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
