Welcome to the last Sunday and day of the year. Let's share poetry.
🕮
 |
| Banner Advertisement for Get Lit! Book Club |
In addition to the festival, Get Lit! Programs does community outreach, helps fill local classrooms with guest creative writers--all the while supporting the literary arts. One of the cool events that has blossomed recently as part of Get Lit! is a monthly book club featuring a book by a writer who will be at the upcoming festival. It provides a wonderful opportunity for readers to feel fully immersed in the festival once it arrives because they will already be cover-to-cover familiar with many of the guests.
My newest book Unexpected Weather Events will be featured in several events at the festival (details forthcoming), which is why it has found itself the January 2024 book selection for the Get Lit! Book Club, which meets the last Sunday of each month at Auntie's Bookstore, 6 PM.
So, if you're looking for a book club, reading community, and a swell place to find yourself on a Sunday evening, then pencil yourself into Auntie's Bookstore on January 28th from 6-7 PM. (I will not be present for the discussion, but you can find me at Northwest Passages on February 22nd; see Calendar for details.)
More information about the Get Lit! Book Club here.
🕮
 |
| Unexpected Weather Events on a window ledge |
The new year already has plans for you, me, and Unexpected Weather Events.
On Sunday, January 28th, the Get Lit! Book Club with Tricia will be held at Auntie's Bookstore. January's selection is none other than Unexpected Weather Events. The discussion starts at 6 PM. This a readers' discussion and so I will not be present. But! here are all the details about the event: https://www.auntiesbooks.com/event/get-lit-book-club-tricia-10
Nearly a month later on Thursday, February 22nd, I will be on the rooftop of the Chronicle building for Northwest Passages, an author discussion series. Luckily, Shawn Vestal will be with me, and we will be tied to each other at the waist in the event that one of us falls, the other will hold on to dear life to a brick or decorative ledge. Shawn Vestal will be leading the conversation about my book, and I will speak back. To witness this, and what I am told is a beautiful venue, you can purchase a ticket for $7. Event starts at 7 PM. Details here: https://www.spokesman.com/northwest-passages/events/unexpected-weather-events-by-erin-pringle/
🕮
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.
 |
| Dr. Seuss back-cover biography, photo via eBay |
 |
| Tim in shop with my son, photo by me |
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.
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.
 |
| Bobbi Jean Bell |
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.
🎁
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.
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.
🕮
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 |
🎄📚
🕮
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 |
 |
| John Kenny, Writer |
🕮
About Julia Drescher: Julia is a poet, writer, editor, and librarian living in Colorado. Learn about her projects here: