Louise Erdrich has a poem called Advice to Myself which I read each New Year’s Day as I set my intentions in motion for another trip around the sun. It’s a delicious poem and you can read it in it’s entirety here. What I love is the encouragement to step back from the culturally-driven urge to tidy things up and reflect on what will support the vocation of writing,
Here are two of my favorite bits.
“…don’t worry who uses whose toothbrush or if anything
matches, at all.
Except one word to another…”
“…–decide first what is authentic,
then go after it with all your heart.
Your heart, that place
you don’t even think of cleaning out.
That closet stuffed with savage mementos…”
Louise Erdrich, Advice to Myself
So I’m reminding myself again this year to set aside the clutter of my desires for my writing and the pressure of my publishers’ desires for my books, and take a moment at the beginning of each working day to bless the blank page and light a candle for the child who will read it some day, and then forge ahead as best I can with the light of that child reader first in my thoughts.
Barbara Kerley is the author of Following Baxter a sweet story for anyone who has ever gotten a crush on a dog. She will be sharing her strategies for using research in your writing.
In just three short months we will celebrate my favorite literary holiday, World Read Aloud Day on February 1st, 2019. I will be doing Skype visits to classrooms all around the world. It’s pretty simple. If you want an author skype with me, we can set up a 20 minute slot. I’ll greet your students, give them a quick tour of my workspace and then read aloud for about 5-8 minutes. They can ask me a few questions and I’ll end by recommending something that I’ve read recently that I really liked–usually one fiction and one non-fiction book. It’s easy, fun and free!
I always find Veteran’s Day a cause for reflection. On the one hand, I believe there is value in honoring the sacrifices our veterans and their families have made. On the other hand, my husband and every other veteran I know has so much more to offer than their time in service. It seems unkind to reduce their lives to this one event and elevate it above all the rest. And in the end, if Veteran’s Day becomes a romanticization of war, then we serve no one well–least of all veterans.
So I was pleased to find the non-fiction picture book THIRTY MINUTES OVER OREGON: A Japanese pilot’s World War II story in Annie Blooms this fall. It’s the story of a plan the Japanese had to drop bombs that would set fires to the coast of Oregon in the hopes of starting the sort of catastrophic forest fires we are seeing now in California. Fortunately the plan failed and like veterans all over the world, bomber pilot Nobuo Fujita, returned to his home and former life. But time passed and one Memorial Day many years later the townspeople of Brookings, Oregon asked Mr. Fujita to return to the place he had tried to bomb, this time as an honored guest in celebration of many years of peace between the Unites States and Japan. What flows from that is a tale of peace and reconciliation and deep healing that would make any veteran of any war proud. Thank you to Clarion and author Marc Tyler Nobleman and illustrator Melissa Iwai for a beautiful and thought-provoking book.