that I see all my young adult novels in one place, dressed up in red, to boot. Thank you, Lisa and Marguerite and all of those who helped create this year's Baldwin School Book Fair.
This coming Monday, I'll be joining the students of Norristown High School at the Montgomery-County Norristown Public Library, where we will be putting some of the
Dangerous Neighbors Teacher's Guide exercises to work. I look forward to talking my city, and to bringing the past alive, if only for an hour or so.
I spent much of the weekend preparing for my long morning at The Baldwin School, where I will today be talking about, reading from, and building exercises on the shoulders of Wordsworth and Mary Oliver, Sei Shonagon, Rilke, Neruda, Sandra Cisneros, Marilyn Nelson, and Gerald Stern, among others. I never conduct the same workshop twice, don't give the same talk over again, and while my husband will be the first to remind me of how terribly inefficient all that is, I know no other way. No two students or group of students are the same. It matters, I think, that we actively lean in their direction.
The students pictured above were girls I met during my spring trip to Wisconsin for the unforgettable Fox Cities Book Festival. I was thinking about them earlier this morning, as I explored
Figment.com, a new site designed to enable the young to "share your writing, connect with other readers, and discover new stories and authors." How cool, might I ask you, is this? I know dozens of young big-dreaming, risk-taking blogger/writers whose work should grace this site and whose insights could power it forward. You know who you all are.... and you know that I love you. Take a spin through Figment and let me know what you think.
And while you're at it, spend some time at Chasing Ray today, because Colleen Mondor has assembled a
bang-up interview with one of my very favorite writers/people, Elizabeth Hand. I wouldn't know Liz if it weren't for Colleen. I wouldn't know a lot of things, were it not for Colleen. But listen to Liz talk, for example, about the beautiful big rawness of teens, the "thrilling and often perilous" process of self-discovery for young artists. I was cooing just this weekend about how happy the Johnny Depp-Patti Smith interview in
Vanity Fair made me. Substance! I declared, I danced. Substance! I shout again today.
They should have a Beth Kephart book display in every bookstore in America!! :)
Why, Stacey!! :)
To book a truck load of literature to teach and preach Christianly values and morality is a God-send that we need to befriend to poverty in its extremity to release them to free dom of mind so that they might find humaness in kind to release them from being blind, so that they might see you and me, and I, in the face of adversity, to set them free!
Thank you. Love love, Andrew. Bye.
Wonderful display.