http://dadjunk.com/2010/01/an-open-letter-of-surrender-to-american-girl/ Reading this funny and sweet post by a dad made me think back to the days when my daughter and her best friend, Shannon, just had to get their hands on all the American Girl books. (Meanwhile, Rebekah was longing like crazy for an American Girl doll, but I felt pretty much as the dad
Okay…I get it that this sounds really dumb…but it wasn’t until Nancy Werlin and Jim McCoy and I were wandering around the neighborhoods near Mt. Auburn Cemetery–where I’d been taken to see birds and birders–that I really understood the connection between the plants we choose to plant + insects + birds. That day, we stopped
I met Julie Evans when I spoke at a reading conference in St. Cloud, Minnesota. At that point, I was sharing what felt like a big and tough dream–that we could help Yohannes Gebregeorgis move from his job as a children’s librarian in San Francisco back to Ethiopia where he wanted to start children’s libraries.
How fun and funny to think so much about camping on this snowy weekend. When I was writing Lanie’s story, I asked people for interesting camping disasters. My favorite stories came from my sister Jan who does a lot of backpacking and told me about a time when deer were running around the campground with
Camping was always quite an adventure in Ethiopia–and my dad loved it. This was one of our sweet spots on the savanna, near a lazy brown river that we floated down on air mattresses and in inner tubes. Sometimes, I laid in my sleeping bag and listened to lions rumbling and grumbling in the grass.
The wonderful person who maintains my website for me set me up with goggle alerts, and one of those let me know about a blog post by the illustrator for the ready-to-read I wrote about Martin Luther King. http://amyjunebates.blogspot.com/2010/01/martin-luther-king-jr.html#comment-form Maybe no other person who lived in the United States quite exemplified the power of one person
Toni Buzzeo, library goddess and acclaimed children’s book author (and a member of my writing group) tells people that when she was stuck on a draft of a manuscript, I said, “If this were my story, it would be a sister story.” That comment led to the revision that turned manuscript into this fabulous book.
I’m finally home for a week or two and have had time to download pictures, reliving memories of the three American Girl store signings that I’ve had so far. Just call me Princess Jane. Apparently, the Boston store has had extraordinary sales of the camper that comes with Lanie. When I was doing research about
Ursula and Stella helped me understand what kids think when a friend moves far away (and what they might ask via email), what girls their age think when they observe boys their age, what the City Sprouts gardening program is like at their school, and so on. They were wonderful interviewees from Haggerty School! I’ve
Soooo many parents at the American Girl store asked me why I chose Cambridge as Lanie’s home. It was important to me to have an urban area because I wanted to show the ways that kids everywhere–even in a city–can help save animals. (Just as orangutans need trees, monarch caterpillars need milkweed to survive…and, believe
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