Parenthetical

To continue this genre discussion… a couple of weeks ago I attended the Horn Book at Simmons colloquium, where my favorite break-out session was Kelly Hager‘s discussion of When You Reach Me and genre. (Fairly general spoilers.) WYRM (hee) is notoriously, delightfully hard to categorize. Kelly proposed “slipstream” as a genre, based on Bruce Sterling’s [...]

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Yet another conference speaker, who brought a guitar on stage and performed some Tom Lehrer, among other things. What’s with all the musical children’s authors? Maybe music should be Simmons’ theme next time… I am not a poetry reader, as a general rule. But a few poems in, I was sold on this book. If [...]

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Another conference speaker with whom I was unfamiliar. She’s also a jazz singer, and gave us a lovely impromptu a capella performance (just reinforcing the sense that I was at a folk festival). I’ll admit, I found her book tiresome. The prose is lovely, I guess, but it was a Woman’s Sexual Awakening and Learning [...]

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Some personal stuff intervened last week*, but I still have many, many thoughts about the Simmons conference to post. The theme was “Crimes & Misdemeanors,” and most of the authors stuck remarkably well to it. A few smart thoughts from smart people, lifted from my notes: Many people argued that crimes (for a sufficiently loose [...]

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In two weeks I’ll be heading to the Simmons College Children’s Literature Summer Institute. Three days of talks by and schmoozing with fabulous authors, editors, and other people working in the children’s lit field (not to mention some dear friends). So excited! I realized that I’m unfamiliar with the work of a number of people [...]

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