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2011 Texas Book Festival: Children’s Entertainment

October 21, 2011 /

When it comes to this year’s Texas Book Festival — which is this weekend (October 23-24, 2011) in and around the Austin state capitol building — few words can do justice to the heroic work that the non-profit’s tiny staff (which you can count on one hand and still have fingers left over) put in to bringing you this year’s awe-inspiring lineup of 250 authors, celebrity guests and entertainers. You’ll get a far better sense of what the weekend has in store by simply reading the author list and looking over the schedule.

As volunteer chair of children’s entertainment this year, I’d like to selfishly point out that particular schedule, which boasts the greatest lineup, by far, that I’ve seen in years (thanks again to Clay Smith, Heidi Smith, Roger Polson, and Hannah Norman for doing much of the booking, coordinating, and long hours of legwork to bring it all together).

The children’s entertainment schedule for both Saturday and Sunday will likely pose irresistible challenges for kids, parents and tag-alongs who want to see a little bit of everything at the festival… because there’ll be something big and wonderful for every little set of eyes in the entertainment tent during every hour of the day.

And here’s the best part: The Texas Book Festival is FREE and open to the public.

I don’t know of any other event in Texas, or perhaps the country, in which you can see so many incredible authors, musicians, demonstrations, lectures and performers, all day, for two days, for FREE.

Having said that, I encourage you to visit the Barnes & Noble tent and consider buying a book or two (early Christmas shopping!)…that you can have the authors sign at the Festival. You’ll go home with some nifty gifts (or selfish finds) and the knowledge that you’ve done a good deed to support an important cause: Texas public libraries.

The Texas Book Festival is a non-profit organization whose sole reason for being is to raise money, through this one annual event, for Texas Public Libraries. The money is distributed through grants, which libraries will use to build their collections. And that’s more important than ever, because tough economic times often lead to drastic cuts in public funding for libraries.

Here’s the children’s entertainment lineup for Saturday, October 22:

And for Sunday, October 23:

Check back here this weekend and in the days that follow for more information, ideas, and images from the 2011 Texas Book Festival.

Postcards from a Self-Inflicted Vacation

June 14, 2011 /

Dear friends, followers and innocent passers-by:
You may have noticed an increase of unusual activity on this writer’s public pages.  I can explain.

I am in the midst of a self-inflicted vacation. The past 18 months of my life have been crammed with action, adventure, fantastic but demanding work, staggering personal change, joy, grief and adaptation. During this time I made some tough decisions and soared, took risks and failed, and chased dreams that have yet to be realized…while somehow simultaneously and often unintentionally embracing or rejecting just about everything you can imagine including my identity, marriage, love family, friends, math, work, sleep and higher beings, and not necessarily in that order. After such prolonged excitement I needed to stop and catch my breath. 

Believe me, this was not an idea that I embraced at first. I’ve rather gotten used to going gangbusters in every aspect of my life, so I took to the idea of relaxation with a mixture of anxiety and reluctance.  But t once I got past the feelings of you-know-you’re-a-mother-when guilt and a few startling moments when I woke up feeling certain that I’d slept through something important (then realized the alarm wasn’t set on purpose), I eventually decided that I either had to embrace the idea of time off or give up on it altogether and go back to work.
I chose the former. I’m glad that I did. I’ve had time to spend with my family and friends, to exercise, clean a few closets, and organize some shelves, take baths and read. I hadn’t realized how much I missed being able to sit down somewhere quiet and catch up on my favorite authors, books and magazines. And I hadn’t realized how much I needed to re-read a few chapters of my own life, which time seems to have written while I was busy making other plans.  
There’s nothing that I love more than a good story, and I may have roped a few of you into reading or listening to one or two of them. Perhaps that’s because I been a writer and a storyteller for as long as I can remember.

My love of writing (and its side-effect of reading) was inspired during childhood by my great uncle Charles Fern – a terrific writer and successful businessman who decided shortly after I was born that I was going to be his pen pal. It was a role that I happily started fulfilling as a toddler, with the help of a talented staff of trained readers that I affectionately referred to as parents and siblings.

I got much better at the Uncle Charlie correspondence job once I figured out how to manipulate crayons and other assorted writing instruments with which to respond to his letters. Those early experiences turned into a writing hobby, then became a storytelling habit, then a journalism degree, and then a communications career.

In my first career-life I was a journalist, and that’s when I learned that what I loved doing most of all was writing columns. If you ask me, there’s no better place for a writer to tell stories than in a newspaper column. I missed that after I left the news business and started writing for other people.

I never really had the time to write like that again. But something happened in my fourth or fifth career-life. I discovered social media and a remarkable new word-crunching, microblogging mechanism called Twitter. Turns out that Twitter is a dandy solution for a storyteller who doesn’t have time to write her own stories or read anyone else’s either, for that matter.
But I’ve got the time now, actually (see title, above). In fact, I’ve got time to spend five minutes going back and forth about whether I should write “time” or “time off,” and in Real World Writer Time (RWWT), spending five minutes for three words is technically classified as either a condition of leisure luxury or a case of writer’s block. Seeing as I am presently a vacationly woman and will be for the next 10 days, it’s clear that I suffer from the former condition. 
Once I dispensed with the first few days teeth-gnashing, which is an early symptom of self-inflicted vacation-positive (or SIV+) writers, I settled down to do some honest to goodness mindless wandering, absorption and reflection.  The in-pouring of various creative and intellectual stimuli led to a buildup of writer-type energy, which, either as a result or a consequence, has expressed itself in the outpouring of communicatable stuff. And everybody needs a place to outpour — or at least blow off a little creative steam.
Twitter just so happens to be a nifty little safety-relief valve, especially for the clumsily contained stockpiles of unsorted mayhem that only a communicator can generate and amass. Microblogging has allowed me to release years worth of pent-up energy and imagination and finally do something with all those misfit words, left-over lines and ideas that never seemed to fit anywhere else. 
Knowingly or not, we all need our sacred spaces, and they can be in public or private places — churches, parks, concert halls, the bathtub, a comfy chair near a bookcase, or the pages of a personal journal.  I have many, including this blog and Twitter. 
I created a personal Twitter account so my own writing would have a place to live and breathe. It’s a playground for characters and stories – some true, some pure fiction. It’s a laboratory for my experiments with words and a proving ground for ideas or lines that I might use somewhere else.  A lot of people I know and love have joined me there, and some other really awesome people I’ve never met have visited me there, too. I’ve scared a few others away as well, but that’s never bothered me. People should enjoy the places where they spend time. And they should love the people they choose to spend time with.
Writers are odd creatures, and it hasn’t taken me long to prove that point to readers and innocent passers-by, whom I’ve half-wittingly exposed to my vacation-positive communicable stuff both here and on Twitter. And it is this very situation that led me to writing this post.

This self-inflicted vacation is as much about relaxing and having fun as it is about taking important time to think about my life and many of the people who are in it, or who might read about it. Sorry about those odd bits, by the way.  I should have warned you sooner.

I don’t really need any vacation time to realize how lucky I am on both counts, but I did want and need to take the time to tell you so. I am lucky. I am really, really, lucky.

I have a great life. It’s been undeniably stressful and overwhelming at times, but I really do believe I wouldn’t change a thing, because I wouldn’t be who I am now if I lacked even a single moment of what it was. And what I am, apparently (although the jury is still out and some of them have quit on principle), is a dang-good and determined woman who’s not half-bad at her worst. I believe I’m starting to see some signs of improvement, too.
I also have great people in my life. I’m not going to dress that statement up in any sort of garden-glovey, summer-hatty vacation language, because it is what it is, and you are who you are, and frankly if I think or write about you too much I’m likely to cry, which would only make a mess of my keyboard. But you are all sacred to me. And I’m so damn grateful that you’ve allowed me to share my ideas and words…. and time with you. Thank you.
If you love to read, come back here once and a while. And if you love to write, regardless of what you think about your writing, promise me that you will never, ever stop doing it.

Life Imitates Snoopy

June 11, 2011 /
By Charles M. Schulz, one of my favorite immortals.

Inspiration flows from the tip of a pen (or the keys of a typewriter) and takes shape in many forms — letters and symbols; characters and cartoons…and Schulz somehow mastered them all.

Deeper Shades of Soul: Searching for things not lost

June 9, 2011 /

My former colleague Peter Wehner has written a terrific and thought-provoking piece about morality in modern times for Commentary Magazine (On Neuroscience, Free Will, and Morality). It’s a subject that I’ve given some thought to myself over the past few years as I’ve researched, written and lectured about the art and science of communication, public relations (or relationships) and human connections.

In his commentary, Peter writes:

“The ancient Greeks and the Jewish and Christian traditions hold that character is, at least in part, the product of habits, which are the result of a series of choices we make. These choices, taken together and over time, determine whether we are people of integrity. The way we become just and brave is by committing just and brave acts is the way Aristotle put it.”

I’m fascinated by the remarkable evolution of social media and the impact it’s had on our choices, our lives, our communities and our humanity. The more I’ve observed, the more convinced I’ve become that people are profoundly driven by a need for community – not simply for the sake of intellectual engagement or entertainment, but also for the sake of a deeper sense of communing with other human beings.

The rise of telecommuting and entrepreneurialism have driven scores of people out of the commons of the business workplace and into home offices, and it’s not long before many start to feel stranded on their islands of isolation. So what do they do? They pack up their laptops and go to places like Starbucks, where they can work in the company of other warm bodies.

The impact of isolation plays out, I suspect, in the rapidly growing world of social media, where people are flocking to connect and collaborate and build virtual relationships with others who share common business or personal interests.

And where you find two or more people regularly interacting in these virtual settings, you’ll often see that a kinship emerges, and that kinship often develops into a sense of responsibility for one another. And, as the media, marketers and sociologists have already discovered, these virtual connections between individuals scattered around the world have solidified into remarkably strong and loyal communities. And at the core of these communities are individuals who have proven, through incredible social, political and economic movements and global collaborations, that they have hearts, souls – and yes, even morality.

Science and technology have not rendered our humanity obsolete — if anything they have reinforced the idea that we are, at our very core, basically decent, caring, moral and spiritual beings … that we are beautifully and inextricably bound together… and we are driven by forces beyond flesh and bone to connect and commune with one other in whatever ways we can, by whatever means possible.

In his book “Care of the Soul,” Thomas Moore wrote:

“We think of the psyche, if we think about it at all, as a cousin to the brain and therefore something essentially internal. But ancient psychologists taught that our own souls are inseparable from the world’s soul, and that both are found in all the many things that make up nature and culture.”

Both are indelible, I might add, and perhaps even more appreciated and better expressed through the miracles of modern science, technology and medicine.

Fog

June 8, 2011 /

I remember experiences of fog in Carmel, where I lived when I was a child.

Fog smells sweet, first notice…it picks up scents from the ocean as it travels inland….a big dash of salt, some evergreen and sweet flower, a hint of old stucco and incense, a smidgeon of simmering garlic and herbs, and perhaps laughter, too, if laughter had a scent.

Fog slips silently past the shoreline, rolling across leaves and flowers; age-old missions and warm hobbit houses with high-pitched roofs; along, along, along the way until it glides right up to the tip of your nose. While your senses are busy translating the story of the fog’s odyssey across oceans and shores, mysterious tendrils of mist coil around you effortlessly, painlessly, unavoidably. In a silent moment you are absorbed and bound in liquid oneness with the fog-traveler and become part of its tale as it stretches ever further inland, embracing and engulfing others as it unfolds.

Angry Bird

June 6, 2011 /

“The truth shall make you free, but first it shall make you angry.”
Unknown

“Speak the truth, do not yield to anger; give, if thou art asked for little; by these three steps thou wilt go near the gods.”
Confucius

“How much more grievous are the consequences of anger than the causes of it.”
Marcus Aurelius

“Anyone can become angry – that is easy, but to be angry with the right person at the right time, and for the right purpose and in the right way – that is not within everyone’s power and that is not easy.”
Aristotle

“Anger, if not restrained, is frequently more hurtful to us than the injury that provokes it.”
Seneca

“Anger is only a natural reaction; one of the mind’s ways of reacting to things that it perceives to be wrong. While anger can sometimes lead people to do shocking things,it can also be an instinct to show people that something isn’t right.”
Unknown

“A woman can hide her love for 40 years, but her disgust and anger not for one day.”
Arab proverb