Vermont College

I've just returned home from Vermont College of Fine Arts where I teach in the Writing for Children and Young Adults. We had a fantastic residency. It's so intense, it's like a writing boot camp. We go from early morning until way after dinner with lectures and readings and group workshops and individual meetings between students and advisers.

 This time I did yoga (classes almost every day) and I managed to get there (7 am!) six or seven times, so I felt like I had a yoga retreat as well. But sleep? Not so much.

Kathi Appelt and I did back to back lectures. I led off with writing picture book biographies, discussing the brilliant craft moves in four of my favorite picture book bios. I couldn't resist talking about the dance between images and text, and how to save "scrap" for the upcoming illustrator while researching. I unplugged my PowerPoint and Kathi plugged in, rolling with her lecture on autobiography and memoir, and how facts and feelings play into them. It was a great saturation in the whole genre with both of us coming at it from different angles. Kathi is pure inspiration.

Residency is a time of taking in more than you ever thought you could, a bittersweet time of letting go of old teacher-student relationships and starting new ones. It's a time of risk-taking, and falling or leaping off cliffs and flying, as the graduating class of Wingbuilders can attest.

Here are the last couple students making it to a reading, just at that moment when it is getting dark but you can still take a photograph. And yeah, I was the very last one there, or I couldn't have taken this shot!

Summertime, interview with Author Turf

I am loving summer. In a week I take off for Vermont College where I'm teaching. It's incredibly fun. Challenging, exhausting, rewarding... all rolled up into ten days. Not only do I get to be with terrific students who are working their hearts out to get better at writing, but I also get to listen to inspiring lectures from the other faculty.

Before I leave I had to make it out to the Pacific Ocean with my friend Andrea to hold me through the Vermont heat.


Why does the ocean look like it should pour through the gap? I've never understood this optical illusion.

We watched a pre-teen girl and her dad play in the waves, and then brush off the sand and get their shoes and socks back on and head out with their backpacks. On the return walk we spotted them again....


See them? Curled up in the high grass, reading?

Summertime and the living is easy.

And here's an interview with me that Brittney Breakey posted on her fantastic blog, Author Turf.

New Year, new adventure

Yesterday our older son, Will, headed home to freezing Minnesota, and our younger son, Felix, went back to work (currently making cow proof fences so salamanders won't get squashed.) All the holiday decorations are put away. One last birthday cake to make -- my husband's birthday is tomorrow -- and then life returns to ... well, not normal exactly. To my new adventure.

In a few days I leave for freezing Vermont. (Notice a theme here with the cold?) I've taken a job teaching at Vermont College in the MFA Writing for Children and Young Adults Program. I am incredibly excited. I've never taught in an organized program before, though I've done all the pieces (lectures, critiquing, encouraging, mentoring.) Being used to mild California weather, I sent ahead a box of warmness -- a down quilt, flannel sheets, snow boots and a teapot.

My year started off with a treat. Last summer we had an amazing Boston Globe-Horn Book award evening, with all the winners giving speeches. The Horn Book people have graciously put links to all of them on their site. Here's my Boston Globe-Horn Book speech for Marching for Freedom. It's partly about writing the book, and partly about why I write and what inspires me.

And with a time-consuming new adventure coinciding with a new year, I've come up with a New Year's resolution: prioritize. This is always a weakness with me in the best of times. So with more demands on my time, I'm going to see if I can be more mindful. I've written prioritize on a slip of paper and stuck it to the bottom of my computer screen.

What will you be doing more mindfully this year?