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I posted this link on Facebook, but it's worth a cross-post here.
Two teachers write letters to each other about the books they are reading---and model for their students how to talk about story. Wow.
P.S. It's my book, Letters From Rapunzel, that they're discussing. I'm bowled over by this.
P.P.S. One more thing, because other than this, I'm mute with gratitude and have little to blog about today. Here are the new author photos I mentioned. Author Sonya Sones took them as part of the pro track offerings at the SCBWI Conference in L.A. She has a beautiful knack of making a person feel utterly comfortable in front of the camera. Thank you, Sonya!
Hi Sara, thanks for stopping by. Can you tell us a little about yourself?
Hi Shelli, I'm the author of two middle grade novels, LETTERS FROM RAPUNZEL, which is about a real girl who writes letters as if she were Rapunzel locked in a tower, and OPERATION YES, which was released last fall from Arthur A. Levine Books/Scholastic.
OPERATION YES has little green army men on the cover, and yes, it's about military families, 
but it was also recently named as one of Booklist's Top Ten Arts Books for 2009. I'm tickled that I managed to write a book about two important influences in my life: being part of an Air Force family and my secret history as a high school theater geek.
A lot of authors do blogs but your blog seems to focuses more on Poetry, which is a great blog niche. Was that a conscious decision or did it just evolve?
I jumped into the blog world on a Poetry Friday with a post called Enter (in which I confessed to my fear of that awful exam word: "begin.") Poetry continues to be one of my favorite ways to enter into and connect with the larger online community. Anyone can play! Poetry is a language; when we speak it, it's hard to stay solitary.
On a related note, I was surprised to learn that my Poetry Friday posts helped confirm my editor's interest in acquiring Operation Yes---even though the book is not poetry. She wrote about the decision process at Scholastic's On Our Minds blog; it's a fantastic window into how editors might look at an author's online presence.
Speaking of online, a coupe months ago, you and your editor, Cheryl Klein, did a live twitter chat together. How did you come up with the idea ?
Cheryl was active on Twitter before I was. She inspired me to open an account and try the crazy thing, and then to go one step further and attempt a chat in real time. Both of us thought the improvisational theater angle of Operation Yes was a great fit for t
My sister-in-law alerted me to a sighting of Letters From Rapunzel on the Today Show!!! Yup. Al Roker talks to Trenton Lee Stewart, author of The Mysterious Benedict Society, and if you pause the tape between 2:43 and 2:49 minutes in, you can clearly see Rapunzel over Al's shoulder. (His left shoulder, to the right as he faces you.)
Because in fairy tales, things always come in threes, don't they?
2) The Statue of Liberty's crown
may re-open, and if so, you can climb all the way to the top again (past those nostrils) just like Rapunzel did with her dad.
Whoops! Four things!
Eep. Just thought of another. Five!
5) Link Jules sent me: "Self-Rescuing Princess" T-shirt at
ThinkGeek
Eek. Okay. There are six.
6) Amy Planchak Graves at
ayuddha.net is starting a Mental Health in Children's Literature Project, which she describes as "the modern/enhanced equivalent of an annotated bibliography" listing books that deal in a literary, non-didactic way about mental health issues. Yes, that would include Letters From Rapunzel. I'll link as soon as it's up and running, but for now, check out more about Amy
here.
Okay, that's it. I can't count, and I'm done.
(Except to say that it's been more than two years since
Letters From Rapunzel came out, and it's exciting as an author to see readers, classes, librarians, and teachers still discovering it and using it in fantastic, creative ways. Yayohyayohyay!)
That is all.
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If you need a speedy gift for someone, I have limited copies of
Letters From Rapunzel at home that are available for signing and immediate shipping to you or your chosen reader. $16 covers it all, including postage.
I'll toss in one of my nifty red "Read * Write * Believe" pencils
too.
Email me: email(at)saralewisholmes(dot)com or use the link in the sidebar.
I have a soft spot for Georgia. The state is known for its fantabulicious peaches, and peaches are my favorite fruit. I've never lived in Georgia, but I was once lucky enough to live in a house with two peach trees in the backyard. That was heaven!
Now I have a new reason to love Georgia. Letters From Rapunzel is on the list of nominated books for the statewide children's book awards. If you read the full list below, you'll see why I'm so thrilled. LOOK at those other fantabulicious authors and their books I'm hanging out with!
The Georgia Children's Book Awards
ESPECIALLY FOR LOWER GRADES (4-5)
• Dowell, Frances O’Roark (2006). Phineas L. MacGuire … Erupts! Atheneum.
• Harley, Bill (2006). The Amazing Flight of Darius Frobisher. Peachtree.
• Lombard, Jenny (2006). Drita, My Homegirl. Putnam.
ESPECIALLY FOR UPPER GRADES (7-8)
• Gauthier, Gail (2006). Happy Kid. Putnam.
• Hill, Kirkpatrick (2007). Do Not Pass Go. Margaret K. McElderry.
• Hobbs, Valerie (2005). Defiance. Frances Foster.
• Smith, Roland (2007). Peak. Harcourt.
POSSIBLY FOR ALL GRADES (4-8)
• Bell, Hilari (2007). Shield of Stars. Simon & Schuster.
• Carbone, Elisa (2006). Blood on the River James Town 1607. Viking.
• Coombs, Kate (2006). The Runaway Princess. Farrar.
• Dahlberg, Maurine F. (2007). The Story of Jonas. Farrar.
• Graff, Lisa (2006). The Thing About Georgie. Laura Geringer.
• Holmes, Sara Lewis (2007). Letters from Rapunzel. HarperCollins.
• Lord, Cynthia (2006). Rules. Scholastic.
• Lowery, Linda (2006). Truth and Salsa. Peachtree.
• Lupica, Mike (2006). Heat. Philomel.
• Riordan, Rick (2006). The Lightning Thief. Miramax.
• Rupp, Rebecca (2006). Journey to the Blue Moon. Candlewick.
• Weeks, Sarah (2004). So B. It. HarperCollins.
• White, Ruth (2007). Way Down Deep. Farrar.
Letters From Rapunzel gets a mention in the latest issue of ALA's Book Links.
I'm delighted to be "linked" in the same article as Donna Jo Napoli and Gail Carson Levine.
Casting the Spell: Fairy Tales in Novel Form (Book Links, July 2008)
P.S. Anybody know if the July issue is being handed out at the ALA convention in Anaheim this week? I remember snatching up a free current copy when ALA was here in D.C.
My sister, Ruth Lewis, surprised me last week with this amazing image:
It's from a collaborative art project she's creating with a friend. Each page of the book they pass back and forth is a collage of images, created in response to a book or story that the artist chooses. One rule (maybe the only rule?) is that the receiving artist must use one item from the previous page in her creation. This is what my sister wrote to her fellow artist upon finishing her piece of art:
"I was waiting for the right item around which to build a page about my sister's book, and you gave it to me when you passed the Ace of Hearts. One of my favorite parts of "Letters from Rapunzel" is the theme introduced when Cadence finds a note written by her father: "You must be willing to have your heart broken in order to live."
"The Ruby Apple" tale ends happily ever after when a daughter saves her father's heart—not by protecting it, but by planting it in the Royal Orchard. In "The True Story of Rapunzel", a farmer boy offers to plant one of his apples so that it will sprout a tree tall enough for the in-towered princess to pick fruit.
Finally, her father urges Cadence "Promise me you'll always listen to your own heart." Wise advice."
I can't tell you how much I love this. Be sure to click on the image, so you can see all the details. Ruth made those authentic-looking fortune cookie sayings, so she could put words from my book on them. There's writing on the bridge, too: armed with only poetry and tears. (If you've read LFR, you'll know where those words come from.) And the broken-open heart at the bottom: I keep seeing it as one of my red pencils, split in two, a reminder of how writing and art---and the response to them---breaks open everyone who's willing to live.
Thank you, Ruth.
When your first book is coming out, early mentions of it are surprising. Last year, my editor emailed me my first review of Letters From Rapunzel (here, in Publishers Weekly) long before I was expecting anything. I hadn't even begun to worry about such a thing, so I got to skip straight to the thrill of it.
But surprise late reactions are fun, too, like this one titled "The Girl in the Tower," which I discovered in the NY Review of Books. My book is mentioned in a scholarly article (ahem) in a venerable publication (double ahem.) Pardon me while I give a very self-impressed and perhaps inappropriate w00t!
I also received a lovely email this week from another writer who I hadn't heard from in about three years. She was living overseas, and had ordered my book, and when it arrived, she wrote:
I was the one to check the mail and find your book waiting for me. A half an hour and many pages later, I realized I was still sitting in the post office parking lot and was about to be late picking my kids up from school!
I love that she read my book (which features a post office) at the post office! She also said that reading it "nudged me back to my own writing" which makes me w00t again.
Anyhow, both of these things made me realize that despite some gloomy "blink of an eye" talk, the life cycle of a book is longer than we think. Sure, Letters From Rapunzel is not front and center on book displays anymore (if it ever was) but it's made its way to Australia. (May I w00t for that also, please? Thank you, WorldCat, for letting me know.)
And it appears that a reader in Australia has it on loan and that it is overdue. I hope that's because the reader is devouring it for the second time, or has perhaps loaned it to her best friend, or is hoarding it for an upcoming book talk---and not because she's lost it under her bed.
I don't like late dinner, late tax refunds, or late trains. But you can take as long as you want to get around to my book. Call me in the nursing home. I'll be reading some old book myself.
When my husband goes to work, he wears his Air Force uniform. Some days, that's a green flightsuit; other days, it's his dress blues; and sometimes, it's his camouflage shirt and pants (the "battle dress uniform" or BDU.) But in most cases, no matter which uniform he wears, he carries a plain, black, inexpensive backpack slung over his shoulder. And in the outside mesh pocket of that backpack, he carries---for every passerby to see---postcards of the cover for Letters From Rapunzel.
It makes me smile to think of the double-takes he must get, when people see a warrior carrying an image of a children's book. (That's an Air Force coin next to it, if you're wondering.)
He often comes home and tells me "I sold a copy of your book today." I think he must have hand-sold several hundred copies by now. The latest sales were to: the guy who financed our car, and another officer after a pin-on ceremony. Watch out if you sit next to him on the subway!
I think I'm going to start calling him my Secret Weapon.
Using the emotionally restrained voice of a ten-year-old fictional narrator, Carole Boston Weatherford draws readers into the heart of an African-American girl who witnesses one of the most brutal racist acts of the Civil Rights era.
"The year I turned ten," Weatherford begins the free verse poem that is her new book, Birmingham, 1963, "I missed school to march with other children for a seat at
Carole Boston Weatherford's book Moses, illustrated by Kadir Nelson is something you've got to read. The incredible combination of Kadir Nelson's illustrations (everytime I see any of his work it does something to me. He is my illustration hero. ) and Weatherford's deep, warm heartfelt writing is powerful. I am going to buy this one....gotta have it.
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You look beautiful, but then, you always do.
I love all three of them - your mischief shines out in the first and third ones.
Sonya is excellent at what she does - the color of your blouse just pops in contrast to the leaves. Gorgeous!
Lisa and I are so excited to be working on this together, and your book is a wonderful place to begin! Like Cadence (and you) said: "...words sprout in all directions..."
Such lovely photos! And how wonderful to read such thoughtful comments about your book!
Hi Sara,
I am the "Lisa" that Callie wrote her letter to. I am so excited to begin this project, for both myself and my students. I really appreciate your mentioning us on your blog. Thank you for the encouragement!
Lisa
A post full of goodness! Great letter, and the pictures totally capture you.