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http://amadeo.blog.com/repository/330130/1555712.jpg. Welcome to our session on author visits!. No efforts for literacy or literature are wasted. Author Visits From Two Perspectives. writer Virginia Euwer Wolff school librarian Jim Tindall. While you may be a public librarian.
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Welcome to our session on author visits! No efforts for literacy or literature are wasted.
Author Visits From Two Perspectives writer Virginia Euwer Wolff school librarian Jim Tindall
While you may be a public librarian you may find great value in partnering with your public school counterparts. This session uses schools as the focus of the venue, but the challenges of author visits in schools are similar to public libraries. All questions are welcome at any time.
Jim asks, • Virginia, as you offer a kind of public performance, what three tasks can the librarian complete as a kind of impressaria to allow you to focus on your audience?
Virginia asks, • “Jim, How many presentations are you expecting in a single day? Will an additional presentation be sprung on me when I arrive? Will the ages of the children be different from the ones I’ve prepared for? (I might be preparing for 6th graders and suddenly the kindergarteners arrive because their teacher has taken ill and has nowhere else to put them for an hour....)
Has the audience been prepared? Knowing their questions in advance may aid the speaker! • What questions have your students had about the book that I might not even think about? • (Some teachers don’t think to have their students write the questions down, so the author/illustrator might leave town without answering the kids’ most urgent questions.)
Jim wonders, • “Is it hard for you to change roles from literary artist to that of public speaker? • If it is, what might library staff do to assist the audience in appreciating your challenge?”
The Author Seeks to Improve Society • What particular conditions exist in your school that I can help by addressing, or at the very least, be aware of? • Large immigrant population? • Has your school had a shooting? • Is there bullying that hasn’t been brought under control? • Have you had racist incidents? • Shoplifting incidents? • Hallway chaos?
Jim follows up, • Your novels deal with some tough issues. • Have you ever encountered overt or covert censorship in negotiating an author visit?
Virginia begins to worry, • “Has the adult in charge dropped any of the balls? “Oh-- No, we weren’t going to READ any of the visiting author’s books before s/he arrives. Did you think we were going to?” Or: “If we read the books beforehand it will spoil the surprise....”
Jim wants to know: • The bond between that perfect book and a person can be a life-changing relationship. • What books have changed your life, fostering your love of reading the printed word?
Then she starts to stress, • Will I have 5 minutes between presentations to go to the bathroom? • Will a microphone be necessary? If so, will there be one? • Are you SURE only 2 classes are coming?
What about the money, Virginia? • When and how do you prefer to be paid for your services?
Oooohh, now she’s downright sarcastic, • It’s too bad someone forgot to publicize my visit. Let’s all 3 of us sit in a circle and share stories of the best books we can remember reading. Would you like that? • No, I’m not the one who juggles. Do you remember exactly who it was who told you I would be juggling? • Have all the teachers who bring their groups had lessons in trying not to look utterly bored?
Publicity is important?!? • Virginia, how might an author look at marketing or publicity differently than an employee of a library? • What are your biggest concerns in how we in libraries “sell” or “market” or “promote” your visit?
Virginia wonder’s about the host site’s awareness of her own reality, • “Will the librarian be aware that a visitor is coming that day? • Of, if a school is hosting: Will the principal think to welcome the visitor?”
Virginia, you have created many characters. • If you had a dinner party and could invite four of them to sit down with you and share a meal, which of your characters would you choose to invite?
It is a sad sight to see a lost and hungry novelist. She asks, • “Will lunch be provided?” • “Will somebody who knows the territory walk from room to room with me? Will anybody know that I’m going from room to room?”
And now… Some thoughts and perspective from other Oregonians.
http://www.deborahhopkinson.com ci.oswego.or.us
I do appreciate it when people think ahead, so that if they know I am doing a Powerpoint and there are known problems with rooms that cannot be darkened we discuss it in advance so I am not struggling at the last minute to find a work-around. It is also helpful to have equipment tested in advance.
http://www.davidmichaelslater.com amazon.com
As the husband of a librarian, I am very aware of the sometime monumental task it is to schedule these events. I am happy to work with any reasonable schedule/group size/etc.
Might there be language issues? • In my case, I need to know if a presentation should be in English, Spanish, or bilingual. I have had people upset because I didn’t speak enough Spanish. I will do so if I am told and if I see that the students understand. I have been invited to immersion programs in which the teachers ask me not to speak a word in English, but the students do not have enough Spanish skills to follow my presentation. That also happened to me at a high school class in which the teacher wanted me to teach writing in English but the students didn’t have enough vocabulary to do so.
Emergencies Happen • Make sure that the author has contact phone numbers. Accidents happen. At Whidbey, we waited for an author who didn’t arrive. His plane got cancelled. He tried to call the director at the office, but the director was at the conference.
In Advance, Does the Author Know the Day’s Schedule? • Send a schedule with all the events.
Jim offers one resource: • The current issue of PNLA Quarterly has an article on author visits: • Periodical: • http://unllib.unl.edu/LPP/PNLA%20Quarterly/PNLAQ74-2.htm • Article: “Author Visits: The Elements Defined” • http://unllib.unl.edu/LPP/PNLA%20Quarterly/tindall74-2.htm
http://www2.scholastic.com/browse/contributor.jsp?id=1943 beachbooks37.com
As a source for researching talentVirginia recommends: Scholastic’s Author and Illustrator Index http://www.scholastic. com/librarians/ab/biolist.htm
http://www.susanfletcher.com http://susanfletcher.com/index.php?pr=About_the_Author
Without school visits, I would not be able to write full time. I know that teachers and librarians are increasingly up against a severe time crunch, so I’m grateful for any preparation they can do when I come to visit. And it is so cool to have the opportunity to meet the kids: my readers!
I have had the pleasure of drinking several types of dragon’s milk. The first was Hawaiian punch, at a bookstore signing. Dragon’s milk is blue, in actuality, but I was grateful to be invited and didn’t want to embarrass the proprietor by mentioning this incontrovertible fact. However, when the proprietor urged a precocious third grader to “Have some dragon’s milk,” the little girl regarded her with utter contempt. “That’s not dragon’s milk,” the girl said. “Dragon’s milk is blue!” I’ve also had milk with blue food coloring, which is difficult to choke down at first but tastes just fine. The best dragon’s milk I ever saw was in a deep cauldron, er, punch bowl at a school I visited. It was blue, seeming to grow deeper and deeper blue toward the bottom of the bowl. It was slightly fizzy, and mounds of white foam pillowed around the edges. Wow! I was almost willing to believe it was real, until the librarian confessed that she’d concocted it from blueberry punch, blueberry Jello, 7-Up, and pineapple sherbet.
Late on the evening before a school visit, I got a hesitant call from the school librarian. It seems that the second graders had something planned for me, and the librarian had gone back and forth about whether or not I ought to be warned. She opted to tell. In my novel, The Stuttgart Nanny Mafia, the protagonist plays a number of practical jokes. In that spirit, the second graders were planning to deploy a whoopee cushion…on me. Let me just say that the teacher had heroically read the entire book to her kids, doing her best to make this book about a sixth grader work for her second graders. When the moment came, and I was invited into the classroom, the kids were so excited they looked ready to pee their pants. “Sit down, Mrs. Fletcher!” they all implored. “Sit down!” The device was not hard to spot. A large, overstuffed chair sat at one end of the room; the seat cushion was tipped up at a suspicious angle. I started to sit on one of the kids’ tiny chairs. “No! No! Not there!” they all shouted. I got up and started to sit on another one of their chairs. “No! Not there, Mrs. Fletcher!” They led me to the booby-trapped chair and implored me, desperately, to sit. Oh, well, I thought. Might as well make this good. I flounced down on the chair. Silence. The whoopee cushion had malfunctioned! I caught the teacher’s eye; her look said, Disaster! But she was quick and resourceful; she put her lips to her curled-up hand and produced the appropriate noise. The kids didn’t seem to notice the five-second delay, or that the sound had come from the wrong area of the room. They broke up laughing. Success! I now refer to this as: The Episode of the Whoopee Cushion Ventriloquist.
One of the most moving experiences I’ve had was at a friend’s school. My friend is a special ed teacher. She sent a “scout” – one of her students – to intercept me at the office when I arrived and take me to her room. So, before I spoke with the rest of the student body, I chatted with the special ed kids. I was just theirs. The next day, my friend told me some things I hadn’t known. She told me that they’d all been waiting with bated breath for my arrival. Every time they heard footsteps in the hallway, they peeked out the door to see if it was The Author. She’d described what I looked like to the class, so they would know me if they saw me. Some of them had even begun to question whether their teacher really knew this exalted personage – although the only reason they thought I was so great was that their teacher had gotten them excited about my books. My friend told me that my scout had had numerous emotional and intellectual problems (though she didn’t go into them at all), and that she was reluctant to read and write. But after my presentation to the student body, she had sat down, without prompting, and started writing a story…for the first time in her life. And I was awed at the power I had to make an impression on a young life. But the power didn’t come from me. It was there before I even stepped through the doors. It came from my friend and the school librarian and the other teachers: from those who prepared the way.
Michael Hoeye
Michael Hoeye lemurkat.xi.co.nz AKA Hermux Tantamoq
I think the least successful visits are really thinly disguised sales calls. They're not actually intended as educational experiences. Just another grim reality of the problems of publishing and bookselling these days. These tend to feature: scrambled introductions by principals who don't know my name, have no idea what I do, had no idea I was coming, and have trouble reading the name of one of my books from hastily scribbled index cards; assemblies where teachers mark papers or doze off and leave me to provide discipline for a whole school in a dark auditorium; and the classic "author's classroom appearance" which serves as free period for teachers -- they leave for the lounge and I babysit a room of kids by answering questions about what kind of car I drive and whether I've met J.K. Rowling (no) or Lemony Snickett (yes).
Hoeye, p.2 • The problem with the "no prep" approach is that the only basis the kids have for interacting with me is that I must be a celebrity of sorts -- "a real life author" -- and that must mean that I won some sort of "reality TV show" for writers. Which is probably closer to the truth than most of us would like to think.
Hoeye, p.3 • The classic example of this approach is the "Reading Rock Stars" program at the Texas Book Festival in Austin. I hate to be the "bite the hand that feeds you" type, but since I spent a number of years in the marketing and branding industry I can smell the work of eager p.r. strategists and a desperate book industry. I think the "rock star" approach is offensive to both writers and readers. And the whole effort to re-brand reading as just another pop culture media choice profoundly misguided in terms of messaging to young people.
Consider An OBOB Author Visit • Next year’s Oregon Battle of the Books lists are now available. One of these literary artists is the natural choice to strengthen your partnering with your public and parochial school counterparts. • http://oboblsta.pbworks.com/
