Where Was I This Summer?
Name the location of one of the photos: town, city, or body of water, and I’ll email you a sneak peek at the cover of my next book—weeks ahead of when I reveal it in a blog post!
Read More...Bringing Robert Frost Home From Newfoundland
A man carried stacks of National Geographic magazines from his truck to a table in the Deer Lake Library. They dated back to the 1950s. One issue caught my eye. The face on the cover was not one I expected to see on a NG cover. It was the April 1976 issue. Inside, unrelated to…
Read More...Off to Liberia!
Hard to believe that a week from now I will be meeting with writers in Monrovia! Sponsored by CODE, “Reading Liberia” is a program through which books written by Liberian authors for Liberian children will be produced, and teachers trained how to use them in their classrooms. Thanks to IBBY-Canada who put my name forward to…
Read More...Last Posting from Monrovia
Well, it’s hard to believe that a week ago tonight I had not yet set foot in Africa, and already my bag is packed, ready for my trip back to Canada, my heart crowded with people I had not even laid eyes on a week ago. So intense has been my involvement with Liberian writers…
Read More...I Want To Go Back to Liberia!
We did so much during the workshop hours, and yet there’s so much more that we didn’t do. I read a few responses to writing exercises while there, and more on the plane coming home – “neighbourhood” and “personal hero” pieces, and moving accounts of experiences participants had when they were five, ten, and fifteen years…
Read More...All My Bags AREN'T Packed
But I am ready to go. To Newfoundland. On Saturday. Or I will be when… Never mind. Talking to a group of Keene teens a few years ago (Keene is near Peterborough, Ontario), I was mentioning how much I enjoy traveling roads I haven’t been on before, as I had that morning, and realized that…
Read More...Three Things About Reading
I was thinking about blogging about good books I’ve read lately when two things happened. I got a letter from a girl in New Brunswick who first wrote me almost seven years ago, and I was asked if I would go back to Liberia to do some more work with writers there. The NB girl…
Read More...Reporting from Liberia
How do I capture in a brief blog entry some essence of my time in Liberia so far? Already I know it will be hard to say goodbye to the people I am getting to know here – the We-Care Library staff, the writers, the teachers, and the other people CODE has sent over from…
Read More...School Visits
On Monday I visited three schools in Monrovia, along with Wendy Saul, a professor from Missouri who has been working with teachers here, and Florence (I don’t know her last name), one of the teacher-leaders. Our purpose was to assess how well the classroom teachers we visited were applying what they’d learned about teaching reading,…
Read More...A “Desert Island” Author
That’s how I was introduced last week before speaking to the Children’s Literature Roundtable in Vancouver. “The great thing about Kathy is that she is the ultimate desert island writer,” said Shannon Ozirny, a dynamic young grad student, soon to be fantastic librarian. “Now, I know you’re all wondering, ‘What the heck is a desert island…
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