Yesterday I received a big bundle of thank you notes from the students I worked with earlier this month.

It is always a treat to hear from kids, especially if they’ve been given a little leeway in terms of what to write. Which was obviously true in this case.

Here are some of my favorites:

Dear, Liz Scanlon
Thank you for coming to my school , I realy liked it espeshly the lie poum.
So I made you a poum!
ps I dount know how to speell poum!
Roses are red
Vilets are blue
Wich is the best?
Ofcores you!
Justin

Don’t they just tickle?
Reading letters like these is one of the surest ways to laugh and be deeply moved all in the same five minutes.
Sincerely.

Currently, my eldest is reading Harry Potter.
My youngest is reading The Hobbit.
Our read-aloud is Prince Caspian.
And I’m into New Moon.

We’re getting Gandalf and Trumpkin mixed up over here.
And I’m considering playing Quidditch with Edward.
For real.

The American Library Association recognized some mighty fine books this morning, not the least of which is Marla Frazee’s A Couple of Boys Have the Best Week Ever — a 2009 Caldecott Honor Award winner.

Granted, I’m already inclined to be wooed by her work because Marla is a dear friend and personal illustrator of my next picture book, but truly folks…

A Couple of Boys is a tender, funny, empathic, intimate snapshot of boyhood and Marla is one deserving winner.

Raising my glass…

The hypothetical conversation at dinner last night went something like this:

"What if they made you give up books or music. Forever. Which one would you choose?"

"Who’s ‘they’?"

"The bad people. Who were taking over the world."

"Yeah. Only bad people would make you choose something like this, Mama."

"And you have to choose. You have to."

Torture!
We all agreed.

But then, after much hemming and hawing, we also all agreed that we’d give up… music.

Partly because we worked in a little wiggle room.
We’d be allowed to hum.
We’d be granted music books, which would help us hear music in our heads.
And who can stop a girl from singing in her sleep, after all?

But books?
There was no way around it.
We need ’em.
The girls had looks of utter horror on their faces at the prospect of doing without.

It’s hard to believe that lots of people do. Without, I mean.

Which is why I think that this is as good a time as any to remember our friends at:

First Book

Ethiopa Reads

Inside Books

Kids in Need Books in Deed

and the angels at your local public library.

Because really, nobody should have to do without books.

Over a family dinner during Christmas vacation, we had one of those long, semi-heated discussions that touch on politics, the economy, media, civic ideals. It went way past the main course and the kids all asked to be excused.

The nut was this — with new media at the forefront, with online versions of newspapers becoming the norm, who will the journalists be? Who will pay them? Who will get the stories, and will they be trained, careful, objective, committed and true?

My undergraduate degree is in journalism, and I tend to err a little on the side of the idealist, so I say that a free and dedicated press is an intrinsic part of our nation’s fabric, and such a vital expression of our values that we will not abandon it — even if we don’t want to pay for a daily paper the way we used to.

I won’t pretend to have a crystal ball vision of the future, though. No doubt journalism is evolving. Local and global stories are being captured and shared in new ways. Journalists struggle, on one hand, to give their audience the stories they say they want to read and, on the other, to give voice to the stories that truly need to be told. Plus, they have to be responsive to the increasingly corporate framework they work within. It’s enough to make a person dizzy.

Enter the poets. The new voices. The unfettered observers of the human condition. Or at least that’s what this very insightful journalist (who also happens to be my aunt) suggests.

I think of poets like Carolyn Forche, who has written as a witness just as keenly as any reporter on the front.
And poets like Billy Collins, who offers up humor and breathing room in the midst of wars and banking crises and whatnot.
And poets like Robert Hass, who puts words to the praise and reverance and compassion in a person’s heart.

These poets observe big and little bits of life, report upon them, and connect us across what seem to be gaping oceans of differences until they become familiar — universal, in fact — in the form of a poem. Not unlike a good journalist, you think?

(Click here for the story my aunt, Jane Dwyre Garton, wrote on poets, journalists and Ted Kooser’s fabulous American Life in Poetry Project.)

In my world, there’s hardly anything better than a good school visit.

I get such a charge out of spending a morning with a bunch of 4th graders.

The voices, both eager and shy, are still (mostly) unselfconsciously unique.
Which is a beautiful thing.

Today, I facilitated writing workshops for two groups of kids and the gleaming moments were many…

The spontaneous hug from a girl named Jenna…

The line, "Fire outraged my head when I was born"…

The hands raised, over and over again, to read aloud…

We talked a bit about breaking rules, about joy and impulse, about the fact that some kids don’t like to write.
Some think it’s boring.
Others think it’s hard.
Many find it scary.

And who am I to tell them differently?
I mean, really.
It IS scary.

That said, there’s fun to be had and under the guidance of William Carlos Williams who said, "Anything is fit material for poetry," we wrote ourselves a collaborative poem full of outrageous untruths. AKA, lies. I think you might like it.

The Lie Poem
By the students of Baranoff Elementary

The ocean is home to the great possum.
The world has ten sides and my dog is blue.
Brussel sprouts were never meant to be eaten.
Birds can’t fly.

You can never die blue.

Both of my girls, in the last week or so, have been asked to consider their goals or resolutions for the new year. No surprise there, right?

I remember tackling the same tasks as a kid and coming up with some pretty standard stuff — make an A in math, be nicer to my sister, that sort of thing.

The piece of this that is new, though, is that they were both asked a follow up question:

How are you going to achieve your goals?

How.

Isn’t that dynamite?

I mean, how many of us still put grandiose goals on our to-do lists, things like Publish six books by next August without ever really considering the steps we need to take to get there?

Y’know, steps like write, revise, revise, revise, share, absorb critique, revise, revise, revise, submit, write something new while waiting, revise, revise, revise…

Instead, there is an inordinate amount of time spent bemoaning the fact that nothing has happened!
Well.
Um… duh.

By the time my daughters have creative/professional/academic/familial lives of their own, this whole process will be old hat. Lucky them.

I love watching evolution happen.

Well, suffice it to say that vacation did a mean little number on my marathon training.
I am slower than I was before the holidays.
And more afraid.

Still, letting bygones be bygones, I will look back just at this one single week.
Back on track.

Mileage for the week: 36 miles
Longest run: 18 miles
High point: Finishing the 18 mile run
Higher point: Going to bed that night at 8:45
Highest point: Not having to run 18 miles the next morning

Quote for the week:

It does not matter how slowly you go so long as you do not stop. — Confucius

And now, with proof that I do have a life (but still with a slow and slogging undercurrent), I am back deeeeeeep in a manuscript so I must run off.

I don’t mean run literally, though.

You understand.

Do ya’ll remember last year when a few of us bloggers with poetic leanings got together to write a crown sonnet? What an utterly terrifying endeavour that was! Except in the end when it wasn’t.

Nope.

In the end it was, dare I say, fun.
And satisfying.

Well.
The Princesses and I (we dubbed ourselves the Poetry Princesses during the sonnet process) have missed each other.
So lately we’ve begun collaborating again.

I can’t really say anything about the project except that our driving force starts with an s-e-s and ends with a tina.
If you get my drift.

It is entirely possibly we’ll break our vows of silence sometime soon, but in the meantime, this:

Sestina for the House
By Ronald Wallace