Eaton Great Start Family Program This Saturday

On Saturday, April 20, Eaton Great Start will have lots of activities for families with young children from 10:30-noon at the Eaton Intermediate School District, 1790 Packard, Charlotte, MI, and it's a day to celebrate our wooly friends. There'll be a sheep "shearing" station with a sheep they've made, sheep puppets, painting sheep with bubble wrap, live sheep on site, and more. I'll tell sheep stories, sign books, and look forward to meeting families. More details here.

Meet and Greet at the Library

Please celebrate the beginning of National Library Week by meeting Michigan children's-book creators at the Author Meet and Greet, to be held Sunday, April 14 at the Frenchtown-Dixie Branch of the Monroe County Library System from noon to 3 p.m. These authors and illustrators will be there:
Debbie Diesen
Matt Faulkner
John Perry
Nancy Shaw
Kelly DiPucchio
Ruth McNally Barshaw
Kalli K. Reid
Colleen Murray Fisher
The library will have their books for sale at a discount, so it's a good way to add to your book collection with a personal touch, or just come and talk books.

Looking Back at Reading Month

Photo by Allison Shaw

The sweet sheep treats pictured here are just part of the wonderful things I experienced during March, known as Reading Month to schools and libraries. They're from elementary schools in Bowling Green, Ohio, where I met staff and students who had decked the halls with sheep, decorated T-shirts, read a lot, and written a lot.

Jeep at Kenwood Elementary School

I heard great questions in Potterville, Spring Lake, Ypsilanti, Webberville, Marion (Ohio), and Ravenna, where Beechnau Elementary School had activities for family night on the theme of "Shoot for the stars--read!" The sheep were happy to Blast Off! at family night, and I checked out the Planet Walk and art projects, and got my picture taken as an astronaut.

The Wood County District Public Library in Bowling Green, also full of wonderful art projects, welcomed me for a family program, which they previewed in Connect Magazine. Thanks to the Youth Services staff, shown here:

Photo courtesy of WCDPL

We'll keep reading in April...

Your Area's Got Talent

Debbie, Natalie, Angie, Debbie, Lynn, Dawn, and Mary Ann (left to right)

The Michigan chapter of the Society of Children's Book Writers & Illustrators fights the mid-winter blahs by arranging meet-ups of people interested in writing and/or illustrating for young people. Thanks to Charlie Barshaw for organizing Your Area's Got Talent groups throughout the state, and thanks to Angie Verges for putting together the Ann Arbor one, held February 17--the same day as Three Rivers and Traverse City.

Yet to come are Holland, Lansing, Marquette, Muskegon, Pinckney, Royal Oak, and Troy. If you'd like to get together with other children's-book people, R.S.V.P. to a host.

Besides Angie's site, the Ann Arbor group heard about book projects and blogging: Natalie Aguirre's www.literaryrambles.com, Lynn Baldwin's openheartsopenminds.blogspot.com, Debbie Taylor's sweetmusicinharlem.weebly.com, and Debbie Gonzales's books and educational guides: debbiegonzales.com.

A Bookstore Party

Thanks to Nicola's Books for hosting a celebration of two new books on December 5:
My Bookstore, an anthology of writers telling where they like to shop, and why; and Elena's Story, my new picture book about a girl of the Guatemalan highlands. It was great seeing readers, neighbors, and friends, including  writers/bloggers/illustrators and book-group members. I was honored that Nicola introduced me, and that my editor, Barb McNally, explained the process of bringing story and art together in Elena's Story.
      I brought tostadas, sheep's-milk cheese, and sheep-themed cookies, because my Sheep in a Jeep characters made an appearance in My Bookstore. They try cybershopping in "Sheep Phone It In," part of my essay about Nicola's. Coming across a smartphone, they test its capabilities:

Nicola Rooney, Owner of Nicola's

   Sheep tap screen and go online.
   Cyber-shopping--how divine!
   Items land in shopping cart.
   Wow! This phone is really smart!

   Alas! The books they order aren't what they want.
   They have to visit Westgate Shopping Center to ship
    their purchases back:

   Returning from their shipping chore,
   Sheep espy a special store.
   At Nicola's, their spirits soar!

   So the shopping adventure turns out well.

Syndicated columnist Katherine Salant, author-illustrator Tracy Gallup, and author-illustrator Deb Pilutti were three of the writers who came to the book party.

Celebrate My Bookstore

My Bookstore, the anthology published by Black Dog & Leventhal in support of booksellers across the country, came out November 13, and I'm making my way through it. So far, I've especially liked Richard Russo's introduction. His first bookstore, like mine, was a stationery store. "Alvord and Smith was a store for people who--though I couldn't have articulated it at the time--had aspirations beyond life in a grungy mill town...to me, bookstores, like my first one, remain places of genuine wonder...Bookstores, like libraries, are the physical manifestation of the wide world's longest, best, most thrilling conversation. The people who work in them will tell you who's saying what. If you ask,...they'll put in your hand something you just have to read, by someone you've never heard of, someone just now entering the conversation, who wants to talk to you about things that matter."

I'm also taken with Louise Erdrich's tale of a coffee date that led to browsing in Magers & Quinn Booksellers. Her date chose a Roethke collection for her. "Bookstore Lovers, I married him."

My sheep characters invaded my essay, pages 302-304, about Nicola's Books in Ann Arbor. We'll celebrate my bookstore, My Bookstore, and my book Elena's Story, at 7 p.m. on December 5. "Sheep Phone It In" concerns the limits of e-commerce, and comes to a happy end in the Westgate Shopping Center. You're invited.

More on Earthquake Relief in Quetzaltenango

The Riecken Foundation has posted these pictures of efforts made through the Huitán library to get supplies to families who lost their homes in the Guatemalan earthquake of November 7.