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Change Your Story, Change Your Life

6 Apr

 

I last wrote a blog post in November 2019, not long before the holiday celebrations and family visits began.

And then came 2020. Let me begin with personal experience. In a post here back on May 7, 2014 titled “No Less than the Trees and the Stars” I told of losing my husband and two of our four sons in 2013. Like that post, this one again confronts the subject of death in my own life, as my dog died in January of this year and my third (and last) stepson died on February 2. With my remaining son and his family I returned from the memorial service in Florida on February 29th, just days before Covid-19-related travel restrictions began.

Since 2013 people have often asked me how I managed to come to terms with the three deaths in that four month period. I would answer that grief can be utterly devastating, but I had found a way to cope through a philosophy I discovered in 1999 and began calling “story principle.” I spoke about it in a talk I gave at the National Association for Gifted Children conference in Kentucky in 2005. After that people began asking me if I could please expand that message into a book. So eventually, I did. It’s called Change Your Story, Change Your Life, and has been available on Amazon as both a physical book and a Kindle version since 2011. While the philosophy didn’t make coping with the deaths of 2013 easy, it did make it possible. The loss of my dog in January this year left me fully alone in my new home, and the death of my stepson took away the last member of the family that became mine when I married in 1964. Once again story principle is helping me cope.

Now, of course, the whole world is dealing with a pandemic that is continuing to bring death to every continent we humans inhabit. Kids are out of schools and families, many of whose gifted children are extremely sensitive and empathetic, are doing their best to cope with what may be the single largest and scariest disaster anyone on the planet today has ever experienced. We are told by those who study the subject of grief that we are all now currently faced with major grief caused by the sudden loss of the patterns our normal lives depend on.

 After a number of internet gatherings and email exchanges with families of gifted kids, I decided last week to make my book easily available in its entirety as a free PDF and posted the link to that PDF on all of my Facebook pages. I am including it here at the end of this post.

Now let me share some thoughts about how to connect with this material, if you decide to download it.  It was never intended as emergency help for a situation as difficult and life-changing as this pandemic. What I hoped for those who wanted to put it to work for themselves was that they could take it a chapter or two at a time, try whichever of the exercises between chapters that appealed to them, and move through it as far and as fast as seemed right for them. The structure of it was designed to bring the reader into the use of story principle one small step at a time, mainly to help them come to terms with how hard it can be to believe the principle without experiencing it personally. There is nothing like seeing and feeling it work for oneself to encourage a beginning acceptance and a willingness to experiment further.

 But now, as I think about the possible effects of the current world situation on the highly gifted, highly sensitive and aware PG population I’ve written about all these years, I would suggest a different approach to the material than I had envisioned when I wrote it. Maybe read the short introduction and then Chapter Two, “Story Principle 101” as a beginning, but after that you may want to skip around in it a bit.  Browse chapters and scan the “Putting it to Work” exercises to see what appeals to your particular interests or needs or life experience. It’s always possible to go back if you feel you’ve missed something that might help you understand more about how (or why) it might work for you.

Though with death tolls now a part of daily news broadcasts, one might be tempted to move quickly to the final chapters that focus on death, my suggestion would be that there are some pretty important chapters that come before those—especially from Chapter 9 on—to provide a more solid foundation first.

Science of Mind, from which Story Principle grew, was itself based on spiritual principles that can be found with some variation in most of the world’s religions. So some readers will immediately recognize aspects of it, especially if you come from a religious tradition that acknowledges “miracles.”

I wrote it to help people, as I had been helped, to bring more joy, more comfort, more fulfillment into their lives. I wanted people to discover the enormous power that their minds, their attitudes, and the “stories they tell themselves” have over their life experience. William James (1842-1910) wrote “The greatest discovery of my generation is that human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitudes of mind.” It’s a discovery that has mostly been lost to later generations. This is just my way to help share it.

When my son first read the manuscript he said “Nobody’s going to believe this coming from you, Mom. Your life has been way too good. They’ll just say, ‘Easy for you to say!’”

Well, possibly they would have said it then, but not so very likely now. Nobody’s life is without losses and grief. But I couldn’t have imagined when I first wrote the book what a solid foundation it would give me for dealing with my own.

Here it is in its entirety. Feel free to download and also to share:

Change Your Story, Change Your Life

 

 

 

 

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Calling All Readers and Writers!

21 Feb

 

Some of you who read this blog may also see my DeepEnd page or my author’s page on FaceBook and so may already know about the issue that is the focus of this post. But to others of you what I am writing about today may come as news (and probably also a shock, as the discovery was to me).

Many, if not most of you who follow this blog are readers; some of the children and the adults in the highly to profoundly gifted population may also write, or may one day want to write books. And all of you use “devices” and the internet, of course, or you wouldn’t be reading this. I assume most of you frequent libraries as well. So the convergence of books, readers and writers, libraries, and the internet is no doubt important to you.

For the last 40 years I have made my living, such as it is, mostly from being a writer, and mostly writing fiction for kids and young adults, though I also, of course, write nonfiction, both books and articles (plus FB and blog posts) about the gifted. In the image above the top shelf has my fiction and the lower shelf has books I have chapters or stories in, my nonfiction books, some translations and some plays. Physical copies! And all indubitably “mine.”

A few weeks ago, the Authors Guild, of which I’ve been a member for decades, advised its members to check something called Open Library, to see if it was making any our work freely available without our permission, in violation of our copyrights. In those weeks I have learned a great deal, most if which is deeply disturbing, which is why I’m writing this post.

On Open Library I found two serious problems—one was that about a dozen of my books, seven of which are still in print and available for sale, were there for downloading (so-called “borrowing”) for free. On “my page” two of my books were listed as having a co-author named Alex Hill. I had no idea who this person might be—certainly not a co-author. I clicked on his name and was taken to a page where I found the second serious problem. ALL of my books published before 2008, both fiction and nonfiction—including Guiding the Gifted Child, in English and in German, which I wrote with Elizabeth Meckstroth and James Webb,—and including a play, “Bridge To Terabithia,” which I wrote with Katherine Paterson and Steve Liebman. Nowhere on this other page could my own name be found. Everything there was simply listed as “By Alex Hill.”

I contacted Open Library and demanded that they take down from “my page” at least the seven books still in print, and in a second communication demanded that they take every one of my books off “Alex Hill’s page.” They complied with this second demand within 24 hours. It took another day before I got the message that they had taken all of my books down as ebooks for borrowing from my own “page” on their site.

So began my journey through the vast and (for me at least) horrifying world of digital copying. I had not known that my books were available this way, which means my permission was not sought before Open Library’s “parent organization,” Internet Archive had my books scanned and made them available through O.L. for download to anyone who has internet access.  

Once Alex Hill was no longer being credited as the author of my books, I asked how this massive “error” could have been made, and Open Library’s answer to me was that the site is a wiki, explaining that anyone—ANYONE—can change its “metadata” at will. And although they have claimed to me that there is no way the content of a scanned book can be changed by anyone once it has been made available on the site [though the author’s name could be changed any time by anyone apparently] I have reason not to believe them about content, because apparently users can also scan books and have them included in this “catalog,” which is what they call Open Library. They thought this information that they’re a wiki should somehow comfort me. Not! My son discovered that the change of author’s name was done by a “rename bot”—and he thinks the bot could have been created and unleashed “accidentally.” This also does not comfort me. Unlike Wikipedia, Open Library doesn’t have hoards of people passionately trying to make sure the material there is accurate.

The original concept for Internet Archive was a noble one—to scan books that are in the public domain and/or historical documents so that people anywhere could freely access them. But Open Library went vastly beyond that mission and began just scanning any books they could buy or get donated (many, many of which are donated) and putting them up, without asking the author’s permission. 

Copyright exists as a protection against unauthorized copying! There are well over 100,000 public “town libraries,” to say nothing of school and university libraries. These “brick and mortar libraries” buy books or contract for ebooks with the publisher, paying either for the ability to lend them a specific number of times or for a specified period of time. Open Library has no such limitations, though they claim otherwise. 

It’s true that some writers get very wealthy (Stephen King says writing makes him a “good living,”—Yes!) But a recent Author’s Guild survey determined that the average yearly income for a writer is around $20K. The standard contract with a hard cover publisher gives the author a 10% royalty on each book sale. That percentage may go up higher if sales reach certain sales targets. And for ebooks, though all other “subsidiary rights” are standardly shared 50/50 between author and publisher, the ebook percentage for the author is (also standardly) only 25%.

Writers’ incomes have been falling steadily for a decade. Surprise? Every writer I have told to check Open Library has found many, most or all of their books available there, always without permission and most often while still in print. Internet Archive began in 2006 and most of us didn’t know it. Open Library, apparently started four years later, also went unknown from the authors whose work they were illegally scanning. They claim this right to scan whole works under a theory they call “Controlled Digital Lending” (CDL) but it is not actually either “controlled,” or “lending.”

I’m not writing here to bemoan my own loss of royalty income, though that clearly does count some for me. I’m writing here because the ability to scan any book and put it up on line is threatening the entire system of written works and the sharing thereof. Brick and mortar libraries serve a geographical location and people in their area who have library cards—Open Library can reach an infinite number of computer users anywhere in the world, and give them the books. While O.L. claims books are loaned one at a time and for a specified period, in the FAQ published (link below) by opponents of this theory, that claim is shown to be untrue. At the end of the specified time period a “borrower” can’t send the book back to O.L. the way you take the physical book back to the library. It is still in their computer’s cache if they wish to keep it. And each ebook “sent” is a separate file, of which O.L. can make an unlimited number.

Our super bright kids are digitally literate, and this technology has brought many great opportunities into the world, but the“piracy” situation of CDL genuinely threatens anyone’s ability to make a future living writing books—of any kind—so that it threatens not only the kids’ own futures as writers, should they want to choose that path, but also the variety of books that will be available to them. Eventually only the most popular, the most famous, the most mainstream or the most infamous writers would be left creating new works, either of fiction or nonfiction. BTW, I’ve checked the nonfiction works of many writers about the gifted and–surprise–they’re on Open Library, too.  Furthermore, how will it be to use a “library” in which the content or authorship of the books can’t be certain.

I would love to see some of our brightest kids take on the challenge of finding ways to protect information and literature from unauthorized scanning and sharing. My imagination conjures wild ideas like paper that would react to scanning by going dark instead of recreating the images. Or the embedding of digital “locks” in physical books that need a specific digital key to allow scanning access—a key available only from the publisher or author. There must be lots of real possibilities that our digitally literate kids might be able to come up with. And surely there can be methods of compensating the authors somehow when their books are made available to readers. 

We need free libraries—many or most of us writers are among the “people too poor to buy every book they want or need to read” that the folks of Internet Archive and Open Library say they want to serve. I would point out that Robin Hood didn’t rob the poor to help the poor! There are copyright laws for a reason. In the long run they don’t just protect writers, they protect readers as well.

Here are some links for anybody who wants to find out more about this issue:

https://www.authorsguild.org/industry-advocacy/cdl-appeal-to-readers-and-librarians/

https://www.authorsguild.org/where-we-stand/controlled-digital-lending-cdl/

https://nwu.org/book-division/cdl/appeal/?fbclid=IwAR0IP8MyJ15JPrVn1CvVVYzAN0zoQoB6_NDX-mFZDiDSj_Tp0FCtSHCtmNY

https://nwu.org/book-division/cdl/faq/

 

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Who Are We?

2 Aug

Tomorrow is the one week anniversary of a sudden and unexpected death that has rocked the gifted community and has brought a deluge of memorial messages that the writers surely hope will assuage their own shock and grief, and comfort both Jim Webb’s family and all those who have benefited over the last 37 years from the work that he (and SENG) did to bring attention to the needs of gifted children and families. In addition, of course, there is the plethora of books that he published in the field, from the first days of Ohio Psychological Publishing (initial publisher—1982—of Guiding the Gifted Child) to the era of Great Potential Press.

As I have read those messages, I have been aware that the Jim Webb those writers describe is not the Jim Webb I met in 1981, nor the Jim Webb I knew during the approximately 20 years thereafter during which he and I and Elizabeth (Betty) Meckstroth discussed and sometimes attempted to write a second edition of Guiding. We never managed it because it turned out that she and I, by then both members of the Columbus Group, no longer were in agreement with what he wanted to say about giftedness. (When I was doing the writing part of Guiding, I found in his notes the statement that a gifted child was a child first and “gifted only secondarily.” so I called him up and explained that Betty and I did not agree with that statement. He acquiesced. The book’s theme became pretty much the opposite—giftedness, certainly extreme giftedness, is inborn.) Because our Guiding contract did not allow Jim to engage someone else to write the revision, the three of us finally gave up on revising it. After that his and my interactions dwindled to social events at various conferences, so I didn’t know him at all well in recent years.

But because I am among those in the gifted community who knew him “almost from the start,” I have been contacted to share for publication my thoughts about him and my feelings about his passing. I decided to write here instead. Of course, I was as shocked as anyone that he should leave the world so suddenly and so “young.” He was only 3 years older than I, so we are of the same “cohort” as it were. Too young, in other words! And I’m as aware as anyone of the enormous impact his work—his speaking and publishing, and the work of SENG—have had on the world’s understanding that the complex population of gifted kids, adults, elders and educators is of vital importance to humanity. I did post a couple of comments on the FB pages of others.

But the requests for comments, and the reading of what others have been posting in social media, got me to asking “who are we?”– we individual humans. The profile photo on my own personal Facebook page is not one anyone except my family would recognize as me—I was a blond, pigtailed child of eight at the time it was taken. Who I was then was an “annoying” kid (according to some of my teachers—and maybe my parents, and probably my older siblings). There was no such thing as a gifted, much less a highly gifted kid in my world at the time.

Back in the 70’s when Jane Piirto did her study of successful women writers, of which I was one by her study’s standards, as I was in the Directory of American Poets, and worked in the Poets in the Schools program, I actually claimed (because I believed) that I had “loved school.” I got good grades, after all. (psst: it’s called repression.)

It wasn’t until the conference in Nebraska to honor Leta Hollingworth (in 1989, seven years after the publication of Guiding!), when I heard Leta’s poem “The Lone Pine” in a documentary, that I confronted the very new truth that I had been a highly gifted child who loathed and despised school except for a very occasional teacher. (I think there were 5 or 6 between Kindergarten and college.) I could add that my teachers did not like me either, to put it sometimes mildly. I literally cried the whole second leg (Chicago to Albany) of my flight home from Nebraska and then wrote obsessively for six hours afterwards, uncovering a veritable dump truck load of painful memories. So it’s a tricky question.  Who was I before and after that conference?

I wrote a great deal about parenting gifted kids before I ever knew I had been one—though my husband’s extreme giftedness had been unmasked when our son was identified. My mother-in-law explained the shocking truth that the one year of elementary school he remembered—when he got to ride a trolley to a special school (a school he thought was for “difficult” kids) was actually a pilot program for the highly gifted. I remember all too well his horror that he hadn’t accomplished more as an adult—he was “only” a theatre director with a Ph.D. after all. Who was he before and after?

I interacted with Jim regularly for years. When SENG conferences began I spoke at them. But when a friend of mine who headed a national organization that had financially supported one of them took me to dinner at the conference and asked me about stories he had heard from other speakers about Jim lowering contracted speaker fees at the last minute with a threat to take them off the schedule if they didn’t sign the new contract, I told him that it hadn’t bothered me because I had just corrected the amount on the contract to the amount I’d been promised, initialed it, and signed. He asked me further questions, and I answered truthfully with whatever facts I knew. The organization never again supported SENG and I was never again asked to speak at Jim’s conferences.

I was born in 1942 and grew up in a world where most women stayed at home and few professions were open even to bright and accomplished women. And I spent some time (5 years) in higher education, where my male office mate, with precisely the same credentials as mine, made one fifth more than I in salary. I wasn’t happy about it, but it was “the way things were.” There was a huge power imbalance in our world, we knew it, and we pretty much put up with it. When Jim promoted Guiding as his book, Betty and I used to call each other “Et” and “Al,” which was the most common representation (when we got any) of our participation. Once I even saw myself listed as the author only of the “Open Letter” chapter, https://welcometothedeepend.com/an-open-letter-updated/ which I had copyrighted in my name so that I could use it elsewhere, as above and in Out of Sync https://www.rfwp.com/book/out-of-sync-essays-on-giftedness. But I long ago forgave him. The book gave me my work with the gifted, for which I am enduringly grateful.

In this era of “#Me, too” I’ve sometimes been bothered when men who have had long and successful careers, sometimes doing important work for the common good, can essentially lose everything when it is revealed that they previously used their power in ways that are now recognized as inappropriate, sometimes decades ago, at a time when the whole culture turned a blind eye to their behavior. Except for actual crimes (and even some crimes have statutes of limitation) I wonder, in spite of those who want to insist on truth, whether it is just or fair to judge a person for “who they were then,” when it is at least possible and maybe probable that they are not that person any more. I know, the culture needs to truly change, but still…

In the many comments I have read about Jim’s kindness, his caring, his deep friendships and unstinting emotional support, I recognize that these people, many of them friends and colleagues, knew a more recent and very different person than I ever did. I honor their experiences because it is very, very easy for me to remember myself treating other people when I was younger in a way that would pretty much horrify me now. I would not wish to be thought of as that person today! In a world where caring and kindness, inclusion, deep listening, and efforts to understand those who disagree with us or have less power than we do are getting vanishingly rare, and desperately needed, I remind myself that we never, genuinely never, fully know someone, perhaps even ourselves, the only one whose mind we inhabit. So today I mourn the Jim Webb those people are mourning.

And having survived some terrible losses myself, I send deep and heartfelt condolences to Janet and his family!

 

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Deep and Deeper

13 Apr

“All things are connected like the blood that unites us all. This we know: Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web he does to himself.”–Chief Seattle

“When we try to pick out something by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.”–John Muir

It has been an absurdly long time since I wrote something for this blog. But today it’s time. Last month I did a workshop for the Caroline D. Bradley Scholarship program’s annual seminar, sponsored by IEA, the Institute for Educational Advancement. The theme of this year’s seminar was “Intersections” and my workshop was titled “From Indra’s Net to the Internet: Intersections, Reality and Consciousness.”

To prepare for the seminar it was suggested that the attendees watch this TED Talk about “multipotentialites”:

https://www.ted.com/talks/emilie_wapnick_why_some_of_us_don_t_have_one_true_callingIf you don’t have time to watch the talk (though I highly recommend it), let me explain that Wapnick uses the term multipotentialite to describe a person who can’t relate to the idea of finding “one true calling.” If they commit to a job or a subject matter, as soon as they have learned or mastered it they need to move on to something else; there are always lots of other paths (interests) pulling them to explore. Many of “our kids” will recognize themselves in this talk.

Watching it, I realized that I am an “elder multipotentialite.” My 6th grade teacher told my mother that I would never amount to anything because I was interested in “too many things.” Miss Shreve deeply believed in the saying “Jack of all trades, master of none.” She was not, you may be sure, one of my favorite teachers! I am lucky, though. I’ve managed to have the best of both worlds. I do have one true calling, but it is writing, a calling so broad and varied that there is no limit to my ability to follow it for a lifetime and yet avoid boredom.

Most of you who read this blog came to it because you share, for your own reasons, my personal passion for serving the needs of super bright kids and adults. This blog and much of the rest of my nonfiction, along with much of my public speaking, has been about extraordinary intelligence, and what I’ve written and talked about on this subject is best known in the gifted community.

But many of you also know some of my fiction for kids and young adults. Certainly Welcome to the Ark and Flight of the Raven, along with my much earlier novel A Time to Fly Free, are specifically related to highly gifted individuals, but I write other kinds of children’s books as well. And my plays, most of them written in collaboration with Katherine Paterson—author, among many other award-winning novels, of Bridge to Terabithia—are meant to appeal to a broad audience of kids.

Most recently my interests and my life experience (some of which I’ve written about here) have led (or pushed) me in a new direction, the first book from that path being my book Change Your Story, Change Your Life. Some of you may have found it through my websites http://www.stephanietolan.com or www.storyhealer.com.

I expect more nonfiction writing will come from the spiritual perspective that the losses in my life forced me to discover and that the current chaos in the world we all share continues to test and expand.

The theme and title of this blog refer to the metaphorical “deep end” environment that mermaids (unable to survive long on dry land) need to survive longterm. But since I created the blog, the term has taken on a new meaning for me—has become, if you will, even deeper. I will not lose interest in the subject that led me to begin it (how could one get bored in the realm of the gifted mind—as broad a territory as writing itself?) but the new depths that interest me may not appeal to everyone. The title of my CDB workshop refers to both the mystical image of Indra’s net and the material world reality of the internet, two very different ways of perceiving intersections, the connectedness of all things. What I will be doing here in future is exploring both kinds of “deep.”

And meanwhile I’ve begun the intense work of writing the third book of the “Ark Trilogy,” Within the Dark. Because, of course, fiction is a fundamental part of my “one true calling.”

 

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Parenting, parenting, and then one day…

10 Oct
HC20677

Newborn

 

Many of you may have seen a recent research article: 

High intelligence: A risk factor for psychological and physiological overexcitabilities

 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289616303324 

And you may be forgiven for saying, “Well, duh!” This research shows what those of us who are and are raising highly intelligent folk (“cheetahs” or “mermaids/men”) have known all along. There are downsides to this “gift.”

When our kids are little and driving us crazy with their messy rooms, or forgetfulness, or endless arguments, or intensity, or sensitivity, or the scary downsides that the above article addresses, we may wonder about upsides. This post is a celebration of upsides, and a follow up to an earlier one, (Feb. 12, “On the Lighter Side”) in case you missed it.

If you’ve never read it, you might want to take a moment to go up to the top right hand side of this blog and click on “An Open Letter….” When I was in the trenches, learning about high range giftedness and coping with school issues and asynchrony (which hadn’t been named yet), nobody told me that it might not be a good idea to “out” my child to the larger world—so when it was decided to make the open letter I had written to my son’s teachers a chapter in Guiding the Gifted Child, 1982, it didn’t occur to me to hide his identity. Luckily, he didn’t seem to be hurt by this (except for the embarrassment of having the words “Gifted Child” as an on-screen caption during an interview with me on the Today Show when he was an adult working in New York City).

“On the Lighter Side” tells the history of the Applewhites books, including my idea (back in 2012) to ask RJ to collaborate with me on the third book my editor had been urging me to write. He agreed, amazingly soon came up with the initial plot outline, and so we began to write, discovering in the process that neither of us was entirely thrilled with the need, sometimes, to let go of a brilliant idea of our own to embrace the brilliant idea of the other. It wasn’t all roses and sunshine but thanks to its being about the Applewhite family there was a lot of laughter. And then the book got sidelined by family tragedy in 2013. It didn’t come to life again for a very long time. But finally it called us back to our keyboards. Laughter had won out!

So we will have a great celebration party next Tuesday, October 17, at Books of Wonder (18 West 18th Street, New York, NY), when Applewhites Coast to Coast is officially launched. It is impossible to fully express the joy of working together, sharing the ups and downs of life and of the creative process. And the fun of celebrating this birth together!

tolan-and-tolan-42.jpg

Mother/Son Selfie

 

 

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On the Lighter Side

12 Feb

It’s been said that laughter is the best medicine. And right now we need as much of it as we can get.

So—this post is not a serious post about the world, or even about the needs of highly to profoundly gifted folks. It is a post to go with a “cover reveal” for the third book about the homeschooling Applewhites and their visiting “bad kid,” Jake Semple.

Back in 2002 I published the first one—Surviving the Applewhites. I had written it precisely because laughter is medicine, and the book of mine that had come out two weeks after 9/11 (Flight of the Raven—sequel to Welcome to the Ark) was set in a terrorist compound. I had therefore had to spend a year of my life while writing it, living in the minds of terrorists, and I really, truly needed to lighten up.

While laughter might be medicinal, funny books seldom win major literary awards, so it was a surprise to many that it won a Newbery Honor in 2003. After 29 years of writing for kids and young adults, I had become an “overnight success.” 

Meantime, I had also become a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Educational Advancement (IEA) and helped to create Yunasa, a camp for highly gifted kids, where I have worked every summer since. My son RJ, whom some of you may remember from the Open Letter in Guiding the Gifted Child (1982) told me I should write a sequel, and that in it the Applewhites should start a camp. Though I wasn’t eager to write a sequel (sequels are tricky and writing humor even trickier), my editor also encouraged me, so I did. Applewhites at Wit’s End, dedicated to the Yunasa campers, and including the disclaimer that “any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental,” came out ten years after the first book.

That, I thought, was that. Done! And then RJ (most of you know how persistent and sometimes maddening highly gifted offspring can be) said I should write a third, because it wouldn’t be “a series” until there were three books! I said no. My editor pushed a bit. I said no.

And then it dawned on me that it might be fun to do if RJ, who is a very funny guy and a very good writer, would collaborate. I hesitantly suggested this first to my editor and then to him. She said yes, he said yes, and I was actually at Yunasa when I got the word that we had a contract for the third book. Great! I thought. Now all we have to do is get an idea. And write it. A few weeks later RJ took care of the first part. And we began.

Long story short, it is done. Brett Helquist has created a splendid cover (as he did for Wit’s End and the new paperback of Surviving) and Applewhites Coast to Coast will be available from HarperCollins in the fall of 2017. One of my favorite parts about the whole project was when our editor said she couldn’t tell which one of us wrote what. Yay! (For some of it, we aren’t even quite sure.) This is the sort of thing that makes all those years of parenting not just worth it, but an amazing, splendid, delightful gift!applewhitescoast_final-s

And as I was posting this, I encountered a really great quote, from Bobby Sands, an Irish activist (1954-1981): “Our revenge will be the laughter of our children.”

Out of Sync

21 Mar

Announcement, announcement!OOS (Imagine a flourish of trumpets!)

On March 3, 2016, my new book, Out of Sync, Essays on Giftedness came out from Royal Fireworks Press, the publisher that brought the Columbus Group’s book Off the Charts to the world. Here is the link where you can check it out (and also buy it):  http://www.rfwp.com/book/out-of-sync-essays-on-giftedness

This book is both new and old, because it’s a collection of my writings that have been published over more than three decades. Many, though not all of these pieces have been available for a number of years on my website, www.stephanietolan.com . Consequently, some of you will have read some of them already. That’s the “old” part. The new part consists of an introduction to each piece that provides a personal and cultural context.

My journey as a parent led from my husband’s and my concerns about our son’s schooling to concerns about American education, the definition and meaning of giftedness itself, the complexities of human intelligence and the reaches of the human mind, as well as how the differences we call giftedness affect one’s whole life trajectory. These are some of the subjects I’ve written about over thirty-plus years as my life and focus changed, in essays that are included in this book.

Unusually bright children are “out of sync” developmentally from birth, and will remain out of sync in one way or another throughout their lives, but they will only be children for a short time (one that can seem long in the midst of it, but like the blink of an eye at its conclusion). So in this eye blink from my perspective (1982 to the present) many parents who found my work helpful when coping with giftedness in their children (and themselves) have taken a journey from worrying about play dates for their kids to helping them choose graduate schools, or plan weddings. And yes, some are now becoming grandparents to a whole new generation of out of sync kids.

Sadly, the “old” stuff isn’t out of date, as I so wish it were. The same issues keep coming up. I see daily on social media questions from parents just beginning this journey that are exactly the same as the ones I faced and then worked (and wrote) to help answer. Last spring at a state gifted conference, I asked the audience of teachers and parents how many of them had read “Is It a Cheetah?”—my single most well-known piece, and the one I’ve been told has had the most success convincing educators that there really is a need to provide different nourishment for the different beings in their care. Only a few hands in that audience were raised, and it occurred to me that a new generation of parents and teachers is embarking on this journey who haven’t found the “old stuff” that can continue to provide a helpful guide to the obstacles out there, and some useful answers to the same old questions.

So that’s why this book—now one can get the pieces that readers have told me were the most helpful to them in one slim volume. (And BTW, the feet in those out of sync socks on the cover are my own!) Yes, I’m still out of sync, too.

Repeat:  http://www.rfwp.com/book/out-of-sync-essays-on-giftedness

 

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