Author: Loree Burns

It’s Book Week at the Margaret Neary School in Southboro, Massachusetts, and yesterday I was part of the festivities.

I visited with Neary’s four hundred or so fourth and fifth graders and talked a bit about earthworms and trash and revising and mistakes. The Neary kids were a fantastic audience, motivated and interested and willing to ask questions. I particularly enjoyed my small group lunches (two of them!) with students. We munched PB&Js and Caesar salads and talked books and movies and ladybugs and processionary caterpillars.

I signed books at the end of the day in the Neary library, which has been transformed for Book Week. It was a treat for me to watch them shop, pawing through piles of books, soliciting opinions from eachother, opening a cover to read a few lines and standing, transfixed, for a whole chapter.

The Neary kids are in for an amazing week … author Carolyn Coman will be visiting them tomorrow and on Thursday they will meet illustrator Ralph Masiello. Many thanks to parent and Book Week organizer Ellen Faherty, librarian Laurie Woodfin, and all the faculty and students I met at Neary. Happy Book Week to all of you!

Look what has arrived:

Thank you cards. Loads of them. Hand-made by the very cool Newport students I have been telling you about all week. Some of the best bits were in postscript …

“PS. Are you going to write about killer bees?”
Yes. Because one of my biggest fears as a young person was that there really were Killer Bees and that they really were coming.

“PS. Why did you choose to write about bees?”
Because they interest me. And because they seem to interest you!

“PS. Go Red Sox!”
Yes!

“PS. Clean up the beaches for our creatures.”
I will try. You try too, okay?

“PS. I liked your sweater.”
Thank you. My sister, who picked out the sweater and who was with me when I read the cards, is now calling herself my stylist and demanding a paycheck.

“PS. I will not tell your kids about the picture if I meet them.”
My kids were also with me when I read the cards. Whoops. (“MOM!! What picture??”)

“PS. Hope you come back soon.”
Me too. Truly.

On Saturday, the pièce de résistance of the ‘March Into Reading’ festival was held at Salve Regina University. It was a day-long, family-friendly celebration of books and reading and writing and illustrating. You can read an objective account here, or you can read my very un-objective account here …

The first thing I learned was this: torrential rain does not keep Newport-ers away from a book festival.

The second thing I learned was this: never, Ever, EVER speak after Ralph Masiello at a book festival. Seriously. The man is a phenomenal presenter and a very hard act to follow. Not only did he have the audience in stitches, he drew pictures for every kid in the place: huge, interesting, fabulous drawings of dragons and dolphins and Sphinxes that came to life before our eyes. Ralph was crazy good.

And I had to present right after him.

Ralph Masiello being fabulous!
Photo by Gloria Schmidt

It was all a tad-bit intimidating. But there were lots of friendly faces in the audience … like Jenny Williams, marketing guru for Houghton Mifflin, and her adorable children, and her lovely sister, and her lovely sister’s adorable children, and several motivated students that I had met the day before while visiting Newport schools. Friendly faces are so important in intimidating situations, don’t you think?

After my talk, I signed books.

Next to Ralph Masiello.

Do you know how many books he has illustrated? Hundreds. Do you know how many Newport children bought his books on Saturday? Thousands. Maybe hundreds of thousands. But I was not intimidated at all, because a whole bunch of those Newport children and their families stopped at my table and at the table of fellow-author Linda Gates-Galvin, too. It was an incredible end to an incredible experience.

Hooray for Newport readers!
Photo by Gloria Schmidt

On Friday the six authors and illustrators participating in ‘March Into Reading’ split up and visited eighteen area schools. This feat required amazing coordination, and the librarians in charge of this incredible event pulled it off without a hitch. Many thanks to Jennifer Long, escort extraordinaire, who made sure I was where I needed to be at every moment. And more thanks to the organizations who sponsored this wonderful event; Newport’s youngest citizens are an intelligent and inquisitive bunch and I *know* these visits were meaningful for them.

Photo by Jennifer Long

My day started at Underwood School, where Jennifer is the librarian. Her third-through fifth graders were a keen bunch, very attentive and full of questions at the end of the morning. I was pleased to see all those arms waving in the air, and even more pleased to hear from Jennifer that some of her shyest students had found something to say. Hooray for Underwood School!

My next visit was to Coggeshall School, where I spoke to one class of third-graders and two classes each of fourth and fifth-graders. We didn’t have as much time for Q&A after the presentation, but groups of students hovered as I took down my equipment and we talked about trash and oceans and trying to live without plastic. Before leaving, I was invited into a fifth-grade classroom and asked to autograph book cards. This sort of thing still thrills me; one kid told me he was putting my autograph with his prized possession: the autograph of Slash. (You know Slash, don’t you? Guitarist. Guns N’ Roses. Wow!)

The final visit of the day was after lunch (more on lunch tomorrow) at Cranston-Calvert School. I have to tell you that visiting a large group of elementary students after lunch on a Friday afternoon is a daunting idea. But the kids at Cranston-Calvert were awesome. They were so attentive during my talk that I worried I had put them to sleep … but when the Q&A session went on for twenty minutes, finally put to a stop by a teacher who worried the kids would miss busses home, I let go of these fears. Thank you Cranston-Calvert!

I spent the end of last week in Rhode Island participating in the March Into Reading festival, and I plan to spend this week reliving the coolness here on my blog. I hope you’ll tune in.

The festivities began for me on Thursday, when I visited the fourth and fifth graders at Elmhurst School in Portsmouth. I was welcomed to Elmhurst by librarian Gloria Schmidt, who worked incredibly hard to make my visit a truly enriching experience for her students*, and by parent Jenny Williams, who created this great sign …

Mrs. Schmidt had let me know that her students were studying the art of nonfiction*, and so we spent a good bit of time, the kids and I, talking about writing. We agreed that research is a blast and that the writing itself is usually fun. Revising, on the other hand, is plain old hard work. They seemed pleased to know that even a published nonfiction writer gets back papers that look like this …

(I can’t get this to appear more legibly, but I think you get the idea. It is a page from the first draft of TRACKING TRASH … covered with comments from my editor.)

After my presentations, the Elmhurst students recorded our Q&A sessions so that they could prepare a podcast. (Mrs. Schmidt had helped the students prepare questions ahead of time*.) They have promised to send me a link when it is finished and I will share it when they do.

I spent the night on Aquidneck Island and, thanks to Mrs. Schmidt, had a driving tour of Newport and a seafood dinner down by the pier. We talked books, of course, and I came away with a new list of must reads. Believe it or not, I also got some early feedback on my presentations … she had spent time collecting comments from her students during the last period of the day, while my visit was still fresh in their heads.*

I’ll share some of their comments tomorrow. For now I want to thank Mrs. Schmidt, Jenny Williams, the staff and—most especially—the students at Elmhurst School. I enjoyed my time with you!

*FYI, these teacher-motivated activities helped to make the visit to Elmhurst extraordinary … for me and for the students.