THIS SUNDAY: Great Books and Local Impact!

My friends - it has been so long since I have written, but look at what I've been doing! For those who live out of reach of this event, please consider helping us spread joy, literacy and critical thinking to children and teens EVERYWHERE!  Panelists are: Nora Raleigh Baskin, Gae Polisner, Wendy Corsi Staub, S. Chris Shirley, Barbara Dee, Lucy Frank, Julie Strauss-Gabel!

This New York Times article affirms the research-proven benefits of expressive writing: Writing Your Way to Happiness. You can make an impact by providing opportunities for local kids to develop these skills. Join us at Sunday’s A Year in Books 2014. Writopia Lab’s 2015 efforts to reach underserved students in NYC’s northern suburbs will be funded through this January 25th literary event. Last year’s Understanding the Books Your Kids are Obsessed With was a successful start, funding free summer workshops at the Yonkers Riverfront Library. For many of those students, it was their first experience with professionally led creative writing, and the impact was tremendous! Buy tickets now to A Year in Books 2014, and encourage your friends and family to attend with you. This local event will feature an amazing panel of authors (and John Green’s editor/publisher extraordinaire). Books will be available for sale at below-retail prices, generously provided by publishers and authors alike to help us raise money. Please forward this urgent plea to your personal contacts and social media.

In addition to our growing outreach work in communities north of the city, Writopia Lab acts as a regional affiliate for theScholastic Writing Awards, promoting access to the Awards, organizing its adjudication, and providing an annual recognition ceremony. If you are unable to come but would still love tosupport us and donate, that would be greatly appreciated. We need your feedback: please let us know which programs you feel could be most impactful Regional Scholastic Writing Awards Programs at local schools Programs at local libraries Expanded programs at our local labs

Thank you YA Community!

I had a hard time falling asleep last night I was so excited. Everything is coalescing as my book birthday looms in front of me, only five days away. I had lunch with new friend and neighbor Katie Davis the other day. She asked me what my book was about, and I faltered in the telling.

"Why are you hesitating?" she asked.

"Well, people don't think that alcoholism and recovery are very sexy," I said.

"Says who?" She challenged. "You've got to own this. It sounds AWESOME. And it hasn't been done before."

Yeah. My book IS awesome. Thanks Katie! Katie not only writes amazing kidlit and YA, but also does a weekly podcast and is a social media/twitter maven. She told me about twitterbookbday.com and I struggled through the signing up, but I did it! (So hopefully a lot of people will be tweeting about Edges next Tuesday.)

And more thanks go out to Judy Blundell for her endorsement of Edges and for her friendship; Sandra Jordan for being with me through the long haul:  Courtney Sheinmel for her adamant insistence that I have a book birthday party; Rebecca Stead, Daphne Grab, Deborah Heiligman, Lucy Frank, Elizabeth Winthrop, Jeanne Betancourt, and Carolyn Mackler for their support and encouragement during our monthly lunches. (Happening TODAY! Must train to the city with Judy in mere minutes!)

And to you, dear readers, and the community we are building through Facebook and through this blog, your support means everything to me. Thank you so much for reading and for reaching out your hands in friendship - I am reaching back and holding on - you're coming with me!

Addendum: I have to also give a shout out to fellow debutantes Lish McBride and Jen Violi, who both live as far west as you can get in this country, and whom I never get to share a real plate of french fries with, but who have been crucial partners in crime, traveling the zig-zag road of YA Lit and publishing! I heart you guys!

EDGES Available for Pre-Order on Amazon!!!

And I need to sub title this: SHAMELESS NAME-DROPPING & SELF-PROMOTION.

I've been pondering how much more pro-active I can be about marketing EDGES other than blogging, and beating down the doors of my publishers. I've been worried: am I doing enough? I've been insecure: but so and so blogs 5x a day and has 3000 followers! I can almost hear my Gran quoting John Donne as she was wont to do in these times of self doubt: "Comparisons are odious", and I try my best to heed her advice.

But I know I need a swank and hip website, and Elizabeth Winthrop sees my need for career control and keeps telling me to make a teaching guide and a workshop around EDGES - she is so write! I mean, right . . . I've been getting antsy about the whole promoting angle, and resolved to do most of it myself.

So . . . last night when I should have been sleeping - now, I may embarrass myself - I googled "Léna Roy", out of curiosity, not expecting anything earth shattering, you know, maybe a couple of links to this blog, when I found a link to Amazon, and to EDGES! Mon Dieu, it is seven months away from publication, and already available for pre-order. I don't know what this means, but suffice it to say, I am VERY excited, and had energy to bring to this months' Writers 4 Writers lunch with Rebecca Stead and Elizabeth, Carolyn, Lucy and Jeanne. Rebecca had other "promoting" news for me - she had just come back from the International Reading Association convention in Chicago, where she was very busy presenting, but had taken a picture of an ARC of EDGES being displayed next to my Gran's AND BOTH WERE YOUNG! How's that for exposure?

And my friends tell me that they never know anything either until it happens. Or it doesn't - we have to be prepared for that too. (Buy oy! Worry can be crippling!) Suffice it to say that I couldn't get a hold of anybody who knew what was going on today, but at the same time, what this shows me that I need to have a little more faith, and that just because I am blind and naive about this process doesn't necessarily mean that I'm going to fall on my tush. And if that happens, as it certainly has on numerous occasions, then I need to pick myself up and redouble my efforts! (After wallowing in chocolate for a week or so of course!)

AND . . . if anybody decides to check out Amazon to see if it's TRUE, (or maybe even pre-order the book? I told you I would be shameless - ah, but you are waiting for my book launch party on December 7th, maybe, yes?) there is no information about the book yet, and I don't have an author page. (Have signed up, but they need verification from the publisher.)

More from me on . . . Saturday!

A World of Radical Possibility

What is that? A church? I thought she promised to blog about her Writers 4 Writers lunch, and brag about the gang: Rebecca Stead, Deborah Heiligman, Elizabeth Winthrop and Lucy Frank? Instead we get church? Well folks, I'm sorry to disappoint, but there's nothing about our lunch I can really share with the world at large - but know that we sat there for hours and were loath to leave one another! (Daphne Grab and Carolyn Mackler were sorely missed.)

So yes, today's blog will be about the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, where I work part-time as a tour guide and workshop leader for the education department. What does that have to do with a Lit.Life, you may well ask. St. John the Divine is the patron saint of writers for one, and for another, it is a place I will forever associate with my grandmother, who for forty years was the librarian and the writer-in-residence. I became involved with the Cathedral myself, volunteering to create a workshop for the education department based on A Wrinkle in Time. Later, I created a more generalized writing workshop. Last summer I thought, hmmmm . . . the money sure isn't raking in with my writing career, maybe I should work here. So I underwent training to become a tour guide, looking at the cathedral in a secular, educational way.

Today I had the insane pleasure of giving an architecture tour to my son's second grade class. My son was excited, the class was excited, and I was over the moon that my son still thinks I'm cool. I led them through the cathedral, explaining the mish-mash of architectural styles, Gothic and Romanesque, pointed arches vs. rounded arches, columns vs. piers. There were tech people around preparing for an event and at one point, the dark cathedral was flooded with light. A gasp came from a little girl in the class.

"Do miracles happen in this cathedral?" she asked.

"I love your question, Why do you ask?" I said, not knowing where this conversation would lead.

"Well, when the lights came on, it felt like a miracle." Wow. She blew me away.
I didn't have an answer, but I riffed off of her.

"Yes! Often it depends on what you believe and how you choose to see things. I think people who come here, regardless of religion, want to believe in miracles in this beautiful space. So they see them."

"I felt one," the girl corrected me.

All I could do is nod, and ponder her Yoda-like response.

The other kids seemed satisfied with this answer, and I went on to talk about how the building is structured, with an emphasis on flying buttresses, getting the prerequisite giggles.

But I kept thinking about the girl's question and her certainty in feeling. This theme also comes up in EDGES, as it is something that is always hovering about my consciousness: what we believe and how we cope. As a writer, I value child-like curiosity, I strive for the openness to see and to listen to the characters and their story. And as a grown-up, maybe I strive too hard to see, and not to feel. I too long for a sense of the miraculous, and want to live in a world of radical possibility.

Writers for Writers

Oh, I just came back from an amazing lunch at PICNIC in my hometown, NYC with six amazing women writers! How did I get to be so lucky? (And please forgive my blatant name dropping, but I AM so excited, and this is the lit.life, huh?) Well, let me tell you a story . . .

Last year a parent in my sons' school kept telling me about her childhood friend Rebecca, and that we would really like each other. "Her book is coming out in July, and the main character carries around a copy of A Wrinkle in Time." Nice! Then my sister told me about a book she was doing a blurb for where the protagonist . . . you got it, carries a copy of Wrinkle . . . well, I put two and two together. (I'm not just another pretty face you know . . . ;-))

In late August, I finally read When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead, and was entirely captivated. So I went to her website and sent her a fan letter and a bumbling would-you-like-to-have-coffee-with-me sort of thing. She did! She suggested we meet for breakfast at PICNIC on the Upper West Side and completely hit it off. She has long brown hair and the warmest eyes ever - she is so down to earth! We talked about growing up in NYC in the late 1970's (when her book takes place) and how different it is raising our kids today. I asked her if she would be interested in forming a children's writer's group - not a critique group or a workshop, but more of a support kind of thing. She was on board! We decided to meet once a month, and to invite a few other kid lit authors. She knew a few writers who might be interested, and I was hoping that Carolyn Mackler (who I was having lunch with the next week) would be interested too. Rebecca was the one who came up with the moniker Writers for Writers in the heading of an e-mail confirming our next meeting. It felt like an actual entity, a real thing. (Again, I keep pinching myself because I'm actually feeling like a writer, rather than just playing at being one. Although my grandmother always said that if you write, you are a writer . . . too bad that I didn't completely internalize that one!)

The next month Rebecca brought Daphne Grab, YA author of a beautiful book, Alive and Well in Prague, New York. (Check it out - I loved it!) And the after that, Rebecca brought Deborah Heiligman! (See last post) Wow!

Today, Rebecca couldn't be with us because she is in Chicago as part of a book tour for Newbery Award winning WYRM. But she still brought people! I was the first to arrive and just getting settled when in walks Elizabeth Winthrop, writer of over 55 children's books! I am in awe . . . then she tells me that not only did my grandmother blurb one of her books, but that we have the same agent, Edward Necarlsumer! (More jaw dropping . . . can't wait to tell him!) Then Daphne comes in, followed by Deborah, and Lucy Frank, another YA author with a new book out called The Home School Liberation League, and Carolyn rounded out the group.

FIVE outstanding author's and me! How did that happen? Deborah told us about receiving the phone call about her Printz Honor, (Will make a great blog post, Deborah!) we talked about awards, writing, not writing, websites, blogging, not blogging . . . and all of the above!

(Full confession now - I am ALWAYS scared to POST, but a very wise woman once told me, if you over-think, you'll never do anything. And then I imagine that nobody is reading or cares and this is a good spiritual exercise for me. So here it goes, I'm pressing the button!)