“That first breath,” says Kaity Adkins, “isn’t for the audience. It’s for you and for the people you are connecting with in the band.” She would know how best to begin a concert. Currently attending Rogers High School, Adkins plays five instruments in four different bands and recently won the Puyallup Valley Community Band Scholarship. She started practicing… Read more
2019
Emanuel African Methodist Church stands directly behind and across the parking lot from the hotel where my husband and I stayed in Charleston. On our first day, we drug ourselves down the sidewalk, tired and hungry from the cross country flight and peered into the front area where people had left flowers. We wondered why… Read more
Remember that old snarky saying? Take a picture–it will last longer? I’m not so sure about that. Last weekend, I stood at the bar looking across the banquet room, past the wedding party table full of delightful people I recently met and the table filled with people I have loved for decades. Beyond that, Commencement… Read more
“My hand hurts looking at this!” said Mike Curato, author and illustrator of The Little Elliot series. Random House Art Director April Ward and he had just put an image on screen from a Portland area artist and I had to agree. The amount of detail in that artwork with trees, foxes, and geese was… Read more
“When my book connects with a reader in this way, it’s a joy I can’t explain.” -Stacy McAnulty, author of The Miscalculations of a Lightning Girl I haven’t yet finished Carolyn See’s book How to Live a Literary Life. But she has at least one solid piece of advice I’m paraphrasing here: Write to the authors… Read more
For all of its many downsides, social media gives me access to fantastic book events and people I never would see without all that clicking and liking. Saturday, I drove down to Olympia–so much easier than Seattle for me–and found a lovely author illustrator with yet another book that awed me with the beauty of… Read more
I love this day. Of all the holidays, Epiphany is my most beloved. Dogs are involved. In October of many years ago, when I had recently graduated and was living with my grandmother, I lost my sweet Rottweiler Susie. Her favorite trick was to rest her chin on my shoulder from behind my seat when… Read more