Carie Juettner

A Father’s Gifts

I’m thankful that I have a father in my life, and I’m extremely thankful to have one as fun and unique and loving as my dad.

My dad has given me so many things: love, support, laughter, poetry books, one-of-a-kind Halloween-birthday parties, and road trips, to name a few. He gave me my nose (slightly crooked like his) and my ability to snore (thanks, Dad). He coached my softball team, attended all my band concerts, taught me to drive, and let me have the puppy I asked for without even checking with Mom first. (It’s ok, she loved the puppy too.)

My dad was the first person to read my whole novel. He stayed up most of the night to finish it. I woke up the next morning to find the manuscript sitting on the kitchen table with a sticky note that said, “Loved it.” You can bet that made me feel good.

While pets and sports and birthday parties are not unusual father/daughter activities, my dad has also given me a few gifts over the years that aren’t quite so common.

Made With Love

Some of the coolest things my dad has given me are his stories and his artwork, which are kind of the same thing. His stories paint vivid pictures and his artwork definitely tells tales, sometimes literally. I have four binders full of the mail he sent me in college, each letter inside an envelope covered with his ink and watercolor drawings, many depicting funny family moments. And I have a computer file full of his life stories, emailed to me in pieces over the past seven years.

To see some of his artwork envelopes and read one of his stories (about chickens), visit this Father’s Day post from four years ago.

IMG_0001 copy — A snippet from one of his painted envelopes, depicting a classic dad moment

Dad also likes to make things. I have a beautiful and very sturdy (read “extremely heavy”) bookcase that he built for me in college and a walking stick that he carved and varnished with his own two hands. I also have several homemade Halloween decorations including this awesome haunted birdhouse he gave me for my birthday in 2014.

Build a nest if you DARE, little birdies!

Stories and drawings and homemade crafts still aren’t too far outside the norm, when it comes to presents, but a few of my father’s gifts have been truly weird.

People Say I Have My Father’s Eyes… They’re Half Right

About fifteen years ago, my dad gave me a coin purse made out of a frog. You heard me.

FrogPurse

Several months ago, my dad gave me an Aztec figurine, found in Mexico decades ago and given to him by a friend. It resides in this plastic container because, three times when I’ve picked it up, it has shot an electric pain into my thumb for reasons I can’t explain. I’m not kidding.

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And recently, my dad gave me his glass eye. Well, not HIS glass eye. It’s the glass eye that he’s had since I was a kid, the one he took out of the lost and found at his work after it had been there for years. I’m assuming he washed it at some point. (Note: His real eyes, like mine, are hazel. This one is brown.) Anyway, now it’s mine.

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Weird? Yes. Totally. TOO weird? No. Not at all. You see, my dad knows me. He probably knew that I would keep that frog purse in my classroom and find delight in shocking my students with it. He probably knew that the cool (and also creepy) Aztec figurine would end up in one of my horror stories. (Draft still in progress.) He probably knew that every time I looked at the glass eye, I would think about how he sometimes used to clasp his hands over his face and stagger around, complaining that he had something in his eye before finally saying, “I think I got it,” and opening his fingers to reveal… the glass eye resting in his palm. And he knew that would make me smile.

I love my father’s gifts. All of them. And I love him.

FathersDayBlogPhoto — **Happy Father’s Day, Dad! I love you! 🙂**

Book Review: Imaginary Girls by Nova Ren Suma

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This is less a book review and more an author review.

In January, I read The Walls Around Us by Nova Ren Suma. It was amazing. As I said in my review on Goodreads, I never expected to like the book as much as I did. I don’t choose to read books about ballerinas and I’m generally not interested in prison stories. But The Walls Around Us, which is both a ballerina story and a prison story, gripped me from the first page and never let me go. It was Suma’s writing that drew me in. So poetic. So magical. Her method of weaving the different character’s stories together was flawless.

I don’t know how many people I’ve recommended this book to in the last six months. I think I even recommended it to some people twice. (Yes, I see many of you nodding.) I can’t help it. The book stayed with me. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. So the day I recommended it to a writer friend and she said, “Yeah, isn’t it good? Although I liked her first book even better,” I did a double take. What? No. Impossible. The idea that the author could have written something better than The Walls Around Us even earlier in her writing career? I couldn’t believe it. I refused to. Then I realized I was being stupid and bought Imaginary Girls. Just, you know, to prove my friend wrong.

Power in Every Sentence

I read the book in four days. The day I opened it, I read over a hundred pages before sleep claimed me. The first thing I did the next morning was pick up where I left off. I feel like I deserve a medal for every chore I accomplished, errand I ran, and meal I ate during those four days. That’s how hard it was to put the book down.

Summary of Imaginary Girls from Goodreads:

Chloe’s older sister, Ruby, is the girl everyone looks to and longs for, who can’t be captured or caged. When a night with Ruby’s friends goes horribly wrong and Chloe discovers the dead body of her classmate London Hayes left floating in the reservoir, Chloe is sent away from town and away from Ruby. But Ruby will do anything to get her sister back, and when Chloe returns to town two years later, deadly surprises await. As Chloe flirts with the truth that Ruby has hidden deeply away, the fragile line between life and death is redrawn by the complex bonds of sisterhood.

Imaginary Girls is a sister story, but it is also so much more. The summary really can’t capture the magic of the book—neither the actual magic threaded through the novel, nor the magic of Suma’s voice and style. There is power in every sentence of her writing. She is a master of moving the story forward with every word, of telling the reader just enough to keep us reading and leaving out the unnecessary bits that we don’t need to know.

Here is one tiny example from page 102:

“They waited for the late hour to do their looking. Tonight I wondered how many of them were here. Maybe they formed a chain from the rocky bottom, locking webbed fingers to slippery wrists, lifting the lightest one to the top, where the water broke open and the air got them gasping and Pete’s car could be made out on the hill.”

This paragraph says so little, but conjures so much, more I think than would have been achieved by adding more description.

I Believe

This book involves casual magic and supernatural powers and underwater towns, and I believed every word of it. At this point, I think Nova Ren Suma could tell me anything and I would believe her. I’m convinced that, like some of her characters, she must have magical powers too. Thankfully, she uses them for good, crafting absolutely stunning prose.

To sum up, I owe my friend a big thanks and a cup of coffee for recommending Imaginary Girls to me. However, I won’t go so far as to say she was RIGHT because I think Imaginary Girls and The Walls Around Us are equally phenomenal. 🙂

At this point, I will read anything Nova Ren Suma writes. If you enjoy magical, poetic, intensely engaging YA novels, you should too. Here’s the link to her books on Amazon. I just ordered 17 & Gone.

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BONUS MATERIAL: Read Nova Ren Suma’s blog post about the writing of The Walls Around Us here.

Adventures In Subbing, Part 4: The End

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Every year when I was teaching seventh grade, our school administrators gave us some sort of inspirational poster or story or memento to keep in our classroom for encouragement throughout the year. Sometimes it worked. Sometimes it backfired. I remember distinctly the year the nugget of inspiration came in the form of a very short story about a woman who woke up and only had three hairs on her head. She braided the three hairs and was happy. The next day she woke up and only had two hairs on her head. She parted them in the middle and was happy. The next day she woke up and only had one hair on her head. She wore it in a ponytail and was happy. The next day she woke up and had no hair left on her head. She said to herself, “I don’t have to fix my hair today!” And she was happy.

I’m pretty sure the point of the fable was to find the silver lining in everything and stay positive, but as the year wore on, I decided what it really meant was that teaching makes your hair fall out.

I share this memory as an explanation for why I subbed so much in May. Despite working more hours than usual at my library clerk job, completing a freelance project, and keeping up with my own writing, I still made time to substitute teach eight times at seven different middle schools. Why? Because I know what May is like for teachers. At this time of year, they’re lucky if they have any hair left at all and they need a break. I know that all of those half days, sick days, personal days, and I-just-can’t-today days are well-deserved. I’m happy to step in and help.

The end of my year of subbing was just as interesting as the beginning. I watched Inside Out three times, The Lost World twice, and Scared Shrekless once. (That one was awesome.) One day I arrived to my classroom to find a bag of raw chicken on my desk. (It turned out there was a reasonable explanation for it that had nothing to do with Satanic rituals or mean pranks.) One day when some seventh grade science students playing a card game suddenly erupted into loud yells, I went over to investigate, only to have a boy calmly explain, “Sorry. I got AIDS.” (The card game was called “Defend Yourself” and was from their unit on the immune system.) And during the last half hour of my very last sub job, an eighth grade girl asked me, “Can I go ride my unicycle in the courtyard for Ms. Smith?”

Sometimes I think I’ve been asked everything in my teaching career, but that was a new one.

I think the best way to demonstrate what subbing at the end of the school year looks like and close out my Adventures in Subbing series is with a photo documentary. Here is a look back at my last six weeks of subbing, in pictures.