I was reluctant to go to Madison to get the Charlotte Zolotow Award (University of Wisconsin, Cooperative Children’s Book Center). I think of the Oscars when I think of awards and acceptance and I have little experience with awards, as I’ve never gotten one before. I am grateful that I went.

The CCBC is serious about its awards. They tackle about 500 picture books and librarians and teachers sort through the books  for weeks and them become advocates for the ones they like. They take it very seriously, and halfway through the award ceremony I remember thinking, hey, this means something. This is for real.

I got to meet and listen to the other award winners. Patrick McDonnell for  “Me…Jane,” about Jane Goodall’s childhood, Susan Campbell Bartoletti for “Naamah and the Ark at Night, a wonderful imagination of Noah’s wife, who was never named in the Bible, and “Meet the Dogs Of Bedlam Farm.”  The award ceremony was a bit cozy. The children’s book publishing world – enmeshed with teaching and libraries – is a gentler, more forgiving and affectionate world that adult publishing. It is, after all, nice to be recognized. In all of the pressures and challenges of writing, marketing and coping, it is sweet to be reminded of the point of it all – to touch people’s hearts in one way or another.

Then, there was Madison and Wisconsin. The weekend was more emotional that I expected, in that I am porous and the emotions around me go right through me. There were many to soak up. Wisconsin is in the midst of an epic conflict between public workers and government and that was literally in the air in Madison, and in the signs in every store window.

I saw “Meet The Dogs” in a different context flying out to Madison just as a snowstorm arrived. I am fond of teachers and librarians, they have always been social and cultural heroes to me, good people who labor in difficult circumstances for little reward. It has been a painful shock to see them so embattled and embroiled in the nasty and divisive process that our political system has become.  A society that turns teachers and libraries into villains and scapegoats is sick in the soul, and will suffer for it.  Teachers and librarians can hardly get paid enough for what they do.

All over the country, but especially in Wisconsin, teachers and librarians are all fighting for their jobs, hours, budgets, programs and pensions. Anyone with an open heart and open eyes knows the real victims in a cruel conflict like this – children, who cannot speak up for themselves, and are not heard, except by their parents, if they are fortunate, and people like the members of the CCBS..

This struggle is very visible in Madison. And in the very painful stories I heard.

Sensing the pain and anger and fear swirling around the city and the meetings and evident in the worried and wounded faces of the teachers and the librarians, and hearing the stories of slashed budgets and programs, demonstrations, protests and anguish, I realized that this was, in a very real sense, why I wrote “Meet The Dogs Of Bedlam Farm.” Love is important work. Love and compassion are out of fashion, not hip, not evident in our political leaders or in much of our culture and literature. We are a society that sometimes seems to be arguing ourselves to death.  If my dogs could learn to get along, why not people? And Lenore’s work – her powerful sense of love and acceptance, her impact on the farm and the dogs  – is serious stuff, at least to me.  And very relevant. It would be wonderful to see a political leaders with the heart of a Lab.  So it makes sense that the librarians and teachers connected with it. Of course they would, it’s what they do.

Maria came with me, and I see that more people want to meet her than me, and that was a beautiful thing to see. We had a great time walking around Madison in the snow, talking to the members of the CCBC, who work to promote worthy children’s books to schools and libraries and families.

So I am touched and grateful to these lovely people for honoring my writing and also my photographs. I am thinking of them, and wish them strength and love as they face some wrenching times.  I wish I could go out there with Lenore (maybe Frieda) and make some noise for them in their reluctant crusade. Their passion for children’s books for children – evident in every word they speak –  made the award  very special to me.