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Yesterday saw the birthday of the late Laurie Lee, one of the few people ever to become a legend in his own lifetime - and one of the few people to make my hometown of Stroud famous. He's probably best known for his autobiographical Cider With Rosie, but he also wrote poetry such as this:

April Rise

If ever I saw blessing in the air
I see it now in this still early day
Where lemon-green the vaporous morning drips
Wet sunlight on the powder of my eye.

[...]

Pure in the haze the emerald sun dilates,
The lips of sparrows milk the mossy stones,
While white as water by the lake a girl
Swims her green hand among the gathered swans.

Now, as the almond burns its smoking wick,
Dropping small flames to light the candled grass;
Now, as my low blood scales its second chance,
If ever world were blessed, now it is.

You can find the whole poem here.


This week's Poetry Friday round-up is over at Biblio File.

Three highlights of my February vacation week!



I signed books and met some fantastic readers at Barnes and Noble in South Burlington, Vermont yesterday afternoon.  Thanks to everyone who came out to pick up copies of Spitfire and say hello.  I was especially happy to meet Marje VanOlsen from the South Burlington Community Library in person. We've been emailing for a few weeks, and I'll be presenting a summer program at her library in July. 

Earlier in the vacation week, my family enjoyed the last weekend of Winterlude in Ottawa.  It's a fantastic winter festival with outdoor entertainment, ice sculptures, and best of all -- skating!



As soon as Ottawa's Rideau Canal freezes, it turns into the world's longest skating rink -- literally.  Those world record folks at Guinness made it official this year. 



We had a beautiful day and enjoyed the full 7.8 km.  Of course, we did make a few stops along the way -- most notably to indulge in a Beaver Tail or two.



If  you're ever in Ottawa, this decadent delicacy is a must-have.  A beaver tail pastry is a very thin strip of fried dough shaped like, well, the flat tail of a beaver.  It's dusted with cinnamon and sugar or drizzled with maple syrup (my favorite). 

I even managed to get some work done in between skating and scarfing down pastries.  I've been asked to do a couple presentations this spring, talking about my upcoming book Champlain & the Silent One, which comes out next fall.  That means going back to the places where I did some of my research to gather photographs and other resources for my school visits.

Ottawa's Canadian Museum of Civilization is featuring Samuel de Champlain in an exhibit about people who shaped Canada's history.



This was especially fun to see...



It's a navigational tool called an astrolabe, and historians believe it might have belonged to Champlain himself.  According to documents, Champlain lost his astrolabe near a place called Green Lake when he was traveling up the Ottawa River in 1613.  In 1867, a boy named Edward Lee was helping his father clear trees in that area and came upon the instrument pictured above, right where Champlain supposedly dropped it 254 years earlier.

And here's a quiz for particularly astute blog readers.  Look at this statue of Champlain with his astrolabe at Ottawa's Nepean point.


There's something wrong.  Do you know what it is? 

Sometimes it can be hard to wait.  I'm feeling a little impatient about the books of 2008 for a few reasons.

As a writer, I'm feeling impatient because my second MG historical novel, Champlain & the Silent One,  is still seven months away from the shelves.  It's off being edited and illustrated now, so all my work is done, except the waiting.  I can't wait to see the illustrations and the cover, and I really can't wait to start talking with kids at schools & libraries about Samuel de Champlain and the tribes who guided him on his voyage from Quebec to Lake Champlain 400 years ago.

As a reader and teacher, I'm excited for a whole roundup of 2008 titles from favorite authors & friends & other writers whose work I've heard about and can't wait to read.  I've been lucky enough to get sneak peaks of some of them, like Linda Sue Park's Keeping Score, which I reviewed here. This one is so unbelievably good that I've decided it's a crime not to pass it along so someone else can read it and love it and hopefully talk about it, too.

So here's the contest.  I'm giving a way my pre-read and somewhat well-traveled ARC of Keeping Score.  I won it in a drawing on cynthialord's blog a few weeks ago and asked Cindy if she'd be okay with me giving it away again.  The ARC traveled with me to the Kindling Words retreat in Vermont last week, where Linda Sue Park (lsparkreader) graciously signed it for the giveaway.  It's not a shiny, perfect, unread-by-human-eyes ARC, but it is signed and got to hang out with the likes of Linda Sue and Laurie Halse Anderson and Sara Zarr and Katie Davis and Jane Yolen and other wonderful people.  It's an ARC with lots of good karma.

If you'd like to be entered the drawing, just leave a comment below with the title of one 2008 release that you can't wait to read.  The contest ends at 6pm EST on February 13th.  I'll figure out some bizarre and random way to choose a winner and announce it here on my blog on Valentine's Day.