Tag: crakersforkids

A children’s book featuring Crake, Toby, Snowman, Zeb, and others!

Creating this project was as much a reflective process as it was a creative one. In addition to choosing a story-line, we had discussed stylistic choices, such as semantics, plot, who the writer would be (human, craker, or future craker), etc.

Choosing who the author would be is important because depending on who, there will be certain intentions in the writing style and plot. For example, if the writer was a human, they would probably imbue their writing with lessons and bias. This is similar to how Toby and Snowman don’t actually give the Crakers neutral statements or facts; Toby’s spiritual beliefs and Snowman’s familiarity with mythology heavily influence what they say to the Crakers. (I guess this would be inactive knowledge reproduction/influence?) If the writer were a Craker, they would be concerned with the facts, the history, and would explicitly mention any lessons. We agreed to have the author as a Craker, specifically one from the future. Another reason this is interesting is because over time, mythology tends to change and the differences in our stories from the novel will reflect a the affect of time passing, and also what a Craker’s interpretation events would be like.

Next, we chose a medium. We decided to mostly use collage. We assumed that if the Crakers were to create a book, they would glean the materials around them, instead of drawing. Watching my group members construct their stories was very interesting. They used different materials like tissue paper, stickers, and pop-outs. They also drew very cute pictures. Their parts flow smoothly.

For my part, I literally made collages. I found children’s books in my home, and I cut out things that were relevant to my story, or that I thought I could use. I actually cut them from some biblical story books, and Highlight magazines. Even though I had created a story prior, when making collages, the pieces that you can or cannot find can change your story. For example, I originally wanted Zeb to eat a bear, but I didn’t find enough pictures of bears in the first place. But I had enough snakes, so my original idea changed.

This whole process was very interesting to me because of a story can change depending on the resources that are around. You can’t mention too many things, or obscure things if you don’t have simple definitions (in this case, pictures) to explain it.

My part also has different versions of the characters. For example, Rev the Terror has 3-4 different variations of dog breeds. Explaining the idea of species and breeds to Crakers would be a little difficult, so having the variations identified as “Rev”, or more simply, “dog” is a very Craker-like mental process.

To construct my character, I found a few articles on tricksters in mythology and folklore. I decided to create Zeb as a self-preserving (objectivist) kind of trickster. This means he doesn’t get involved unless it benefits him. In my story, he doesn’t get involved with Rev until he is directly provoked.

I also decided to create the trickster/hero as a snake, and the villain as a dog. Dogs have always been seen in a positive light, and snakes seen as dangerous (which is true for certain snakes, but the whole Adam&Eve expulsion doesn’t help).  We are biologically programmed to not get too chummy with reptiles, but going along with the theme of the novels, I think this biology can change. The snake (and the character) don’t have to be labeled as evil; the dog may be (which makes sense with the wolvogs running around).

Overall, I really enjoyed creating this project.  I think that it was a lot of hard work and was stressful, but that’s what makes it so rewarding to be done.

Having the creative authority to make up storylines and tell the story of the Maddaddam trilogy in the eyes of a children’s folklore story was definitely a challenge.  There are a lot of components that we had to consider.

Do we call them the Crakers at all?
A: In some cases we did, just for introductory purposes, however we just shifted to using “we” and “us” to be inclusive.

How sophisticated should the drawings be?
A: We decided not at all, because if they’re just discovering art and delving into it, since Crake didn’t really make them to enjoy art, we figured their skills wouldn’t be amazing and they’d rely on pictures found.

Would they know what ____ is?
A: If it was anything technological from the 21st century, we assumed they did because they left over Humans and prospective Humakers could’ve taught them.  Also, being to into writing and possible literature, they may have seen it in books.  So we opted to keep things like computers and lightbulbs in.  Although, we did make sure to reference that it was “from chaos” or the pre-flood.

All questions like this.

This project really pushed us to think 1000 years ahead in the eyes of Crakers and potentially Humaker hybrids.  It was both a challenge and a highlight because I think the creative freedom we each got showed in the distinguishability between the four books.  Each book has a certain style that is uniquely ours.

I enjoyed this project because it let us showcase some artistic and creative abilities that we have while simultaneously putting ourselves in the mindset of Crakers and future Humakers.

Suggested Readings:

Baird, Adela; Laugharne, Janet; Maagerø, Eva; Tønnessen, Elise Seip
Children’s Literature in Education, v47 n1 p1-17 Mar 2016http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10583-015-9244-4

Purpose: The reason I’m suggesting this piece is because it focuses children’s perception to picture books.  I think this journal is relevant because it talks about children making connections between the real world and what they’re reading.

When we were making the stories, our first task was figuring how to distill all of what was to become the lore of the combined Craker and human populations after all of the characters we had grown to know and love had died. We eventually settled on picking 4 characters – Toby, Zeb, Snowman, and Crake. Each group member picked 1 character to write approximately 20 sentence-long pages about.

Although we devised our stories independently, we worked on the actual art together (for the most part). This was so we could create consistency in our visuals – whenever we draw humans, or pigoons, we followed the same style. There was some divergence in our stories (for example, Sarah’s story has no human characters: Zeb’s a snake, and the Rev is a dog), but we didn’t want things to seem like they were all written by one author. Each story is told in our own distinct voice and handwriting (sorry in advance if my handwriting’s difficult to decipher).

We also drew a lot from collaging techniques, mirroring the “gleaning” of the God’s Gardeners, as well as the post-Flood society. Luckily, Christy had a ton of stickers, which helped us add a certain childlike charm to the way we constructed our stories. I had a lot of fun making a two-page collage spread (pp. 29-30), where I used a mix of flattened dried flowers/leaves, tissue paper, and flower stickers to create the God’s Gardeners’ rooftop garden.

I drew my greatest inspiration from Aesop’s fables, because of the instructive nature of Toby’s story. There were some deviations, clearly – I chose to be very explicit with all of my morality, going for an inversion of the essential rule of “show, don’t tell.” Kind of boring, but realistically, it’s what the Crakers (and their perpetual questioning) would prefer. At one point, my story innocently glosses over the deadly fight between the MaddAddams and the remaining Painballers, with a little footnote – if you want to hear more, you can read it elsewhere. That way, I get to placate the prying Crakers, without having to include too much of that difficult-to-explain gore.

We also worked on consistency in terms of Craker lore – for instance, we decided that all characters would move to the “sky” with Oryx and Crake after death, and that Oryx and Crake would exist as humans as well as godlike figures. Since our stories take place a few generations after the events of MaddAddam, we figured some things would become codified as the combined human/Craker culture progressed.

Suggested Readings

Lawrence, Randee Lipson and Dennis Swiftdeer Paige. “What Our Ancestors Knew: Teaching and Learning through Storytelling.” New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education 149 (2016): 63-72.

This paper tracks the shifting in storytelling methods – from indigenous oral tradition (and its role as both instruction and entertainment), to classroom strategy, to fusions with visual art methods and digital storytelling. Since our stories serve as a transcription of the oral tradition started by Snowman and Toby, it’s valuable to look at the roles that storytelling plays.

Pelletier, Janette, and Ruth Beatty. “Children’s Understanding of Aesop’s Fables: Relations to Reading Comprehension and Theory of Mind.” Frontiers in Psychology 6 (2015): 1-9.

A study was conducted where 172 children (between the ages of 4 and 12) had one of Aesop’s fables read to them (the fox and the crow). The paper shows how understanding of the fable and its lesson shifts as children grow older: changing from “the story is about a fox” to “don’t get tricked.” As a writer, it’s important to think about the level of understanding that your students will have – sometimes a lesson will need to be explicitly told if you are reaching a younger audience.

Plus, a nice digital collection of Aesop’s fables from the Library of Congress, each with the moral stated clearly at the end of the story.

Beyond its ecofeminist critique, the Maddaddam trilogy is about language and storytelling (not that these are mutually exclusive concepts). Atwood constantly plays with narrators and narratives within books as well as across books. The stories themselves are about characters and groups of characters (e.g. Snowman to the Crakers, the God’s Gardeners, the Maddaddamites) that are defined by the way in which they interpret the world around them and share their beliefs, a basic form of storytelling. I think that our group’s decision to make a children’s book about the Crakers and their origins is thus a natural one. A children’s book follows the passing on of writing from Toby to Blackbeard at the end of Maddaddam. We imagine that this book would be created a few generations after Blackbeard as a way for Crakers, Craker-human hybrids, and/or humans to explain their origins to their children as well as tell cautionary tales or important lessons.

Each person in our group was responsible for a character to write a story about. I wrote about Snowman/Jimmy, in particular his role in relation to the Crakers. The process raised a lot of questions about what aspects of the story to distort. For instance, I chose to sugarcoat the relationship between Jimmy, Crake, and Oryx and describe them as best friends because this is how the Crakers would have liked to think about them. The story is titled “Snowman’s Sacrifice” because Jimmy/Snowman is portrayed as an endlessly benevolent character, constantly making sacrifices for the Crakers. We know from the book that his feelings towards the Crakers are far more complicated and even negative, but once again the Crakers perceive him to be an intermediary between themselves and Crake and Oryx. His relaying of the words of Crake and Oryx as well as his decision to “look” after the Crakers becomes an act of good will. This process of blurring or even warping the plot felt similar to what Atwood does throughout the novel, particularly in “The Story So Far” section in which Atwood summarizes previous books or the way the narrative changes depending on different focalizers. In many ways, I found this project to be an exercise in focalizing and understanding the function of stories in collective culture. It reminds me of my favorite line from The Year of the Flood, “We’re sitting around the fire…The light flickers on all of us and makes us look softer and more beautiful than we really are. But sometimes it makes us darker and scarier too…” How we understand characters differs depending on where the light shines and who it shines for and I think the Atwood meant this line to be about storytelling, especially as its around a fire like people telling campfire stories. I also wanted to note that for the most part our group wrote our stories separately and it was interesting to see motifs emerge across them. Specifically, we all used the “clearing of the chaos”/the flood as a turning point or temporal marker. Events and ideas became defined as pre-chaos and post-chaos for all the characters.

The trilogy ends with Blackbeard picking up language and I think that if we follow this trajectory, it is not unlikely that generations after him would create books for the purpose of explaining ways of living to their children, especially given the way the Crakers seem to want an explanation for everything. This was the other challenging part about the project- imagining what the future for Crakers/humans. Some questions that we grappled with were what would society look like after the mating of Crakers and humans? Would there be a fine line between Crakers and humans? Would a hierarchy emerge? What technologies would this new society develop? What symbols would they know? We did not jump to any assumptions to this questions, but rather picked up from where the books left off. Even if these stories became dated to new generations of Crakers, there is something about fairy tales and fables that preserves the past and is even otherworldly/othertimely.

Mostly, I really enjoy the different directions that our class took this project in and the variety of digital forms that these three books will now take on. In particular, I am really excited to see how folks constructed a calendar and conceptualized Craker-time because I can see many overlaps with our project and how we defined time (pre-chaos/post-chaos, visually through phases of the moon) and ideas about what does time mean given the Craker lifespan. I feel like this project has been a really tangible way of seeing how creative works lend themselves to one another and build a body of work and knowledge.

Suggested Reading List

Corr, Charles A. “Bereavement, Grief, and Mourning in Death-Related Literature for Children.” Omega-Journal of Death and Dying 48.4 (2004): 337-363.
I was wondering how to discuss death and violence within my story and decided after reading this article that these topics raise important questions for children to grapple with. Especially with the shorter lifespan, I assume Craker kids will need to become familiar with death, so I chose to address it pretty explicitly.

Grenby, M O. “Moral and Instructive Children’s Literature.” British Library. British Library Board, n.d. Web. 24 May 2016. 

On the function of children’s literature.