"

Garfield Minus Garfield
The newspaper comic strip minus the main character casts Jon Arbuckle as a strange and seemingly depressed character. It is funny in an absurd way.

The Phoenix Requiem
A ghost story wrapped inside a Victorian romance.

PVP (Player Vs. Player)
A long-running, geek-minded strip about a guy who writes for a video game magazine. Lots of references and jokes about video games, music, movies, TV, etc

In His Likeness

A more traditional 4-panel set up a joke and get to the punchline kind of comic, illustrated mostly with modified clip-art. It pits characters like God, the Devil, the spirit of the Internet, etc. against each other. Especially recommended for fans of Terry Pratchett or Kurt Vonnegut.

Bayou
This creepy southern fantasy, is not for the faint of heart. Racial violence figures largely in a story of a young girl trying to clear her father's name of murder charges and save her friend from the clutches of strange and terrible beings. The Zuda Comics reader that you view this title in is different from just reading a web page. It full-screens nicely and has a good one click page turn and not a lot of loading time- like refreshing a whole page. Recommended for older teens.

EarthSong Saga
A manga style fantasy where the children of living planets are brought for safe-keeping to the childless planet EarthSong. Recommended to me by a ninth grader.

That's twelve comics for you to enjoy. They are mostly fantasy or in some way gaming related. Perhaps that just goes to show you the kinds of topics that are prevalent on the Internet. Leave suggestions for others in the comments!

And We're Back!

I probably really need a new blog, or at the very least a redesign, since I haven't been here in a year. But I don't see that happening this morning, so I shall merely proceed.

They say people have stopped blogging due to the expediency of status updates on sites like Facebook and Twitter. It is possible this has happened to me. I tweet a lot. Look to your right and we'll see if the widget is working. But lately, I keep having thoughts that are longer than 140 characters. I need a place to put them because I haven't been putting them anywhere. I used to love to blog. So I shall return to it.

Re-branding to follow when I have some energy/time... or just a more focused desire to rid myself of brain crack. (Further explanations of Brain Crack, and my quest to defeat it, can be found here, and here. We can definitely talk about that later.)

Today, I just need this blog back so I can link to a list of Webcomics to share with teens from my post over at the YALSA blog (where I do blog, about once a month). So I'm gonna do that and then we can talk about other things, like how my ambition to be a teen librarian has made me better at integrating technology into an elementary school curriculum, later.

Quiz: Amherst History Quiz

Quizzes by Quibblo.com

Example for Latin Class

A Book Review: Kelly Link's Pretty Monsters

I follow the yahoo groups list for Small Beer Press, home of Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet and the stories of Kelly Link (and several other things that look really cool, but I have yet to adequately explore). A few weeks ago they asked if anyone wanted to review Link's new short story collection for teens. I wrote back, using several exclamation points, that, yes, I did. So they sent me an advance reader's copy (my very first), I read, I enjoyed, and now, I will review:


Kelly Link writes strange stories. They take all the things you know about genres and twist them up until they become nearly unrecognizable, and suddenly real. Fantastic things: a dead girl’s hair with a mind of its own, a country contained within a handbag, thick, viscous magic, beautiful aliens, a secret television show called The Library—seem plausible, tangible. This is not in a far away land a long time ago. It’s magic, plain and simple, and it’s happening right here, right now.

This latest collection, Pretty Monsters, is geared toward teens, and populated by young protagonists, each with their own collection of confusions about identity and relationships. These are woven with skillful curiosity into narratives of the strange, where in addition to the challenges of growing up, there are ghosts to catch, monsters to flee from, and wizards who want their dinner. But, whatever the characters encounter, an intimate knowledge of emotion takes the forefront.

Though the apt juxtaposition of the teenage years with fantasy and horror is not an innovation, Link keeps it fresh each time. Strange can be humorous, scary, sweet, intense or all of these at once, just like being a teenager. Word play and the quotable turn of phrase are frequent features. You’ll want to stop and read every few sentences again, aloud.

Some of the stories take place in our own world, or nearly enough. In those with settings that are different, world building is subtly interspersed so as not to interrupt the flow of the story. The reader catches on little by little, trying to solve the riddle of the place.

If there is fault to be found, it may be that some stories end abruptly or split off into unexpected directions. For those who find this disorienting, I offer a thought from Jeremy Mars, protagonist of the story titled Magic for Beginners:

Jeremy supposes that [the ever-changing casting in his favorite show, The Library] could be perpetually confusing, but instead it makes your brain catch on fire. It’s magical.

My gray matter is certainly singed. A highly recommended collection for anyone, teen or adult, with a taste for the strange.