Sunday Paper!

I just recently began a weekend subscription for the NY Times and since then my books have been mentioned in it, not just once, but twice! Yes, Thanking the Moon was mentioned in today's paper! Yay! I'm planning a string of posts to celebrate its release this week, at my personal blog, so this was a great way to start. Make sure you tune in there for Moon Festival crafts, recipes and more!

Also notice my friend Barbara O'Connor's book The Fantastic Secret of Owen Jester is also mentioned. I wonder if she just got a subscription, too?



In honor of my new book Thanking the Moon: Celebrating the Mid-Autumn Moon Festival I'm running a week-long series of posts on the Moon Festival at my personal blog. Don't forget you can celebrate the book & the festival with me Sunday the 19th in NYC at the MOCA's Mid-Autumn Family Festival!

Photograph from September 11 by Wislawa Szymborska

In remembrance:

Photograph from September 11
BY WISŁAWA SZYMBORSKA

They jumped from the burning floors—
one, two, a few more,
higher, lower.

The photograph halted them in life,
and now keeps them
above the earth toward the earth.

Each is still complete,
with a particular face
and blood well hidden.

You can read the rest of the poem here.

**********

At Wild Rose Reader, I have a review of Joyce Sidman’s wonderful new poetry collection—Dark Emperor and Other Poems of the Night.

Anastasia Suen has the Poetry Friday Roundup at Picture Book of the Day.

Minipage Me!

Last week, I was featured in the MiniPage! The MiniPage are the Sunday newspaper supplement for kids, inserted with the colored comics (oh, how I loved those!). I think my younger readers were more impressed with this than seeing Ling & Ting in the NYTimes.

Wasn't in your paper? It wasn't in mine either, but you can download the MiniPage issue HERE!

Another lovely Desmond review

This review of Disappearing Desmond just in from School Library Journal. Thanks guys!

ps Will have pictures and updates from our recent cross country move soon, once my office arrives from UPS (fingers crossed).


"Desmond the cat blends in with his surroundings. In fact, his entire family fades into the background in their portrait. Everything changes when Gloria, a rabbit, arrives at school. Not only does she take every possible chance to get noticed herself, but she also notices Desmond no matter where he hides. To his surprise, he likes interacting with others. He even coaxes someone else from his hiding place to join the playground fun. Young viewers will enjoy spotting Desmond in his ingenious costumes and identifying others trying to stay out of sight in the schoolyard. Alter’s animal characters will be familiar to those who know her previous books, including Abigail Spells (Knopf, 2009), featured in a library poster. This low-key story of how friendship can support and encourage others will be a welcome addition for most libraries."

-School Library Journal

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.

********************

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.

**********

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.

nostalgia

I was thrilled to receive from Albert Whitman the beloved Flicka, Dicka, Ricka & Snipp, Snapp, Snurr books that I adored from childhood. If you recall, they are the books that inspired Ling & Ting! They are actually still in print--do you remember them now? Seeing them is like seeing a bit of my childhood all over again.

I forgot about "Flicka, Dicka, Ricka and the Strawberries"...I think Ling and Ting are going to have to go berry picking in their next adventure!

Desmond is out today, hurray!

As I mentioned last week I've been busy putting together materials for my new book, out today! Lots of fun things are in the works, I'll keep you posted as I put materials on my web site and plan events this fall to get the word out about the book.

If you'll be in the San Francisco area, I'll be signing books at Kepler's in Menlo Park on October 3rd. More on that soon!

Did I mention I'm temporarily moving to San Francisco for 9 months? So that is happening too. In one week. This is what my studio presently looks like:



Also, I am seven months pregnant. This is what I presently look like:



Its been a busy summer to say the least. Looking forward to an eventful fall!

Ode to Twitter

Last week, I mentioned that I had passed my one-year anniversary of joining Twitter. To commemorate this important landmark, I thought I'd highlight a few of Twitter's benefits, in no particular order:


Research and Advice
-I was working on a book and the question arose as to whether students in an illustration set during gym class should be wearing gym clothes or their regular school clothes. The students were in third grade. I sent out a Tweet, and within 20 minutes had received over six responses from around the country saying that third graders don't change into gym clothes.
-I asked for recommendations for iPhone apps, and received lots of great tips, including Lose It, Scramble 2, and Paper Toss.

Food Recommendations
-discovered a new poutine restaurant in NYC after seeing someone tweet a picture of their almost-consumed poutine.
-after I took a picture of my soup dumpling from Joe's Shanghai, an author asked where it was from, and then she went and tried it out.

Fundraising
-an author saw my Tweet about doing the MS Ride--it turned out that her mother suffers from multiple sclerosis, and so she, her brother, and her father all donated to the cause. I received at least one other unrelated donation as a result of my Tweet. (BTW, I'm doing the ride again this year, you can donate here. My goal is to raise $550, and ride 50 miles. Please sponsor me!)

Recruiting
-I've found two interns through Twitter--in both cases, someone saw my Tweet and then referred a candidate to me. I've actually found many candidates through Twitter!
-We've also hired two editorial assistants who have come directly or indirectly via one of my tweets on Twitter.

Networking
-I interact with other editors, agents, authors, illustrators, librarians, etc. via Twitter.
-I participate occasionally in several different Twitter chats, including #Yalitchat and #kidlitchat.
-I went to a Tweet-up at ALA Midwinter.

News (publishing and otherwise)
-I follow news people and magazines (Slate.com, NYTimes, PW, SLJ, Entertainment Weekly, Gothamist, Roger Ebert, etc.), and follow links and headlines.
-I know very quickly which celebrity has died (or is rumored to have died). Of particular note this past year: Patrick Swayze, Michael Jackson, and Britney Murphy.

Promotion
-I tweet reviews, awards, and other good news about the books I edit (and other books I love)
-I've set up an automatic tweet when a new post is up on both my personal blog, and the Blue Rose Girls. Oftentimes, seeing my own update on Twitter has alerted me to the fact that one of my fellow Blue Rose Girls has posted something new!
-I helped organize and participated in a Twitter chat in honor of the paperback release of Geektastic: Stories from the Nerd Herd using the hashtag #geektastic.

Keeping up with friends/Entertainment
-this is yet another way to know what my friends are up to, and vice versa.
-I love tweeting about events and reading other people's tweets who I know are watching/experiencing the same thing: for example, the season finale of Dexter, or an awards show like the Oscars or Grammys.

Creating a record
-While writing this post, I went back to a site where I've archived all of my Tweets. As I Tweeted last night, I found myself sucked in--it was like reading an old journal, except the entries are much shorter, of course! I loved reading my tweets from my Japan and Hong Kong trip last year.
-I've tweeted several live events, such as the Printz Awards, Happyface book launch party, and Children's Choice Awards.

Twitter isn't for everyone, but I love it. Although I'll admit, I'm perhaps just a wee bit addicted and spend a little more time checking Twitter than I should. But if you haven't tried Twitter, I'd suggest at least checking it out. I have a feeling it'll be around for a while. And who knows what benefits you'll find--others have found all sorts of uses for Twitter. Some people have even used Twitter to lose weight!

GUM ART

In honor of my book POP! getting in the NYT...



I've finally gotten my act together and finished up some of the web pages for the book.



So this is what you have to chose from, though I haven't finished the coloring pages section yet. Okay, I haven't even started it yet. but I'll get to it! (To see the section click here)

If any of you have any good ideas of what else I can do let me know. I was thinking about having some sort of contest - like a bubble gum blowing contest. Send in videos of you blowing in bubbles and you win a book or some such. But I don't know how to make it work exactly. So I don't know.

So that's what's happening for now.

meghan