August 28th, 2010
Dolores came up with some good questions:
Hello-Did I miss something-what happened to the Tory Gold?-Or is that yet to be revealed? Is there a reason why both Scots-Jennet and Simon Ballentyne both die? Why was there no “news” about Simon’s death? I was sorry that Ethan and Callie won’t be part of your next story. The prologue by Curiosity is the best introduction I’ve read. Thank you for a wonderful story.
.In fact, all y’all came up with good questions, but I’m locked into deadline hell just now and I can’t have to be resolute and stay away from fun stuff for the moment. So does anybody want to take a stab at answering these?
Categories: wilderness
August 27th, 2010
Listen, everybody: I’m as excited about the Kindle release of the first two books as you are, but all I can tell you is, it should have happened on the 25th, and will hopefully happen in the next few (work) days. I will get in touch with my editor and see what’s what. Note: people who work in publishing in Manhattan usually get Fridays off in the summer. So don’t look for an update on that until Monday. And I thank you (1) for your enthusiasm and (2) for your patience.
original message
—————————————————–
What she had to say about the Kindle/ebook release of ITW and DDS:
They should be on sale by 8/25. Sorry for the delay!
Categories: news
August 12th, 2010
Here’s a proposal. If you want a signed book, we can do an Amazon swap. That is, I send you a signed book of your choosing, and you email me an Amazon gift certificate.
For a hardcover, $25; for a softcover $10; for trade paperback size, $14, and no cash changes hands. So this is how it would go:
1. You email me to say you want book x, and you’d like me to sign it “To Gertie with best wishes” or “For Alice, my favorite reader” or just my name. At the same time you send me your mailing address.
2. I check to make sure I have the books you want available (and I’ve got a lot of books with the exception of ITW in hardcover), and let you know by email.
3. You wander over to Amazon and arrange for a gift card to be emailed to me for the total due. I will cover shipping costs up to $5, unless you want it shipped some way other than media mail, in which case I’ll have to figure out a way to calculate that. I’ll also have to figure out how to handle overseas rates. If somebody from somewhere else is interested, I’ll sit down and figure it out.
4. The gift card arrives in my email box, and I sign and pack up the book(s) you asked for. And then of course I take them to the post office.
Maybe nobody will be interested in this, but I thought it was worth putting out there.
Offer good for as long as supplies last.
Categories: news
August 11th, 2010
Okay, lemme explain something.
Questions that work for a FAQ page don’t have to do with what happens after book six. FAQ usually include questions like:
why the penname? … where is the setting supposed to be in reality?… how many children did Nathaniel have with Elizabeth? … Why don’t we hear about x dying? What did x die of anyway? Why did you move the story to Scotland, New Orleans, etc.?
You get the drift?
Below are the kinds of questions I won’t/can’t answer because they are in a not-as-yet (and likely never) imagined future. In some cases I can’t answer a question because well, I don’t know the answer; in other cases I might have an idea, but I’m not going to speculate, and the character in question isn’t giving me any feedback. If I were going to write another novel about these characters or their grandchildren, it would not be a good idea for me to paint myself into any corners. So I can’t put the following questions (or anything like them) on the FAQ page. And I won’t answer them via email, either, just in case you were wondering.
Did the acupuncture work for Daniel? Could he use his arm? Did they ever get rid of the high bed? How many grandchildren did Nathaniel and Elizabeth have, all in all? Are you going to be writing more novels about the Bonners?
To make this a little clearer, imagine that you read Gone with the Wind the year it came out. You were shocked by the ending. You wrote to Margaret Mitchell and said: please, tell me how Scarlet goes on without Rhett.
There’s an element of storytelling here that needs to be respected. I expect that if you asked her about Scarlet, Mitchell would have said: What do you think happened? Because once the story is done, it’s in the reader’s mind and it’s the reader’s imagination that takes over. You can tell the story yourself of how Scarlet follows Rhett around from pillar to post making an ass of herself, and how he decides she’s insane and has her confined to the attic with a nurse, until he meets … okay, wrong story.
Some of the best book discussions I’ve ever been in involved questions like this. For example, a small group of people talking about Tied to the Tracks got into a very funny and loud discussion about What Comes Next. Somebody said that John and Angie were doomed, they’d never make it. Others were outraged by this suggestion and pointed out all the things that would hold them together. A comparison of Angie to John’s mother ensued. Somebody wondered if Patty Cake would show up on campus with an Uzi, and if so, who would save the day?
With a group of people who have read a book closely, this kind of discussion can go on for a long time.
Which is the long-winded explanation of why I am not going to tell you if Daniel ever got back the use of his left arm. And what he did with it, if he did.
Now I have to get back to these thrilling reports on the history of bilingual education in the southwest. ttfn
Categories: general, wilderness
July 29th, 2010
I’ve been gone a long time, I know, but I’ve got six weeks to finish these revisions and then I’ll be free(er). I’m stopping in now because I’ve read about the millionth comment asking why Luke would leave his children in Paradise.
It was quite common even up to 75 years ago for families to trade children. You went to live with your aunt or grandfather or whatever, for a year or longer. This happened multiple times in my own father’s generation (at a very young age he was shipped off to Italy to be raised by an uncle who had no kids). And in my maternal grandmother’s, too (she was sent to be raised by grandparents after her mother died).
Men did not think themselves capable of caring for young children. Certainly Luke had the resources to hire whatever help he needed, but he had five traumatized children to think about. Take them home to Manhattan to be cared for by strangers, or leave them in the care of Elizabeth, Nathaniel, and the rest of the family?
Luke couldn’t give up his business, and he didn’t want to hurt the children any further, and so he left them where they were loved and safe and happy (under normal circumstances). He still spent every summer with them, which is more than most fathers would have done in that time and place.
va bene?
Categories: wilderness
June 21st, 2010
Below is an organized and reasonable response to Arizona’s recent xenophobic and unwarranted education policies, from linguists at the University of Arizona. If this whets your appetite, there are other formal responses from linguists and educators, for example: Stanford University Faculty and National Council of Teachers of English.
May 26, 2010
Teachers’ English Fluency Initiative in Arizona
The undersigned faculty of the Department of Linguistics at the University of Arizona endorse the following statement.
The Wall Street Journal reported on April 30, 2010 that “the Arizona Department of Education recently began telling school districts that teachers whose spoken English it deems to be heavily accented or ungrammatical must be removed from classes for students still learning English.”
It is our position, based on decades of scientific investigation into the nature of language, and of language acquisition and learning, that such a policy undermines the effectiveness of the teaching and learning of English by non?native speakers and may lead to additional harmful socioeconomic effects. Our position is based on these facts (see the following pages for a brief discussion of each, including references).
1) ‘Heavily accented’ speech is not the same as ‘unintelligible’ or ‘ungrammatical’ speech.
2) Speakers with strong foreign accents may nevertheless have mastered grammar and idioms of English as well as native speakers.
3) Teachers whose first language is Spanish may be able to teach English to Spanish?speaking students better than teachers who don’t speak Spanish.
4) Exposure to many different speech styles, dialects and accents helps (and does not harm) the acquisition of a language.
5) It is helpful for all students (English language learners as well as native speakers) to be exposed to foreign?accented speech as a part of their education.
6) There are many different ‘accents’ within English that can affect intelligibility, but the policy targets foreign accents and not dialects of English.
7) Communicating to students that foreign accented speech is ‘bad’ or ‘harmful’ is counterproductive to learning, and affirms pre?existing patterns of linguistic bias and harmful ‘linguistic profiling’.
There is no such thing as ‘unaccented’ speech, and so policies aimed at eliminating accented speech from the classroom are paradoxical.
Discussion
1) ‘Heavily accented’ speech is not the same as ‘unintelligible’ or ‘ungrammatical’ speech. “This is one of the most robust findings that has emerged from every study we have done on intelligibility: intelligibility and accentedness are partially independent. In other words, it is possible to be completely intelligible and yet be perceived as having a heavy accent” (Derwing and Monro 2009: 479). Proficiency in the language of instruction, whether classes be targeted for English language learners or native speakers, is obviously essential for a teacher. Clearly, no teacher should have an ‘accent’ so marked that his or her students cannot understand him or her, but existing hiring and training practices are sufficient to mitigate this.
2) Speakers with strong foreign accents may nevertheless have mastered grammar and idioms of English as well as native speakers. The science of language acquisition shows that if you begin acquiring a language before age 13, you will master grammar and idioms like a native speaker (Lenneberg, 1967 and the large literature that follows). However, if you begin acquiring a language after the age of 6, you will probably never completely lose some trace of an accent. The older you are when you begin acquiring a second language – even between the ages of 6 and 13 – the greater the ‘foreign accent’ you are likely to retain. Having a (heavy) foreign accent does not mean you do not know English as well as a monolingual speaker (Piske et al., 2001 and references therein).
3) Teachers whose first language is Spanish may be able to teach English to Spanishspeaking students better than teachers who don’t speak Spanish. Foreign born speakers who learned English after age 13 may nevertheless attain fluency – even if their understanding of their second language is slightly different from that of speakers who began acquiring the language before that age (Piske et al., 2001). In addition, these speakers’ near?adult experience of learning English as a second language gives them personal exposure to the particular features of English that are hard and/or easy for second language learners, especially second language learners from their language background. In particular, teachers originally from Mexico have a deep knowledge of what is hard for their Mexican?American students to learn about English.
4) Exposure to many different speech styles, dialects and accents helps (and does not harm) the acquisition of a language. Evidence from studies of language acquisition shows that increased variability in the pronunciation of words that children hear appears to facilitate – and not slow – acquisition of linguistic patterns by very young children (Singh 2008, Richtsmeier et al., 2009). This has also been shown to help adults learning the sounds of a second language (Kingston 2003). If variability of input facilitates language acquisition for a child’s first language, and for adults learning a second language, it almost certainly facilitates children’s learning of a second language.
5) It is helpful for all students (English language learners as well as native speakers) to be exposed to foreign?accented speech as a part of their education. All of us will be exposed to speakers with foreign accents, and it is useful for all speakers of English (whether we speak English natively, or as a second language) to be proficient in communicating with others who have foreign accents. Listeners benefit from practice listening to foreign?accented speech in terms of comprehension and attitudes towards speakers (Rubin 1992). It may, in fact, be particularly useful for Spanish?speaking students learning English to have a teacher with an accent similar to their own. A recent UA dissertation (Cox 2005) addressed the impact of accented speech on second?language listening, such as in an ESL environment. The research showed that comprehension of samelanguage accented speech could be both faster and more accurate. In addition, subsequent published research (Leikin et al., 2009) has reinforced this conclusion. Banning accented speech in the ESL classroom will have no positive impact on learning and, in some instances, may harm instructional effectiveness.
6) There are many different ‘accents’ within English that can affect intelligibility, but the policy targets foreign accents and not dialects of English. American English, like all naturally occurring human languages, encompasses a variety of different ‘accents’ and dialectal variants (see the very important work of William Labov and his students over the past 50 years). Not all of these ‘native’ accents are equally easy for different speakers to understand. There are native born ‘accents’ that are harder for Arizonan English speakers to understand than many foreign ‘accents’. For example, native speakers of English from the deep south may still have marked ‘accents’ that speakers from the American Southwest cannot easily understand. Similarly, foreign?born speakers from English?speaking countries have strong non? American ‘accents’, e.g., those who grew up in Australia, Scotland, India or even England. Most speakers of American English rate British varieties as ‘more grammatical’ than many American English varieties, however. Our attitudes about ‘accents’ are more related to our attitudes towards speaker populations than to any reliable measure of ‘grammaticality’ (cf Baugh 2003, Wright 1996 and others). Other, non?linguistic, factors could affect speakers’ pronunciation of English and ultimately their intelligibility (e.g., speech impediments, stuttering) – however ‘accents’ are being differentially targeted in the policy.
7) Communicating to students that foreign accented speech is ‘bad’ or ‘harmful’ is counterproductive to learning, and affirms pre?existing patterns of linguistic bias and harmful ‘linguistic profiling’. Evidence exists that listeners’ perceptions of ‘foreign accented speech’ are often inaccurate – listeners predisposed to view a speaker as having a ‘foreign’ identity are likely to perceive that person’s speech as accented, even when it is not (Rubin 1992; Derwing and Monro 2009). Nancy Niedzielski’s (1996, 1999) work shows that people think the same sounds are more or less ‘standard’ depending on whether they are told the speaker is from Canada vs. right over the border in Detroit (participants, of course, viewed their own dialect as ‘standard’). In Rubin’s work, these beliefs lead to lower comprehension scores for listeners who think that they are listening to ‘foreign accented speech’ (even when they are not). To the extent that policies like this further stigmatize foreign accented speech, therefore, they are counterproductive to learning. Stigmatizing ‘accented’ speech also perpetuates other kinds of social harm. The work of John Baugh of Stanford University demonstrates that American English speakers regularly engage in discriminatory practices of ‘linguistic profiling’ when making decisions such as hiring employees, admitting tenants, and the like. Accents associated with African American and Hispanic citizens are particular targets of the harmful effects of linguistic profiling (Baugh 2003), and to the extent that Arizona state policy supports discrimination against speakers based on ‘accent’, this policy continues these social harms.
There is no such thing as ‘unaccented’ speech, and so policies aimed at eliminating accented speech from the classroom are paradoxical. When we say that someone has an ‘accent’, what we are really saying is that they speak in a way that sounds ‘different’ from a particular standard, or from our own pronunciation. Speakers are fully capable of drawing inferences about any person’s place of origin, age, ethnicity, gender and socioeconomic status based on the way we talk – and this is certainly true for speakers of American English. Since all human linguistic production is characterized by particular patterns of sound that allow others to draw these conclusions, it is axiomatic that all of us speak ‘with an accent’. The standard for instruction ought to be speaker intelligibility, not speaker identity – and intelligibility is distinct from ‘accentedness’.
References
Baugh, John. 2003. Linguistic Profiling. In Sinfree Makoni, ed. Black linguistics: language, society, and politics in Africa and the Americas. Routledge. 155? 166. Cox, Ethan A. 2005. Second language perception of accented speech. Dissertation, University of Arizona.
Derwing, Tracey M. and Murray J. Monro. 2009. Putting accent in its place: Rethinking obstacles to communication. Language Teaching 42. 476–490.
Labov, William. 1963 to current. Homepage and Curriculum Vitae: http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~wlabov/home.html.
Leikin Mark, Ibrahim Raphiq, Eviatar Zohar and Sapir Shimon. 2009. Listening with an accent: speech perception in a second language by late bilinguals. Journal of psycholinguistic research 38. 447?57.
Lenneberg, Eric H. 1967. Biological Foundations of Language. Oxford, England: Wiley.
Kingston, J. 2003. Learning foreign vowels. Language and Speech 46. 295?349.
Niedzielski, Nancy. 1996. Acoustic analysis and language attitudes in Detroit and Windsor. Penn Working papers in Linguistics 3. 73?86.
Niedzielski, Nancy. 1999. The effect of social information on the perception of sociolinguistic variables. Journal of Social Psychology (Special Edition) 18. 62?85. Piske, Thorston, Ian R. A. MacKay and James E. Flege. 2001. Factors affecting degree of foreign accent in an L2: a review. Journal of Phonetics 29. 191?215. Richstmeier, Peter T., LouAnn Gerken and Diane K. Ohala. 2009. Induction of phonotactics from word?types and word?tokens. In J. Chandlee, M. Franchini, S. Lord, and M. Rheiner (Eds.), Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.
Rubin, Donald L. 1992. Nonlanguage Factors Affecting Undergraduates’ Judgments or Nonnative English?Speaking Teaching Assistants. Research in Higher Education 33. 511?531.
Singh, L. 2008. Influences of high and low variability on infant word recognition, Cognition 106. 833–870.
Wright, Susan. 1996. Accents of English. In David Graddol, Dick Leith and Joan Swann, eds. English: History, Diversity and Change. Routledge. 259?287.
Signed: Dr. Diana Archangeli, Professor Dr. Andy Barss, Associate Professor Dr. Thomas G. Bever, Professor Dr. Andrew Carnie, Professor Dr. Erwin Chan, Visiting Assistant Professor Dr. Sandiway Fong, Associate Professor Dr. Amy V. Fountain, Lecturer Dr. Michael Hammond, Professor and Department Head Dr. Heidi Harley, Professor Dr. Simin Karimi, Professor Dr. Cecile McKee, Professor Dr. Janet Nicol, Associate Professor Dr. Diane Ohala, Assistant Professor Dr. Massimo Piatelli?Palmarini, Professor Dr. Adam Ussishkin, Associate Professor Dr. Natasha Warner, Associate Professor Dr. Andy Wedel, Associate Professor Dr. Mary Ann Willie, Associate Professor Dr. Ofelia Zepeda, Regents’ Professor
Categories: general
June 18th, 2010
Quite a few people have written to ask why Into the Wilderness and Dawn on a Distant Shore aren’t yet available on Kindle, though the last four books are available.
My answer: I’m not sure.
About two months ago I signed a revised contract with Bantam that was drawn up for this (and no other purpose): to get the first two books into Kindle/ebook format. Why it hasn’t happened yet is a mystery, but I’ll email the relevant people (again) and report back.
Two other notes:
- I realize the feed isn’t working. Haven’t had time to sort it out, yet.
- I hope to get in there and respond to all the questions and discussions about children and causes of death this weekend.
Categories: wilderness
June 4th, 2010
I’ve had quite a few emails lately with questions that are entirely reasonable, but would take a long time for me to answer one by one. I don’t have the original FAQ page I set up, unfortunately. So what I’m thinking is, it might work if y’all replied to this message with questions you think need to be answered on a FAQ page. And if you have the answer: so much the better.
I am up to my ears in the revision for English with an Accent and there are, as always, other catastrophes to deal with. This idea occurred to me as a way I might be able to pull this off. With your help.
Categories: general
