Category Archives: Books

Happy St. Patrick’s Day!

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Shamrock! Not that there is such a thing ... but anyway, the attribution is by greymalkn on Flickr, CC 2.0, from Wikimedia Commons.

I’m the usual Midwestern (originally, now from the Pacific Northwest) white person – Irish and German, though there might be some English, Scottish, French and who knows what else in there before they immigrated to the U.S. in the 1840s and 1860s.

I grew up with one grandparent who emphasized the Irish Catholic side of the family, so we had St. Paddy’s Day with corned beef and cabbage, carrots, potatoes, soda bread, a cake with a shamrock on it (shamrocks aren’t a real plant, by the way) and little replica shillelaghs (shi-LAY-lee) all over my grandparents’ house. (I also learned to do some Irish dancing in my Catholic school girl uniform from the wonderful Sister Eileen at Notre Dame de Sion Lower School in Kansas City, but that’s long forgotten. Thankfully.)

I’m not Catholic anymore; I don’t eat meat (though I did find a motherlode of “vegan corned beef and cabbage” recipes today); and I don’t want a chocolate cake with green sprinkles making a shamrock on it. I don’t drink green beer or Guinness. I do listen to some Irish music though…

Why did so many Irish Catholics come to the U.S. (and Canada and Australia)? Here’s a kind of goofy Sinead O’Connor … um … rap – which pretty much answers that:

And I admit to loving “Kilkelly, Ireland“ about what happened back home (I first heard it in 1991 in Estes Park, Colorado, when the group Colcannon played there – I like their version better, but I can’t find it online):

Here’s one of my fave Irish-in-the-U.S. Pogues songs, in a rather weird YouTube form:

And randomly, a couple of my fave recent Irish books:
Roddy Doyle’s Paula Spencer
Colm Toíbín’s Brooklyn

With the exception of Paula Spencer, occurs to me that everything I’ve linked is pretty sad. But the Irish have a good sense of humor, and I’m personally pleased that my long-ago family immigrated, and that I do not live in a place where the Church still has way too much power. Plus, hey, we wouldn’t have so many sad and sentimental and frankly boozy songs and books and movies (well, the movies tend to be a bit more grim) without that immigration.

All of that said, the original point of this post was that I love it when the Muppets sing “Danny Boy.”

I bet you do too.

Author Chris Crutcher Came to the Eugene Public Library, And All I Got Was A Lot Of Tears And Laughter

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Chris Crutcher opens his March 10, 2012, talk at the Eugene Public Library with a joke. Photo by Suzi Steffen

A couple of weeks ago, I interviewed young adult lit author Chris Crutcher for the Literary Duck – link here, and it was a delightful interview, so you should go read it & then come back – and on Saturday, March 10, he spoke at the Eugene Public LIbrary for one of their programs during the Big Read (there’s one big event left – Ursula Le Guin is coming to Eugene on March 24th! Hurrah!).

I live-tweeted a fair amount of the talk – I had to leave a few minutes before the end – and thought I’d get up a record at least of the tweets, with a little information in between the tweets

Crutcher was in town for a few days before the talk, going around and speaking to teens in Eugene and maybe Springfield? I don’t know the details, but here’s YA librarian Traci Glass’ tweet about that:

Crutcher started off thanking the hosts of his trip and saying that he’d had a great few days talking to people and eating good food. Then he said that when he was young, his dad thought he was kind of lazy:

Then Chris told us what kind of a high school student he was – not a star, to put it mildly. But not a screwup either.

He wasn’t a reader, and he didn’t want to be a reader. Didn’t want to read the books for high school.

(This status came later, but it fits here:)

That story: He told about how he became a writer, and how he modeled the football coach in his first book somewhat after the football coach at his high school in Cascade, Idaho. He went to read in Cascade’s high school library, and he said one boy said to him, “Is this a real book? LIke, can you get it?” When the boy believed that it was a real book, he turned to the librarian and said, “How many people who went to this high school have written books?” and the librarian said, well, just Chris. And then the kid asked, “Well, why don’t we have it in the library, then?”

Crutcher: “And that was how I learned that the book was banned in my own high school library.”

Then Crutcher talked about his work as a child abuse therapist and how he doesn’t take any one kid’s specific story to create his own work:

Then Crutcher read (on his iPad, which he called “just about the coolest little thing in the world”) from his book Deadline.

This was a short reading, and it sounded pretty good. I have read many of Crutcher’s books, but not Deadline, so it might be time to pick it up (especially as I just read John Green‘s  The Fault in Our Stars, which made me cry continuously, with short burst of sobbing, for about the final hundred pages and occasional moments before as well, and was lovely but not half as funny as Crutcher’s writing).

He proceeded to tell us a story about part of where this book – about a kid who’s dying of cancer, and how the kid deals with saying goodbye to everyone – came from:

Then he told a super sad story about a 5-year-old from his experience as a family/child abuse therapist. How sad was it?

And this is one of the reasons Crutcher doesn’t like the banning or the censorship – every topic needs to be open for discussion in order for people to have a chance of connecting and healing.

And some wise words:

And finally, just before I left: