Rockin' on The Prophet's Birthday

When traveling in Syria my friend Janet and I visited the town of Ma'loula, a village cut into rock about an hour from Damascas known for its preservation of the Aramaic language, the language Christ spoke. The place has a long history, which includes the refuge of Thecla, a woman who led people to Chrisitanity as a follower of St. Paul. A larger-than-life statue of The Virgin Mary overlooks the valley and a monastery on the mountaintop celebrates Mass every morning in Aramaic. Please see my website for a video of the local priest reciting the Lord's Prayer in this ancient language.

The day we arrived in Ma'loula, the townspeople were busy setting up chairs, shade tarps and mega speakers. Soon, rocked-up versions of Sufi music echoed off the bluffs. As we passed by the crowd, men waved to us to join them, handing us small cups of hot tea and bags of roasted nuts. They directed Janet and I to the women's side of the space. Women covered in veils and others wearing black chadors stood up to greet us, kissing us on both cheeks, and others reached out to squeeze our hands. We could hardly hear their greetings over the music. We soon learned that we were in the midst of a birthday celebration for The Prophet Muhammad, may peace be upon him. "We're celebrating about a month late," someone with English told us. "because of the weather."

The mix of religions coexisting in this town felt mirrored in Damascas and every other town we visited in Syria, as if everyone is equally appreciative and proud of a shared rich cultural heritage.

For more information visit: www.MeghanNuttallSayres.com

Shrines of Damascas, An Interfaith Experience

When traveling in Iran, Turkey and Syria I have witnessed the convivial atmosphere of people of different faiths living together. In Damascas, my friend Janet and I came upon this shrine in the old Jewish Quarter for Say'yeda Roqayya, The Prophet Muhammad's granddaughter. It would be one of many Muslim, Christian or Jewish shrines we would visit during our travels in Syria, including those of St. Paul, Saint Thecla (a convert of Paul), John the Baptist, Ibn Arabi, among others. I was told that the neighborhood of Roqayya's shrine is home to many Shiite Muslims from Iran.

After borrowing proper robes and head covering, my friend and I were welcomed into the mosque and the women's sanctuary beside Roqayya's tomb. Here pilgrims chatted and wept together as they paid homage to this revered saint. The women were delighted that we took the time to visit with them. Many hugged us, kissed us on both of our cheeks and asked to take photos with us. The video below will give you a feel for the mood of this moment.

Walking in the footsteps of these holy people was a treat for me as I have written characters based on some of them in a collection of stories Daughters of the Desert: Tales Of Remarkable Women From the Christian, Jewish and Muslim Traditions, which I coauthored with Storyforce authors Claire Rudolf Murpy and Mary Cronk Farrell. For more information and images about the interfaith aspects of my trip, please visit the pages on my website for this book as well as the Middle East section.
www.MeghanNuttallSayres.com

Storyteller of Damascas

I have just returned from Turkey and Syria, the setting of my novel-in-progress. While in Damascas I met Abu Shadi, a storyteller who has been carrying on the tradition in the Coffee Shop Ainfora beside the Ummayid Mosque. (Among other things, this mosque houses a shrine for John the Baptist.) Since time immemorial Arab men gathered in tea houses to drink tea, smoke waterpipes and talk. Even under Ottoman rule they continued to maintain this aspect of their culture though the cafes were subject to scrutiny by their new rulers. Men whose wives were giving birth waited in the tea house among friends who would congratulate or console them, should the baby or mother die.

Storytellers, like series writers today, always ended their tales with a cliff hanger, so people would return to the coffee house the next night. Check out the Middle Eastern pages on my website in the coming weeks for more photos of this most expressive and conversant storyteller as well as to view a video of Abu Shadi telling his story.

---Meghan Nuttall Sayres
www.meghannuttallsayres.com

Good book night

Another First Friday book discussion. Among the books we liked this month:

Going Bovine - Libba Bray
Jumped - Rita Williams-Garcia
Rapunzel's Revenge - Shannon Hale
To Dance: A Ballerina's Graphic Novel - Siena Cherson Siegel
Princess Ben - Catherine Murdoch
Charles & Emma - Deborah Heiligman
When You Reach Me - Rebecca Stead
Where the Mountain Meets the Moon - Grace Lin
Rock 'n Roll Soldier - Dean Ellis Kohler

Thanks, Claire, for hosting.

The Timekeeper's Moon

I will have to stop saying I never win anything. Recently, I won a Native American dinner prepared from authentic recipes and ingredients. It was delicious and interesting! The same could be said of The Timekeeper’s Moon, by Joni Sensel. I won an advance copy of the book in a contest over at Joan Stradling’s blog .
I loved it! I did not want to put it down and I stayed up late to finish it. A sequel to Sensel’s The Farwalker’s Quest, Timekeeper’s Moon, is set in a world far in the future when all technology has vanished from the world. The people developed innate talents to survive after “the Blinding” a war that left everyone blind.
Ariel, the only remaining one with “Farwalker” talent is a wonderful character. She hears the moon calling her and feels compelled to follow. With a mysterious map and her feet to guide her, Ariel sets out on a dangerous journey to save the vault of knowledge she discovered in the first book.
The writing is beautiful, original and suspenseful. The world is fascinating and well-crafted. It’s hard for me to say which of the books I like best, but if I had to choose, I would say the relationships between the characters in Timekeeper’s Moon tips the balance. They feel so real they practically thrum off the page.
Another thing I will have to stop saying, is that I don’t like fantasy. Joni Sensel, you captured my heart with this one.

Kidlit Contest

Associate agent Mary Kole, from Andrea Brown Literary Agency, is offering a chance to submit the first 500 words of your completed MG or YA novel over at her blog’s “Novel Beginnings” contest!

The prize?

Grand Prize Winner: A 15 page critique
First Place: A 10 page critique
Second Place: A 5 page critique
Third Place: A 2 page critique
Honorable Mention(s): A critique of the first page of your novel

Deadline for entries: Sunday, January 31st at 11:59 p.m., Pacific Time.

Read the details of the contest and submit at Kidlit Contest

Talking Books

Many thanks to Mary Cronk Farrell for organizing a monthly book-talk group. Last Friday, a congenial mix of teachers, librarians and writers gathered to chat about recently read books we loved. Among those discussed:

Woods Runner by Gary Paulsen

All the Broken Pieces by Ann Burg, YA

Bless Me Ultima by Rudolfo Anaya, HS/adult

The White Giraffe by Jill St. John, MG

The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate by Jacqueline Kelly, MG, YA

When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead, MG, YA

Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, YA

Pagan's Crusade by Catherine Jinks, YA

Columbine by Dave Cullen, HS/adult

A Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger, HS/adult

Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barberg, adult

The Help by Katheryn Stockett, adult

--cross-posted to Under the Covers

India's Children's Book Trust

Seated with me is Ira Saxena, Secretary of the Associaition of Writiers and Illustrators for Children in New Delhi. She is also a volunteer for India's Children's Book Trust, an organization that publishes books for children in hundreds of local dialects and sponsors literacy programs along with IBBY through out India.

Manorama Jafa, the Vice President of AWIC invited me via email before coming to India to participate in their monthly meeting in which twenty or more writers attended. On this particular day, they celebrated their first Hindi dictionary for children, a book the Trust had published many years ago, but had been bought by a major publisher. Royalty checks were distributed to several of the authors who were present.

On a second visit to the Children's Book Trust, Ira Sazxena interviewed me for an article she will write for Indian IBBY Journal. Our discussion roamed from the craft of writing to the underlying theme of Sufism in my novel Anahita's Woven Riddle and our favorite translations of Persian poetry, which Ira grew up reading. Her mother translated the Sufi poetry of Omar Khayyam into Hindi. Ira, a child psychologist and children's book author is presently at work on a novel set in 1800's India with an environmental theme. "Did you know the world's first tree hugger was in India?" she said. I had never given much thought to the origins of this kind of activism and assumed it may have been in the California redwoods. I look forward to reading this novel. For more details about the Children's Book Trust, its volunteers, and my trip to India, please check out the Central Asian pages on my website www.meghannuttallsayres.com

Making it Work

I am secretly (maybe not so secretly) addicted to Project Runway. Sometimes, watching the show, I've thought, what if there was such a contest for writers? Would I get to the writers' equivalent of fashion week if required to produce a well constructed, cleverly plotted tale in a genre outside my comfort zone?

Last weekend, I attended Weekend on the Water, a three day writing retreat hosted by the Western Washington SCBWI region. During the course of "Going Deeper" into plot, character, setting and voice, we attendees did a lot of writing exercises. In one, we wrote a description of a gothic cemetery, then were asked to re-write that description, adding a teenage girl who had just been asked on her dream date.

It was as if Ruta Rimas morphed into Heidi Klum, asking me to make a red-carpet ballgown from plastic grocery sacks.

But the point of that exercise, and everything else presented by Ruta, assistant editor with Balzar+Bray/HarperCollins, and Cheryl Klein, senior editor at Arthur A. Levine/Scholastic, was to explore our writing more deeply. How well do we know our characters? How does setting affect their behavior? Does the voice we've chosen bring the reader close enough to the story?

The two extraordinary editors presented for a total of five and a half hours each during the weekend, as well as providing first page intensives for everyone. And retreat organizers Joni Sensel, Laurie Thompson and Jolie Stekly did an outstanding job keeping us on time and comfortable. I left with a new feeling of energy for revising my novel, and deeper insights into the creative process.

--cross-posted from Under the Covers

Wake up

Have you noticed hardly anyone pays attention anymore?

So many conversations resemble narcissists passing in the park, each chatting so busily about themselves they don’t notice the other isn’t listening. And the dialogues that consist of periodically posting links on Facebook to “Check out my latest blog".

It's the writer’s job to pay attention. But today anybody can be a writer. Anybody with a computer, internet hook-up and some tech knowledge can post a blog. Anyone with the gumption and money can self-publish a book. With the explosion of information on the web, we don’t even have to think for ourselves. We can cut and paste other people’s arguments and opinions into e-mails and send them to all our friends and relatives. None of this requires paying attention.

Good writing requires not only paying attention, but the time and facility to step back from what we see and hear to get a bigger picture. We need the patience to wait for corollaries to appear and the courage to also pay attention with the inner eye. For it is the synthesis of the world without and the world within that gives our words the weight of truth.

We can be blinded by busyness, deafened by the minutia of a day’s distractions. If we keep moving fast enough we can outrun the demons. If we have enough difficulties to worry about, we needn’t pay attention to the simple, the beautiful, or that which we know to be real and true, but can approximate only through story.

It’s a noble journey to pay attention, a great trust to name oneself a writer.

Readers Humble Writer

A writer is often humbled. An honest critique from a writing group bites, but helps improve craft. A rejection by an editor hurts, but offers a chance to decide: Have faith and stand by one's story? Or re-think and revise?

Then one day, without warning, a book you have sent out into the world goes somewhere unexpected and drops a pebble in a pond radiating ripples far beyond your expectations. This humbles in an entirely different way. It takes all the humility out of humble and replaces it with gratitude.

My middle-grade historical novel Fire in the Hole! found a home with some very unique college students. At Gonzaga University, better known for its Zags basketball team, a thriving English as a Second Language program caters to students from all corners of the globe. The department chose my novel for reading comprehension class. Instructors like the book because it has an accessible reading level for students learning English, but introduces new and varied vocabulary and a compelling story.

The novel details events in Idaho’s Coeur d’Alene Silver Mining District, where labor war exploded in the 1890’s. Students from China, Ukraine, Iran, Columbia, and Korea learned American history as well as English words like dynamite, ciders, foothill, canyon, mineshaft, pincushion, seize and surrender.

Invited to the class, I expected their curiosity about time and place. I was surprised by their many questions about my characters, and how much they cared about them. One student wrote a song, with verses to cover the plot from beginning to end. While the class sang, small groups of students acted out the scenes.

I joined their fun and laughter, while wiping tears from my eyes.

Books, Music, Sun!

Greetings from Galway, Ireland! I am here to participate in Children's Books Ireland's Book Festival. I will read at the Westside Library at 10am and the Ballybane Library at 11:30 on Thursday Oct 15th. I am looking forward to these events and excited to meet local readers.

Meanwhile, I am at work on a new novel. But given the stellar weather, I am a little distracted and want to share the moment with you in this video. The music is by Luka Bloom. He gave a fantastic performance in the Town Hall last week. Look for his new cd Eleven Songs....

---Meghan Nuttall Sayres

Children's Lit in Ireland and India

In October I will be visiting Ireland and particiapting in their Children's Books Ireland Book Festival 2009. Please check back here for more details. I am also off to India in November where I will be meeting with children's book authors connected with IBBY India. I look forward to introducing you to them on my blog in the near future!

---Meghan Nuttall Sayres

Weaver's Perspective on Iran

Friends of the Moscow Library invited me to speak on Iran this August about my recent experience weaving on Iran's First World Peace Carpet and my novel set in Iran Anahita's Woven Riddle. To learn more about the Peace Carpet, a project sponsored by UNESCO, please check out the Iran or Weaving pages on my website.

Modeling this Iranian Qashqa'i nomadic headpiece is Homa Assefi, who attended my talk. Many thanks to Homa! This three-pieced covering evolved over many generations. The blue beanie has been worn for centuries along with the black sequined veil. In the 1960's teenagers added the tie-dye like scarves.

---Meghan Nuttall Sayres

Celebrating Wetlands in Moscow, Idaho

This August I was invited to the Palouse-Clearwater Environmental Institute in Moscow, Idaho, to read from my children's book The Shape of Betts Meadow: A Wetlands Story. Shown here is Anika reading from Betts Meadow. Check out the video of her and other listeners' spirited participation, puppets and all, on my Betts Meadow pages.

---Meghan Nuttall Sayres

Another great conference!

Many thanks to the organizers of the Washington-Idaho region for putting on another great conference. Mary Kate Castellani, Assoc. Editor of Walker Books, YA novelist Terry Trueman, Author/Illustrator Richard Jesse Watson and middle grade novelist Judy Gregerson all shared their expertise on the craft and business of writing. All of us who attended appreciate the time and generosity of these great presenters. See you next year! --Mari

Author Interview

Check out a recent blogger interview with StoryForce author Meghan Nuttall Sayres on Books and Movies' Literary Road Trip.

Interview submitted by Carrie Kitzmiller

Can you tell us a little bit about your journey as a writer? Was it something you always wanted to do?

Meghan: “Writing was not something I went to school for or even thought about until after graduate school. However, while taking courses in political science my papers tended to morph toward qualitative essays. The first piece I ever published was about a rock art restoration project in Castle Dale, Utah. The article was so long, and unedited, that the newspaper there had to publish it in two parts. But, that project led to a children’s book on rock art, which was bought by the press that published my picture book The Shape of Betts Meadow: A Wetland’s Story.”

Where do you get the ideas for your writing?

Meghan: “From all the exploring and stumbling around I do in life. My ideas might come from people I meet, a far away place or time, even an unusual artifact that seems to find me.”

Read more at: http://booksandmovies.colvilleblogger.com/2009/08/27/literary-road-trip-author-meghan-nuttall-sayres/

Upcoming Events

Monday Aug 24rth, 10:30am, Clear Water Institute Books in the Park, Moscow, Idaho. I will read from my book The Shape of Betts Meadow: A Wetlands Story.

Tuesday Aug 25th, 7pm, Moscow Library (sponsored also by Book People, an independent bookstore in Moscow, Idaho), Iran: A Weaver's Perspective about my recent trip to Iran to weave on a World Peace Carpet and discussion on Anahita's Woven Riddle, my novel about a nomadic carpet weaver.

Monday September 14th, 6:30-9pm, University of Utah Life Long Learning Center, Salt Lake City, Utah. Iran Experiential Class.

---Meghan Nuttall Sayres

Contest at Eye Feathers

I'm on the verge of finishing a major revision of my MG novel. Despite temperatures in the high 90's for the last week, I have persevered at my keyboard with no air conditioning. I've been writing seven-days a week since the beginning of July and making great progress. However, this morning the procrastination bug bite me.

That's how I stumbled upon this contest over at Tara McClendon's blog Eye Feathers. Tara is a freelance writer currently working on a young adult novel about fairies. She also works as an editor for InspirationForWriters.com. Here's what she says about her first contest: "I’m giving away a 10,000 word edit, which equates to a $300 value. I’m going to host this for an entire month, so I’ll draw a winner on September 1, 2009."

I will have my revision complete by September 1st. Just in time to win an edit from Tara! See, procrastination isn't so bad after all.

Writing Fiction About the Prophet Muhammad, continued...

Here is a view into one of my personal hurdles while working on this collection. I had initially set out to write a story about how the Prophet Muhammad’s wife Khadijeh supported him both financially and spiritually. I found the makings of the plot in one of the hadith’s (an historic account of the Prophet’s life), which explained how difficult of a time Muhammad had when he was receiving his revelations. He lost sleep and questioned himself. From this premise, I wrote a story full of detail and tension. Months slipped by as I worked hard at pulling quotes of the Prophet from the Qur’an and using them for his dialogue. When finished I sent my draft to our Muslim proof readers with much anticipation. Their response was less enthusiastic than I had hoped for. “You cannot not describe the Prophet as having ‘walnut brown hair,’” my consultant said. “You should not imply that Muhammad suffered any strife, and, it is disrespectful to put words into the Prophet’s mouth.”

Hmm, I thought, dropping my pen. Now what? How do I write a story without the conflict that is needed to move a story as well as keep it appealing for the reader? And how am I to write a story about a couple, if I cannot let one of them speak? There has been much written and said in the news, Publishers Weekly and the blogs about recent books and cartoons that have insulted Islam. The debates rage for and against the notion that the world deserves free expression. In my case, I chose to withhold my particular interpretation of this event in Muslim history and scrap my story out of respect. I then set out to write another one. In my view, the point of pulling this collection together was to remind those of the monotheistic faiths that we have common stories we can build upon, which can help bring our people in a closer communion of spirit. Why thwart that possibility by publishing something that might likely offend?

I learned much from the stories of my co-writers Claire Rudolph Murphy, Mary Cronk Farrell, Sarah Conover and Betsy Wharton. This project continues to feed and inform my spiritual life and creative impulses. To my delight, I have since discovered on my travels to the Middle East and Central Asia that women (more so than men) throughout history have been weaving their own interpretations of scriptural stories into carpets, long before they knew how to read and write. I have literally found new and actual threads of these ancient parables to explore. Perhaps a nonfiction story of the richness of monotheistic and other spiritual cultures is on my horizon---illustrated, of course, with rugs.

Photo: I found this image on an Iranian rug of Moses in the reed basket in the Tehran Carpet Bazaar.

---Meghan Nuttall Sayres