Know your audience

Hi everyone,

To follow up on yesterday, writers who write for children understand how much their audience changes from year to year. How often do we say, upon seeing a friend’s child or grandchild after an absence of a year or two, “I can’t believe how much they’ve changed!” Watching our own kids grow up makes us well aware of the ongoing metamorphosis of childhood. Kids can fall into and out of love with something — a certain toy, a nightly ritual, a pet word — as they discover, examine, and experience the world around them, sometimes at a dizzying pace. We know how that works because the same process happened to us when we were young. It’s still happening, though perhaps in a less exuberant fashion, today.

Now and then I find myself giving a workshop on writing for children. I have one coming up in May. For longer events of two or three days I get into the writing process but if I only have an hour or two, I focus more on knowing your audience. In my collaborations with educators to create books for the classroom, I must always focus on which classrooms, that is, which ages we have in mind. For one project, TIM RASINSKI and I wrote an early literacy program for the 11th largest school district in America, Fairfax County, Virginia. Nearly 190,000 students attend school in the system’s 223 schools. We focused on Grades 1 and 2.

My job was to write poems, 84 in all, based on repetitive use of the various sounds and sound families, for each grade according to target reading levels for the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th quarter of the school year. Examples: here’s one for Grade 1, 1st quarter, demonstrating the short i. I chose a limerick.

In the faraway kingdom of Zit,
a turtle was learning to knit,
He said, “When I’m better,
I’ll knit a neat sweater
for the king of the kingdom of Zit.

It is hard for a turtle to knit,
and the sweater he made didn’t fit.
It was short by an inch,
which caused it to pinch.
“I think,” said the turtle, “I’ll quit.”

For a second example, here’s one for Grade 2, 4th quarter, demonstrating the sounds of es and est.

My brother is
the king of gases.
All the kids
in all his classes
compare the smell
to rotten fishes,
last week’s lunches,
moldy peaches
so overripe
it leaves them speechless.
Brother seems
to feel the proudest
when his gases
roar the loudest.
The oddest, rudest,
noise, alas is,
brother bravely
passing gases.

That was the most demanding task I’ve tackled, dividing the early reading process of six- and seven-year-old children into eight steps. Tim and I thought about each of my efforts, weighing the subtle growth in complexity of progress. I’m not suggesting that those who write for children in general must attempt such preciseness. What I am saying is that before we set out to write for children, we need to know our audience.

My education books

Hi everyone,

I’ve been thinking that the education book with MARY JO FRESCH coming out in August with Stenhouse will be #19. I just went through the files and can only find 18 counting this one. LAURA ROBB and I have discussed a new collaboration that she plans to propose to a publisher we’ve both published with, but if I’m going to reach twenty, I’ll need to do one more after that. Bring them on!

Here’s the list.

Books co-written for Classroom Teachers as of 1/19/26

2026	The Phonics Handbook Poetry Collection: 101 Decodable Poems for Reinforcing Sound Letter Patterns (with Mary Jo Fresch), Stenhouse
2024:	The Fluency Development Lesson, Closing the Reading Gap (with Lynne Kulich and Tim Rasinski), Benchmark
2024	40 Poems for 40 Weeks, Integrating Meaningful Poems and Word ladders into Grades 3-5 Literacy (co-edited with Tim Rasinski), Routledge/Taylor & Francis
2022	Partner Poems & Word Ladders for Building Foundational Literacy Skills; Grades	K-2 (with Tim Rasinski and Mary Jo Fresch), Scholastic
2022	Partner Poems & Word Ladders for Building Foundational Literacy Skills; Grades	1-3 (with Tim Rasinski and Mary Jo Fresch), Scholastic
2020 	A Guided Practice for Reading Growth, Grades 4-8: Texts and Lessons to Improve Fluency, Comprehension, and Vocabulary (with Laura Robb and Tim Rasinski), Corwin Literacy
2020	Empowering Students' Knowledge of Vocabulary: Learning How Language Works, Grades 3-5 (with Mary Jo Fresch), National Council for Teachers of English
2017:	7 Keys to Research for Writing Success (with Mary Jo Fresch), Scholastic
2016:	Rhymes for the Times: Literacy Strategies through Social Studies (with Timothy 
Rasinski), Shell Education
2013:	Learning through Poetry: Short Vowels (with Mary Jo Fresch), Shell Education
2013:	Learning through Poetry: Long Vowels (with Mary Jo Fresch), Shell Education 
2013:	Learning through Poetry: Consonants (with Mary Jo Fresch), Shell Education
2013:	Learning through Poetry: Consonants and Blends (with Mary Jo Fresch), Shell Education
2013:	Learning through Poetry: Rimes (with Mary Jo Fresch), Shell Education 
2013:	Let’s Write This Week with David Harrison (DVD series, guide book, with Lauren Edmondson); Phoenix Learning Resources
2009:	Partner Poems for Building Fluency (with Tim Rasinski and Gay Fawcett), 
Scholastic
2003:	Using the Power of Poetry (with Kathy Holderith), Scholastic
1999:	Easy Poetry Lessons that Dazzle and Delight (with Bernice Cullinan), Scholastic

January on Goose Lake

Hi everyone,

Goose Lake is icing over. Starting from the shores, the sheets are edging toward the center, leaving a passage that grows narrower each hour. This morning a few geese are navigating their way like silent ships working through the channel.

On the surface of things, all is quiet on the lake, save for the geese with their legs churning them along through frigid water. I’m thinking of the frogs and turtles of summer; the local birds, toads, worms, insects — all the life that sang love songs and tilled the soil and patrolled water and built nests and sunned on rocks.

Some have left. Some have perished. But most are still here, making do with temperatures cold enough to freeze a human to death, days and nights when food is scarce or nonexistent. How each member of the Goose Lake community weathers the weather would fill books, has filled books. Winter is a vital time, a time to rest, wait it out, survive. The trees, standing naked in the wind, bare limbs raised as though in surrender, wind chimes dangling like noisy baubles clanging out the time till spring, know.

Need to update my website

Hi everyone,

I was just looking at my website (https://www.davidlharrison.com/). I don’t go there everyday. Mostly I send my host, KATHY TEMEAN, a note when something needs to be changed. Have you been there lately? I used to have a guest registry, which was great for keeping track of visitors to the site. Like a lot of “improvements” to technology, the registry was removed from the site at some point. This picture has nothing to do with anything. I just like to throw it in now and then. It was taken in Stone Chapel at Drury University when I was Missouri Poet Laureate as well as Drury Poet Laureate (which I still am). Where was I?

Oh yes, the need to update my website. There aren’t many tweaks to be made but I like to be accurate. Few people care in the least how many books I’ve published, how many awards they’ve received, etc. But I do. I’ve always been a counter. (Ask my old friend, SANDY ASHER. She kids me about that.) For one thing, I need to ask Kathy to remove the crawling banner across the top of the page that says I’m Missouri Poet Laureate. That title now belongs to my successor, JUSTIN HAMM.

I think I need to edit my autobio page. It implies that I still visit lots of schools, as I did every year for decades. I’m going on 89 now. Many of the educators who invite authors to speak in their schools are a third of my age. I understand. Their loss though. I’m really very good with kids.

One thing I’ve given up on is keeping track of how many times something of mine has been reprinted in anthologies. I know it’s over 200 and I’m going to let it go at that. I like to count but chasing after titles that I’m in is a lot of work and I’m content with an estimate. I still love those translations though. When Kathy was creating my website, I wish I had known to have a category for online interviews, podcasts, videos, Zoom visits, and such. I’ve done tons of those over the years. Same with education books that I have co-authored. The titles are all there but they are listed according to publisher rather than in a stand-alone category. I’m proud of those collaborations and am coming up on #20. That’s sort of a career within a career and not many have done it. But again, that probably falls into the who-cares folder. I’ll let you know when the tweaks are tweaked.

My talismans

Hi everyone,

My friend MICHAEL FRIZELL sometimes posts pictures that demonstrate the sort of mood he’s in or might be in or could be in or once was in. It’s great fun and I always look forward to his next selection. This morning I’m looking around my office at the much loved objects that have found their way here over the decades, thinking about Michael’s exercise, remembering stories behind each of my treasures, the many moods they evoke when I pause to look at them, and wondering if I’m going too far to think of them as my talismans — my bringers of luck, inspiration, strength (?), and endless stories.

We all have them. You know what yours are and why you feel compelled to keep them near you. I have a dead lizard in a jar, mummified in the desert sun on an Indian reservation near Ajo, Arizona. I was eight years old when I found it and took it home in the jar I was given by my hosts. I have kept it close for eighty years. I have written about it. Gazing at it through its glass tomb takes me back over the years and miles and lifetimes to the moment I looked down and saw it at the bottom of a dry cistern. Never going to let it go.

My grandfather’s pocket watch hangs in a small glass dome. Once years ago I got up the courage to turn its winding stem a few clicks. I was suddenly hearing the tiny tinkling that my dad’s dad, the grandfather I never knew, had held to his ear. I couldn’t hold back the sudden tears. On another shelf, a small framed picture of my other grandfather, the bastard who ran off with another women, leaving his wife and four girls at home without a penny. How many times have I looked at that picture and wondered what sort of man would be capable of inflicting such pain and hardship on his family.

Close by, three skulls. The big one, a replica of a short-face bear, was a gift from my wife and son when my book about Riverbluff Cave was published. A joyful day, an incredible surprise. The smaller skull is actually large in its own right; an extinct variety of black bear that I discovered with BILLY PAULY when we were twelve years old. Shouldn’t have been in that cave. Great adventure.

Pictures on my walls and shelves are gifts from artists with whom I’ve collaborated on a number of books — BETSY LEWIN, ELOISE WILKIN, CHRIS DEMEREST, DAN BARR, GILES LAROCHE, ROB SHEPPERSON… All represent months and years of collaboration with wonderful people, gifted artists. Yet another shelf holds a Steuben crystal brontosaurus. SANDY bought it for me in 1969 when my first book came out. One of the most wondrous gifts and the sweetest memory of all.

As the song goes, these are a few of my favorite things. There are many others. Each represents a poem or book, but their value can’t be measured that simply. They belong here. They are part of me. I have no idea what will become of them when I’m gone, but for now they bring me pleasure every day. That seems enough.