Betsy Bird is the Collection Development Manager of Evanston Public Library and the former Youth Materials Specialist of New York Public Library. She writes for the School Library Journal blog A Fuse #8 Production and reviews for Kirkus. She is the host of the Story Seeds podcast as well as the co-host of the Fuse 8 n' Kate podcast that she creates with her sister. Betsy is the author of nonfiction, picture books, anthologies, and the historical middle grade novel Long Road to the Circus (Knopf, 2021), illustrated by David Small. Her new picture book Pop Goes the Nursery Rhyme is out Fall 2024. You can follow Betsy @fusenumber8 on Instagram, Threads and TikTok or @fuse8.bsky.social on BlueSky. In our animated conversation, we talk about what makes a great picture book.
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What Makes A Great Picture Book?

Interviews with Writers about their New Books
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A collected series of intertwined poetic essays written by acclaimed Japanese poet Hiromi Ito--part nature writing, part travelogue, part existential philosophy. Written between April 2012 and November 2013, Tree Spirits Grass Spirits (Nightboat Books, 2023) adopts a non-linear narrative flow that mimics the growth of plants, and can be read as a companion piece to Ito's beloved poem "Wild Grass on the Riverbank". Rather than the vertiginously violent poetics of the latter, Tree Spirits Grass Spirits serves as what we might call a phyto-autobiography: a recounting of one's life through the logic of flora. Ito's graciously potent and philosophical prose examines immigration, language, gender, care work, and death, all through her close (indeed, at times obsessive) attention to plant life.
For a better understanding of this collection and the author, the following books are recommended by translator Dr. Jon Pitt:

Hiromi Ito - Wild Grass on the Riverbank


Hiromi Ito - The Thorn Puller


Robin Wall Kimmerer - Braiding Sweetgrass


Hope Jahren - Lab Girl


Jeanie Shinozuka - Biotic Borders


Banu Subrahmaniam - Ghost Stories for Darwin



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Hiromi Ito, "Tree Spirits Grass Spirits" (Nightboat Books, 2023)

Ukraine, 2007. Yefim Shulman, husband, grandfather and war veteran, was beloved by his family and his coworkers. But in the days after his death, his widow Nina finds a letter to the KGB in his briefcase. Yefim had a lifelong secret, and his confession forces them to reassess the man they thought they knew and the country he had defended.
In 1941, Yefim is a young artillerist on the border between the Soviet Union and Germany, eager to defend his country and his large Jewish family against Hitler's forces. But surviving the war requires sacrifices Yefim never imagined-and even when the war ends, his fight isn't over. He must conceal his choices from the KGB and from his family.
Spanning seven decades between World War II and the current Russia-Ukraine conflict, Your Presence Is Mandatory (Bloomsbury, 2024) traces the effect Yefim's coverup had on the lives of Nina, their two children and grandchildren. In the process, Sasha Vasilyuk shines a light on one family caught between two totalitarian regimes, and the grace they find in the course of their survival.
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Sasha Vasilyuk, "Your Presence Is Mandatory" (Bloomsbury, 2024)

Anthony Valerio's novel Confessions of an Aspiring Pornographer (Grailing Press, 2024) tells the story of Walter Michael Gregory. Call him Wally. 
Walter Michael Gregory is a literary rogue peddling his prose and amours around 1970s Manhattan. He talks like Frank Sinatra sings, he writes truly, he is a lover par excellence, and he will charm you with his bawdy confessions.
Raised in Brooklyn by mobsters and his doting mother, Wally recounts his idyllic childhood and how he came to be such an amorous soul. Now stepping into life as a young man about town, he establishes himself in the Greenwich Village literary scene and sets out to find work, any work, in the publishing industry. What he finds is the heady rush of hobknobbing with the greats and the tough truths of working for a living. Forced to live off his literary wits, Wally finds interesting work as a copy editor, encyclopedia writer, and literary pornographer. If he can dodge lovers, hunger, meteors, and a lurking bengal tiger of his own imagining, he might realize his dream, cashing in with his prose and feeling like a writer.
From his boyhood in Brooklyn to the pastimes and pitfalls of a bachelor's life, join Wally on this jaunt through his consciousness and a bygone big city, big book era.
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Anthony Valerio, "Confessions of an Aspiring Pornographer" (Grailing Press, 2024)

Although Katie Kitamura feels free when she writes—free from the “soup of everyday life,” from the political realities that weigh upon her, and even at times from the limits of her own thinking—she is keenly aware of the unfreedoms her novels explore. Katie, author of the award-winning Intimacies (2021), talks with critic Alexander Manshel about the darker corners of the human psyche and the inescapable contours of history that shape her fiction. Alexander and Katie explore how she brings these tensions to “the space of interpretation, where the book exists” and places trust in her readers to dwell there thoughtfully. They also discuss the influence of absent men (including Henry James), love triangles, love stories, long books, and titles (hint: someone close to Katie says all her novels could be called Complicity). Stay tuned for Katie’s answer to the signature question, which takes listeners from to the farmlands of Avonlea to the mean streets of Chicago.
Mentioned in this episode
By Katie Kitamura:

Intimacies

A Separation

Gone to the Forest

Japanese for Travelers

The Longshot

Also mentioned:

Flannery O’Connor, “Revelation”

Henry James, Portrait of a Lady

Garth Greenwell, What Belongs to You

Elena Ferrante, The Neapolitan Novels

Elsa Morante, Lies and Sorcery

Lucy Maud Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables

John Steinbeck, East of Eden

Theodore Dreiser, An American Tragedy


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You Write Because You Want to Feel Free: Katie Kitamura and Alexander Manshel (SW)

Danielle Amir Jackson is a Memphis-born writer and critic, and the editor-in-chief of the Oxford American. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Vulture, Bookforum, Lapham’s Quarterly, the Criterion Collection, and elsewhere. Honey’s Grill: Sex, Freedom, and Women of the Blues, her first book, is forthcoming from Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.
Originally based in Oxford, Mississippi, hence its name, Oxford American is both a literary and general interest magazine intent on honoring the cultural wealth of the South. Four writings are discussed, beginning with “What If It All Burned Down?” by Katrina Andy, which as its title suggests, is loaded with questions about the largest slave revolt in U.S. history. It happens at the Andry Plantation north of New Orleans, in the aftermath of the successful Haitian Revolution. Two other writings involve music: there’s “How to Take It Slow” by Lauren Du Graf and “Coming Up Fancy” by Jewly Hight. The first portrays Shirley Horn, emphasizing her unique singing and piano style as well as her being such a homebody that she took a pressure cooker along with her on musical road tours. The second takes the song “Fancy” as sung by Reba McEntire and others and explores what home means when it isn’t a place of comfort. The episode’s fourth entry, “The Mustang” by Gwen Thompkins, is an evocative piece about a family journey to see grandparents at the same time that the narrator’s parents’ marriage is coming to an end.
Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of ten books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc.
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What Makes A Great Picture Book?

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