A good week

Hi everyone,

A short week but a good one. We returned from Oregon on Tuesday after a great trip with Jeff and Jennifer that included Portland, Crater Lake, Sunriver, and Cannon Beach. Spectacular views, wonderful food, and loving company. Couldn’t ask for more or better.

I’m twenty work-days away from my Fairfax deadline and feel confident I can make it. A lot of things are going undone for now but it won’t be much longer before I can return to a more normal routine. This past week I agreed on terms for an old story of mine, “The Little Boy’s Secret,” to appear in a U.K. HarperCollins anthology for 7-year-olds. The story originally came out in THE BOOK OF GIANT STORIES, co-published by American Heritage Press in the U.S.A. and Jonathan Caple in England in 1972.

I’m set for a virtual return on October 30 to The BookMark in Neptune Beach, Florida. This time I’m introducing the new book, I WANT AN APPLE. I look forward to it.

I began sketching notes for a video I promised to make as part of the Fairfax project. I need to make it before the end of November. Mary Jo Fresch, Laura Robb, Tim Rasinski, and I made plans to rehearse a 60-minute webinar for California Reading Conference that will be broadcast live on November 18.

Next week I speak at American Association of School Librarians at its national conference in Salt Lake City. Kate Coombs and I will discuss science/nature-based poetry for young people. Our presentation, “Take a Walk on the Wild Side: Connecting Young Readers to Nature,” will be moderated by award winning librarian Amanda Jones from Louisiana. I’ll speak on the subject in general but with emphasis on THE DIRT BOOK.

Time to get to work.

The Word of the Month word for August

Hi everyone

Kaye Cosgrove and I enjoyed our virtual visit yesterday morning to The BookMark in Neptune, Florida. I hope sometime to get over that way to meet Rona Brinlee and the gang in person. The picture is in a different place (SunDog Books in Seaside, Florida) and a different book (AND THE BULLFROGS SING, but also illustrated by Kate), but it’s hard to take a picture when you’re doing a virtual visit. If it helps any, yesterday I wore the same shirt and shorts.

Time to put away your “poem” poems and write your “weed” poems. I’ve been looking back through the records and it appears that we’ve never used that word before.

So off we go. Let’s see your weedy best!

Book store today

Hi everyone,

This morning at 9:00 EST I’ll join artist Kate Cosgrove in a virtual visit to The BookMark, a fine book store in Neptune, Florida. I look forward to the opportunity to talk about THE DIRT BOOK and see Kate again. The new book is off to a good start and I hope this will make a few folks in the Neptune area aware of it. Maybe I should write a sand book as a sequel. Have a good weekend.