Category: YA Authors

Well, I wanted to blog all about ALA — and now it’s been a couple of months.  However, I really do want to relive it and post all the pictures with authors I admire.

Sunday after the YA Author Coffee Klatch, I was in a mood for author signings!  I went to several and got signatures but not pictures, but did get a few pictures with authors whose books I’d already read and enjoyed:

Here I am with Jessica Day George:

Here’s the review I’d recently written of her latest book, Princess of Glass.  I was happy to get a signed copy!

Another author I met was Tom Angleberger, author of The Strange Case of Origami Yoda.

One session I did want to be sure to go to was to hear Will Shortz speak.  Yes, he’s a big famous puzzle guy now, but I remember doing his puzzles in Dell Magazines when I was a little girl.  (Sure enough!  When they talked about his bio, he worked for Dell Magazines in the 70s.)

I thoroughly enjoyed his talk.  He told some secrets about making puzzles, and ended off with a competition between the two sides of the room.  (My side won!  Woo-hoo!)  I had some signings I wanted to get to and didn’t want to wait in the long line after that, and he was signing crossword books, not logic puzzles or the types of puzzles I prefer, so I went back down to the exhibits.  But here he is signing books:

Back at the exhibits, I almost ran into Mo Willems and Jon Scieszka.  I couldn’t stay away from that!  I did some serious lurking and picture snapping.  I got to tell Jon Scieszka that I have more brothers than he does.  (Hey, you think of whatever you can say.)  And I told Mo Willems that I was wearing his Elephant and Piggie design t-shirt yesterday.  (Oh well.  He said he would have signed it.)  Oh, and I talked to Casey, Jon Scieszka’s daughter.  She was very nice, and I’m going to watch for her graphic novel coming out soon.

Here are the pictures I took while lurking:

Mo’s on the left, Jon’s on the right, and Casey’s wearing purple.

I always say that Jon has the smile and laugh of a mischievous little boy.  His daughter agrees that he never grew up.

I think they were discussing the Book Cart Drill Team Championships that afternoon, which they would host.  I saw them host it three years ago, and was very very sorry to miss it this time — but I was scheduled to go home and get the shawl I accidentally left at home, but while I was at it take a little nap and change clothes for the Newbery/Caldecott Banquet.

On the way back to the car, I stopped at a Bookmobile that had been set up with a project to record hundreds of people’s voices reading The Wizard of Oz.  It was a lot of fun — I’ve read the book aloud to both my boys and loved it as a child myself.

Imagine my delight, though, when the person who walked into the booth after me was Grace Lin, scheduled to receive her Newbery Honor Award that very night!  For the book Where the Mountain Meets the Moon.  I was so excited to meet her, the person reading ahead of me had to do a couple extra takes because I was too noisy.  But when the production is finished, I’m reading the page right before Grace Lin!

Here I am with her, thrilled to meet her:

And here she is reading her page from The Wizard of Oz:

So, like I said, I’m disappointed it’s taking me so long to post about ALA, but now I’m up to the highlight of the whole weekend.  My next post will be about the Newbery/Caldecott Banquet.

I’m taking a long time to write about ALA because life is interfering.

I got RIF’d from my job as a Youth Services Librarian, but I was fortunate enough that the county found me a job as part of the RIF process.  I’m a Management Analyst for the Office for Children, Provider Services.  I’ll be managing data, but I will probably also get to talk to providers about Early Literacy and how the libraries can help them serve the children under their care.

I’m a little bit annoyed that my new job is at the same paygrade as the Librarian position.  It does not require a Master’s degree, like the Librarian position did.  It doesn’t supervise anyone.  It doesn’t deal with the public.  It’s much less stress and much better hours.  The catch, of course, is that I feel a tremendous calling as a children’s librarian — ALA confirmed that strongly.

It turns out that the county sets the pay grade based on what the surrounding counties pay the same position.  So it’s not that this county undervalues librarians — it’s that librarians are undervalued as a profession.  However, it is enough to get by on, as long as I’m still getting child support, and my Dad is helping me pay my student loans.  But the nice part of keeping paychecks coming is that I can pay rent.  Yay!

And in the meantime, I’ve been applying for corporate and school librarian positions, and now have an interview for a Youth Services Manager position in a neighboring county!  So we’ll see…  Maybe I can get back to being a children’s librarian.

And I love meeting authors!  That’s what the YA Author Coffee Klatch is all about.

I admit that Sunday morning, I had a lot of trouble getting out of bed.  I had very much wanted to go to the first hour of the session “Children’s and YA Book Blogs: Enhancing Library Services.”  But alas!  Trying to get there by 8:00 only meant that I was there on time for the 9:00 YA Author Coffee Klatch, which I’d bought a ticket for.

The worst thing was that they didn’t even bring coffee to the tables — you had to stand in line.  I wasn’t early enough to want to risk not meeting an author for the sake of coffee.

Basically, we had an extra seat at each table, and we had 6 authors spend 10 minutes with us.  It wasn’t time to really talk to them — they talked about their books.  But it was cool to meet them, and they talked me into reading some of their books.  Here are the authors I met that morning:

Carrie Jones was tremendously nice and did talk me into getting a signed copy of her book later.

James Kennedy was a lot of fun.  His book sounds quite bizarre — the perfect thing to give my son for his 16th birthday.  I decided then and there to be sure to go to the author’s book signing and purchase a copy.  I thoroughly enjoyed James Kennedy’s sense of humor, and am looking forward to reading the book myself.

Next, we met Simone Elkeles.  I later saw her book signing and bought a copy of her latest book.

Next was Holly Black.  I already had her latest book, White Cat, in one of the piles in my bedroom.  After she talked about the book, I planned to put it on the top of the pile.  Sure enough, since then I have read it, and it’s intriguing and fabulous.  Holly talked about how in that world, people can curse you by touching your skin with their hand.  So everyone wears gloves, and seeing bare hands feels far too intimate.  Fascinating!  My review is coming soon.

Here’s Richard Smith, pitching The Marbury Lens.  He made it sound fascinating, but a little on the scary side for me.

This is the amazing Laurie Halse Anderson, who just keeps winning awards.  She pitched Wintergirls, telling us some background behind it, and also the upcoming sequel to Chains.

Deborah Heiligman had one of the most interesting stories-behind-the-book to tell.  She was a religious studies major, and her husband had written an award-winning book about evolution.  Charles and Emma is the story of Charles Darwin’s marriage to a deeply religious woman, and how their partnership made both of them better people.  Deborah Heiligman convinced me to be sure to pick up a signed copy later.

 

 

Then came Carol Lynch Williams, pitching her new book, Glimpse.  I have heard good things about her earlier book, Chosen, and was convinced to give her books a try.

Finally, our table was visited by Kekla Magoon, another author whose book, The Rock and the River, I’ve heard great things about.  That’s the only problem with ALA:  My list of books I really want to read gets so much longer!

After the authors had visited tables, all the authors (there were lots more) posed for a group shot:

I was thrilled to meet some of them, like Rebecca Stead (!) in the milling around afterward.

All in all, it was a great time to meet people who have done it — they have gotten published!  And they are nice people, who enjoy talking about their work.  I wanted to read books by all of them!

Saturday, June 26, 2010, I woke up bright and early and excited to go to ALA.  I drove in — funny thing, but there’s no traffic early on a Saturday — and had no trouble and even made it to the 8:00 session! 

Saturday was a day of lots of great sessions of learning and inspiration.  First up, at 8:00, I went to a session called “Listen Up!  Using Audiobooks to Motivate Boys to Become Readers” featuring a panel that included the illustrious Ambassador Emeritus of Children’s Literature, the hilarious Jon Scieszka, He Who Laughs Like a Little Boy Getting into Trouble.

Jon and the rest of the panel talked about how audiobooks can help reluctant readers (particularly boys) see themselves as readers.   They talked about all the great things that happen when children listen to audiobooks.  Jon is adding a new part to his Guys Read website called Guys Listen.  It has some great resources.  If I become an elementary school librarian, or even if I go back to being a public librarian, I want to come back to this site and this information to convince parents and teachers how great audiobooks can be for kids. 

Oh, they also showed the hilarious clip which you’ll find on the Guys Listen site that promotes Jon’s new Guys Read collection of funny stories.  The clip is of the writers of the funny stories all telling parts of a joke.  I want that book!

After that session, I tried to get to the session called Move Over Dick and Jane: Reconsidering Books for Beginning Readers, about how beginning readers are changing.  However, in that room, there were no seats left, and I learned three years ago that it’s no fun to go to an ALA session and sit on the floor.

So instead, I went to hear Sue Monk Kidd and Anne Kidd Taylor talk about collaborating together on their book Traveling With Pomegranates.  It was wonderful!  I’ve recently been reading several meditative books by Sue Monk Kidd, so it was a thrill to meet her.

Some things she said that I liked:

Memoir is about backward understanding.

It’s always a reach for wholeness when you write memoir.

Memoir can create wholeness in the reader as well.  [That says it for me.  When I join an author on her journey seeking wholeness, it indeed helps me find it myself.]

To write memoir, you need an authentic willingness to be known, a unilateral disarming.

Aging is about the process of letting go of what is leaving anyway and letting something new grow.

After their talk, I got in line, and the publisher gave everyone a free copy of Traveling with Pomegranates, which both authors signed.  I was completely inspired and uplifted by the time I walked away.

Next on my schedule was the Margaret Edwards Award Luncheon, honoring Jim Murphy for his lifetime achievement in the field of literature for young people.  Jim Murphy writes amazingly immediate nonfiction for children.  There was a copy of one of his books on our chairs.  I got to sit next to blogger Liz Burns, and Fairfax County Librarian Shannon Seglin was nearby, sitting at the School Library Journal table.

After a yummy lunch, Jim Murphy spoke about his process of writing and getting at primary sources, and his innate curiosity that fuels his great books.  He had some nice stories of serendipitously discovering material that later became the meat of his classic books.

After lunch, I went to a session called, “Everyone’s a Critic: The Future of Book Reviewing.”  The panel included the founder of GoodReads, a New York Times Book Critic, and a blogger and librarian, moderated by a reviewer from Booklist.

The session was interesting and fun to listen to.  All the panelists agreed that there is room for everyone, that the different review sources have different purposes.  They did point out that one of the strong points of professional book reviewers is that they are excellent essayists.  Their reviews are good reading, whether you want to read the book or not.

Next, I rushed down to the exhibits and got two books signed by Diana Peterfreund.  I met her back in October at the Kidlitosphere Conference, a few days after I had written a review raving about Rampant.  One of the Advance Reader Copies I was the very most excited to get was her sequel, Ascendant.  It’s not out until October, and now I don’t have to wait!  I also bought my own personal copy of Rampant for her to sign since I liked it so much. Killer unicorns rule!

And right next to Diana, who should be signing but Sarah Blake, the author of the excellent book sitting on my bedside table at the time, about three-quarters done, The Postmistress.  While I was there, I got a signed copy.  Very cool!

After that, I went to “Science Fiction and Fantasy: Informing the Present by Imagining the Future.”  This wasn’t so much a panel discussion as it was five distinguished authors speaking on that topic.  They were good!

Here are some things I particularly liked that they said:

Dom Testa  (He’s on the far right behind a fan.)

The visionaries provoke us into thinking.  Their greatest contributions are their ideas.

Science Fiction can be the driving force behind good things, not just defense against bad things.

Jane Lindskold (on the far right at the table — the rest proceed across to the left.)

Give kids something a little different: Imagination is key in any endeavor.

Libraries are the best place for the combination of knowledge and imagination to happen.

Cory Doctorow

Science Fiction writers are always really writing about the present.

Writers also inspire the future.

Science Fiction allows people to vividly imagine the future consequences of their decisions today.

Science Fiction today is an inherently activist literature.

Cherie Priest

Science Fiction and Fantasy is talking about us right now — especially Steampunk.

“Steampunk is what happens when Goths discover brown.”

With Steampunk, you get to go back and change the rules that bound you.

In Steampunk, if you’re not having fun you’re not doing it right.

It looks to the future by looking to the past.

Brandon Sanderson

Our culture has a fetish for the “real.”

SF and Fantasy write about real things “with dragons” or “in space.”

Fantasy writers are talking about NOW.

When people are more important than ideas, that brings people together and does great things for our world.

***

Alas!  The only thing I didn’t like about that session was that even though I got there before they started, I did not get one of the bags of books the publishers were passing out, to get signed after the talk.  They definitely got me wanting to read their work.  (Brandon Sanderson is the only one of them whose work I have read — and I did get a signed copy of his second Alcatraz book that morning.)

After so much inspiration, I finished the day off by going to the Opening General Session with Toni Morrison speaking.  Good stuff!

I didn’t stay for evening programs, because I was hoping to get plenty of sleep and get there bright and early the next morning for the bloggers’ session.  Unfortunately, I got to posting pictures on Facebook and was way too excited to sleep.  The next day was the pinnacle of the conference…