A Teacher's Lament by Kalli Dakos

I’ve been retired from my elementary library position for six years. Before I worked as a school librarian, I was a classroom teacher for more than three decades. I stopped teaching a children's literature course at BU 1n 2008. Although I enjoyed my years teaching young children and college students, I have to say I love being retired! I can do whatever I want--whenever I want. I can blog, write poetry, go away on vacation, have lunch with friends when I choose to.

I thought Labor Day weekend would be a good time to post a poem about school—as many children will be heading back to class next Tuesday.

A Teacher’s Lament
by Kalli Dakos

Don’t tell me the cat ate your math sheet,
And your spelling words went down the drain,
And you couldn’t decipher your homework,
Because it was soaked in the rain.

Don’t tell me you slaved for hours
On the project that’s due today,
And you would have had it finished
If your snake hadn’t run away.

You can read the rest of the poem here.

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At Wild Rose Reader, I’m still in summer mode. I have an original poem titled Toasting Marshmallows.

Susan Taylor Brown has the Poetry Friday Roundup this week.

Come to the Mid-Autumn Moon Family Festival!

Mark your calendars! I'm launching my book, Thanking the Moon:Celebrating the Mid-Autumn Moon Festival at the Mid-Autumn Moon Family Festival at the Museum of Chinese in America!!

Description:

Mooncakes, lanterns and the Jade Rabbit in the moon! Join MOCA for a day-long series of activities in celebration of the Mid-Autumn Moon Festival (中秋节), including storytellings, drop-in arts and crafts activities, gallery tours and lantern making workshops with special readings by Asian American children's book authors Grace Lin (that's me!!) & Lenore Look.

WHEN: September 19th, 12pm reading and signing (other activites will be going on all day from 10-5)

WHERE: Museum of Chinese in America, 215 Centre Street, New York, NY 10013

I hope to see you there! Please come!!

vacation

trying to hold onto the summer sun!

For the last ten days I've been on vacation! When you are a freelance author, vacations can be infrequent (just like how Libby said). Most of the time, my vacations are a mix of work and fun; places to help inspire my writing or illustrating. However, this vacation was planned for pure enjoyment, relaxation and fun. See:

Doesn't that look like pure fun? It was! Because that's me up there! Really! Here, we'll zoom up:


Because, I spent my vacation on the shores of North Carolina at Okracoke Island and Kitty Hawk and had a fun, fun time swimming, getting tan, looking for sea glass, and eating lots of bad (but delicious) things. We rented a house right on the beach. To live with the ocean as a daily companion was a new and magical experience for me. In the mornings I could watch the sunrise:


and at night I could see the moonlight on the water:


Even when it stormed, it was beautiful. A child was a bit careless with his large, clear beach ball and during a storm it was slowly washed out to sea. It looked like a giant bubble, delicately riding the waves:



There was something bittersweet and poetic about it. In fact, it gave me an idea for a book...ah! For freelance authors, there really is no such thing as a non-working vacation!

OH NO! Eyewitness Charity Auction has begun!

Grace, Meghan, and I all have pieces up for auction this week! Click here to bid on our pieces for the Eyewitness reports auction. This profits from this fundraiser go entirely to support 826LA, a fabulous literacy organization. Bid on an original piece of children's book art and support a great cause!

This is what my piece looks like:

Sob inducers

A while ago Josie Levitt posted about crying in public over a book on the Publisher's Weekly Shelf Talker blog. I'm proud to say that she was sobbing over one of the books I edited, Sorta Like a Rock Star by Matthew Quick, a book I had also sobbed over in public the first time I read it.

Sorta Like a Rock Star is one of two books that I've edited in my career that have made me more than just cry--they've made me sob. Actual, stomach-heaving sobs. Not just moved, not just having tears well up in my eyes, but really cry. The other book was Rubber Houses by Ellen Yeomans.

I was remembering some of the books I sobbed over as a kid. The ones that stick out in my mind are My Brother Sam is Dead, Where the Red Fern Grows, Charlotte's Web, Summer of My German Soldier, and A Taste of Blackberries. I remember the sobbing, the streaming tears, the nose blowing and crumpled tissues. I remember feeling simultaneously anguished and reborn when I finished the books. God, I loved that feeling. A big cry feels good, particularly if it's not my own life's tragedies that I'm crying at.

As I always tell agents and announce at writer's conferences, I'm a sucker for books that make me cry. I just finished reading a wonderful book, One Crazy Summer by Rita Garcia-Williams. And yes, I had tears streaming down my face while on the train--although no actually sobbing this time, probably because they were tears of joy, rather than agony. But if you want sobbing, The Book Thief is your book.

I marvel at the skill of these authors to write such real characters, so real that I suffer true pain at the loss that the characters suffer, or pain when I lose them altogether. That's something.

What are some of your favorite sob inducers?

this is my contribution for the auction...

Freelancer's vacation

I haven't taken a going-away vacation,

or, in fact, ANY declared,I'm-not-working-for-two-weeks time in 5 years. Freelancers! What about you? Who else hasn't?


So I declare from now until the Tuesday after Labor Day TIME OFF. Time out. If you (like me) can't go anyplace, make a vacation at home -- do things you don't normally do. Me, I baked a peach pie yesterday (gluten free) which the guests declared the best they'd ever eaten.

Today I'm going to the beach.


And every day from now until the Tuesday after Labor Day, I'll do something really fun -- probably, by the water. Noel Streatfeild writes in both her autobiography and her Bell family books about a holiday by the sea, "a mountain top of a holiday; one by which all the others could be measured. Afterwards the family all knew what was meant by 'nearly as good as St.Anne's.' " (Most of their holidays were rather horrible for the children: their father lived in a dreamland where everyone loved swimming in cold English water under grey skies, lips blue all day (the picture below is me and my siblings at an English beach -- but our parents didn't make us swim! Neither did anyone else's! Most kids didn't even wear bathingsuits!),

as much as he did, and relished staying in out of the way cottages with no books, no games, nothing at all for the children to do. The children's real feelings would slip out afterwards in casual comments:
"Isn't it glorious to be home after that awful Poppy-land!" or, when drinking some new medicine:
"It's nearly as nasty as Derbyshire.") But this was a real, true, happy family vacation.

Of all the places my family went -- and as anyone who's read Blow Out the Moon knows, we travelled a lot -- OUR best vacation was when we drove to Okracoke Island, in those days only accessible by four-car ferry (just visible in the small picture, very clear if you look at it full-size)

and inhabited by not very many people and a herd of wild ponies. One of the many highlights of the vacation -- to us, at least -- was when one

stuck his head through our (closed) car window, smashing it and not hurting himself one bit. Grace is on Okracoke as I write this: Grace, I hope your time there is as happy as ours was!




As for my vacation: no babysitting, no client work, and if, or as they say in math, IFF ("if and only if") I want to, my own writing. I bet this will bring something new to it, whether I write or not over the vacation.

"One should lie empty, open, choiceless as a beach, waiting for a gift from the sea." --Anne Morrow Lindbergh (probably mis-spelling her name, but the vacation starts now, with not worrying about things like that!)

POETRY FRIDAY: Fireflies by Marilyn Kallet

Sorry I’ve been missing in action the past two Fridays. I was away on vacation at a beautiful waterfront house on Westport Island in Maine. Except for one rainy day—we had glorious weather. It was warm and dry. My daughter and her husband and two close friends came up for the weekend—and other friends joined us later in the week. We cooked and ate outside and chatted and laughed and enjoyed the view and the sound of lobster boats putt-putting around and put together jigsaw puzzles and played Scrabble and bocci. I also had an opportunity to do some reading and crossword puzzles. It was a relaxing and fun-filled vacation.

As we near the end of summer, I thought I’d post this lovely poem about fireflies and memories that I found at Ted Kooser’s site American Life in Poetry.

Fireflies
By Marilyn Kallet

In the dry summer field at nightfall,
fireflies rise like sparks.
Imagine the presence of ghosts
flickering, the ghosts of young friends,
your father nearest in the distance.
This time they carry no sorrow,
no remorse, their presence is so light.
Childhood comes to you,
memories of your street in lamplight,
holding those last moments before bed,...

You can read the rest of the poem here.

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At Wild Rose Reader, I have a post titled Going Back to School…with Poetry 2010. The post includes a brief review of and excerpts from Betsy Franco’s book MESSING AROUND ON THE MONKEY BARS AND OTHER SCHOOL POEMS FOR TWO VOICES—as well as links to my reviews of other school-themed poetry books and my original school-themed poems.


The Poetry Friday Roundup is at Book Aunt.