Today I drove through Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri and Arkansas.
I’m not kidding.
With my kids in the back seat, my iPod on shuffle and my nose turned toward home.
We’re currently ensconced in a Holiday Inn in West Memphis which, oddly enough, isn’t in Tennessee.

But needless to say, our dinner time conversation centered on Elvis and his Graceland, the weddings, impersonators and bejeweled jumpsuits, and the difference between Elvis and Buddy Holly. 

Mind you, my little gals are Texans so they knew all about Holly but not a hoot about Presley. What a funny story he is to conjure up and tell with any sort of credibility. It all sounds a bit, I don’t know, kookie. But to add to the drama and verisimilitude, I ended up singing and doing a little hip demo. In the restaurant. They were duly impressed. The kids, I mean, not the waitstaff.

Maybe this is what happens when you go on the road for five weeks. You end up happy and a bit untethered. We started in Colorado and wound our way to Wisconsin and then Michigan. My L.A. jaunt got tucked in the middle there, and now we’re making the long slog toward home. Don’t even start calculating the miles. It’ll make you queasy.

Our girls were born to road trip. They’ll curl up in the back with their string cheese and bowl of cherries, a ream of construction paper and a book of MadLibs, and lose themselves in dreamland until one of them notices the truly prehistoric insectoid sprinklers crawling across the fields of soybeans and corn. Then it’s back to recording all the license plates they see, sipping on a root beer and listening to one of the Herdman’s books on tape.

My husband and I are always itchin’ for the road so it’s no surprise, I guess. Still, I’m gratified that they’ve acquired the taste for adventure, and the patience to roll along through the middle of middle America when the air’s hot and still and there’s not much to see. 

Travel’s like reading, I think. You get a good view of the world out there, and a good view of yourself, too. 
Wholly worthwhile. Don’t you think?

Here’s one of my favorite Wallace Stevens poems, in honor of all that:

The Poem that Took the Place of a Mountain

There it was, word for word,
The poem that took the place of a mountain.

He breathed its oxygen,
Even when the book lay turned in the dust of his table.

It reminded him how he had needed
A place to go to in his own direction…

(Read the rest of the poem here)

I’m posting this from my gate at LAX, which means the conference is over — at least for me. There are a fair number of lucky ducks who are still getting one last afternoon of edifying fun, but I’m back in the land of tray tables and flight attendandants who are there primarily for my safety.

Sigh. 
Really, the dream went * poof * the instant I pulled away by taxi cab, which was more like a pumpkin than I’d have liked. A really, really hot pumpkin with a broken credit card machine.

But the last little bits of the conference were flawless, so let me re-direct.

Allyn Johnston and Marla Frazee gave a talk about their many years of working intimately together to create gem-like books. I mean, if gems could breathe.

It was a picture-perfect presentation — quite literally — with gorgeous slides of everything from early thumbnail sketches to various cover art samples to funny notes that’ve passed between the two. There were a lot of rather revealing antecdotes about the pressures of the marketplace, like this one:

“Books have to shout out what they are these days. Subtlety is not the name of the game,” said Marla.

But, said Allyn, “Titles, colors and trim widths can change; if our intentions change, that’s dangerous.”

I mean really, half the stuff we learned this weekend about the marketplace would be disheartening if it weren’t for all these incredibly gifted, careful and conscious caretakers working to stay focused on creating great books for children — on top of, along with and in spite of the bottom line. 

Allyn tries to “remain as mindful as possible of the actual experience an adult and child will have reading a book,” and that seems like a surefire way to get things right, don’t you think?

It pretty much made me want to get writing so that I can work with her for a long, long time.
Which I think is how you’re supposed to feel on your way home from a conference like this. 

Ready.
Eager.
Fired Up.

Report respectfully submitted…
Signing off.

So, John Green not only writes books that win the presitigious-beyond-measure Printz award, but he also gives speeches that are touching and funny, and he’s cute to boot. I’d say that it’s not fair except I hate to complain when we’re all enjoying him so dang much. Y’know?

This morning he talked about freeing himself  “from the shackles of the facts” in order to write something emotionally and intellectually true. I really, really like discerning between facts and truth, and I know from countless discussions with writing students that just because “it really happened” doesn’t mean it really works.

He also said that “great books don’t happen by accident.”

“I don’t think literature just comes to you,” said Green. “I think its something you work very hard on.”

I like that, too.

Later, I went to hear Mary Hershey talk about writing better humor. It was thicker and better than I expected because she wanted us to dig into our childhoods and obsessions and stuff. This was no banana-peel-on-floor-Tom-trickery. Hershey was talking about the real deal. 

“The art of humor is in the way that you look at the world,” she said.

And then a pretty good chunk of the day was devoted to the Golden Kite Awards and luncheon. Those are the book awards given by SCBWI members to books by SCBWI members. Kind of Golden Globey. Tony Abbott, author of Firegirl, gave a particularly thoughtful and funny acceptance speech. Plus, the dessert was chocolately.

And then this afternoon, Linda Sue Park and her editor Dinah Stevenson did a little tag-team talk on the author/editor relationship. Here are my favorite bits:

Linda Sue Park said, “Most people who want to be published writers do not read enough.” And she asked the audience to read 1,000 picture books before writing their own. I think she should win some sort of award for that. Or get a bronze book on the sidewalk in front of New York Public Library. Or something like that.

And then Dinah Stevenson said, “Focus your energy on your craft.” 
I mean, it sounds so simple but don’t we all get wrapped up in wanting to be published, rich and famous when really we should be reading and crafting and revising and crafting and reading and revising? 

So now I think it’s my responsibility to crawl into these very fine sheets at the Hyatt Regency Century Plaza and read one of the many new books I’ve picked up in the last coupla days. Don’t you?

Was this morning really this morning or was that like three days ago?
Or are days longer here?
Or are we in a time warp?

Granted, I woke up thinking maybe I should’ve gone to bed a tad bit earlier and sipped on maybe one less glass of wine the night before. But even if I’d been to bed at a proper hour, I think I’d be pretty well walloped. 
In a good way.

Today we started with agents Kate Schafer and Tracey Adams, the latter of whom said, “We’re not looking for a reason to reject. We’re looking to fall in love. Absolutely.”

I swear that people’s shoulders relaxed when she said that.

Illustrator Kadir Nelson showed a lot of really pretty slides and talked about evolving as an artist.

“Is this going to give me the opportunity to do something new?” he asks himself when approached with a new project. Because “you don’t want to be bored when you’re working on a piece of art. It’ll show.”

Next, I went to hear Linda Sue Park talk about switching genres since she’s a master and I’m finding my middle-grade work-in-progress kind of tricky after spending my whole writing life trying to tighten, distill and encapsulate things in very little packages. 

She gave us a whole heap of reasons why not to branch out — not the least of which is that it confuse the heck out of readers — but in the end she encouraged going with your gut, listening to the story and giving it the space it requires.

“The best reason to try to write in another genre,” said Park, “is because you learn something about yourself as a writer.” Which kind of makes it seem worthwhile, don’t you think?

After lunch, we got a report on the state of the industry from publisher Ruben Pfeffer. He talked a lot about negotiating the murky waters of artistic integrity and the commercial marketplace and about the value of what it is we do.

He said, “A great book is one that sends a child off to read another book.”

In the afternoon, Kirby Larson and Ann Whitford Paul hosted a really great get-together about connections and community. They pulled all the chairs into a circle, which always helps, and by the end they pretty much required everyone to get up and mingle. 

“Little connections can take you to big places,” said Whitford Paul. 

An added bonus here was meeting (in person) Kelly Fineman, whom I’d previously known only through blogging. Wasn’t that an appropriate time to have that happen??

The real capper to the day was a truly moving keynote speech by Ellen Wittlinger called How Can a 58-Year-Old Write Books for Teenagers (and why does she want to?)

“An older person is just a teenager with no fashion sense or technological skills,” she said.

She got a lot of laughs for lines like that but by the end, there weren’t many dry eyes. She talked about attending to  the interior lives of teens, about social justice, about prejudice and enlightment. 

She said, “When you write for teenagers, you can be certain that you will touch their lives…. Once you’re an adult, it’s a lot harder for something you read to change your life.”

I still had a lump in my throat when I bumped into Lisa Wheeler and Kelly DiPucchio and Cecil Castellucci and Cynthia Leitich Smith and I don’t know who all else. It’s hard to keep track of all the really shiny stars around here.

Many of whom came dressed as such to the Light of the Silvery Moon Gala tonight. 
Outside.
By the pool.
Dancing and yummy Mexican food even a Texan could love.

Sweet dreams…

I think I’m dizzy. 
If this was really just Day One, I’d better catch my breath — big time — 
in order to make it through the weekend.
But don’t get me wrong, I’m happy happy happy.
I soaked up a lot of good stuff today. 
Like crusty bread in bouillabaisse.

Originally, I thought I’d write long, journally pieces on everyone I listened to, but nix that.
My new plan: One quote per session. 
Is it short-shrifting the whole deal? 
Yep. But that’s inevitable anyway, so humour me.

Here goes:

Our welcome came from the warm and funny Stephen Mooser and Lin Oliver of the executive branch of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI). 

Lin said we’d come together to “celebrate what it is that we’re all blessed to do.” 
Oh, she also told us that there were 964 us. Which, like I said, is whole lotta folk.

The deeply talented Walter Dean Myers talked about trying to articulate to others (and himself) exactly what it is he does — with his time, for money, for love. I really liked his answer. 

He says that as readers, in order to be completely taken by a book, we need more than mere information — “we need to recognize the details as truth.” Isn’t that lovely? 

So his bottom line is this: 
“What I do, every single day of my life, is select details.” 
That almost sounds do-able, don’t you think?

Young-as-a-whipper-snapper author-illustrator Peter Brown gave a little slice-of-life presentation that was particularly comforting to me since I can’t draw worth beans. 

Here’s my favorite line: 
“You can draw anything and if you give it a trunk and some leaves, it’ll look like a tree.”

Next, I went to session called “Inside Harcourt” since I have my own new and vested interest in that particular house. Plus, I’m curious about the inside of almost anything, aren’t you?

Editor in Chief Allyn Johnston, joined by editor Andrea Welch and editorial assistants Beth Jacobsen and Jessie Dzundza, talked about the inner workings of the house of Harcourt and honestly, my favorite part was when Allyn said, “If it wasn’t books that got us into publishing it’s the fact that we like opening mail.” 

I mean, really, don’t we just start thinking that editors dread the dive into the slush pile? So to find out that their fingers itch and their hearts race, hoping to discover the next best book? That’s pretty cool. Don’t you think?

Editor and publisher Emma Dryden, of McElderry and Atheneum Books (Simon & Schuster) talked about connecting kids and books in the digital age. “Writers find themsleves in their books,” she said, suggesting that the sharing of that emotional journey is how we can hope to connect most viscerally to our readers.

From there I got to visit with Susan Patron, Newbery award winner for The Higher Power of Lucky who talked about her 10-year-long writer’s block. That’d be a decade. Holy moly. And then she talked about how she pulled out of it. 

Hint #3 was a goodie:
“Act as if you know what you’re doing, even if you don’t. Trust the rich interior life of your mind.”

I think that means we don’t have to have outlined everything on index cards or Powerpoints. 
Phew.

By the way, Susan Patron was introduced by none other than Tim Crow, the Regional Advisor for the Austin (Texas) chapter of SCBWI. (Go, Tim!)

After all this, we were each gifted a cold and creamy Ben & Jerry’s Peace Pop.
Mine was Cherry Garcia covered in thick chocolate.
Come to think of it, maybe that’s why I’m dizzy.

But wait! To wrap up the day, there was a panel of editors discussing how to receive criticism, during which they tried to de-emphasize the editorial power and mystique we tend to be so weak-kneed around.

Arthur Levine, for example, says that editors are “just people who are having a reaction.”

And speaking of editors, I got to have a long, late dinner with Allyn and Marla and I’m having a reaction. 

Satisfied.
Grateful.
Inspired. 
Exhausted.

More tomorrow.
Trailing off….

Late last night I arrived to the pink lights and bustle of Los Angeles.
Late late. I’m all foggy-headed. 
A constant stream of gate announcements ran through my dreams

Still, I’m here, sharing air space with zillions of other writers, readers and artists.
OK, maybe not a zillion but a whole lot of folk.
A whole lot of folk whose passion is making good books for kids.
I’m so inspired to be in the thick of it.

Here’s a link to a good batch of poems about reading, like this one by Arnold Lobel:

Books to the ceiling
Books to the sky
My piles of books are a mile high…

(Complete poem on the web page…)

I think they might help put you in the mood I’m in.

Ahhh. 
We’ve left the mountains and turned to the midwest, 
where my daughters are swimming in the same lake I swam in — and my dad did — when we were 8. 
Squint your eyes and not a day’s gone by.

In honor of all the fun, this poem:

The Barefoot Boy, by John Greenleaf Whittier

Blessings on thee, little man,
Barefoot boy, with cheek of tan!
With thy turned-up pantaloons,
And thy merry whistled tunes;
With thy red lip, redder still
Kissed by strawberries on the hill;
With the sunshine on thy face,
Through thy torn brim’s jaunty grace;
From my heart I give thee joy,—
I was once a barefoot boy!

Read the rest of the poem here…