Happy Mother´s Day!

Happy Mother´s Day! Today in the United States, we celebrate all the wonderful moms out there by having a special day to recognize how important they are to all of us. Many moms take time to read books and allow us to have amazing adventures through stories. World Story Project would like to say a big thank you to moms around the world!!!

In recognition of all the contributors and stories we share from around the world, we´ve included how to say mother in 10 different languages. Check it out:

In Arabic, you say ahm

In Dutch, you say moer

In French, you say maman

In Greek, you say mana

In Russian, you say mat

In Vietnamese, you say me

In Afrikaans, you say ma

In Spanish, you say mama

In Hindi, you say maji

In Swahili, you say mzaa

Notice anything similar in all of the words for mother? The “ma” or “mm” sound is one of the first noises or words that babies make, which explains why we have similar words for our moms all around the world! If you know the word for mother in a language we did not include above, make sure to share it in the comments section below!

Let the Wild Rumpus Live On!

Yesterday, children’s fiction lost a hero. But one World Story Project contributor reminds us why Maurice Sendak’s stories will always matter.

Like many people in the United States born after 1963, I was saddened by Maurice Sendak’s death. The author of Where the Wild Things Are had an effect on so many young people who flipped through his pages.

I never read anything else by Sendak. I didn’t have to. Where the Wild Things Are was my favorite book as a child. And in some way, it still remains on the favorite books list. Admittedly, as lines from the story appeared in print and were read on the radio yesterday, I realized I’ve forgotten a lot of the details. That’s telling. For me, the book’s lasting importance isn’t because of language, or illustrations, or lessons.

It’s about an imaginative boy who conjures adventure. That’s what matters most, and that’s how I’ll remember it. The book means something unique to everyone. To someone like myself first reading it – at about 7 or 8 years old, close enough in years to Max – it was an excuse to live through a character’s creativity. I wasn’t a creative child, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t enjoy someone else’s imagination, fictionalized or in real life.

And setting matters. Not the setting in the story, but the setting where we enjoyed the story. Mine was from my reading tutor. I wasn’t the best reader, either. After seeing a tutor for months, to the point where she and my parents thought I could read at the appropriate level, she gave me Where the Wild Things Are as a parting gift. The book was perfect: It was an accomplishment; it was the book that helped me read aloud; it was the book that I didn’t mind reading, even though everyone else started reading longer books.

And more than 20 years later, that gift continues to give: it reminds me that audience matters. I could relate to Max. Max was a kid who could entertain himself. Max had a temper. Max wasn’t altogether different from any 8 year old boy.

The obituaries describe Maurice Sendak as a versatile, cerebral, writer. He probably was, and people will certainly remember him that way. I’ll remember him because he made me comfortable around Max. He made me comfortable being a normal boy.

Story Time: Orfy and Erin

The story we are sharing this week is based on the ancient Greek myth, Orpheus and Eurydice. This re-imagining looks at our world filled with keyboards, computers and messages and tells us how our two young characters, Orfy and Erin, find each other through technology and eventually get caught inside it (really!). Read this week’s story to find out what happens and let us know how computers have changed your life.

Written by: Joseph Marks
Author Nationality: U.S.A.
Illustrated by: Tracy Huang
Illustrator Nationality: Taiwan

ORFY AND ERIN

Orfy grew up in a town in the U.S. called Champaign, Illinois. He was a small boy growing up, always about a book’s length shorter than the other boys who were better than him at soccer and softball and most of the things boys do. Orfy’s nose ran when he played soccer. He’d lose his balance trying to wipe it away as he ran or he’d trip over a branch and fall on his face. The world always seemed to be moving too fast.

Sometimes Orfy wouldn’t go outside at recess. Those days he’d hunker down in the school music room and play piano by a window that looked out on the other children running outside. Orfy could play with a fast and urgent rhythm like the children careening across the schoolyard during the first days of spring when the sun feels like a threadbare jacket that can’t cover you all at once. Or he could play slow and lonely with each note fading before the next one followed like those sad, autumn days when the leaves fall one by one and each game is being played for the last time. Or he could play music that wasn’t at all about the world outside because it was wintry, dark and snowing and you were cramped inside, red-faced from the chugging heater.

Orfy had been playing the piano for years. He played first on his grandmother’s piano, picking out notes and repeating them until they sounded right in succession. His parents were students then and couldn’t afford a piano, so Orfy would use a computer program on his mother’s laptop, holding his hands as if typing a letter but pecking different keys to make different notes and clicking numbers to change chords.

Orfy’s parents became professors when he was older and they bought a keyboard that sat in the corner of his room. Orfy still liked playing on his laptop, though. The keys were small like his hands and felt familiar. It was more exciting too, as if the cramped keyboard made possible sounds that never would have occurred in the expansive world of a piano.

Orfy did other things on the laptop, which his mother gave to him when she got a new one from the university. He played games on it and did his homework. When Orfy was a teenager he began to talk to people on the laptop. That’s how he met Erin.

Erin wasn’t Erin’s real name. She was from Seoul, Korea and her name was Yoo-Jin, but that sounded like a boy’s name in English so she went by Erin online. Erin’s parents gave her that name. They were students like Orfy’s when she was young and studied in Dublin. They chose the name because it sounded like an Irish wind whirling between houses and out to the sea.

Erin listened to music for hours online. Each day she’d learn something new it could do, some new way it could make her feel or some new thought it planted in her head. She played a clarinet but she could never make it say what she felt and when that happened she’d complain on message boards.

That’s where Orfy met Erin. He tried to explain to her how to take the excitement and sadness and longing around you and turn it into sounds. But he always stumbled over himself like a clumsy boy on a soccer field and so finally just made music for her.

Erin could put the music Orfy made into words in a way he never managed. She couldn’t turn the whole song into words but she could pinpoint the idea behind each set of notes and when she described it Orfy understood it as if for the first time.

Orfy and Erin talked for a long time online. Sometimes they’d send each other written messages and music. Sometimes they’d talk over video. They’d be anxious all day until they spoke with each other.

After awhile Orfy realized he wasn’t writing music about the rush of boys on the soccer field or the stifling warmth of a heater. He was writing about Erin and the lightness in his limbs when he spoke to her. His music had a swelling grandeur it had never had before. Sometimes he’d write about the emptiness he felt when Erin was away for a few days and the music swelled even more but with a tinny hollowness at its center. Erin described Orfy’s music to friends and family and she found she was describing him and the way he made her feel when they spoke.

When Orfy and Erin were in college they decided it was time to meet in person. Orfy saved for months for a plane ticket to Seoul. He arrived on her doorstep with flowers and a bag of tangerines he’d bought from a market on the way. When Orfy knocked, though, Erin didn’t answer. He knocked and knocked but no one came.

Orfy wandered the streets of Seoul for five days. Each day he’d return to Erin’s door and knock again. It was winter but Orfy didn’t care. He walked through blowing snow that burned his cheeks.

On the sixth day, Orfy went to an Internet café. He logged into all the sites where he and Erin used to talk. When he went to one video site she was there looking back at him. Her face was pinched and there were tears in her eyes.

“Where have you been,” he asked.

Erin had been cleaning her apartment before Orfy arrived, she said, and dancing to music he’d made for her. She spilled a bottle of cleaning solution on her computer and it started to sizzle. She tried to unplug it and as her hand wrapped around the cord it stung her like a snake that she couldn’t release. It was the sharpest pain she’d ever felt. She closed her eyes. When she opened them again she had no form, only the face that looked back at him from the computer screen.

A man inside the computer told her that’s all she’d ever be now, she said, that she could never return to the world of forms and feelings and music and people.

Erin told Orfy to forget about her in that formless world but he couldn’t. He pounded on the computer keys and as he pounded he made music that was full of anger and longing and loneliness. He pounded faster and harder until the keyboard keys began to crack and smoke poured from the screen. The music was churning now, pulsing with all the loneliness he’d known before he met Erin and it was building to something but he wasn’t sure what. As the keys began to splinter off the keyboard, Orfy plunged his hands between them, pushing deeper and deeper until he was inside the machine.

Erin was standing at a distance from him and the man inside the computer she’d spoken of was there too, grasping her arm. The man was a grayish pale with sunken eyes that looked as if they hadn’t seen light in years. There were no keys to press inside the computer so Orfy pressed his hands against silicon chips and circuits, running his fingers through their grooves like wet fingers along a glass rim so they made music more pure and beautiful than any he’d ever made on a keyboard or piano. It filled up every empty place inside the machine and it seemed to say everything that could be said all at once.

The man’s grip was slipping. Orfy played louder. The silicon chips bonded to his hands and he ran them up and down metal wires, hugging some wires together and pushing others further apart.

The whole world seemed to stop in silent awe. Every wire Orfy wasn’t pulling went bone straight as if it was only a picture. A tear rolled down the man’s face that seemed to glow neon green. When it hit the ground Orfy stopped playing

“You may go,” the man said to Erin and she ran to Orfy and wrapped her arms around him. “But it’s a long way out,” the man said. “You both must promise to never look back.”

Orfy and Erin nodded and turned away. They walked for hours past dangling wires and humming panels. Erin was walking behind Orfy but he was reaching back to hold her hand. When he saw a pinpoint of light, he knew the world where they could be together wasn’t far off. He was terrified, though, that the feel of Erin’s hand was only a mirage and that he’d never really found her at all. Without thinking he turned to look at her and she was whisked way to the formless land of circuits and wires and he was out and alone in the world again.

Orfy didn’t play music for a long time after that. He went home to Champaign where he sat by the banks of the Embarras River and thought of Erin. One day, after many months, he took his laptop to the river bank and began to play. He started slowly and gently but then the music grew bolder, it began to tell the story of Erin and the time they never had together. It was the music he’d played inside the computer and it seemed to say everything all at once. It seemed to consume everything around him including the birds and squirrels who stopped and watched. The music consumed him too. It was as if when he played, but only then, they were still together.

Happy Earth Day!

This Sunday, April 22nd is Earth Day! While everyday is earth day, this special Sunday is a time for us to celebrate and appreciate the earth’s natural environment. We can use this weekend to plant a tree, clean litter and trash in our neighborhood or share with other’s what nature means to us (by the way, stories are a great way to talk about the earth!).

Here at World Story Project, we have a few favorite stories that remind us of how beautiful and wonderful the Earth can be. Click on the titles to read more about these books! And tell us what your favorite book about the planet is!

The Lorax by Dr. Seuss

Nature for the Very Young by Marcia Bowden

Over in the Jungle: A Rainforest Rhyme by Marianne Berkes

The Great Kapok Tree by Lynne Cherry

Story Time: Frosty Lakes

Whether you live in a place that’s steaming hot, freezing cold, or anything in between, we think you’ll love this story about kids on a quest for the season they’ve never had!

Written by: Katherine Kipp
Author Nationality: U.S.A.
Illustrated by: Cailean Cooney
Illustrator Nationality: U.S.A.

FROSTY LAKES

The town of Frosty Lakes was so small, no map had ever recorded its existence. In Frosty Lakes, it was warm all winter, even warmer in the spring. The summer was so unbearable that most residents spent all day long cooling off in the lake.

Every year, the children of Frosty Lakes asked their teachers why the town was named Frosty Lakes, yet it never snowed, never even got cold. No one owned a coat, and when Johnny Maskin’s cousin visited wearing a scarf, it was passed around amongst all the children wanting to try one on for the first time.

The teachers explained to them that they were like Greenland and Iceland, a place that had been wrongly named for their climate. They assured the children that if they studied a map, they would probably find a town with a warm-weathered name that was cold all year long.
Every year, more and more children studied the map, but never found such a place.

Also every year, the children wrote letters to the Weather Consulate, a group of men they were told controlled the weather, just like there were men that controlled taxes, street traffic, or holiday celebrations. In these letters, they would beg for snow. Not just cold weather, but snow specifically. They had only seen snow in pictures of far away places, like the Himalayas, Alaska, or Greenland. But they were tired of pictures. They wanted to have a snowball fight, make snow cream, and build a snowman. They were tired of the usual activities, like water slides, watermelon picking, and diving contests in the pool.

As spring neared once again, the town preparing for its annual First Day of Spring Festival—although there seemed no point for such a celebration—the children of Frosty Lakes grew sad over their once again failed attempts to bring cold weather to their town. They blamed Charlie Jenson, who always bragged about having a relative on the Weather Consulate, and were planning to corner him one day after class. But, instead, they were all asked to attend a special event in the gymnasium.

The gymnasium, which was usually smoldering hot, was colder than ever, and the children shivered sitting cross-legged on the floor, whispering to each other with speculations to why this was so.

“Maybe someone poured a bunch of ice cubes into the air conditioner.”

“The air conditioner is broken!”

“I bet you the teachers are trying to freeze us!” All the children learned about hypothermia in 3rd grade, and since were fascinated by the concept of freezing to death.

Suddenly, all of their teachers walked to the middle of the gym floor, pushing a large, thick box in front of them. Upon closer inspection, the children realized it was a large freezer, with several colorful stamps covering the surface. The teachers were all smiling big, as if they had a secret to share.

“We have just received a very special gift in the mail from Summerville!” They announced.

“Where’s that?” The children asked in unison.

“We’re about to find out!” One of the teachers, Mrs. Clarkson, produced a letter. She opened it with a big flourish and started reading.

“Dear Frosty Lakes,
I have recently learned that the children of your town beg for snow every year. Every year, our children pray for summer months, wanting to experience something other than snow. They ask why we are named Summerville when we have never experienced summer, and we keep promising them that there must be a town out there with a cold name for a warm place. To celebrate finding such a location, we are presenting you with a gift that represents our town in the hopes that you will do the same. Enjoy, and don’t let it melt too fast.”
Sincerely,
Chancellor Berinsky, Summerville

By now, all the children had stood up, unable to contain their excitement to see what was inside. The teachers motioned for them to crowd around the freezer. When everyone was close enough that there was barely any room to breath, Mrs. Clarkson opened the gift.
“It’s SNOW!” One of the kindergarteners, Missy Hughes announced, jumping up and down and clapping her hands. It took longer to register for the other children but, when it did, they started doing the same.

Sure enough, in the freezer, the town of Summerville had packed dozens of snowballs, perfectly round and glistening white.

“They’re so bright!” Carmen Plack said, her eyes wide in amazement. In fact, everyone’s eyes were wide, even the teachers.

No one moved to pick them up, even as the teachers encouraged them to each take one. But the children discovered that, even after all the years of wanting to have snowball fights, when faced with actual snowballs, they didn’t want to waste the precious snow on playtime.

After staring at the snowballs for a few minutes, the snow so bright it nearly twinkled, the children agreed, with the permission of their teachers, to remove a few a day in order to preserve the snow for as long as possible. Mrs. Clarkson removed five snowballs, commenting on how cold it was to the touch, and the children tentatively started passing them around. Each time a new hand touched the snow, the children would giggle as the holder stared in amazement at the ball of snow, wanting to stay in this moment forever. And even as the snow started to melt after being held so much, the children didn’t mind, instead jumping up and down in excitement of the many days of snowballs they had to come, a first for all of them.

As the children left school, buzzing with excitement to tell the rest of the town of the gift, they forgot completely about cornering Charlie Jenson. Instead, they began planning a gift to send to Summerville in return, understanding for the first time the thrill of experiencing something new, even if it seemed old to others.

Spring Stories are Blossoming

Have you ever seen a whole city turn pink? Well that’s what happens every spring across Japan as the beautiful cherry blossom trees show their colors. And thanks to Japan’s generous gift of 3,000 trees to the United States in 1912, it’s also happened here in Washington, DC for the last century! The 100th anniversery of this wonderful gift and expression of international friendship calls for a major celebration. So on March 20th, DC kicked off the five-week National Cherry Blossom Festival.

Believe it or not, the Festival was just one way trees were honored and celebrated on this particular day. March 20th was also World Storytelling Day, and storytellers the world over were encouraged to tell stories about trees!

Here at the World Story Project, we were pretty excited to find this great online resource for tree-huggers and story-lovers alike: Tree Story Links from Around the World.

If you’re looking for Japanese tales of the cherry blossoms check out Ubazakura (The Cherry Blossom Nurse) or Cherry Tree of the Sixteenth Day.

Our other top tree stories include these gems:

Bones of Djulung (Philippines/Pacific Region)

Bushmen Creation Myth (San peoples of Africa)

Gift of Ku (Hawaii)

Krishna, Yashoda and the Mouthful of Fruit (India)

Mishosha or the Enchanted Sugar-Maple (Native American/Chippewa)

The Magic Tree Trunks (Iceland)

The King and the Ju Ju Tree (Nigeria)

Why the Evergreen Trees Keep their leaves (Denmark)

Do you have any favorite stories about trees that we should add to the list?

Expanding the Irish Color Palette

Every March 17^th, millions of people in Ireland and millions more around the world celebrate Saint Patrick’s Day. Many take part in the festivities even if they’re not Irish, because who doesn’t love a good parade and the color green? But Saint Patrick’s Day is about so much more than that. Not only is it a religious holiday that commemorates the patron saint of Ireland and the arrival of Christianity, but it’s also a chance to honor Ireland’s culture and folklore.

Did you know, for example, that Saint Patrick was said to have used the now famous three-leaved shamrocks to explain the Trinity to the Irish? And did you know that Irish mythology is packed full of captivating legends and brave heroes? This Saint Patrick’s Day, the World Story Project salutes the Irish storytellers who are keeping this heritage alive. We especially want to acknowledge Fergus Lyons, an artist who found himself captivated by the legends that have become a part of the Irish landscape. His vivid and very colorful paintings tell the tales of King Sweeney as well as The Red Woman, and are worth checking out here on any day of the year!

Fergus Lyons' painting "Lough Dagee" or Lake of the Two Geese, from the myth of King Sweeney