(This is a cross-post on the blog for Longacre, a great summer program that I attended as a teenager. I’ll be blogging for them for the next few months, alternating with 2015 debut novelist Cordelia Jensen, another alum. I’m excited for a bona fide chance to revisit some good parts of my teen years, and to see what someone else says about the role of Longacre in her own life. Stay tuned!)

So I was thrilled when Director Matt asked me to blog for Longacre, because my summers there had an enormous effect on me, and I’m eager to explain how. I can sum it up in one word: doughnuts.

Yes, so doughnuts are a big go-to in my life. There are certain streets I can’t walk without instantly thinking, “Can I get a doughnut now?” But here, doughnuts are relevant.

Lots of things about me were the same from ages 11 through 18: a love of reading, writing, and theatre; high levels of goofiness; an allergic reaction to anything I perceived as fake. The attitude toward the doughnuts, however, evolved.

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Container of joy and fear.

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Before I went to Longacre Farm, I went to a conventional camp. Sports, arts, and waterfront; Saturday night socials; Sunday breakfast in bed. We didn’t get served on trays, but we got to sleep in, and someone in the cabin would go up to the kitchen and get cereal, milk, and doughnuts for breakfast. (I hope you weren’t worried that I wouldn’t get to the doughnuts. I will always get to the doughnuts.)

In five summers at this camp, I never once went to pick up breakfast. I honestly don’t know how I managed this without a) anyone noticing or b) anyone slapping me. I was probably there for a total of twenty-eight Sundays, and for every single one of them, I slept in, played cards, and elbowed my way to a powdered doughnut without contributing a thing. Of course, I meant to volunteer for breakfast duty, one day. It was just—where did one go, really, to pick it up? No one had explained the location of the mysterious breakfast window. Would there be scary people I didn’t know there—maybe boys? (I liked boys, but our camp was gender-separated, and I didn’t want to run into them as I looked in the wrong place.) It was all just too scary. Better to let someone else get pushed into the job of breakfast retrieval.

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Why does summer camp ever end, really?

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Fast-forward to Longacre Farm. On our first night, we counted off into different work crews. As with most work crews, the jobs rotated: Showers and Latrines; Kitchen; Barn Chores … I don’t remember the rest, but there was one every day, and they took up serious time—kitchen, in fact, was an all-day adventure starting when everyone else was asleep and ending when you staggered out for dinner. We’d had a chore-wheel at Camp Generic, but even sweeping the cabin didn’t compare to mashing 35 potatoes—by hand.

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I kind of hope they have upgraded to electric.

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I don’t know why, but I didn’t mind these chores. I found it impossible to remove every hair from the countertops (I still do), but I realized early on that if we didn’t clean up after ourselves, nobody would, and if I did a lazy job, it would just annoy someone the next day. It was also fun to work with other people. I still remember a counselor singing back to Edie Brickell as he washed 80 plastic cups. (When she sang, “Don’t let me get too deep,” he would reply, “Don’t worry, baby, I won’t.”) At my high-pressure school, working hard had meant staying up late with grueling essays. I didn’t have that many chores at home (thanks, Mom and Dad), but the things I did felt like something I had to do, rather than something I got to provide. At Longacre, hard work meant sweat and ache, but pride, fun, and community, too.

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I bet you can guess how old I am within 5 years,

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I know it’s a luxury to have positive experiences with physical work. For many people, that work is not an option, and it’s nothing close to fun. Nevertheless, it was my experience, and it formed an ethos in me that has had unexpected and lasting effects. My best friend and I met in 10^th-grade math, but we didn’t really bond until we spent a Saturday making sandwiches at a soup kitchen. I have often gotten back-pats for lending a hand at work, and it’s because of that same Longacre realization: if I don’t do this, who will, and how badly would it stink for someone else to do it alone? And while I have the usual marital housework spats, part of the strength of my marriage comes from the mutual practice of my partner and I taking things off each others’ plates—and I don’t mean the last pierogi. I am no saint, believe me. I have often been accused of hoarding and then insufficiently washing dirty dishes. But I am better than I could have been.

All those summer-camp Sundays, playing spit and waiting for the breakfast delivery, I think I felt guilty, and afraid to be revealed as a shirker. Perhaps what really awaited me on the breakfast run was a pajama-walk over dewy grass and the pride of presenting my friends with their breakfast. I’ll never know what I missed on that front, but I’m glad I got the chance to make it up in the years to come.

Now … where’s the nearest doughnut?

Curious about Longacre, or maybe just want to see pictures of cute kids in grubby clothes? Head on over to Longacre.

To lure schooly types (parents, teachers, librarians) to a bookstore event last month, I raffled off a free author visit.  As you may recall, a mom bringing a neighborhood full of spirited middle-school girls won the drawing, and on Monday, I got to make good on my promise at Scribner Middle School.

I’m sorry for anyone who did not win, but I am glad that Scribner did, because not only is their auditorium gorgeous, their teachers organized, and their kids an ideal audience, but they made 250 kids available to come hear me speak!  Thank goodness I was a teacher before I was an author, because this was a big crowd, y’all.  The pictures tell the story best, so I’ll let them do it…

See what I'm saying? That place was huge!

Am I balancing an invisible tray?

Once they raised their hands, they all became ghosts.

Okay, obviously, there was no paranormal element to the proceedings.  The blurriness is a result of the fact that I hate the way the flash affects digital pictures and always turn it off, and then other people have to suffer through my poor choices when they kindly take the camera (thank you, Ms. Thompson!)  I’d like to think it lends a cool effect, at least.

One fun thing about the visit was that Ms. Thompson, who organized it, encouraged me to talk about my own experiences with niceness and meanness, and I did, in a more forthcoming way than I have before.  The most meaningful part for me, and I think for the students as well, if I’m any good at reading a room, was when I talked about the only time I remembered anyone standing up to me for the way I tried to run the show.  I’ll tell that story some other time, some other place, but I think it was as much of a “Wow” moment for them as it was for me back in ninth grade that somebody could be brave enough to say, “I know I have no control over what you do, but what you’re doing is hurting me, and I wish that you would stop.”

Another great element of the visit was the questions, and my favorite happened to be the last one: “You know when books–not yours, maybe, but other ones–have, like, handwriting in them?  How do they do that?”  I explained that there are more fonts in the world than your Microsoft Word can even dream of, and publishers look for the ones that best fit the character.  The girl seemed to like this explanation, and I liked the question because it so exactly spoke to what kids really care about: the nuts-and-bolts of the physical book that they interact with.  Never mind this mush about what inspired you, the boring adult author.  What’s the deal with the book in my hand?  I hope to do more school visits so I can keep bringing on the ghosts and connect with the kiddos.

Thanks, Scribner, for your extensive awesomeness!  Oh, and ps, thanks for telling your kids that if they couldn’t buy books, I would sign their planners!  I think that might be an all-time career high.

Will talk about my reading on Saturday in a moment, but guess who’s coming to town this weekend?  The cutest nephew ever!!

In other news (ha, I almost wrote, ‘in other words’), I’m hoping to see some of you Louisville readers at Carmichael’s Bookstore on Frankfort Avenue this Saturday at 4pm!  I’ll be reading and doing Q&A, and there will be a special presentation for teachers called, “Ways to Enhance Writing Workshop: Lessons from a Real-Live Writer.”  I always thought I was a pretty good writing teacher, but when I started writing full-time, I realized there were several things I could have done more effectively.  Here’s a teaser: no more memoirs!  Nancy Atwell, writing guru, swears by memoirs.  I loved Nancy Atwell, but I never thought the memoir units really worked, and at Carmichael’s, I will reveal the reasons why.

I also have a new approach to my get-the-crowd-talking technique.  Questions will fly.  Objects will fly.  Be there.

Carmichael’s did a great write-up for me, so I’m going to paste it here. Did you know they’re Louisville’s oldest independent bookstore?

Saturday’s Reading at Destinations Booksellers in New Albany, IN!

I’m so grateful to Andy and Randy at Destinations Booksellers and to everyone who came indoors during a completely glorious summer afternoon to hear me read and answer questions about Nice and Mean.  Thanks especially to the cool mom who brought these fun kids!  (She’s taking the picture.)  They also won an author visit from me on behalf of their middle school, and I can’t wait to set it up, in part because I need to do a better job at answering one girl’s question.

The Q&A about the book veered toward the subject of meanness, and one of the girls, not pictured here, asked, “If you had a daughter this age, what would you tell her if people were being mean, the way they were in this book?”

“Ooh,” I said, “that’s a really good question.” (Apparently this is what I automatically say when I don’t have an answer ready, which is one sign of a good question.)  “It’s such a good question that I’m not even sure I can answer it well right now, but I’ll try.”

I said something to the effect that there will probably always be mean people and they’re not likely to change a ton, but if you are a nice person, people will notice.  Classmates and teachers will notice your including someone who isn’t well-liked, or going out of your way to support a friend, or having the character to engage people in interesting conversations.  And it may not pay off right now, in elementary or middle school, but as you get older, people will seek you out for friendships and positions of responsibility, and you will be a happier person than the person whose main means of pulling themselves up is putting others down.

“How’s that?” I asked the girl.  “On a scale of tiny to huge, how helpful?”

She gave what I can best describe as a look of kindness, although that’s not quite it.  “It’s okay for now,” she said.

Well, phew.  But I went home and thought about it some more, and I came up with a longer answer–so long, I created a new post.  But thank you, brave middle-school student, for asking me that question, and thanks to everyone else at Destinations Booksellers who created an environment where she felt comfortable asking.  I admire you all.

Coming soon: an 8-step plan for dealing with meanness in school.

Hello! Gosh, I feel like I’ve been a non-internet vacuum these last couple of days, even though I think I posted less than a week ago. I certainly am in a vacuum of sorts–I’m in New London, Connecticut. Not that New London is a vaccuum in and of itself (and maybe I just like saying vacuum, because I like those two u’s next to each other, and the way I pronounce it in my head as “VACK-you-um”)–I’m just in an, um, self-contained pouch.

My partner is working at the venerable Eugene O’Neill Theatre Center, and since I am about to attend–nay, participate in–my best friend’s wedding in New England this weekend (!!!), it made sense for us to come up here together.  (Thre is a much more ridiculous picture of O’Neill at the center itself, but I can’t find it online.)  Anyway, while A. has been faithfully attending to the play at hand, I’ve been hiding out at the lovely house they’ve let us stay in, working on a la novel.  Did I mention that I finished a draft?  Maybe I did, which is a huge accomplishment, at least a year in coming.  I also re-outlined and cut 90 pages just for starters!  I always laugh at how hard we writers try to nudge up our page counts and then how much we cackle when we’ve cut whole chunks.  It makes a certain amount of sense, but it’s still funny.  As a teacher, I never would have been like, “The students just learned twelve new vocabulary words and forgot five!  Bliss!”

In the midst of all this novelicious productivity (which is also, I might add, somewhat lonely, although the beach awaits at the end of the day)–are odd memories of New London.  I passed through here all the time on my AmTrak way to and from college, of course, but I think I only stopped here once, and not even on purpose.  It was the summer of 1996, and I was on my way back from visiting a friend, whom I’d formerly had a huge crush on.   I’d thought we’d had a good visit, including a nap for me on Saturday afternoon that was, no joke, The Best Nap I have Ever Taken, but then Sunday morning we got into a fight somehow.  It was strange, because we’d never fought, but I remembered her accusing me of not, I don’t know, supporting her relationship with her boyfriend, and I burst into tears.  “That’s so not true!” I blubbered.  “I always ask you about him and how things are going.”  Who knew which one of us was right, but I’m not the kind of person who bursts into tears during fights at all, so it obviously really upset me. 

We reconciled enough to go on a great bike ride and meet up with two other friends for Mexican food, and then I was on my merry way back on AmTrak–except that the train stopped in New London with a bomb threat.  Since this was in the late ’90s, it was way more of an eye-roll than the actual scare it might be a few short years later.  (Gosh, it’s kind of crazy how much things changed in such a relatively small amount of time.)  Anyway, we all had to unload off the train and of course there was hardly anywhere to go and I hadn’t eaten dinner, but we ended up at the bar across the way that must make a huge living from stranded travellers.  I don’t remember if I got anything in the way of enough to eat, but the great thing was that the Women’s Gymnastics Team Competition was up on the screen!  So not only did I get to see my beloved gymnastics (I’m sure readers of this blog will understan what that means to me)–but I also got to see Keri Strug do her amazing vault with a cracked ankle or whatever it was to victory!  I can be a bit of a wimp and I am sure that if I injured myself on a vault, I would have been like, “Sorry, Team USA; you may be the Magnificent Seven” (a reference I didn’t understand then and still relate to only hazily), but you’ve made your bed with your poor scores.  I can’t do anything for you at this point, so I think I’m going to sit it out for Vault #2.”  Not so for Keri Strug!  As I slurped Diet Coke at a New London bar, Keri Strug ran and flipped and landed on that injured ankle and brought the US GOLD.

Or at least, I think she did.  The crazy thing about memories of important events, as I learned ound September 11, 2001, is that they create–oh gosh, this is becoming eerily related–a sort of vacuum.  They suck nearby events into their orbit to the point where people who attended weddings in July or November of 2001 will say, “Yeah, that wedding was right around September 11th.”  I suppose the important event in my story, embarrassingly, might be the winning vault.  Maybe it didn’t occur that night as we waited for the train to be searched; maybe that was later, on my mom’s bed, with my cousin who was living with us for the summer.  I honestly don’t remember. 

What else to say?  I stopped being friends with the crush, although we did have a rather poetic re-meeting.  We didn’t correspond over the summer except for me to send her a postcard requesting that she return a library book I’d left behind, and apparently I’d said something like, “I’ll see you online at the bookstore,” because that was pretty much how you’d see everyone back on campus. 

I didn’t see her then, and I didn’t contact her, but a few weeks into school, my roommate and I were at Shaw’s (oh, that great Shaw’s–I still think of their Indulgences chocolates sometimes)–and there was the crush in the cereal aisle.  (Okay, I made that up–I have no idea what aisle it was.)  It was deep enough into the year that it was clear that our silence meant something, but I hadn’t known she cared until she said, “Well, I guess it’s not the bookstore after all.”

She may as well have been speaking Sanskrit.  “Um, what?” I asked.

“You know.”  She blinked.  “That thing you said in your postcard–how you’d see me at the bookstore.”

“Oh.  Yeah, I guess not.”

And we weren’t really friends after that.  Which in way was too bad, because I’d really enjoyed her when I’d thought she might like me back, but the things that had complicated the crush (including the fact that she turned out to be, you know, kind of straight) got in the way, and in some ways, at least at that time, she wasn’t such a good friend.  I will say, though, that that is the only time I ever remotely felt like I had the last laugh on anything, though if for some reason the crush is reading this (which I sincerely doubt), I hope she knows it does not reflect on her.

So au revior, bad crushes–I’d get a much better one several months before September 11th, 2001, who would become my wife–and hello to a less troubled New London; and hello wife herself, whom I am about to go off and meet, maybe for Mexican food, not at a bookstore.

I know I need to write about Good Old Reliable Nathan, Part II, but I had to link to this article about using the game Second Life in schools to give kids lessons in government negotiations.  There are potentially things to say about bringing role-playing games in school, but as usual, what I loved was what the kids actually said. 

If they forgot a vendor’s name or a meeting location, the mayor’s assistant gave them a hard time. The mayor herself had an attitude, telling avatars in jeans and sneakers not to come back until they were properly attired.

“[The mayor] just yelled at me,” said Nina-C’mone Helms, 18, staring at her computer in disbelief last month. “She got smart with me because I chose the wrong person. My feelings are hurt, but it deals with real life because people really do talk to people like that.”

Talk about real life–I love that this girl talked about the mayor getting smart with her.  That is just so classic.  It actually reminds me of that show on the CW, where that one kid talked about someone getting smart with him.  Do you know which kid I’m talking about? 

Good old reliable Nathan–Nathan, Nathan, Nathan Detroit!

Boo-ya!  Didn’t see it coming, did you?