Happy Friday! A couple of days ago, I attended an event called “Young Author’s Day” at K’s school. It’s a big deal — the entire school participates and all the students are shuffled into groups of about 10 kids from various grades. Each student takes a turn reading a story he/she had written, and my favorite part is listening to the “About the Author” section. They all invariably include information about their family, a hobby and a totally random factoid like how they like to eat cereal for dinner or are completely opposed to school uniforms.
K’s group was exceptional. The fifth graders blew me away with their poetry (their haikus made me want to delete all of mine from here), and K recounted how M and I got engaged, which the teacher found hilarious. There was one girl who read a story about finding a lizard in the middle of the street and how she ended up keeping it as a pet (a true story).
The first grader who went last stole my heart, though. I saw how her hands trembled as she clutched her book with the green construction paper cover. Her cheeks blossomed into the color of the brightest of pink peonies, and her voice was so soft, barely a whisper, that all the kids tipped to their sides, cocking their ears to catch the small gasps of quickly strung together words. I remember being that little girl. The one who refused to go until there was no choice, the one who hoped that reading the story super fast would make it less frightening. I couldn’t quite hear the story in its entirety, but I saw her carefully drawn illustrations of a fox and clouds, and a little girl that looked very much like her. She beamed with relief and pride as the group enveloped her in applause and hands shot up to praise her efforts. What a beautiful, beautiful thing.
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Have a delightful weekend, my friends! I am going to RELAX. So, so, so, so excited about this.
At Mockingbird Books
I’ll be doing a reading
I feel like that girl*
I’ll be doing a storytime reading of Little Kunoichi at one of our lovely local bookstore this weekend – there might be a little bit of trembling involved…
I’m sure you’ll do a great job! There are so very many kinds of performance art that I could not bear to do, but reading aloud? I’m up for that any time. To keep me sane at bedtime I sometimes imagine that I’m doing the perfect, single take BBC audiobooks version of whatever I’m reading to the kids!
I love books shops, so to avoid Amazon I have reserved my copy(ies) of Little Kunoichi at my fav bookshop for it’s August release in Aus. looking forward to it!
Haha, I’ll give an update about the reading tomorrow ;-). And I am CERTAIN that your bedtime renditions are Oscar- (or whatever the BBC audio version of an Oscar) worthy! Huh, I didn’t know the release date was August in Australia. Good to know!
These are the things that will weave a quilt of wonderful memories. I miss those precious days when my boy was young and we had all these special moments. I read the bit about your engagement – amazing story about THE Ring! Thanks for sharing that.
Have a wonderful weekend, Sanae! I’m sure you will have a blast at the reading!
I always thought it was so appropriate that I found out about my engagement from a receipt – not sure why. 🙂 Hope you had a wonderful weekend too, Melissa!
I love this story, Sanae!!!! It warms my heart to know that in this fast forward world there’s still a spot for literature and writing stories and poems in the modern kids’ hearts. So cool! Hope your book reading is a blast, trembles aside. What an exciting moment in your life!!!!
The kids are SO into Young Author’s Day, it’s fantastic, Gita! It’s a very out-of-body experience with a lot of the stuff going on right now, and I’m doing my best to enjoy it all :-). Thank you!