jacqueline woodson before the ever after

I think, you know, trying to get to the essence of what I'm trying to say without overwriting - it's so easy to add a bunch of adjectives, or say it: he's 223 pounds, he's this tall, you know, he has these broad shoulders. And it's almost like I'm trying to draw the picture with the words - the pictures that I see in my head, I can't draw, but I can do it with words.'Īnd getting rid of them.

And it is about, for me, just rewriting and rereading and listening to how it sounds out loud to get to the images that are in my head.

'What would it look like to have these little boys climbing on this dad and they think they're, quote unquote, tackling him and he just rises up and shakes them off, you know? Does he shake them off like marbles? Does he shake them off, you know, like stones? It's like no, he shakes them off like feathers cause they're really not tackling him at all. 'A lot of times it's really visual for me as I'm writing it,' she says. I asked how that description came to her. That's Jacqueline Woodson's lovely writing. And how when his son and a group of his young friends pile laughingly on his back, he shakes them off 'like feathers.' But his father is also suffering from chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, the degenerative brain disease that's been diagnosed in many collision-sport athletes.īefore the Ever After documents his father's decline.

It's called Before the Ever After and it's written in the voice of a 12-year-old boy whose father is a professional football player, a big star both on TV and to the neighborhood kids. Many of Jacqueline Woodson's books tackle serious issues in a way that's accessible for kids: Race, drugs, foster care, classism, intolerance.

Jacqueline woodson before the ever after