Life fizzles. Life drizzles. Life drips. Just like in my book Rain Romp. And let’s face it–sometimes when it rains we cannot go out and stomp in the puddles and get our grouchy feelings out. I’m just home from a speaking trip that honored the 25th year of the Lion and Lamb center at Bluffton
China! Okay, before I went there, it’s not like I knew most of these things I’m going to blog about. I was in southern China, close to Hong Kong (which was the airport of entry)–we then took a ferry to the mainland–and that’s really far away from the Great Wall or from Bejing Olympics and other
“Do you like it better in Ethiopia or America” Again…at an author visit in Boston last weekend…the question. I had talked about how I left the U.S. so young I had no memories of that country, how I’d reconnected briefly with Adrian, Oregon and my father’s home the year I was seven. About how awkward it
Pawing through a suitcase…curling cramped in an airplane seat…feeling stark pop-eye awake in the middle of the night…feeling draggy deadish in the middle of the day…making a living through traveling and speaking has its agonizing side. Once I had just returned from Ethiopia and was sitting with my three-year-old granddaughter on the couch while her parents
I spent a whole bunch of hours on airplanes yesterday…seven of them from Abu Dhabi to Paris…ten from Paris to Salt Lake City…about two from Salt Lake City to Portland. Lesson learned: If the Air France agent in Abu Dhabi asks, “Would you like to sit in the front row of the economy section?” ask,
I was talking with a girl at the American Community School of Abu Dhabi this week about the tangles of traveling, of living on this continent and that. We were talking about how I felt every time I left Ethiopia for a visit in the U.S. “I know. When I go back to America,” she said, “kids ask
Eight years ago, I did an author visit at the American Community School of Abu Dhabi…and I just spent five days back in the same school. I started with two assemblies to introduce students to why and how I write books–showing that many of my books draw power from the small moments of my own
Seven years ago, my son and daughter and my brother’s daughter took time from their college years to volunteer in an Ethiopia Reads library in Addis Ababa. They taught English classes and made stories pop off the page using puppets and dance and songs. They lived in the neighborhood of the library, hopping over sewage puddles
Being an writer breaks hearts left, right, center and all the time. When I first met Toni Buzzeo, she was school librarian goddess of Maine, a smart and determined connector of kids and books. I did an author visit in her school and said, “Wowee. You have to write about how you do this!” She agreed.
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