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“Happy New Year” in Mongolian
Naran Badushov’s childrens book
Jacob Albee Goldsmith
“Good soil makes good crops; a good wife makes a good husband.” in Marma
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Jacob and Kristin Albee JacobAlbee.com . 802-540-0401 41 Maple Street, Burlington, VT
VCFA / MFA in Writing for Children & Young Adults / Readings and Book Signing
1:31 PM
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1/7/14 9:30 AM
STATE OF THE ARTS 25
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Hours BY APPOINTMENT ONLY connectivity does not stop there. Last www.juiceboxvt.com summer, Brookes brought his exhibit to the Smithsonian Folklife Festival in Washington, D.C. In the tent next 8V-JacobAlbee010814.indd 1 1/7/148v-juicebox010814.indd 9:25 AM 1 1/3/14 to his were singers and dancers from the Kalmyk Republic, a nation in the Caucasus Mountains that is, as Brookes describes it, “the last surviving outpost of the Mongols.” The Kalmyk language, too, is in jeopardy. Brookes met Naran Badushov, a Kalmyk national and creator of the Tulip Marie-Louise Gay—Montreal-based visiting Author/Illustrator—has written and/or illustrated over sixty books for Foundation, which is dedicated to prechildren, including the Stella and Sam picture books and the Travels with My serving the Kalmyk language and culFamily novels. Published in over fifteen languages, Gay has won two Governor ture. “Like any small community here in General’s Awards, the Vicky Metcalfe Body of Work Award, the E.B.White America,” says Badushov by phone from Award and has been nominated twice for the Hans Christian Andersen Award New Jersey, an epicenter of Kalmyk and the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award. culture in the U.S., “it’s been hard to Reading Tuesday, January 14, 2014, 7:30pm, Chapel Book Signing Tuesday, January 14, 2014, 8:30pm, Chapel keep our culture and our language. Assimilation is so overwhelming here.” Lucy Christopher—United Kingdom-based Brookes carved for Badushov a plaque Writer-in-Residence—is the award-winning author of three novels, in todo bitchig, the ancient Kalmyk Stolen, Flyaway, and The Killing Woods (January 2014). Recognition for script. By coincidence, Badushov has Stolen includes the 2010 Branford Boase Award, the Australian Gold Inky authored a children’s book in the script, Award and the Children’s Book Council of Australia Book of the Year for Older and aims to use the book to teach Readers Award. Both Stolen and her second novel Flyaway were long-listed for the Carnegie Medal, with Stolen being short-listed for the Waterstones Kalmyk children about their history Prize and the Costa Book Award 2010. Her third novel The Killing Woods and culture. Brookes and Badushov met combines “dark young adult themes with the lightness of touch for which last month to discuss collaborating on Lucy Christopher is so acclaimed.” Kalmyk-language educational materials. Reading Monday, January 13, 2014, 7:30pm, Chapel No one is more surprised than Book Signing Tuesday, January 14, 2014, 8:30pm, Chapel Brookes about the remarkable evolution of his woodcarving project, and he deeply appreciates what it has taught him. “It’s amazing,” he says, “how much we take vcfa.edu/wcya our own language for granted.” m
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electronic publishing. He recruited a team of students to design a series of educational books in several languages of the Chittagong Hill Tracts. When the books are complete, Brookes will use the $10,000-plus raised via Kickstarter to print them and ship them to rural schools in Bangladesh. They’ll be the first printed educational materials in their native languages that the students will ever see. Among the students producing those books is Jamie Kutner, a graduate student in printmaking and book arts at Louisiana State University and a self-described “font geek.” Alerted to the project by a mutual friend, she met up with Brookes at a tapas bar in downtown Barcelona in summer 2012. “He needed to collaborate with someone who understood how writing systems are visually structured, and who was sensitive to the cultural aims of the work,” Kutner writes in an email. “I swear, I had signed on to the project by the end of the cheese plate.” Kutner has designed typefaces for the Chakma, Mro and Marma alphabets used in the schoolbooks. The work has made her more aware of the connections between language and culture, she notes. “As a linguist, you could spend your whole life studying French syntax,” she says by phone. “But how could you do only that when you know that you could use your skill set to save languages and cultures?” Endangered Alphabets’ international
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