Virginia Euwer Wolff

There's a wonderful interview with Virginia Euwer Wolff (you know, Make Lemonade) on Publisher's Weekly Children's Bookshelf. A wonderful read. Check it out. Virginia is one of the few people who can leave me holding my aching sides laughing while she looks at me, all innocent-like. And she writes beautiful, intense, breathy novels. And plays the violin.

If you are really lucky some day you will hear her speak and you'll laugh so hard you have to gasp for breath. Except for the parts where she'll make you weep. And if you aren't going to cross paths with her soon, you can pick up her new novel, This Full House, which is the third (and I think final) book in the trilogy about Jolly and La Vaughn.

Obama Inauguration Day at UC Berkeley's Sproul Plaza

In 1962 my mother kept us all out of school and we walked up to the UC Berkeley Memorial Stadium to hear President Kennedy speak. I was ten, and we sat on the wooden benches under the open sky with his voice ricocheting from the loudspeakers. I don't remember what he said, but I remember he was laid on my heart like a patch that day, a man who made people laugh and cheer when he spoke. A man important enough that my shy and reclusive mother would brave crowds to make sure we saw him.

Since then, my heart has been patched and repatched, in love and in anger and sorrow, often within sight of the campus, inside the surging sounds from the carillon bells. I went to school at UC Berkeley, was tear-gassed in Sproul Plaza, graduated as the first student with a degree in Women's Studies. My husband Tom and I had our night-before wedding party at the Faculty Club, with our family gathered to celebrate us. I still frequently walk to campus, my library card in hand, loving the smell of the halls, the echoing sound of chairs scraping back from study tables, the quiet rustling of paper as people turn pages and scribble and type and sigh.

This morning Tom and I headed for Sproul Plaza to watch Obama's inauguration under a wide open sky. The lovely circle of completion: another president who can inspire us like we haven't had since JFK, another president already laid on my heart, just like on so many other American hearts. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of us gathered together to cheer and weep and dare to hope he can guide our weary, crashing world to a better place.

Oh Lord, What a Morning. The sun clears the building as Michelle walks out.

Obama speaks.


Everyone listens, and this man stands and sings the Star Spangled Banner, start to finish.

As things wound down and the crowd began to drift away, this woman, Lady Liberty, remained perfectly still and watched until Bush took off in the helicopter. Then she turned quietly and walked away, witness to the moment.

Dan Stone Memorial Chidren's Author visit

I just had the most exhilarating school and library visit. Dan Stone, who lived in Burlingame, California, was a dedicated library user for many years. After he died, his family created a special event, the Dan Stone Memorial Children's Author Series. I was invited this year as the guest. I followed in some pretty big footsteps : Paul Fleishman 2002, Maxine Rose Schur 2004, Pam Munoz Ryan 2005, and Gennifer Choldenko 2007.

In the morning I did two presentations in the middle school library. I had fantastic kids, clustered together on the carpeted floor of the library and up the also-carpeted steps. The were full of questions, which was great. As I was showing Dorothea Lange's photos of the Great Depression and playing Woody Guthrie songs, I realized these kids were hearing today about the recession-could-it-turn-into-a-depression, and now they were seeing and hearing about the Great Depression. What I was doing was not just history, but was suddenly relevant, scarily enough.

In the afternoon I did two more presentations at the Burlingame Library, which is a beautiful place. Dan Stone's daughters came and brought their children, which was really an honor. Here's a photo of the Stone grandchildren with me on the right and a picture of their grandfather. My author minder for the day was Cathy Somerton, with assistance from Kathy with a K. Thanks to both of them, as well as Michele Gilcrest, the librarian, who prepared the kids for my visit. And thanks to Cathy Somerton for taking the photos!

Manuscript into copy editor!!

It's a sheer pleasure to turn in a manuscript and have it go to copy editing. I know I've wrung every creative drop out of myself that I can, and it is someone else's turn to buff it up. Now I'm working on gathering photos with the designer. I just keep sending the amazing, wonderful photos I find, knowing he will be able to make sense of them, culling out the ones that aren't the best, alighting on ones I'd casually included, but thought were unimportant. (Note the theme here: someone else is hard at work on "my" book! This is actually true all the way along -- the editor has been hard at work, especially the last few months as we passed versions back and forth via email.)

I just had one of those lovely "ah-ha" moments where I discovered a great theme that I can weave into the book, mostly via the images. This makes me very excited. Because images can be so evocative, kids will get a feeling for this theme, a gut level reaction, and it will give them something to think/feel about. More on the details anon.

Meanwhile, I'm home with my cats, who want to lay across the keyboard, and be fed, not necessarily in that order. That's Coyote, un-creatively named for the coyote trap that caught her by the back leg and skinned off her fur when she was a barn cat long ago, before she was rescued by my sister, taken in by me, and mended by her own resilience. (The skin grew back, top to bottom, then the fur came in, top to bottom, except for a thin band around her ankle of shiny scar tissue where she just couldn't make fur anymore). She's a very sweet cat, big on eye contact with her tall, clumsy human companions, and not above an occasional swat at Blackberry, her neer-do-well son, whose tail you see above.

Welcome in the new year!

It sure feels like 2009. There is something about that first Monday after the first of the year. We had truly spectacular times with our family this year. Some of the best eating ever -- our boys had a bunch of their very best friends up to Mendocino (thirty, to be exact), and they spent the days collecting mussels from the Pacific and mushrooms from the woods and the last of the apples off the trees. We ate Candy Caps and Cauliflower mushrooms and even a lingering, hidden Boletus. The kitchen was a madhouse of cooks who made steamed mussels in broth and all kinds of mushrooms and apple pie. Lots of reading, resting, playing music by the fire, writing (last go-over on manuscript before editor pulls it from my hands and gets it to the copy editor) and watching the sun set over the ocean. Can you see the God's rays in this photo? Beautiful!

We finished off the celebrations with my husband's birthday party last night. Our son Will jumped in with both feet and showed us how to make a Vietnamese dinner. More madhouse chopping and sauteing and boiling and wrapping and then, finally, the delicious eating.

Couple of really cool articles to check out: Nina Lindsay is doing her mock Newbery discussion at the Oakland Library. This is a fantastic way to discuss books by the Newbery criteria. Nina has chaired the Newbery, is one really smart, well-read woman, and she writes incredible poetry as well. If you can't make it, at least try to check these books out from your library or pick up a copy at the book store. This is a compelling group of books.

Kerry Madden just got her first starred! review on her bio on Harper Lee and gave me a nice shout-out on her blog, Knoxville Girl.

And Roger, over at Read Roger flags a great article on the financial squeeze in the book biz. It's a fascinating, nail-biting-inducing article, Puttin' Off the Ritz: The New Austerity in Publishing in the New York Times.

That brings us back to 2009. Time to put on your work gloves. It may be an austere business, but it's our austere business.

Winter Gathering

Woke up to frost all around, sparkling and beautiful, on the grass and trees and glimmering on my strawberry plants.

Winter solstice here, once again. Had a holiday party Sunday night, with food and drink and caroling and lighting the menorah, all to drive back the dark, and glory in the cozy center in the depths of winter.

And before the cold could strike everything, we'd brought in the bounty of the back yard. The persimmons gathered, hung and drying, thanks to our son Felix. These ridiculously large squash, cut and stewed and pureed.





And flourishing in the garden, the sturdy, defiant Meyer's lemon tree, perseveres despite the cold.

Folk and blues singer Odetta dies

Last week, the astonishing folk singer Odetta died. There's a lovely review of her life in the New York Times... They title it "Odetta, voice of Civil Right Movement Dies at 77." Please scroll down on the NYT page to the video of a recent interview with her. She's already old, very old, for the interview, but when asked to sing, she closes her eyes, dips down her chin, and then, up with her chin and she sings... incredibly. Her voice is so percussive and rich. She is a big part of my family lore. When I was little, she came to visit us on the farm we lived on and my dad took astonishing photos of her. We often had her music playing.

As I've been writing books, she's been with me. A friend gave me a tape of her original recording at the Blue Angel in Sausalito. I worked my father's photo into my book on Woody Guthrie. And just two days ago, I wrote about her discovering Pete Seeger asleep in a big tent on the march they had both joined, Dr. King's Selma to Montgomery march for the vote in 1965.

There is lots of end-of-life joys and trials around me right now. My parents live about a mile away, and my mother is bed-bound, and on hospice. The great grace is that she is no pain. Our brother-in-law, Bernard, is very, very ill. He and my sister live with my parents. And in a separate apartment, our son Felix and his girlfriend live at the house. Felix gardens with my dad in the day (they have a ripping garden full of winter vegies and two huge, homemade greenhouses), and goes upstairs to check on my mom every evening, taking his guitar and singing songs to her. Today Felix called me from his cell phone. He and Sasha were just taking a walk in the Mountain View cemetery nearby, and he wanted to know where the family plot was.

Dying can involve a whole family, the sadness and hopeless waiting and caretaking and beautiful, unexpected moments of grace in it all.