Book Your Stocking 2023 with Bobbi Jean Bell

Book Your Stocking 2023 features readers sharing children's books from their past or present. Perhaps you'll stumble upon forgotten books or titles you somehow missed. Should a book find its way into a stocking near you, all the better.

Please tip your hat for today's reader, Bobbi Jean Bell, all the way from Albuquerque, New Mexico.

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My Favorite Place to Go

by Bobbi Jean Bell 

My favorite place to go, from as far back as I can remember, was the local library. We were a library family. A weekly visit was prepared for with great delight and anticipation. While reading all the titles borrowed from the previous visit, I'd be making a list of books to bring home the next visit. As the youngest of us kids, I always enjoyed exploring the titles my older brother and sister chose. I was often told, “You’re not old enough yet for this book.” I couldn’t wait to be old enough! 

When I think back to the library days, I don’t have a strong memory of any one book. Books quickly came into and out of my life. Ravished and consumed. Read aloud. Read silently. Then, returned. That all changed in 1966 when my sister, Wendy, gave me my first book.

My book.

For me.

Oh! What an unexpected gift!

The Golden Treasury of Poetry: Selected and with a commentary by Louis Untermeyer, illustrated by Joan Walsh Anglund

After unwrapping this gorgeous book, I sat with Wendy to begin our exploration of poetry. A first for me. She found favorites in the collection and together we read them aloud. We exclaimed over the illustrations. We found time to peruse the chapters – reading one from “Creatures of Every Kind” and then, perhaps, another from “Unforgettable Stories” or “Laughter Holding Both His Sides.”

It is here that I met my first pirate, characters from the Canterbury Tales, Robin Hood, and Queen Mab. It is here that I read aloud, for the first time, Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky,” and Edward Lear’s limericks. Robert Louis Stevenson, William Blake, Emily Dickinson, Wiliam Shakespeare, Robert Frost, Ogden Nash, T. S. Eliot… and more… and more… and more. Each poem became a friend. What a treasure! Each poem, an adventure. Words to relish, to savor, to ponder, to revisit. 

Wendy is eight years my senior. She took me to my first live theater performance, Tartuffe, at New Haven’s Long Wharf Theatre. Together, we explored Shakespeare and Mozart and Bach. We gathered in her room every Saturday afternoon to listen to the Metropolitan Opera on the radio. Her passion for the written word was contagious.

Even as our lives took us miles apart, books kept us together. Hours on the phone catching up with what we were reading. And many more hours of our lives sharing our passion for reading with others. For her, as a Children’s Librarian. For me, through interviewing writers on live radio.

I don’t know if The Golden Treasury of Poetry is still in print. I still have mine. It’s worn to the point of lacking resale value. You can see, though, in one of the pictures that the book is happiest being open—and that is priceless.

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About Bobbi Jean Bell: Bobbi Jean Bell loves books, music, poetry, the radio, and all things Western. And if you can't find her at home, in the library, or working at her business OutWest Shop, then you'll find Bobbi on the air talking about books, music, poetry, and all things Western. 

On Thursday mornings, she co-hosts Campfire Cafe and Saddle Up America with Gary Holt on equestrianlegacy.net, live at noon-1:00 PM (CST) and on demand. 

On Thursday evenings 6 PM (PST), she hosts Rendezvous with a Writer Outwest, in which she interviews every stripe of writer with husband Jim Bell. For nearly a decade, she hosted the writer-interview show The Writer's Block with co-host Jim Christina (archived shows here).

Bobbi also hosts the OutWest Hour radio show featuring Western, Western Swing, and Cowboy Country music, as well as Cowboy Poetry, on KUPR  (Placitas, New Mexico Community Radio) Saturdays 5-6 PM (CST) or on demand.

For details about her upcoming shows, follow her Facebook page.

And if you've recently read a wonderful book, you should tell her. She wants to hear all about it..

Bobbi Jean Bell

My Heart When My Preschoolers Say Thank You

My Heart When My Preschoolers Say Thank You

by Erin Pringle

When I taught college, I sometimes received small, kind gifts from my students--more frequently in the form of a handshake than a card, but sometimes a card--sometimes chocolate. The most common gift came the final day of the quarter or semester, when a student would approach my desk for the last time, lock eyes with me, and nod. I would nod back, and that would be our way of expressing appreciation to each other as well as acknowledging that our time together was now over.

Of course, growing up, I always made a Christmas gift for my teacher as well as an end-of-year gift. I remember huddling over the dining room table, newspapers spread out to protect the surface from the paint I brushed onto ornaments. The miniature and useless paint containers that tipped over more often than they stood aright. 

I don't remember when I stopped giving teachers presents. Junior high? High school?--as the number of teachers seen in a day increased, or once I began working after school, or when I spent tennis season on the courts or driving back from matches? Drama club, plays, musicals--the time it took to memorize lines and block stage directions equal to the time I once would have spent creating presents? In college, I don't remember giving gifts to my professors, but I was a nod-and-handshake sort of student. By graduate school, gifts would have seemed like extravagances; I did not go in for the extravagance. 

Maybe I simply don't remember writing thank-you notes to teachers in the involuntary, generous way that my mother had raised me to do--both through example and practice. I don't think so. 

However, when my son entered nursery school, I immediately initiated him into the custom of giving to teachers--helping him create gifts--pressing his inked baby fingertips onto a card, giving him a sheet of shiny jewels to stick onto ornaments, handing him a paintbrush and miniature nutcrackers to paint. Art, beauty, care--this is what you give to a teacher, this person who has patiently helped you understand the world and yourself better or in new ways. Made your life a little easier by helping you develop a skill, made your life a little harder by giving you new questions and imaginings. Whether that's developing your gross motor skills or introducing you to the decimal system, tying bows, the Trail of Tears.

But it wasn't until a handful of years ago, when I began teaching preschool and kindergarten that I became the gifted in the custom. And what a beautiful role that is, too. 

Sometime in the week before winter break begins, children begin arriving at school bearing gift bags, offering flowers, or clutching construction paper cards that hold their careful drawings and sometimes a gift card for coffee or to the local bookstore. A packet of flower seeds, a sturdy candle, a salt-dough ornament. The coloring-marker drawings of two balloon people, you and them, side by side. A heart drawn with such intent that you can feel the child breathing on the card as he drew, concentrating through the marker as he tried to remember the way to translate the shape he imagined into the shape he saw.

Like the former gaze and nod, the eye-lock and handshake, the best part of the holiday gift--even in preschool--is the moment the child comes through the door, looking for me, and hurries over before becoming suddenly shy as he or she offers the gift. Our shared smiles. Our giving and receiving. I kneel to see their eyes. 

Because they are learning the choreography of this custom--of giving--of what to say, what to expect, when to let go of the handles, how to gauge whether your teacher will offer a hug. How this hug is a different sort from the hugs received after disappointment, pain, tears, irritation. 

And I too am learning what it is for this child to give. The flicker of anticipation in her eyes. His steady answer when asked if I should open it now or wait until Christmas. What expectations they have formed in the time leading up to this moment. It is its own kind of surprise, the giving moment.

Then, we examine the gift together. I ask questions or point out details about the gift that are beautiful--generous--pleasing. They give their own observations, or none if they have gone shy or were more the delivery person for the parent-led gift. One child announces how pleased she is with the gift bag itself--a snowman, Miss Erin! 

To hell with whatever her mother put in the bag--besides that she doesn't remember making whatever might be in there, anyway--but, Miss Erin, do you love this snowman?!

Yes, I say. It's such a happy snowman!

Because it is. The happiest. And so is this small person, face tipped up in a grin, sunlight in her hair.

With my eyes, I say you are my love, my heart, my student. And I am honored that you would want to give this joy, this snowman's glossy cheer to me. I am so honored. Thank you.

This moment that the student tries to make tangible the appreciation of learning. 

This moment that the teacher tries to make tangible the appreciation of teaching.

Through handshake.

Through ribbon.

Through the pause that giving allows--for the student to give and the teacher to receive.

Before we leave each other for holiday, for family, home, so that we may return freshly to the classroom--to our friends and fellow teachers, to the tasks at hand, ready to discover a new day together.

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Book Your Stocking 2023 with Tom Noyes

Book Your Stocking 2023 features readers sharing children's books from their past or present. Perhaps you'll stumble upon forgotten books or titles you somehow missed. Should a book find its way into a stocking near you, all the better.

Please welcome Tom Noyes from Erie, Pennsylvania.

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The Hidden Stories

by Tom Noyes

I remember liking Richard Scarry books very much as a tike. Books like What Do People Do All Day? and Cars and Trucks and Things That Go didn't offer much in terms of plot, but the charmingly absurd and busy illustrations--Is that rabbit driving an alligator?--offered lots of raw material for me to use to tell myself stories. While large-ish animals like hippos, pigs, cats, bears, and foxes got the starring roles in Scarry's illustrations, my favorite characters were GoldBug and Lowly Worm, recurring minor players who made miniature, half-hidden spectacles of themselves on the perimeters of the books' pages. To this day, I still find myself interested in these kinds of peripheral characters, suspecting that the most compelling stories might not always be the most obvious ones. 

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About Tom Noyes: Noyes is the author of three story collections Behold Faith and Other Stories, Spooky Action at a Distance, and Come By Here as well as the novel Substance of Things Hoped For. He teaches at Penn State in the Behrand College. Write website here: https://tomnoyes.org/

Tom Noyes

Book Your Stocking 2023 with Marilynn Strasser Olson

On this year's Book Your Stocking, readers are sharing children's books from their past or present. Perhaps you'll stumble upon a book you once loved or a title you somehow missed. Should a book find its way into a stocking near you, all the better.

Please welcome my friend and cherished teacher, retired Professor of Medieval Studies and Children's Literature, Marilynn Strasser Olson.

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One Way to Shelve a Magical Book

by Marilynn Olson

I was accosted on a bus by a handsome stranger once, who said “You read a lot of Edward Eager as a child, didn’t you?” – which is the most solid proof that I have that reading Edward Eager as a child had a permanent effect.  I’m pretty sure it did.  I would have told anyone that Half Magic was my favorite book. I got it in the summer when I was 8 from the Weekly Reader Children’s Book Club.  

The cover scared me (I have heard one other testimony to this – neither of us is sure why), so I always put it back in the same place in my bookshelf with the cover against the right-side edge so I could find it but wouldn’t be taken unawares.  

I loved the Bodecker illustrations, which have exactly the right tone.  I loved this one because it is very funny, but also (I think) because it revealed some adult vulnerabilities that had not occurred to me yet.  

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About Marilynn Strasser Olson: Dr. Olson recently retired from Texas State University where she taught an array of courses over a number of years in both the undergraduate and graduate English literature programs. She's author of innumerable essays, lectures, and presentations as well as the books Children's Culture and the Avante Garde: Painting in Paris 1890-1915 (2013); Ellen Raskin in the Twayne's United States Author Series (1991). She's fabulous.

Marilynn Strasser Olson

Book Your Stocking 2023 with John Kenny

On this year's Book Your Stocking, readers are sharing children's books from their past or present. Perhaps you'll stumble upon readers who read the same books as you, or will remember books important to your own childhood. Should the book find its way into a stocking near you, all the better.

Please welcome writer, editor, and teacher John Kenny from Dublin, Ireland.

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Through the Reading Glass as an Adult

by John Kenny

My main obsession as a child was with comics. My 'education' at a Christian Brothers school here in Dublin, Ireland turned me off books, so it was only as an adult that I started to dip my toes into the world of literature. I've since read a number of children's classics, several of which I loved: Peter Pan, Kipling's Puck of Pook's Hill, Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verses. 

Perhaps it's an obvious choice, but my absolute favourites have to be the two Alice in Wonderland books. As a parent, I had the privilege of reading to my two daughters. They would sit on each side of me on the bed and I would read the next chapter of whatever book they had picked before they went to sleep for the night. It was a magical few years, a total delight for me. 

I think one of their favourites, and mine, was the Spiderwick Chronicles, which we all loved. It was a bittersweet moment when they got a little older and finally said to me, 'It's okay, Dad, we can read on our own now.'

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About John Kenny: John is an avid reader, writer, and for many years served as editor of the Dublin science-fiction and fantasy magazine Albedo One. He teaches writing workshops in Dublin and writes about books and more at his website https://johnrichardkenny.com/

John Kenny, Writer

Book Your Stocking 2023 with Julia Drescher

On this year's Book Your Stocking, readers are sharing children's books from their past or present. Perhaps you'll stumble upon books you remember reading or somehow missed. Should the book find its way into a stocking near you, all the better.

Please welcome today's avid reader, Julia Drescher.

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Both a Dress and Not a Dress

by Julia Drescher

My favorite book in elementary school was The Hundred Dresses by Eleanor Estes. When I was a kid, I suppose I was attracted to books that were sad with a tinge of a small, lonely triumph. I loved the fact that the main character did not have 100 dresses & very much did have 100 dresses, & I loved that they were an art project & not the "actual" things that would've helped her socially. Later, when I was made to go to church, I think this book led me to sit in the pew with a small spiral notebook & design/illustrate lots of fashion garments for the Virgin Mary statue at the front of the church. It was a lovely way to spend the time.

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About Julia Drescher: Julia is a poet, writer, editor, and librarian living in Colorado. Learn about her projects here: 

http://www.furtherotherbookworks.com

http://deletepress.org/julia-drescher/

Book Your Stocking 2023 with Meredith Lombardi

This year on the holiday series Book Your Stocking, readers are sharing children's books from their past or present. Perhaps you'll stumble upon forgotten books or discover a title you somehow missed. Should the book find its way into a stocking near you, all the better.

Today's reader is Meredith Lombardi of Spokane, Washington.

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What the Sisters Predicted

by Meredith Lombardi

Louisa May Alcott's Little Women is a book that I read in childhood that has left a lasting impression. I think it still stands out to me because I was a young girl when I read the book, and the author portrayed the sisters as such unique women. They all had dreams, struggles and responsibilities but were ultimately respected as individuals. They demonstrated empathy, sacrifice and patience but still found their way. I think it made me feel like life wasn’t always going to be perfect but that I could be myself and still figure it out.

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About Meredith Lombardi: Meredith is the owner and director of Spokane Montessori North, Preschool and Kindergarten. In her spare time, she travels, teaches yoga, walks her dogs, hikes, reads, and enjoys her family. 

Meredith the morning before hiking
into the Grand Canyon

Wake to Words and Brew Some Coffee (December 17, 2023)

It wasn't until I typed out December 17 that I realized how far into this month we've come. Thanks for bringing your coffee today to listen to good poems by other people. Today's reading is for my good friend Steve Parker who is home in bed when he'd rather be in the mountains.

Poems:

• The Plan by Wendell Berry (from his book The Peace of Wild Things)

• Hiking with the Old Acorn Lady by J.W. Rivers (1988)

• Mason Jars by the Window by Alberto Rios (1988)

• Last Hike Before Leaving Montana by Patricia Traxler (from her book Naming the Fires, 2015)

• Grace by Wendell Berry (1967)

• The Hike by Neil Weiss (1955)

• The Burial of the Old by Wendell Berry (1967)

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🠊 More Wake to Words here: http://www.erinpringle.com/p/wake-to-words-and-brew-some-coffee.html

🠊 Catch the live show Sunday mornings at some time-ish: https://www.facebook.com/erintpringle 

Book Your Stocking 2023 with My Mom

On this year's Book Your Stocking, readers share children's books from their past or present. Perhaps you'll stumble upon readers who loved the same books as you, or you'll recall books  important to your own childhood. Should the book find its way into a stocking near you, all the better.

I'm pleased to welcome my mother to the series who begins by remembering her own mother.

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From Listening to Reading Aloud

by Carol Pringle

Mother read to us The Bobsey Twins series. Then, I read a lot of forgettable library books as a child and owned only one book (dog vs. cat) until ordering a Scholastic romance book as a high-school freshman. So, I wasn’t an avid reader until I became a teacher who read to children. My all-time fave is E.B. White's Charlotte’s Web. Loved his Trumpet of the Swan, too, and Beverly Cleary’s Ramona the Pest books. Pippi Longstocking by Astrid Lindgren was one my third graders enjoyed hearing. Others liked Little House on the Prairie; Old Yeller also comes to mind. 

My 2024 reading list is going to contain mostly children’s book titles. This week, I’m reading all of Kate Dicamillo’s books (Because of Winn Dixie, et al).

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My mom reading to my son

About Carol Pringle: Carol taught elementary school for over thirty years after a stint in social work. She grew up in Evansville, Indiana between her older sister Judy and her younger brother Gary--a sibling position to which she attributes many of her personality traits, faults, and desires. She is now retired, volunteers at the local library, and is an active member of her church community.

Book Discussion with Erin Pringle on Rendezvous with a Writer OutWest

Last night, I met up virtually with Bobbi Jean Bell and Jim Bell for a discussion about my newest book Unexpected Weather Events. I met Bobbi Jean several years ago when she co-hosted a different book show entitled The Writer's Block. Thankfully, she continued a writer-interview radio show and podcast even after the death of her co-host, the wonderful Jim Christina. 

This is my third time talking with Bobbi Jean, and for good reason--she is SO easy to talk to, thoroughly reads the work, and it really feels like a conversation and never a template. I wish I wrote faster so that I could know the next time we get to talk at length about writing. Luckily, Bobbi Jean and her husband Jim interview a writer every Thursday, so you can tune in live or listen/watch recorded shows.

If you missed our recent conversation on L.A. Talk Radio, you can view the show via YouTube (below) or on the L.A. Talk Radio website. 

An audio-only version is also available here: https://www.latalkradio.com/content/rendezvous-121423%20#audio_play

 

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