Thirty years ago, Kathryn Lescroart Detzer was faced with the challenge of coming up with Christmas gifts for her nieces and nephews.
Not in the financial position then to shop for each child individually, Detzer, an artist, hit on the idea of an alphabet book that she would write and illustrate, and give as presents to friends and family.
Detzer, who lives with her husband in Wilder and in addition to working as an artist is a practice manager for a neuropsychologist, has now updated the alphabet book in a number of ways.
It occurred to her, she said, that the book, apart from introducing kids to the alphabet, could also be used to help them read the social and emotional cues that are so much a part of being elementary school age.
She turned black-and-white drawings into color, and broadened the range of both the ethnicities and disabilities represented.
The ABC Book of Feelings lays out the range of kids’ emotions with humor and empathy.
“D for Determined,” shows a boy swinging along, looking purposeful; “U for Unhappy,” shows another boy, face twisted in a frown, body tense; “J for Joyful” is acted out by a girl with braids, grinning and leaping in the air.
The facial expressions, postures and body language are vivid, expressive and easily read.
Her aim, she said in a phone interview, was to show children “what do you do when you feel this way, and how do you know when you feel this way?”
What began as an idea for presents has turned into a primer for elementary school children on recognizing that there are more ways to describe their feelings beyond “happy” and “sad.”
Detzer includes more nuanced states of emotion: shy, ornery, curious, eager, impatient, bored and angry.
Rebecca Lallier, a school counselor at Dothan Brook School in Hartford, which serves children in grades pre-K through 5, began using The ABC Book of Feelings this term. Detzer also created for the school a poster that shows illustrations from the book.
The book has several points in its favor, Lallier said. First, it shows a representative sample of children of different races and ethnicities.
“In Vermont, where we don’t necessarily see a lot of diversity, it’s important for kids to be introduced to that in picture books,” Lallier said.
She said that a fifth-grader looked at the poster and commented that she liked that children of different cultures were represented.
Second, Detzer’s care in introducing a range of emotions using such sophisticated words as “melodramatic,” “yearning” or “quizzical” helps children differentiate feelings or states of mind.
If a child is jealous, frustrated or upset, Lallier said, using a broad term like “mad” doesn’t necessarily get at what the problem is.
Learning words that more precisely identify what a child is feeling helps that child negotiate the sometimes tricky task of regulating emotion in a school environment — or anywhere.
“It’s really simple but it just opens up a lot of conversation,” Lallier said.
For Detzer, to see her alphabet book used in the classroom has been rewarding.
“It’s very exciting for me to see it taken to a whole new level,” she said. “It’s really been greatly received and I’m tickled that it can be used for a greater purpose.”
The ABC Book of Feelings is available through CreateSpace.com and Amazon.
Poet Sydney Lea, Vermont’s last Poet Laureate until Chard de Niord took on the title last fall, has a new book out. No Doubt the Nameless (Four Way Books) mines the territory — nature, age, death and the associations between — about which Lea writes with lucid empathy.
Lea’s inquisitive eye lights on neighbors, animals, family and how we are bound to each other by ties that are both obvious, and not so. He has a conversational, easy way of taking a reader from one line to the next.
In the poem Pariah, Lea treads on territory familiar to people living in small towns: a quarrel between young men that turns ugly when one group severely beats up another on the suspicion of having informed on them for poaching. The narrator happens on the aggressor, Jack, in the village store.
“He knew I felt what I felt,” Lea writes. “He was sober and clear. He knew I was one of a lot/ who felt the same. He dropped his eyes to the floor/and buried both raw hands/in his dung-rank pockets, quick as he could, a motion/that somehow brought to mind the frantic efforts I’ve noticed in frightened rodents/as they dive back into their dens.”
Joe whispers hello to the narrator, who doesn’t answer but ruminates, “We all just want some peace./The road back home was sheerest ice.”
That’s a good example of the kind of poetry Lea writes here. Crystal-clear, nothing extraneous and all too aware of life’s sorrows and injustices, but also the joy that accrues over a long marriage with children and grandchildren.
Two Dartmouth College professors, Cynthia Huntington and Darrin McMahon, are among 178 scholars from the U.S. and Canada who have been named 2016 Guggenheim Fellows.
Huntington is a poet who teaches in the English department and was a National Book Award finalist in 2012 for her book of poems, Heavenly Bodies; she was awarded a fellowship in the poetry category.
McMahon, a professor in the history department, received a fellowship in the Intellectual and Cultural History category. He is the author of Enemies of the Enlightenment: The French Counter-Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity, published in 2001, and Happiness: A History, which was published in 2006 and was named a Best Book of the Year by The New York Times, The Washington Post and Slate . His most recent book is Divine Fury: A History of Genius.
Pomfret poet Laura Foley has been awarded a first place in the Joe Gouveia Outermost Poetry Prize, judged by fiction writer Marge Piercy, for her poem Nine Ways of Looking at Light.
Bookstock, the annual summer book festival in Woodstock, takes place this year July 29 through 31.
At least 35 writers from across the region will be in attendance, including poets Mark Doty and Ellen Bryant Voigt, Harvard Law School professor and writer Kenneth Mack, author of Representing the Race: The Creation of the Civil Rights Lawyer, Vermont’s own mystery writer Archer Mayor, and Nathalia Holt, author of Rise of the Rocket Girls, a history of women’s contributions to the American space program.
For information go to bookstockvt.org.
Nicola Smith can be reached at nsmith@vnews.com.