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I get an obscene amount of spam offering me everything from a good time to magical pills that would enhance body parts I don’t even have. Recently I found buried among the junk an email from Owlkids Books that knocked my sock off. It was an offer to go through their 2011 catalog and pick [...]

Who would have thought that tough times could be so useful? I often take bits of my life, twist and turn them and after many revisions a book emerges. That was the case with BLOB.

I turned the memory of a miserable summer into this story. Nothing that really happened in my life, happens in the book (except for the weight gain) but the emotions are true to my experiences.

So here’s the story behind BLOB.

When I was 20, I found a summer job in an overnight camp. I was the counselor for a cabin full of thirteen-year-old girls. Most of the girls came from wealthy families and although there were some sweet girls in the bunch there were four snarky, spoiled “brats”. They thought that counselor was just another word for servant. “Pick up my trunk,” one barked the first day. “Get this for me,” ordered another. I felt like Cinderella with four nasty stepsisters. At first I didn’t know how to respond except to feel awful. I wanted the girls to like me so I tried being nice. That didn’t work. It backfired. The snarky girls got snarkier. The bossy girls rolled their eyes and whispered behind my back.

I was devastated. How could I live through a whole summer with this group?  I took long walks to think about what I could do and sometimes just to cry in a quiet spot. On one of my walks I discovered that the camp was not far from a Dairy Queen.  Yes! Salvation! I love chocolate and I love ice cream and nothing cheers me up quite so much as chocolate ice cream.

I soon became a fixture at that Dairy Queen. I escaped there whenever I could. Although my spirits lifted when I ate the ice cream, my mood plummeted when I returned to the bunk from hell. I was also gaining weight fast. I’m not a big person by nature and when I started to blob out, you could really see it. I was soon not only miserable about  my group of four but self-conscious about my weight.

Somehow I survived that summer. Things improved with the girls as the summer went on. I bonded with most of my campers but never reached the difficult four. I finally came to terms with the fact that those four in my bunk would continue to treat me with disdain.  There wasn’t much I could do about that so for the rest of the summer, I ignored their rolled eyes, whispers and smart-aleck responses.

Unfortunately the weight gain took longer to address. It took me three years to lose the twenty pounds I put on that summer.  How did I finally lose the weight? I didn’t follow a crazy diet or exercise like mad. Instead I taught myself to eat slowly. Very slowly.  I still adore chocolate ice cream, chocolate bars, chocolate chips, chocolate anything but my weight has stayed pretty steady over the years.  After all, it can take me a half hour to eat just one truffle. But I savour every bit of it.

As for those campers from hell, I bumped into some of them a few years later and they turned out to be approachable and friendly. They were older by then and so was I.

I was also not a BLOB any more—in any way.   —Frieda Wishinsky

Frieda Wishinsky is the Orca Featured Author for the month of July. Learn more about her on Orca’s Featured Author Page

We have a poster at work that is titled “Unlucky Arithmetic; Thirteeen Ways to Raise a Nonreader”. It really reminds me that there are many different ways to raise a reader despite the poster outlining what not to do (Here is a pdf version of the  poster). I think the point of the poster is to show us that reading should be fun and varied. There isn’t a right way to read.. any reading is the right way. 

There is a little article here where Frieda Wishinsky which outlines her ideas for successful reading out loud and the benefits it has for the upcoming generation of readers. Enjoy!