Loree Burns – Page 5

March 3, 2020March 13, 2020

National Science Teachers Association conference

EDITED, MARCH 13, 2020: THIS CONFERENCE HAS BEEN CANCELLED.
READ THE OFFICIAL ANNOUNCEMENT HERE.

I’m excited to be attending the 2020 NSTA conference in Boston, MA this year … and launching my next children’s book, You’re Invited to a Moth Ball. I’ll update this post with additional information about my appearances as the details are finalized. So please stay tuned!

Friday, April 3
Book Signing, time TBD
Copies ofYou’re Invited to a Moth Ball will be available to the public for the very first time, and I’ll be signing them in the Charlesbridge Publishing booth!

Saturday, April 4
Linking Literacy Share-a-thon, 9am -1pm, location TBD
This celebration of science and children’s literature will feature a panel presentation and several round table discussions with more than a dozen award-winning authors who specialize in creating STEM and STEAM-themed books for young readers.

Linking Literacy Author Book Signing, 1:30-3pm, location TBD

February 28, 2020February 28, 2020

Being Frog

So, are you the sort of person who would be distracted by a parade of hopping frogs and excited by the idea of helping them? Do you like being out of doors, even at night? Are you intrigued by the thought of listening to spring? Have you held a frog or toad in your hand, looked it in the eye, and felt something?

These are questions I posed in the pages of Citizen Scientists, suggesting those who answered YES! would make good frog watchers. Today I’d like to add that those people–frog people–will also adore this new picture book from April Pulley Sayre.

Being Frog is a delight, cover to cover, a celebration of language and image and, of course, frogs. Don’t miss this one, friends!

February 28, 2020February 28, 2020

New Writing: Wild Bounty

I’m pleased to share that a feature I wrote about Rachel Goclawski, a Worcester county mushroom forager and wild food enthusiast, was published in the winter 2020 issue of Edible Worcester. My favorite part of writing this piece was heading out into the woods with Rachel, learning how to find and identify mushrooms. I also got to take one of her classes, and I can’t recommend them enough. All the links you need are in the article. Enjoy!

December 4, 2019February 28, 2020

What Miss Mitchell Saw

Distilling a full life into 32 pages is such a hard thing to do. It requires deep reflection, a willingness to seize a single theme and, at the very same time, to let all the other beautiful and important and relevant themes in that beautiful and important and relevant life go. Hayley Barrett and Diana Dusyka manage this task brilliantly in their picture book biography of Maria Mitchell. WHAT MISS MITCHELL SAW is a marriage of deliberate storytelling and expansive art, a book that focuses readers on knowing and naming, cornerstones of scientific inquiry, but doesn’t get mired in details of astronomy, its devices, and its techniques. I’m really glad I finally picked this gem up. You should too!

November 20, 2019November 24, 2019

Holiday Author Festival

Worcesterites can celebrate local authors, support local bookselling, and shop for the holidays at this year’s Holiday Author Festival, hosted by the booklovers at Root and Press, 623 Chandler Street, Worcester, MA. You’ll find great books, festive music, warm drinks, sweet treats, and plenty of holiday cheer. Here are the details:

Worcester Holiday Author Festival
Root & Press, 623 Chandler Street, Worcester, MA
Saturday, December 14
3-5:30pm

And here’s a list of the excited local authors–writers of fiction and nonfiction for adults and for children–who will be on hand to sell and sign their books:

Susan Bailey

Loree Griffin Burns

Darlene Corbett

Joyce Derenas

Gordon Duncan

Kathryn Hulick Gargolinski

We hope to see you there!

November 7, 2019November 7, 2019

The Important Thing About Margaret Wise Brown

“No good book is loved by everyone,
and any good book is bound to bother somebody.”
~ Mac Barnett

Even if you don’t recognize the name Margaret Wise Brown, you’re likely to have read some of her books. The Runaway Bunny, Bumblebugs and Elephants, The Little Fireman, Goodnight Moon, among so many others. Hers are classics of childhood reading, even today, and I know I’m not the only mother of grown children who can still recite them rote. (And every now and then, does.)

Mac Barnett’s biography of Brown is unusual, deeply literary, and spellbinding. I cannot get enough of it. And while often such books are criticized as being inaccessible to children, I believe my kids would have adored this book. Would they have appreciated the metaphor that turns a single life into a single book? Would they have grasped, when they were small, the dangers of a gatekeeper? Maybe not. But they would have understood being misunderstood. They would have felt the joyful zaniness of buying an entire cart of flowers or bringing ducks into a place for no reason at all. They wanted desperately to know more about things they knew were frowned upon, like swimming naked in an ocean, or borrowing the fur from a dead rabbit. I think they’d have peered into the life of the woman behind books in their very own bedrooms and felt satisfied.

I cannot express how much I admire this book. I’m going to read it aloud to my kids, adults though they may be, when they’re home for the holidays. I’m not kidding. Because the important thing about me is that I share the stories that move me most. I’m grateful to Mac Barnett, Sarah Jacoby, and Margaret Wise Brown for this beautiful reminder of that.

October 31, 2019

Reading Life: No Heart, No Moon

I’ve been making my way through the 2019 edition of The Best American Science and Nature Writing, edited by Sy Montgomery, and as is the case every year, it’s like taking a master class in communicating life and living and all the ways those two things happen in this world. I try to read a couple essays a week, but often pause, struck dumb by a piece that begs for a deeper study. That’s what happened with Matt Jones’ No Heart, No Moon.

Originally published in The Southern Review, the essay is available in its entirety at Jones’ website. It’s a stunning example of literary nonfiction, of taking the facts of a story and weaving them into something that is informative and also deeply meaningful. Art. I read the essay before bed, and re-read it the very next morning, out loud, with my morning tea. It’s gorgeously written, layered with connections that surprise and worry. I’ll be studying it for a while, sharing it with students and friends, pondering the mechanics and the message.

October 31, 2019

A Life in Books

When I started blogging back in 2006, my little apartment on the internet–a light-filled efficiency in a great neighborhood (LiveJournal!)–was called A Life in Books. I saw that title as a play on words, a way to categorize posts about my life as a working writer, which was then only just starting, and my life as a reader, too. Every post was titled with the name of a book, one I was reading to research a new project, or for pleasure, or with my three (then) young kids. Over time, it became clear that the books were just a way for me to connect to other things going on in my life at the time, and I was obsessed and pleased with the interesting ways books and thoughts and life influenced one another.

As always happens, though, life changed. My kids got older, and my working world got busy, and this, and that. Blogging became a sometimes affair. I left LiveJournal for a place with more space, built an entire author website, took on more work than I had hours in the day. You get it, right? I was still reading, but I no longer had (or took?) the time to reflect on those books and their place in my life, on the ways the work of other writers shaped my thinking, or inspired ideas, or entertained me. Such, too, is a life in books, I guess.

But, again, change. My kids are two young men and one young woman mostly off in their own places reading their own books. I’m still writing, still reading, but also teaching, and nowhere is it clearer to me how important reading is than in a classroom with writers. So much of what I know about writing–I’d say all of what I know about writing–I soaked up by reading the work of other writers.

All to say, I’m dusting things off here, spit-shining tables, sweeping up the cobwebs, thinking about how to better use all the spaces at my disposal. I’ll continue to post updates on upcoming books and essays and appearances here, of course. But I’m also going to share my reading life again, the blog posts that make me think, the articles and essays that thrill me, the books that paper, spark, and inspire this life of mine.

July 29, 2019

Of Moths and Cousins

National Moth Week may be over for 2019, but I have so many more images to share. These pictures were all sent to me by friends and relatives who’ve been inspired to stop and look at the incredible moths that live in their part of the world. Like these ones.

First up this week, my cousins Keri and Tracy, who were wowed by a small-eyed sphinx moth that showed up on Tracy’s front door in Massachusetts back in June:

I can’t say the girls were super excited to know its name, and I don’t know if all my moth enthusiasm convinced them to hang out a sheet with collecting lights. (This is doubtful!) But I can tell you that Keri continues to send me moth photos. (I think she’s hooked!) This is an image she sent me just yesterday, from Georgia. It’s a pink-striped oakworm moth, I believe, and it’s a beauty.

You know what they say about cousins, right? They’re your first best moth-ing friends. Thanks for studying moths with me, Keri and Tracy. I hope we can do it in person one day soon. I’ll bring the lights. <3 <3

July 22, 2019

Happy National Moth Week!

One of the interesting parts of writing a book about moth-watching, besides all the local moths I’ve gotten to know, is how many people reach out to me with photos of the insects they find in their own backyards. I find this thrilling, because it means there are a lot of curious people out there. The moths below, for example, were all found and photographed by friends who weren’t even looking for moths. But they recognized something interesting when it crossed their path, snapped a picture, and sought out more information.

Which leads me to the hard part of finding these photos in my Inbox: I’m an amateur moth enthusiast and most of the time I have no clue what the insect in question is! But I have a lot of field guides—print and online, and I always have fun looking into it. Here are a couple photographs sent to me by friends in the northeastern US this summer, including two that came in just today. I hope they inspire you to look for moths in your neighborhood!