The Places You Will Go

Go On, Tell a Story!

By DAPHNE LEE

From Tots to Teens, StarMag

LAST weekend I held a reading-aloud workshop for volunteers who work with young children, and I thought I would highlight my main points from the session in today's column, as I think these tips are useful for anyone who spends time with children.

First of all, I'm going to take for granted that we all agree that reading aloud is desirable, and want to read aloud to children. The volunteers I met with wanted to know how to choose books for children and also the best way to read the books. Finally, we discussed what we should avoid when reading to kids, and what we should strive to do.

Monsters in Our Minds

From Tots to Teens, StarMag

Picture Book of the Month - July 2009

THE ENEMY

Author: David Calli

Illustrator: Serge Bloch

Publisher: Schwartz & Wade Books, 32 pages

ISBN: 978-0375845000

I LOVE the video for Paul McCartney's 1983 song, Pipes of Peace (from the album of the same name). The video depicts the famous 1914 Christmas truce between British and German troops. McCartney plays both British and a German platoon leaders who, while their men play football, "chat" and show one another family photographs. A shell blast breaks up the game and forces the two groups to return to their own trenches. The video ends with both leaders realising that they have each left pictures of their family with the other. Call me sentimental, but this last scene always makes me bawl. (Watch the video on YouTube).

The Enemy: A Book About Peace (Schwartz & Wade Books, 32 pages, ISBN: 978-0375845000) by David Calli, illustrated by Serge Bloch, made me immediately think of Pipes of Peace although there are no heart-warming scenes in the picture book. The video was about the simple similarities shared between "enemies" - football, family, a deep desire for peace, which would allow them to be united with their loved ones and once again indulge freely and without reservations or restrictions in simple play. In The Enemy, two  soldiers sit in their respective trenches, each picturing the other as a cruel monster: "the enemy and I have nothing in common. He is a wild beast. He does not know mercy. I know this because I read it in my manual." On the facing page, Bloch presents a scene of utter devastation - corpses of animals and humans lie strewn and bloody while a gun-toting figure with a forked tail walks away.

An Interview with Shih-Li Kow

From StarMag

A local author who was shortlisted on Monday for a prestigious international literary prize shares aspects of her writing life.

IN 2007, Silverfish Books published News from Home, a collection of short stories by three Malaysians, Chua Kok Yee, Rumaizah Abu Bakar, and Shih-Li Kow.

The writers were participants of the Silverfish Writing Programme, and had been chosen to contribute to the anthology because they showed promise and commitment. Each had a different style of storytelling, but Kow’s stories stood out as the most original and interesting, and also because her voice was the most confident and natural of the three.

A year later, Kow published Ripples and Other Stories, a collection of her own, to critical acclaim locally. On Monday, that acclaim became international when Ripples was shortlisted for the world’s richest short story prize, the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award.

The winner of the ‚35,000 (RM175,000) prize will be announced on Sept 30, at the culmination of the annual Frank O’Connor International Short Story Festival in Cork, Ireland, which begins on Sept 16.

The other titles shortlisted are An Elegy for Easterly by Petina Gappah; Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower; Love Begins in Winter by Simon Van Booy; Singularity by Charlotte Grimshaw; and The Pleasant Light of Day by Philip Ó Ceallaigh.

In an e-mail interview, Kow, 40, talks about being shortlisted and other aspects of her life as a writer.