ncte, stories, and song

I posted this note to my facebook author page -- I just discovered I had a "write a note" function -- who knew? -- so I practiced. I want to put it here on the blog as well. I'm not sure how I will end up using the fb author page along with the blog... I'm experimenting.

This is my last week home before the last of the year's travel. 2013 is coming to an end. I'll be in the D.C. area for a few days next week, and then in Boston for NCTE. I'm signing Countdown at Scholastic's booth on Friday (Nov. 22) from 3 to 4. There may be a little sneak-peek giveaway for Revolution, at my signing... wheee! I love watching a new book being born.

I speak at NCTE on Saturday at 2:45 as part of a panel called "Meaningful Literacy Learning With Short Texts: An Inch Wide and a Mile Deep." I'm working with two amazing (truly) Mercer University professors, Jane West and Emilie Paille. I'm so looking forward to teaching with them -- I appreciate them including me and my "organic" way of teaching writing. They will couple it, in their seasoned way, with their expertise and strategies and we'll have what we think is a session with excellent tools for you to take back to your classroom, to teach writing. You'll find us in room 108 at the Hymes Convention Center (level one).

The leaves in Atlanta are showy and fall-y and drifiting in waves with every breeze that tugs them from the trees. The carpet below my feet is beginning to crunch. There is a fire now, almost every day, in the fireplace by my writing chair. Soups and stews and root vegetables are in constant rotation. Friends come to share food and fire and songs. We break out the banjo, the guitar, the melodica, the kazooo!, and laugh and send up another old tune.

Someone -- a young college student whose grandma has just died -- suddenly lifts his voice in harmony to an old Methodist hymn. Everyone in the room, without moving or uttering one spoken word, gathers that young man's heart together and brings it to the center of our attention, in that ancient, communal embrace of song.

I want to take that feeling with me into the world today.