Is there anyone who didn’t read William Golding’s Lord of the Flies when we were in junior high school? Golding’s bleak view of human nature left me depressed for a week–which isn’t hard to do when you’re in junior high school. Well, here’s something to cheer you up. There is hope for us yet. Perhaps, [...]
A librarian friend of mine asked me to write a letter of support for the librarians in her distract. The district has been considering eliminating elementary and middle school library positions. This has been happening all over the country. In some cases, the librarians are replaced with interns or teachers working toward a library certification. [...]
I was rereading my post about writing to authors when a thought occurred to me. Writing a letter to your favorite author? How 20th century! I’ve always believed that schools are 19th century institutions that never got around to dealing with the 20th century. Now they’re in the 21st! Most of the letters I get [...]
I recently received a rush of letters from children all over the country whose classes are writing to a favorite author. It’s important to me that I answer these letters, or at least respond and acknowledge that I received them. If children go through the trouble of writing a letter, they deserve an answer. However, [...]
Okay, I”m back! It’s been a long time since I posted anything here. January 21st was the last one. I hadn’t realized it had been that long since I put anything up here. All I can say is that a lot has been going on. My friend, author Bruce Colville, was visiting Egypt when the [...]
Okay, I’ll admit it. I hate to throw anything away. I’ve always been this way. When I was a little boy I had the idea—delusion?—that my toys, books, clothes were alive. If I threw them out or gave them away, they felt pain. They knew I was abandoning them to a horrible fate: the garbage [...]
An interesting email came in yesterday that started me thinking. The writer was either a teacher or parent. She wrote to say how much she enjoyed my books. Then she asked me to tell her which ones corresponded to a list of values that she provided. The values were certainly the sort you would want [...]
An astonishing article appeared on the front page of the New York Times yesterday. Here’s the link so you can read it yourself: Picture Books, Long a Staple, Lose Out in the Rush to Read. Since most of my books are picture books, this is not something I want to read the first thing in [...]
