February 4, 2012
Tags: book reviews
Sheila Says We’re Weird by Ruth Ann Smalley

I’m here at the PASA conference in State College, PA, surrounded by a few thousand amazing souls. While leading a Radical Homemakers workshop yesterday, the question arose about how I am helping my daughters to make sense of the life they are living in our radical homemaking household, when it is so contrary to our mainstream consumer culture. _

One of the things Bob and I have done is to write a collection of short stories chronicling the adventures of two fictitious girls who have a LOT in common with Saoirse and Ula. We are always adding to the vignettes, and the collection is called The Adventures of Sasha and Luna, Sapphire Ridge Mountain Girls. I write the stories, Bob illustrates them. We’ve found this to be a very helpful way to enable Saoirse and Ula to examine their lives, and to talk about ways that we might be different. I’ve also discovered that they find the stories very comforting; they serve as a reminder of the good times they’ve had, and a harbinger of the fun things to come. Saoirse and Ula’s lives are different from the characters in many of their other favorite books, but by having their own book, they realize they are equally engaging and fun.

Another terrific resource I discovered while on this path was a picture book written by RuthAnn Smalley, called Sheila Says We’re Weird, about some kids growing up in a radical homemaking lifestyle in an urban residential area. The illustrations vividly capture all the nitty gritty details of that life – mending clothes, keeping the air conditioner off, backyard gardening, vermiculture, composting, cooking from scratch, and places it in a story line where the rh-kids explain their life to Sheila, a neighbor who doesn’t understand why they do things the way they do. This is a favorite in our house, and for the first three months after we got it, Ula asked me to read it to her daily. We’ve moved on to other favorites since, but the book is often referred to by the girls as they encounter different elements of a consumer culture life and make sense of their own.

With both resources, I see them hold their heads up high, and simply acknowledge that “we’re different.” Saoirse, who is 8, is able to articulate a number of the reasons, and I’ll hear her saying things, like, “we care about the earth, and we want to do what we can to protect it;” or “we want to make sure that the food we eat is healthy and clean.”

I believe, however, that we need more literature depicting this way of life. We need new stories that help our children (and grown ups) make sense of their experiences and empower them to explore the struggles and witness the beauty in a life path that is in harmony with the planet. Non-fiction “how to live off the grid” books are helpful, but stories ignite the imagination, opening our minds and hearts up to visioning the world we must create.