News item: My YA contemporary of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, Sometimes We Tell the Truth, is out in the world and available wherever books are sold.
Teachers: I would be open to sending your students bookmarks and stickers--and I can Skype with your class!
Signed books: If you are out of the area and want a personalized copy, you can order it from the Avid Reader in Davis (telephone 530-758-4040). Let them (and/or me!) know to whom I should personalize the copy (also, let me know your favorite Canterbury pilgrim, if you have one, because i have stickers for each character!). Then I'll sign the book, include an adorable bookmark and sticker, and the Avid Reader will ship your book to you! Easy!
If you teach or want to teach Chaucer, I’d love for you to include all or part of my novel to help you bridge the gap between today and the fourteenth century. A simple compare/contrast of the opening of Sometimes We Tell the Truth and The General Prologue can help make the medieval characters relatable, and students can dig deeper into Chaucer alongside a contemporary YA retelling that assumes no prior knowledge of Chaucer.
Here are some sample teaching materials, created Amanda Lentino, a twelfth-grade teacher from New Jersey. Help with teaching the General Prologue: Character-Chart.docx, helping students chart the content of a tale: Character-Graphic-Organizer.docx, and help with student presentations on a tale: SWTTT-Presentations.docx.
Readers of Chaucer will see all the twists and turns and games I play with the original and with Chaucer's own sources to the tales--such as classical and medieval authors like Ovid, Marie de France, and Boccaccio. Chaucer's Tales are themselves retellings, so it's been especially fun playing with that dynamic in my modernized retelling of Chaucer.
If you are a teacher using this book in your classroom, I am happy to do a free Q&A Skype visit with you. Just contact me and we'll work out the details. The book would work well in courses for Chaucer, medieval pop-culture, and young adult literature. High school teachers offering Chaucer can use the book to promote discussion of the characters, the frame story, rivalry between characters (to "quyte" one tale with another), and gender, for example.
Fun fact: the gorgeous Ellesmere Manuscript in the Huntington Library features beautiful art at the start of each character's tale. You can see Chaucer here (with cute, short legs) riding on his horse and pointing to where his tale begins. For Sometimes We Tell the Truth, artist Adam Turnbull created spot art for each character's tale.
On the long bus ride to Washington, D.C., a group of seniors each tell a story—some fantastical, some realistic, some downright scandalous—in a competition for the ultimate prize: a perfect grade. In this contemporary adaptation of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, the popular and unpopular alike have their say as relationships are challenged, lines are blurred, and carefully-guarded hearts become vulnerable. It’s a day to learn that most lies are really just lies—but, sometimes, they can tell the truth.
Kim Zarins has a PhD in English from Cornell University and teaches medieval literature and children’s literature at Sacramento State University. Her debut novel, Sometimes We Tell the Truth, retells Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales with modern teens, and she wrote it with a gigantic smile on her face (there are funny bits). She also published two picture books for very young children. When she isn’t reading or writing or teaching, she is feeding peanuts to a very hungry scrub jay named Joe.
