Dragon Daily News. Stories of Imagination for Children of All Ages

By Gene Twaronite

"… he heard a strange rumbling noise coming from the kitchen. Then a loud crash. He got there just in time to see a small glacier go right through the kitchen wall, into the living room, and out the front door." ("The Glacier That Almost Ate Main Street")

A glacier that starts in a refrigerator is just one of the weird things that can happen in these twenty-one stories by Highlights for Children author Gene Twaronite. What if you showed up for school one day, but the school wasn't there? What if words suddenly leapt off the page in the book you're reading and floated away? What if the jet you're on is afraid to fly? What if your parents gave you a real live rhino for your birthday? What if a little snake stretched and stretched to become the longest snake in the world? What if dragons really exist somewhere? What if …? Discover the answers to these and other questions. But be careful. Imagination can be a dangerous thing … especially if someone closes the book on you while you're inside.

While some of these stories were first published in magazines including Highlights for Children and Read (Weekly Reader), many are brand new. So what are you waiting for? Jump right in—have fun with your head!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gene Twaronite
• Release date: Dec 26, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223233039

Gene Twaronite

GENE TWARONITE is a poet, writer, andauthor of twelve books. Early in his career, he wrote humorous stories for children, some of which were published by Highlights for Children and other magazines. He has always been fascinated by the way fables can weave together truth, wonder, and absurdity in a form appealing to all ages. This is his first fable.

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Dragon Daily News

Copyright ©2013 by Gene Twaronite

All rights reserved. No part of this  book may be used or reproduced by any means,  graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any  other storage retrieval system without written permission from the author, except in  the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

The Glacier That Almost Ate Main Street, The Day the Books Leaked, and  The Worst Day in the World first appeared in Highlights for Children, to which grateful  acknowledgement is made for permission to publish them here. The Man Who  Stayed Inside first appeared in Read (Weekly Reader); I Can Fight You on Thursday...  first appeared in In Short: How to Teach the Young Adult Story edited by Suzanne Barchers,  published by Heinemann; Travels Through a Pencil Sharpener first appeared in  Comic Tales Anthology No. 2, published by May Davenport; The Jet Who Wouldn’t Fly  first appeared in Kids’Magination; The Tofu Hunters first appeared in Mouse Tales Press.

This is a work of fiction. All the characters, names, incidents, organizations,  and dialogue in these stories are either the products of the author’s  imagination or are used fictitiously.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Iwish to thank my editor, Kate Robinson of Starstone Literary Services, for helping me hone these stories to a fine edge. I also wish to gratefully acknowledge both my wife, Josie, for critically reading and rereading the manuscript without killing me, and my sister, Maryanne, for her editorial comments and continuing faith in my writing. I am indebted to artist Johanna Hoffman for her two lovely dragons and permission to use them, and to book cover designer Abigail Westbrook for wizardly weaving them into the cover. I also wish to thank Suzanne Barchers, former Managing Editor of Read magazine at Weekly Reader, for being such a stern task master before agreeing to publish my story, I Can Fight You on Thursday, and for later including it in her anthology In Short: How to Teach the Young Adult Short Story .

And, finally, a special thanks to the good editors of Boyds Mill Press and Highlights, who not only helped me polish three of these stories for original publication in Highlights for Children, but allowed me to publish them again here.

CONTENTS

The Day the Books Leaked

The Ugliest Street in America

School Vacation

The Glacier That Almost Ate Main Street

What Makes the Wind, Grandpa?

No Time

How to Stuff a Rhino

The Girl Who Got Away

Travels Through a Pencil Sharpener

The Longest Snake in the World: A Tall Tale

Dragon Daily News

The House That Hannah Built

When Walt Met Henry

The Jet Who Wouldn’t Fly

Willie’s Weird Garden

The Worst Day in the World

A Slight Roach Problem: An Ecology Fable

Joey Swanson, Time Traveler

I Can Fight You on Thursday...

The Tofu Hunters: A Vegetarian Fable

The Man Who Stayed Inside: An Urban Fable

INTRODUCTION 

Without this playing with fantasy, no creative work has ever yet come to birth. The debt we owe to imagination is incalculable.

~Carl Gustav Jung, Psychological Types

When I wrote my first published story in this collection— The Glacier That Almost Ate Main Street —my goal was simply to create a wacky story that might prick the curiosity of young readers enough to ask: OK, where do glaciers come from? The premise of a glacier starting in a refrigerator was pretty far out, I must admit. I don’t have a clue where it came from. But once the absurd idea popped into my head, there was no escape. I had to follow it to wherever it led, which in this case turned out to be a playful and enjoyable detour from reality.

Another story that began as nothing more than an absurd notion is The Tofu Hunters. I think the word tofu had something to do with it. It has such a cute ring to it, almost as if it could be an animal. So why not make it one? I had also recently read Jean Auel’s wonderful novel, The Mammoth Hunters. The rest just followed.

Sometimes these absurd ideas are inspired by events in my life, like the time I sat on a real jet in San Francisco as it taxied endlessly from one end of the airport to the other. It seemed to be trying to make up its mind whether to fly or not. This started me to thinking. Why wouldn’t it fly? Was it afraid? And why would a jet be afraid to fly? Could there be such a thing in the future as a thinking, feeling robotic jet with no need for a human pilot? The result was The Jet Who Wouldn’t Fly.

An idea might start with a walk on a city street, a street so unbelievably ugly that it seems to cry out for a label—The Ugliest Street in America. It might start with a real-life animal called a rubber snake that leads to the tall tale The Longest Snake in the World, or with my lifelong love affair with strange, exotic plants that inspired Willie’s Weird Garden.

My fondness for lizards certainly had a great deal to do with When Walt Met Henry—the story of how two great lizard writers first meet. I was also inspired by the historic meeting in 1856 between two of my favorite writers, Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau.

Have you ever gazed at a painting in a museum or perhaps a landscape photograph in a coffee table book that seemed so real you felt you could fall into it? And have you ever stood at the rim of Grand Canyon and imagined falling into its multi-colored layers of rock-time? That is what happens in The Girl Who Got Away.

Maybe you know someone who fills his son, niece, or granddaughter with imaginative explanations of how the world works—stories that are patently not true yet so much more fun to believe than real fact. And how do we reconcile this storytelling with the rational side of our being? I’m not sure I know the answer, but I will always hear the voice of a dear friend who inspired What Makes the Wind, Grandpa?

Words have a magic all their own. What a strange pull they have on us. In many ways, words are as vital to us as air and rain. But what if all these necessary words were suddenly removed from our beloved books? What if they just leapt off the page and left us? And where would they go?  Of course, as a writer I also know that some words are unnecessary, as Elwyn finds out in The Day the Books Leaked.

Speaking of magic, there are no more magical words in the English language than these: what if. They can lead to all kinds of wondrous predicaments and perplexities. For example, what if you showed up for school one day but the school wasn’t there? In School Vacation, there’s definitely something funny going on and Marvin is determined to get to the bottom of it.

Like most kids growing up, I dreamed of waking up on my birthday and finding a real live horse, elephant, or even rhino in my bedroom, though deep down, I also knew the extreme unlikelihood of such an event. My poor parents would buy me a toy animal in hopes of assuaging me at least temporarily until the next big fixation came along. But I have often wondered what would happen if my dreams had come true, as in the story How to Stuff a Rhino.

A dinosaur kid, I never dreamed of dragons, but I imagine many children do. They probably also imagine alternate universes where such creatures really exist. So why not create dragons as smart as or smarter than us, doing some of the same things we do? There might even