What Makes A Good School Visit Tick?

My dad -- he of the military bearing and the strict demeanor -- had a sense of southern-boy humor and a streak of the deliciously funny, too, and could dead-pan like nobody's business. Now and then, he would put a scarf over his head, hold it under his chin and give us the most pathetic look and say, "Ah been sick."


It cracked us up. Today I know it was a riff on an old cartoon (and, truth to tell, he reminded me (purposely, I think) of the old aunts who said that very thing, and often), but at the time, it was totally original to me.

Well.... ah been sick. I have no scarf, but I do look pathetic. I've been hacking my brains out and my voice is gone, and I travel tomorrow to the D.C. area, where I work for six straight days doing a variety of things. Help!


I've been babying my voice since Thursday, when it disappeared, and it's back a bit. I've tried lozenges and Throat Coat tea and steam inhalations, and long hot baths, and more. I've got it up to a crackle, and you can understand me, but I can't lose it again.

This week is the first leg of the Aurora County Shoestring Tour. I'm taking travel already scheduled and folding in, with Houghton-Mifflin-Harcourt's help, bookstores and other events to celebrate the paperback publication of The Aurora County All-Stars, and the availability now of all three Aurora County novels in paperback.

I've researched how to take care of my voice (again; this is a perennial problem for me when I do too much speaking in a day or a week). I've spent days not talking. Much. I'm coaxing back my voice, and I'm slowly coming back to a healthy place, although my energy level is low. It will be fine by the time I step in front of students, because I'll make it so.



Here's my schedule for this coming week. If you are in the D.C. area, come see me at Politics & Prose on Thursday, April 2, at 10:30, or at Dancing Bear Toys and Books in Frederick, MD on Friday, April 3 at 7pm. I'd love to clap eyes on you. And I promise I'm not contagious.


The photos today are from schools I visited this past two weeks. I'd love to do a full post on each visit -- each was special in its own special way, as schools always are. For now, just know how much I appreciated your enthusiasm and hard work in bringing an author to your school, and how much fun I had... even if I carried home a little something to keep me company at the end of the week. It's a job hazard, now and then.


If you look carefully, you will see students finger writing, writing in notebooks, answering and asking questions, making connections, extending the lesson, and you will see teachers doing the same thing, modeling for their students, collaborating with the media specialist who initiated the contact with me (usually it's the media specialist) and creating a memorable day for their students.


Thanks so much to everyone at Barrow Elementary School in Athens, Georgia for making me feel so welcome -- thank you, media specialist Andy Plemmons for all that hard work -- we did work hard! -- and thank you teachers for the collaboration, and a special thank you to principal Tad MacMillan and assistant principal Ellen Sabatini, who not only attended all sessions, but enthusiastically okayed a teacher writing workshop after school and made themselves a part of that as well. It was an awesome learning day for all of us.


Thanks to students and teachers at R.D. Head Elementary in Lilburn, Georgia -- what a reception! Thanks to PTA cultural arts chair Laura Green for asking her teachers what they wanted, and for listening when they said, "We want Deborah Wiles to come teach our students about writing." When Laura called me, she said, "I didn't think of this as cultural arts... but it is, isn't it?" Yes ma'am, it is. Laura thought outside the box, and she made it happen -- and teachers ran with this and prepared their children so well, they sometimes knew my books better than I did. What a rush. What learning we can do, when we are all prepared. What teaching takes place! It was phenomenal.

Thank you to Nancy Ergle at Davis Elementary in Marietta, Georgia (awesome students!), and to Kathy Schmidt at Rock Springs Elementary in Lawrenceville, GA -- Kathy and I started setting up a school visit long months ago, before Coleen Salley died, when we met at the Decatur Book Festival, but we are connected through Coleen, who came to visit me last May, just before she went to Kathy's school for a visit. Kathy and I stayed in touch through Coleen's brief illness and death, and it was a bittersweet meeting last week -- so good to see one another again, so good to talk about Coleen's visit to Rock Springs, and so sad at the same time, as Rock Springs was Coleen's last school visit.

There are so many ways in which we are connected, and so many stories we have to share.

I'll start a separate post for the schedule. It's part of the Shoestring Tour, and I want to do it justice. First, another cup of Throat Coat. Ah been sick....

Compromises and Coming Back to Life

Wow, what a lot of mail my post about face time generated! It seems we're all struggling with this, in this electronic age. How much is enough? How much is too much? I appreciate all your thoughts, and I commiserate in the struggle.


After a month away from most electronica -- a month of reconnecting and reflection and looking forward, I have come to a compromise, for now:

1. I've reinstated tweets on my blog, and will continue to use twitter, although I can't follow folks much or I go nuts trying to keep up. I once thrived on multi-tasking, but today it takes too much out of me. Hmph.

2. Same with most blogs and news -- I can't keep up, and when I try, it eats into the day so much I look up hours later realizing the day is gone. So I cut out blog reading this past month and I stopped reading the news -- again. I can't believe (well, I guess I can) how much my life has expanded (which tells me how much it had contracted). I feel lighter and want to keep it that way.

3. I've stopped using facebook for updating and I like this. I've also stopped following friends on facebook -- it's just too hard. But I have linked this blog to facebook, so whenever I post to the blog, it appears on facebook, and that will serve as my update. So, in effect, I don't "go" to facebook at all, unless I have a friend request to attend to.

4. You can reach me via email on facebook, or through my website, or on the blog. My email address is deborahwiles@gmail.com. I'm sometimes slow to respond but I do respond. I want to stay connected and I think (for me) email will work best.

5. The website will be overhauled this year. The website will be overhauled this year. The website.... sigh. And when it is easier to navigate, that will help lots with various requests and other mail.

There is more to say, and I feel almost ready to say it! This rest has been good for me. I've been to several schools since I last posted, and will catch up soon with photos and stories -- the posters in this post were made by third-grade students at R.D. Head Elementary School in Lilburn, GA (hey, y'all!).


Then there is the first leg of the Aurora County Shoestring Tour to tell you about, which is just about to start -- in less than a week. Watch This Space. ha.

Thanks for hanging around. I'm so glad you are here.

More Face Time

Well. That was nice. I left the land of ones and zeros for a while, and made-do with face time.

I visited the D.J.s in my life. Son Zach is on the left (D.J. Veda), and his roomate, D.J. Martin, is behind him. John Ray (also a D.J.!) -- who came to visit from Santa Fe -- is on the right, with my husband, Jim standing behind him. Jim's the piano player in the family, a jazz man through and through. He's learning to appreciate these guys and their style -- their enthusiasm is infectious.

Sat at the counter chatting with daughter Hannah while she made batch after batch of muffins. She is smitten with smitten kitchen, and we are the willing beneficiaries of her experimentation and largess.

Face Time. Remember that? When we knew each other because we'd met in the flesh, had formed relationships side-by-side, and kept in touch via the telephone or snail mail when we were apart.

I'm glad to have my laptop, my internet access, my ways of touching base nowadays that go beyond snail mail and telephone, partly because I have phobias surrounding both, so the internet allows me to be much more social than I would normally be, and of course it allows me to conduct business on a level that wouldn't be otherwise possible.

But, I have felt sucked in lately. Some days, I look up and the day is gone and all I've done is stare at my computer, whether it's the work in progress I'm staring at, or administrivia, or research, or email or... it sucks up hours of my day. This is the way I've begun to live, and it's not good for me. I don't seem to be able to multi-task in a way that grants me pockets of time for everything, and so I have asked myself these questions: What can you let go of? What's important? What's most important?

How can I not have had time to scrub and cut some Yukon Gold potatoes, add in the last of the whites, and cook them with some freshly sliced organic cabbage and lots of cracked pepper (and a dash of cream) for a lovely winter soup?

This past three weeks, I found time. It snowed last week, and we sipped this soup, cozy, with our fire crackling. Then, the next day, I added tomatoes and red kale and curry and a tinge of red pepper. It was great. I didn't look at my computer for an entire day; I looked at the snow, and my family, and my friends.


In the time I wasn't catching up on my 262 facebook friends or twittering about my latest experience, I steamed spinach and made pie crust and started knitting a new scarf. I read. Imagine that. I took long, hot baths in the new, deep tub. The bathroom is almost finished. Beautiful photos of a beautiful new room here.

Also in the last couple of weeks, we hosted a potluck for a beloved friend and mentor who is retiring (early retirement, at age 86!). Talk about face time! (photos here) That's all there was, was face time. I adored every moment of this evening, and remembered what it was I had been missing -- craving. Time away from virtual visiting, and more time face-to-face.

So I'm going to do something about it. This "something" is a work in progress, but for now I'm going to abandon facebook and twitter (so much for that social experiment... but never say never, I may be back). I'm planning more face time, here at home, and away. I'm going on a trip. Two trips. Three. I'll tell you about them soon. I'm going to visit friends and family, to see them, face-to-face. Along the way, I'm going to do the ALL-STARS two-step. It's all very, very good.

AND... I'm going to write another novel. I'll be sitting in front of my computer as I do that. I'll be checking email (and glad to have that connection, so please don't quit writing me), I'll be researching on the internet, I'll be staying in touch here at One Pom. I'll just be structuring my life for more face time. It does me good. It grounds me. It brings me home.