{"id":37884,"date":"2020-06-26T18:18:25","date_gmt":"2020-06-26T22:18:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/blog\/?p=37884"},"modified":"2023-07-10T21:55:21","modified_gmt":"2023-07-11T01:55:21","slug":"closing-session-with-natalie-portman-at-ala-virtual-conference","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/blog\/?p=37884","title":{"rendered":"Closing Session with Natalie Portman at ALA Virtual Conference"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The Closing Session of ALA Virtual Conference 2020 featured Natalie Portman, who has a new picture book coming out called <em>Natalie Portman&#8217;s Fables<\/em>, being interviewed by librarian Betsy Bird.<\/p>\n<p>[Betsy made a funny slip when she was listing Natalie&#8217;s credentials and called her an &#8220;Archivist&#8221; when she meant to say &#8220;Activist.&#8221;  Only a librarian!  Natalie said that would be cool!]<\/p>\n<p>The main idea of the book, which includes three stories, is to rewrite beloved stories with more female characters.<\/p>\n<p>She noticed when she had a daughter after having a son that people had given her boy baby &#8220;classics&#8221; that all seemed to feature male characters.  Then they gave her girl baby books with feminist slants &#8212; but does a toddler really need to be told she&#8217;ll encounter obstacles?<\/p>\n<p>She would change the pronouns in the stories she reads to have more female characters &#8212; and decided to write a book that does that.  It&#8217;s not going to be all females, but just more a reflection of what the world is actually like.<\/p>\n<p>They discussed the old saying that girls will read books about boys, but boys won&#8217;t read books about girls.  Natalie said that girls are taught from a very young age to get inside boys&#8217; heads and understand what they&#8217;re thinking.  Boys also need to learn to think about a girl&#8217;s perspective.<\/p>\n<p>The practice of empathy starts in children&#8217;s books.<\/p>\n<p>Toddlers will empathize with <em>any<\/em> creature.  We should encourage that.<\/p>\n<p>She chose three tales with animal characters that she could fit into a message appropriate for modern times.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Closing Session of ALA Virtual Conference 2020 featured Natalie Portman, who has a new picture book coming out called Natalie Portman&#8217;s Fables, being interviewed by librarian Betsy Bird. [Betsy made a funny slip when she was listing Natalie&#8217;s credentials and called her an &#8220;Archivist&#8221; when she meant to say &#8220;Activist.&#8221; Only a librarian! Natalie [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[207,419],"tags":[406],"class_list":["post-37884","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-conference-corner","category-conf-corner","tag-alavirtual20"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37884","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=37884"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37884\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":37885,"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37884\/revisions\/37885"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=37884"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=37884"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=37884"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}