Month: May 2010

Thanks to all who visited a bunch of new bloggers to welcome them to the neighborhood at my little online block party last week!  As promised, I put everyone’s name in a drawing for an ARC of SUGAR AND ICE, but things…er…didn’t go quite as planned.

You see, when I asked my daughter what might be a fun way to do the drawing, she suggested that we let one of her pet Dumbo rats choose the winner.  So we put all the names on a blanket on the floor. 

Then we got Guy (rhymes with "tree" – he is a French-Canadian rat) out of his cage and put him down on the blanket with orders to run to whichever post-it note he liked best.

Unfortunately, Guy just milled around for several minutes and flat out refused to pick a winner. Must be he knows what nice people all the entrants are and couldn’t pick just one. So we fired Guy, put him back in his cage and got Chester out instead.  Chester took full advantage of his freedom, not to choose a winner but to dart under the couch. So once we got HIM back in the cage, we went the old names-in-a-hat route.

I know…not very original. But at least it was a fancy hat.

And the winner is…

 , please drop me an email with your mailing address, and I’ll get your ARC in the mail this week. (no thanks to Chester and Guy!)

Dear Indie Booksellers,

I have been thinking all day about what I could write that might possibly express how truly grateful I feel about THE BRILLIANT FALL OF GIANNA Z. winning the E.B. White Read Aloud Award at BEA last night.

First, I thought I’d say thanks for all that you do — for authors and teachers and librarians, for families like mine and kids like my students — every day.  You cheer for our books, help our kids grow into young adults, help our young adults find their places in the world, and make our communities stronger. I was a fan of yours long before I had a book in your stores.

Then I thought might tell you a funny story about where I was – making dinner, still dripping wet from my first lake swim of the season – when my agent called from New York to share the news. 

But the truth is, I can’t even think about this award for too long without getting tears in my eyes. Because reading aloud is a very big deal in my world.

When I was growing up, the youngest of four kids in a busy house, I was always on the lookout for someone who might want to read to me. When my parents, brothers, and sister grew weary, I’d wait in the kitchen for unsuspecting visitors.  As soon as the doorbell rang, I’d run for the bookshelf.  My parents still have photos of a preschool me, bringing piles of books to the table at their dinner parties, hoping to find a reader.

When I became a parent, reading aloud became a huge part of my life again. It doesn’t matter that everyone in our house is an independent reader now; read-aloud time is a treasured part of every day.  Curled up by the fireplace in winter. On the deck by the lake in summer.  And just before bed at night.  I have read the end of CHARLOTTE’S WEB aloud more times than I can count, and never without tears. I have read every word of all seven Harry Potter books out loud – twice – since my kids are five years apart and were ready for them at different times. And my daughter and I were reading Grace Lin’s WHERE THE MOUNTAIN MEETS THE MOON, one of the other E.B. White finalists, the week the short list was announced. I’d picked up a signed copy at Flying Pig Bookstore after Grace’s author visit, when Elizabeth and Josie told me how much I’d love it.  They were right.

In addition to writing books for kids, I teach 7^th graders. I read aloud to them almost every day.  No…they are not too old for read-alouds.  And yes…I do all the voices. We started our school year with Rebecca Stead’s WHEN YOU REACH ME. The kids voted on their next read-aloud by class, so one group listened to Ann Burg’s ALL THE BROKEN PIECES, while two more heard Nora Raleigh Baskin’s ANYTHING BUT TYPICAL and one shivered its way through Neil Gaiman’s THE GRAVEYARD BOOK.  We just finished Laurie Halse Anderson’s CHAINS as a whole team read-aloud, and by the time the last page was turned, Isabel and Curzon felt as real to my students as their classmates.

Reading aloud in the classroom holds special magic for kids who aren’t always successful in school, kids who might not have had those experiences at home. A guidance counselor stopped by my room one morning to let me know that one of my kids was having a particularly rough day and probably wouldn’t make it through class. When he arrived, I could tell he wasn’t himself, and he came up to me right away to tell me he was leaving for the study room so he wouldn’t get in trouble.

 “I can write you a pass to go if you want,” I said, “but we’re reading for most of the period because we’re at that good part. Do you want to give it a try and see how it goes?”

 He nodded and went to his seat, and I kept an eye on him as I read. I watched the story change his afternoon. I watched his hands unclench and his face relax, and watched him leave in a better place than he was when he came. And it wasn’t my doing; it was Isabel and Curzon, I think, who made him feel like things might be okay, and it was those funny British soldier wives who made him laugh.  I saw him later in the day, too, and he still seemed to be doing all right.  I wasn’t surprised.  Stories stay with us.  They nurture us, long after the reading is through.

So anyway, indie booksellers, this is my big, long way of saying thanks.  That gold sticker with the spider web means an awful lot to this reader.

 With much gratitude,

~Kate

Even though I planted them years ago, these flowers in my garden always manage to surprise me when they bloom.

Somehow, I never remember that big, bursting, blue fireworks are going to appear, and I’m always delighted.  This is a big, blue fireworks sort of post…because some ideas in life and writing show up that way, I find.

I’ve been kind of quiet about my current work-in-progress because it’s different than anything else I’ve written. It’s a new genre for me —  upper-MG dystopian — and the draft is happening faster than most.  I think that’s partly because of my excitement for the project, partly because the proposal is already with my editor, and partly because using Scrivener for planning and note-taking along the way makes things move along more quickly.

Anyway, I got to a point this weekend where the characters and the plot and the themes were all pushing me to stop for a little while and think…about science and art and where the two intersect.  Should they intersect?  And when we insist on separating the two, do we lose some of the potential for each?

Since I live with a scientist (my husband’s a meteorologist), I asked him what he thought, and his initial reaction was no…art has no place in the science of forecasting.  But what about those times when two or three meteorologists look at the exact same set of data, the exact same numbers and models, and come to different conclusions about what a storm will do?  Might some of that intuitive stuff be considered art?  (He didn’t like this idea much.)  Eventually, we got to the thought that even though there probably is an artistic element at work, scientists always feel safer discussing the numbers.

And then…I was reading a few more pages of ART AND FEAR by Bayles and Orland (thank you, all of you who recommended that recently!) and there in the middle of a paragraph about artists writing about process is a mention of Watson and Crick, the scientists who discovered the structure of DNA and kept detailed journals of their process.  Just dropped into the middle of a bunch of photographers and painters as if it were a foregone conclusion that scientists are artists, too.  Of course they are.

I am still thinking about all of this.   And have requested this book from my library….

…hoping for more fireworks.

In Ellen Wittlinger’s new middle grade novel THIS MEANS WAR, Juliet Klostermeyer is a typical bike-riding, roller skating, candy-bar-eating kind of kid, navigating the changes that always come with growing up. Her parents argue, her older sister keeps kicking her out of their shared bedroom to listen to music and talk about boys with her friend, and Juliet’s best guy friend is hanging out with new neighborhood boys instead of her.  Typical kid stuff.

But the year is 1962. The Cuban Missile Crisis is looming large over Juliet’s Air Force base town, and she is afraid. In a voice that is equal parts funny and poignant, Wittlinger captured that feeling perfectly in passages like this one, when Juliet reacts to a news bulletin and speech from President Kennedy on TV:

Juliet had her legs tucked underneath her and her arms wrapped around her chest; she hadn’t moved through the whole speech. "I wanted to watch Mister Ed with Mom," she said, and then the tears began to trickle down her cheeks. It suddenly seemed as if President Kennedy and the Russians and the newscasters had all stolen something precious from her that she could never get back.

And this one…just a few pages later, when Juliet looks to her teacher for reassurance:

Juliet tried to look deep into Mrs. Funkhauser’s eyes to see if she was telling the truth about not being worried. But it was hard to tell with teachers.  They all looked like they had varnish on their faces — it was hard to see if there were any cracks underneath the shine.

(As a teacher, I particularly love that line!)

A contest between the boys and girls of the neighborhood serves as a great way to lighten the feeling of menace for a while, but even that challenge, which starts with things like running races and roller skating, escalates.  It ends up serving as a great allegory for the kind of one-upsmanship that punctuates international relations in this period of history.

Overall, THIS MEANS WAR is a funny and wonderful book that will really give middle grade readers a sense for what it was like to be a kid in October of 1962.  Highly recommended, and it would make a terrific class read-aloud. (Recommendation based on a review copy sent to me by Simon & Schuster)

Now I need to read Deb Wiles’ book COUNTDOWN, also about the Cuban Missile Crisis, which I’ve heard is terrific as well. Sounds like these two would be great paired together with some nonfiction about this period in history!

Would you do me a favor? 

If you are a children’s writer or illustrator — published or unpublished — with a relatively new blog, would you drop me a note in the comments to let me know your username (for LJ) or the URL if it’s another blogging platform?  In an upcoming post, I’d like to share a list of newer bloggers so that those of us who have been here a little longer can say a proper welcome.

For example,   is a writer who attended the blogging workshop that Carrie Jones, Jo Knowles, and I presented at NESCBWI this past weekend.  She’s just posted her first blog entry, with some gorgeous pictures of where she lives, and I know she’d love it if you dropped by her new blog to say hi.

Who else out there has a shiny new blog that some of us might not have discovered yet?  Don’t be shy… Leave a comment so we can all say hello, okay?

As promised for those who attended the NESCBWI workshop panel with Carrie Jones, Jo Knowles, and me, here is a SlideShare version of our presentation with links to all of the blogs.  Happy reading & blogging!

Are you awake?

That was the subject line of the email in my box early Sunday morning at the New England SCBWI Conference. It was Loree Griffin Burns, summoning me for a hike. She needed some exercise and fresh air and knew a trail nearby. Did I want to come along?  I did!  I just barely caught Loree in the parking lot, and off we went.

After a few minor wrong turns (we were exploring…we weren’t lost), we climbed to the top of some gorgeous rock ledges.

This little guy joined us to enjoy the view for a little while before his owners caught up to him.

Then it was back to the hotel for Kelly Fineman’s workshop on free verse poetry, which was as interesting and informative as I knew it would be. If you love poetry, Kelly’s blog is the place to be – she’s   here on LJ.

I had to sneak out of Kelly’s session the tiniest bit early to get ready for my last presentation of the conference, a panel on blogging with two smart, kind friends, Jo Knowles and Carrie Jones. 

The audience members had great questions about blogging, how to balance personal and professional selves online, and dealing with friend requests. (Just for the record, if you are a friendly, nice person, I am happy to be your friend just about anywhere, online or in real life!)  I’m in the process of converting our presentation for SlideShare, so it will be available on all of our blogs, along with all the links, later this week.

Overall, the conference was absolutely fantastic, thanks in large part to all the volunteers who made it happen, especially the ever-energetic co-directors, Anindita Basu Sempere and Greg Fishbone.  I’m already looking forward to next year!

"…there is nothing you can buy, achieve, own, or rent that can fill up that hunger inside for a sense of fulfillment and wonder. But the good news is that creative expression, whether that means writing, dancing, bird-watching, or cooking, can give a person almost everything that he or she has been searching for: enlivenment, peace, meaning, and the incalculable wealth of time spent quietly in beauty."

~from Anne Lamott’s essay "Time lost and found" 

This piece is one of a million reasons I am in awe of Anne Lamott. You can read the full essay here.