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Learn some tricks for reading the Units of Study, whether you're new to the units or have been using them for many years.

As the school year comes to a close, many of the schools I work with are launching into a week or so of in-service, summer institutes, and other professional development. It’s “curriculum season”… Continue reading →

Recently, I caught up with my friend and colleague Chris Lehman. For a little end-of-the-year inspiration, please enjoy our interview: Beth: Your books make it clear that you have a passion for reading… Continue reading →

Guided Writing Lesson Front Page Originally uploaded by teachergal I attended the Literacy for All K-6 Northeast Literacy Conference here in Providence today. Specifically, I attended “Guided Writing in Small Group Settings,” which was led by Kerry Crosby, Heather Morris, and Helen Sisk. It was an informative workshop. Here are some of the highlights: Guided [...]

Now I think this is a neat meme: it's done the rounds of library land, and  I first spotted it here (thanks Constance!) - but like this person, I'm going through the year from the beginning. Bear with us both for being ornery, everyone else is going backwards, blog-style.  Please adopt it if you like it - and do let me know, so I can have a look.

Each month links to the post from which the first line only is quoted (well, all right, one of mine has two lines). It acts as an overview of your year in (journal/blog) writing.

January Elsewhere's Telly Meme - has been everywhere. I refuse to start a TV category as this will be a lonely post. But it's a good meme, worth a run, and thanks to Ariel for getting me started. (Now if I'd picked up Gravity's Rainbow, I'd be back in bed asleep by now...)

February Congratulations are due to Will Elliott whose first published novel, The Pilo Family Circus, has won the Golden Aurealis award at the annual Australian awards for genre and young adult fiction, held this year in Brisbane.

March Gabrielle Lord will be available for Q&A on crime writing in all its forms, the evolution of the genre, the essential value of research and her new book, Shattered. 

April If you live in Melbourne, Victoria, then you are invited to a 'massive bash' this Thursday. Sleepers Publishing are holding a salon to launch Conceived on a Tram: A
Book of Cartoons, Illustrations and Graphic Stories Done in Melbourne.

May News of Don Burrows' recent admission to the Jazz Hall Of Fame has jogged my memory about a fabulous evening I had last year...I'm ashamed to have filed it away and forgotten about it, but it was a magnificent occasion and I was delighted to find I hadn't deleted the post I did write later that year.

June This article (link from Miriam Burstein, the Little Professor) points to a range of difficulties emerging with the Google Books project, including poor cataloguing.

July  Not quite sure how this will blog up - we are Internet free this week, and this news has come to hand from Victoria McClelland-Fletcher from the Australia Council, so I'm posting it in only slightly edited form in at the City Library.

August
Found 'in an unguarded moment...'investigating NoveList, a database for selecting books based on readers' preferences which is syndicated to Victorian public libraries and has some intriguing subject headings, I found that under "Elvis Presley impersonators" there are 21 books listed!!

September I was sitting in the Latrobe Reading Room yesterday and got the vibe that prizes were in the offing when photographers snapped Alexis Wright and two other writers sitting on the desks in the row in front of me.

October Aduki Press is about to become the very first publisher in Australia to give a book away online, in addition to selling it in hard copy.

November I got my act together and finally went to my first, and the last, Sleepers' Salon for 2007 on Thursday last, at the Trades Hall bar.

December Is Leipzig all that far from Mansfield Park, Germaine?

Happy New Year, everyone. A new year, a new government. Hopefully a new decision on water recycling for Melbourne...

Is Leipzig all that far from Mansfield Park, Germaine? (Afraid to title this "A l'esprit de l'escalier', it's not fair to Googlers of idiomatic French.)
This is a post of afterthoughts, which came to me in an unguarded moment alone with books and good food at a spot outside Melbourne this week.

Last week at the Capitol Theatre, Germaine Greer put Jane Austen's Mansfield Park and Henry Handel Richardson's The Getting Of Wisdom together fairly arbitrarily, perhaps with an eye to getting the punters in to discuss at least one book they have all read.
It's possible that not everyone in the space had read Mansfield Park all that recently, apart from the academics, as an absorbed silence hung over the assembly while GG dissected it for the most part of her lecture, leaving only ten minutes or so for Henry Handel Richardson's popular bagatelle, perhaps more a companion piece to her first novel and true bildungsroman, Maurice Guest.

In the spirit of the staircase I am sitting on a verandah in the bush today, turning over in my head, and admittedly practising out loud in the still house as well, what a question on Maurice might have produced in the assembly last week. Here's a fin-de-siècle female writer who adopts a male pseudonym to write a rich, overblown, rotting rose of a book about a young music student who blows his brains out for love, claiming at the time that she 'wrote many of my own [agonies of youth] out in the book, and came up a quieter and saner person.'
It could have been fun to go into HHR's need to get a boy to shoot himself for love (spoiler aside, Jane devotees might have enjoyed being alerted to the darker side that Richardson's own bildungsroman explored), leaving aside the concomitant issues of Louise Dufrayer's characterisation as a festering lily, for which there might not have been any time at all once Richardson's subversion of the genre into a suicidal downward spiral had been covered. Now I'd have liked to see that. Given Greer's brave opening about incest fantasies, it would have been fun to consider the gap between not marrying the heir to Mansfield Park, and killing off male protagonists under a pen name, wouldn't it?

Just two quotes from Michael Ackland's recent bio of HHR, on the reception of both novels, and then I'm done here: firstly, of The Getting Of Wisdom, H.G. Wells wrote to Richardson,

expressing his 'enormous admiration' for her novel ('your little rag of a girl is a most admirable little beast...I don't think this particular thing could have been done better')

and of Maurice Guest, the Times reviewer wrote:

' a fine achievement, thought it is too long and too full of morbid self-analysis and too relentlessly cruel in its denouement to be widely popular,'

while John Masefield remarked he could scarcely find its equal in the preceding decade

'for strength of purpose...[and]truthfulness, of execution and power, not of observation (since many animals observe more sharply than man) but of survey, as from an intellectual watch-tower'.

These are very much the afterthoughts of an idle mind, and I'm getting carried away. The theme of the Austen conference for which this lecture was the opener, after all, was "Jane Austen and Comedy".

And accolades are due to my bloggy colleague, Laura, of Sorrow at Sills Bend fame for a terrific evening, for which I understand she fielded last minute calls from television producers who thought they might like to film it (Ahem.) The story reads like a Frontline script and you can read it here.