Staying Humble

Last week I spent a day at the University of Connecticut leading a workshop at the Third Statewide Student/Teacher Writers Conference. Nancy Springer gave the keynote address. Now, Nancy Springer and I were both at the same literary tea sponsored by Penguin Putnam in New York City a couple of years ago, and I am a hundred percent certain we actually met. Briefly. But nonetheless. So I, who am not a naturally outgoing run up and greet people sort, decided I would make a point of speaking to her. I saw her for a moment at the beginning of the day, missed her address because I felt my workshop needed a little revising before I led it again in the afternoon, and caught her, literally, on my way out the door that afternoon. I stopped her in the hall, told her who I was, and said that I thought we'd met at a literary tea for Penguin Putnam. Well, of course you've probably guessed that she didn't know me from Adam. No recollection of me whatsoever. That's because in addition to not being very outgoing I'm also not very memorable.

Why do I find this story so funny?

Ethan Allen and Me

The presentation last Friday went...okay. I put the first class to sleep. I suspected that others wouldn't share my obsession with the Puritans, and I was right. I should have trusted my gut. The other presentations went better because I'd practiced the material enough that I was able to flip around and cut, cut, cut. All the kids had read the book, and there were some very sophisticated questions. "Why did you put Pokie in the book?" "Why did you put Peggy and Deborah in the book?" I thought those were deep questions since everything in a piece of fiction should be there for a reason.
I also used PowerPoint for the first time. That went very, very well.
This particular presentation needs work, but it's promising.
I just noticed that the March 5 entry was posted twice. Some day when I have time I'll fix that.

Suffering

I'm not accustomed to working very hard so I'm finding this month overwhelming. Work on Happy Kids! has ground to a halt because of writing angst. I have a day of presentations this Friday, and the school asked me to combine both my presentations, which means I'm prepping for a new presentation. I'm teaching a workshop next week that I've thought about but need to do some work on. I've been asked to submit a short story to a themed anthology, and that's due April 1. There's a reporter from a local newspaper coming here tomorrow morning which means hours of work on the house as well as on myself.

This entry is short for obvious reasons.

Read Across America Day

Monday, March 3, was Read Across America Day, and I actually had someplace to go and something to do. Usually when things like that happen, I find out after the fact and wonder why I was home alone. This time I was invited by a Future Business Leaders of America group to speak to the third graders at an elementary school. This particular high school FBLA has sort of adopted a grade school in their city and do things with the younger kids 3 or 4 times a year. Their president was extremely gracious, competent, well-mannered, etc. etc. The event they planned was bigger than I expected. I was impressed and had a good time.
Now I'm worried about whether or not I'll be invited somewhere for next year's Read Across America Day--which will be March 2, 2004.

Read Across America Day

Monday was Read Across America Day, and I actually had some place to go and something to do. Usually these kinds of things happen, I hear about them long after they're over and wonder why I was sitting home alone again.

Blog Insecurity

Here are two blogs that look way cooler than mine: The Reverse Cowgirl's Blog and rabbit blog. Unfortunately, I don't have a clue what they're about.

In case you haven't guessed, I don't have much time to do a decent posting and haven't for more than a week. But when I get back to this I'll have news about a forum I joined, my visit to a school, and a book I'm reading.

So even though this blog doesn't look way cool, you can tell what it's about. Or you can tell what it would be about if I did a better job of maintaining it.

Another Book I Wasn't Crazy About, But Some Fun Stuff, Too

After, literally, a couple of years of anticipation, I finally read The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants by Ann Brashares. Of course, I wasn't all that crazy about it because I'm not that crazy about anything, as my regular readers know. (My sons would say, "What regular readers?") I wanted the book to be more about the pants! The pants were supposed to be magical! But it seemed to me they were just used as a device to hold together four different "women's stories" for girls. And I don't like women's stories because I'm a traitor to my sex.

However, this is one of those books that teens are supposed to love. Go to Favorite Teenage Angst Books to a view a wonderful thread posted by readers excited by this book. Included is a discussion of whether or not Eric and B did something. They so did!!

You can also go here to read an excerpt.

Look What I Found

I can't even remember what I was looking for this afternoon, but what I found was Reading Rants! Out of the Ordinary Teen Booklists. I liked what I saw. Right now this site is prominently displaying a review of Feed by M.T. Anderson, a book I've been wanting to read. A lisit called Coolest Classics includes three favorites from my teen years: Cheaper by the Dozen (Get this--my mother-in-law met the mother in this book at a wedding); We Have Always Lived in the Castle (I was obsessed with Shirley Jackson, the author, when I was a teenager; and The Scarlet Pimpernel (Actually, I'm embarrassed to say I think I may have been past my teen years when I read this one.)

This site looks good and has an engaging voice. It's worth checking out.

Rebecca's Birthday Present?

I read in a recent issue of Newsweek that the Miss Spider books by David Kirk have inspired a line of products that will be sold by Target. I'd never read the books, but I have a niece who will be four next month, and I wondered if she wouldn't like a book and some type of Miss Spider item to go along with it. So I made a trip to my local library. They had four of the books there, and I checked them all out.

The illustrations are very sharp and intense and a little surreal. Some of them look almost three-dimensional. I don't think it will take long for Kirk's style to become "Kirkian"--identifiable. The text is interesting because it's all in verse. Aspiring authors are always being told that editors aren't interested in verse, yet, here is a well-known writer using verse. Go figure.

My favorite of the four books I read was Miss Spider's Tea Party. It's about both alienation and counting. How cool is that? I'll check out the Miss Spider products next. At the very least I think maybe Rebecca will get Miss Spider's Tea Party and some sort of tea set. That would balance the tool kit we got her for Christmas.

Here is a neat idea for a real spider tea party.

Look! A Post Two Days in a Row!

Well, I read a book a few weeks ago. Good for me. Philosophy Rocks by Stephen Law is a discussion of philosophy written for young people. When it was originally published in England, it was called The Philosophy Files, a far better title, in my humble opinion.

Philosophy Rocks doesn't try to cover everything about philosophy. Even someone who knows as little about the subject as I do was able to figure that out. The author seems more interested in trying to give young readers an idea about what a philosophical question is and how philosophers think. Most chapters end with the question "What do you think?" I would have liked to see more answers, not because I think young people need them but because I do. But that definitely was not Law's point. His point is the process. To illustrate this process he uses kids arguing about things or aliens trying to understand what's going on on Earth. I know that that was an attempt to make the concepts discussed more interesting to the reader, but I started skipping them and cutting to the chase, which came later in the chapters. As a result, I now know something about Plato and have thought about how definitions impact philosophical questions. (Read the book.)

Though I respect what Law is doing here, I wonder if this isn't one of those kinds of books that adults think is a great idea but kids won't actually read. Like using scripture in picture books.

Law has written a follow-up book, published in England, called The Outer Limits: More Mysteries from the Philosophy Files. He has a very readable article on why philosophy should be discussed with children called Natural Born Philosophers at The Humanist website.