Yesterday was the last day of school for my daughters.

We went up in the morning for the holiday sing-along and back in the afternoon to deliver gifts to teachers. (And to hear the kids called out, "See you next year!" and then cracked up.
Some things never change…)

In between, Small One’s class presented a short program on Peacemakers.
They’d each chosen one (Ghandi… Cesar Chavez…. Helen Prejean… Pete Seeger…) to research and tell us about.
There’d obviously been some rehearsing because they were clear as bells — all of them — talking about nuclear disarmament and nursing the poor and civil rights.

They stood in front of the little village of papier mache houses they’d made and a big bulletin board bedecked with images of the peacemakers. Imagine my surprise to see that the headline on the bulletin board read, "Hope and peace and love and trust, All the world is all of us." I think it’s my favorite reading of the book so far, and it was a silent one.  

The kids had all taken UNESCO’s Pledge for Peace, too, and I was left with an overall sense of hopefulness that if these 8- and 9-year-olds grow up to run the world, things aren’t gonna be half bad.
 

I love teaching.
I love the opportunity to put on shoes and lipstick and leave my little cave every once and awhile.
I love being around when new writers experience epiphanies and evolution.

I also find it hard sometimes.
Trotting out the shoes and lipstick, yeah, but also trying to figure out how to be most helpful to my students.
What resources to offer… what to say and how to say it… what to require…
How to balance encouragement and critique… how to stay organized and on track… how to assess creative work…

At the end of each semester, I reflect on how it all went (okay, so I’m procrastinating because my grades are due today).
Here’s what I’ve come up with this time around:

1. Sitting in a circle is a good idea, even when I’m giving a sort of lecture.

2. The fewer lectures the better.

3. The more reading aloud the better.

4. Humor’s a good idea, too.

5. Workshops are richest when there are many voices. I’ve resisted "required commenting" for a long time, but I think I’m going to experiment with a new format next semester to get every single student to speak up more regularly.

6. Online workshops also work best when communication is frequent and vital. Students say they want to be left alone to work at their own pace, but that actually just allows them slip away into the great interweb void. I need to play a little bit more of the street performer to keep everyone engaged from beginning to end.

7. Meeting in person, at least once, might really, really, really help an online workshop gel. Just attaching faces to names and saying, "Please pass the cream." That sort of thing. Next semester, I plan to schedule an in-person get-together right out of the gate.

8. I work best when I have a particular day or two per week dedicated to teaching prep and student critique. I need to get in the zone through immersion. A little bit here-a little bit there is not efficient or inspiring.

9. Trying to discern between a student who needs a little empathy and a student who’s taking me for a sucker is.not.easy.at.all. So, although I do get burned at least once a semester, I’m still going to err on the side of a little empathy.

10. Not all students have library cards. I’m seriously thinking of making this a required part of all my syllabi from now on. I mean, it’ll look like a requirement but it will really be a gift. Y’know what I mean?

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have some really dynamite portfolios to read.
The written word is alive and well in Austin, Texas.
Indeed it is…

Probably everyone else took care of their holiday gift list about a month ago.
But, if you’re like me — still ticking away and pretending like the post office is a kind and gentle place for last-minute mailers, take heart.
I have a few ideas for you…

1. Books. Shocker, right? I’m giving mostly books this year because there are so darn many good ones out!!! I can’t mention them all here because I fear there may be spies a’foot, but here’s a little taster: The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate, The Navel of the World, Where the Mountain Meets the Moon, and Moonshot.

2, Photo books a la Shutterfly, Snapfish or, my new favorite, A & I.

3. Gift certificates to Kiva, microloan love worldwide.

4. Paperwhite bulbs.

5. Homemade chocolate sauce.

I wish I could say I was knitting scarves (my Small One’s doing that) or making potholders (ditto) or otherwise crafting the perfect holiday gift. But I am missing the craft gene. Seriously.

A little kindergarten buddy of mine came over the other day and assessed our advent calendar — one of the only finished craft projects to my name. He wondered why I’d used an elf hat rather than a Christmas tree as the central motif. Um. The thing is, it IS a Christmas tree. See what I mean?

But if you guys are good at that sort of thing, carry on…

My agent, who’s also agent to a daunting number of supremely smart, funny and talented folk,
has launched a web site!
It’s pretty!
It’s inspiring!
It’s slick!
Go see!

This weekend, I got word from friends coast-to-coast that All the World was named the year’s best picture book by the L.A.Times (thanks, Melodye!) and a Best Kids’s Book of the Year by The Washington Post (thanks, AnneMarie!)

Mercy, mercy me…

Also (and this kind of cracks me up) it was featured in People.
As in People Magazine.
For real, you guys.
They failed to include the photo of me hanging with the cast of Twilight, but they did recommend All the World on the books page. Isn’t that a trip?

My editor sent me a pdf of the page but I can’t figure out how to copy it here.
So, go ahead and imagine me with the cast of Twilight if you must…

My daughters have not outgrown being read to.

We share the latest chapter in our latest chapter book every night.

My husband and I take turns. (He sometimes cheats and reads ahead after the girls go to bed.)

We take the books camping and on road trips and on airplanes.

We have a list of the ones next in line.

Often we’re all on the couch together.

Sometimes my Small One is doing handstands while she listens; sometimes, she knits.

The cats are there, too.

If the phone rings, we let it ring.

Nightly, when we finish, the girls beg for me.

Nightly, we give in.

But that’s not even what I’m grateful for today, if you can believe it.
Nope. I’m grateful for the fact that my daughters’ teachers know they haven’t outgrown being read to.

As third and fifth graders, they are read to every single day in school.

Tall One’s teacher is currently trying to finish The Tapestry before winter break; Small One’s teacher is a Bill Wallace fan.

They’ve built in their classrooms a culture of books, discussion, prediction, emotion, and passion.
They’ve established "reading for pleasure" as a priority.
They’ve helped recreate that intimacy that often only happens at home and, all too often, with much younger children.

For that I am grateful and so, I know, are the eight- and eleven-year-olds listening…

… don’t write picture books just because they’re shorter than novels — Michael Stearns

At an author’s gathering on Saturday, we discussed the pains and perils of the picture book market.

It turns out that at that very moment, literary agent Michael Stearns was blogging about the same thing.

Serendipity!

I thought you’d find it kind of interesting, what he has to say…

Do you guys remember the Poetry Princesses, from way back when?

OK. So. We’re not real princesses. We came up with that name as a way to distract ourselves from the dull, thumping awareness that we’d committed to:

1. Writing a Crown Sonnet
2. Publishing it on our blogs
3. Using our real names to do so
4. Not freaking out or throwing up in public

I mean, really.
It’s a wonder we just anointed ourselves as royalty.
We might’ve locked ourselves in the Tower of London with medicinals.

But no.
We’re made of crazier stronger stuff than all that.
We wrote the dang sonnets.
And then we retreated into the black holes of our own private blogs for a year and a half.

Well guess what?
The memory finally sufficiently scabbed over and we took on another project — villanelles this time!

Kelly Fineman, our indisputed Duchess de Form, explains the ins and outs of villanelles here.
Beyond all that, our rules were to include the words friend and Thanksgiving in our first and third lines.
And to finish by today.

Nothing to it.
Right?

Oi.

You should see our panicky Google Mail exchanges from the last two weeks:
"… doesn’t meet the requirements…"
"… way darned harder than it looks…"
"… isn’t complete garbage…"
"… sigh…"
"… crap…"

But also:
"… lovely…"
"… a comfort…"
"… in awe…"
"… happy…"

Happy to be together again, that it is. Because really, is anything better than a community of smart, funny, like-minded friends willing to take on a 16th century French form poem on a whim? The luck of it all!

So on that note, and with gratitude, we share with you these… our poems.
Thanks for reading. And enjoy.

Kelly Fineman’s
Sara Lewis Holmes’
Tanita Davis’
Andromeda Jazmon’s
Laura Salas’
Tricia Stohr-Hunt’s
and mine:

First Date on the Railroad Trestle

Thanksgiving through her lips, a whispered prayer –
Let this night last, I do not want to say goodbye.
Inside of every friendship there’s a dare,

a pit, a seed, a growing need to strip down bare.
This is me, so full of fear but willing, still, to try.
(Thanksgiving through her lips, a whispered prayer.)

She followed as his feet fell on the makeshift stairs –
breath like water, shoes like stones, a shimmer in her eyes.
Inside of every friendship there’s a dare.

At the top he took her hand, the wind let down her hair.
A slip of moon, his skin on hers, she felt like she could fly.
Thanksgiving through her lips, a whispered prayer

lost in the coming of the train, the whistle blared.
Right now, he yelled. The dark turned light, she didn’t even cry —
inside of every friendship there’s a dare.

I did not fall, the trestle held, my god, I did not die.
He laughed and bent to kiss her as the train rolled by.
Thanksgiving through her lips, a whispered prayer.
Inside of every friendship there’s a dare.

(You can find these — and a lotta other wonderful stuff — at Wild Rose Reader’s Poety Friday Round-Up today!)

Thanks to my fabulous matchmaker of an agent, this announcement from Publishers Marketplace:

World rights to ALL THE WORLD author Liz Garton Scanlon’s picture book THINK BIG, a lyrical celebration of imagination and creativity in many child-friendly forms, to Michelle H. Nagler at Bloomsbury Children’s by Erin Murphy.

The illustrator thing isn’t pinned down yet, but I’ll keep you posted. He or she has a big job because this little wisp of a manuscript is only fifty-four words. No. I’m not kidding. Before long I’ll be submitting individual dots instead of words.

Man, I have been on one of the best reading jags ever.
Not a miss in six months.
And I keep thinking I’m going to post about them all — both the books for kids and adults — but then I get all embroiled in the next-one-I-can’t-put-down.

People.
This is a very good problem to have.

Still, I’m going to take a quick breather here and (better late than never) tell you about Dave Eggers’ Zeitoun.

This book blew me away for all kinds of reasons.

1. It totally completes Eggers’ evolution from self-referential memoirist, through creative-nonfiction-based novelist, to impassioned journalist. Don’t get me wrong. I’ve actually loved all of Eggers’ books and am not dissing Heartbreaking Work or, god forbid, What is the What at all. But there is something newly and deeply generous and outward-looking about Zeitoun.

2. It takes place in New Orleans before and after Hurricane Katrina which, as you know, was not a time or place filled with great hope. But I had.no.idea.quite.how.bad.it.was. I mean, I live close enough to New Orleans that when they have a storm, we get some of the rain, and still, I felt as if I were reading post-apocolyptic sci fi or something. The story is crazy eye-opening.

3. It is also an indictment without hysteria. It is calm and measured and graceful. Which, on the one hand, just makes you want to scream. And on the other, makes you want to bow, in admiration and gratitude.

4. Hello, Muslim faith education. Feeling kind of dumb about the gaping holes in my knowledge that this book shone light through and I have been working to rectify that ever since.

5. The covers of the McSweeney’s books are beautiful to look at and wonderful to hold.

I’d like to recommend that you read this one.
I really would…

Time was when my husband (then boyfriend) and I used to backpack 17 miles in a day — uphill both ways — fueled by a few dried apple rings and some creek water with a tab of iodine thrown in for good measure. And the next day we’d get up at sunrise and do it again.

I know it doesn’t actually sound fun, but it was.

We’d go for days without seeing anyone but each other.
We’d meet rattlesnakes and red-tail hawks and foxes, up close and personal.
We’d daydream.

And when we had children and had to toss in the teeny tent for a bigger one, we grieved. Car camping just wasn’t the same, though dang if we didn’t try. We trucked our kids all over god’s green acre with cans of beans and a camp stove, all for the pleasures of smelling campfire smoke in their hair and showing them the stars that just plain don’t show up at our house. It’s been worth it, but still…

This past summer, a decade into parenting, we fitted the girls with their own small packs and made our maiden family backpacking voyage into the Tetons, in Wyoming. It went so well that we just did it again, over Thanksgiving (this time in Big Bend National Park), and lordamercy was it fine.

We hiked and climbed and stomped for three days — covering about the distance we might’ve used to in one.

We carried all our own water — needing to be certain that we had enough for the kids to drink.

And we ate a heck of a lot more than dried apple rings. There was corn chowder and oatmeal and trail mix galore. I even toted in an itsy bitsy pumpkin pie for Thursday night.

But the integral reasons for getting out there were still fully realized.
Intimate togetherness.
Wildness and staggering beauty.
Space to dream. (Um, in a chatty sort of way.)

As my husband said on our last day (a day in which we’d already played some hilarious rounds of 20 Questions, discussed which other National Parks we’d like to visit, made up mysteries, and played a newly-invented acronym game), "They do the same random free associating we do when we walk… they just do it aloud."

And now we’re home. It’s cold and rainy today — not the weather for a good walk. The girls are back in school, I have a lunch date and the laundry is the most astounding sight around here.

And yet.
We saw a black bear this weekend.
And oaks that had turned gold.
And the summit of Mt. Emory.
We saw each other and it was really, truly fine.