Wednesday, August 26, 2009

Girls vs. boys: the throwdown

Kirby Larson has organized the Ultimate Throwdown on Gender in Books.

Following the SLJ article that suggested making characters boys when it makes no big difference to the story, and a rebuttal on MSN Entertainment written by a certain opinionated person whose name rhymes with Schmartha, Kirby's adding even more voices to the debate.

Starting around noon today, you can read a lively series of posts exploring the question of gender and reading/writing featuring the likes of librarians Jerene Battisti and Nancy Pearl and writers Erin Blakemore, Dave Patneaude, Rodman Philbrick, Jon Sciezska, Joni Sensel, Terry Trueman and Ben Watson, plus avid reader, Tyler Larson (NYU Film School grad, Associate Producer at HBO, and son of a certain blogger).

What a great lineup! She's also giving away an autographed copy of HATTIE BIG SKY to the first commenter each day. So you can't miss this. I'm bringing popcorn. And maybe a Hefty bag to protect my clothing from tomatoes. I hear that Ben Watson kid can throw.

Click here to go there.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Martha, could you provide links to the SLJ and MSN articles? I don't have enough to distract myself with today, and would like to procrastinate a little longer.
;-) ~Jet

Martha Brockenbrough said...

Sure: Here's my MSN piece...

http://movies.msn.com/movies/article.aspx?news=421011

And the SLJ piece:

http://www.schoollibraryjournal.com/article/CA6666670.html?talk_back_header_id=6607030#talkback

BJW said...

I can throw a tomato. I'll bet I could hit Seattle from here with accuracy if i tried. Watch out Martha.

Martha Brockenbrough said...

Thrown on, Watson! I could use some salad for dinner.

BJW said...

This is the woman who enjoyed "shooting" her kids with water right? Maybe I should reconsider...