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Where Was I This Summer?

September 7, 2022

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!

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Bringing Robert Frost Home From Newfoundland

November 6, 2009

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…

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Off to Liberia!

February 9, 2009

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…

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Last Posting from Monrovia

February 20, 2009

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…

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I Want To Go Back to Liberia!

February 22, 2009

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…

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All My Bags AREN'T Packed

October 14, 2009

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…

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Three Things About Reading

January 27, 2010

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…

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Reporting from Liberia

February 17, 2009

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…

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School Visits

February 18, 2009

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,…

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A “Desert Island” Author

November 18, 2008

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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