December 14 - Small World

This past weekend has been a whirlwind of writing in our household. My husband is working hard on finishing the edits to the revised rule book for Thousand Suns (you can read more about it on Grognardia, his blog on old school RPGs). I've been quickly churning out graphic novel reviews for my GTA-Tinlids Graphic Novel Club meeting. To take a break from the keyboard, I picked up copies of Access and Canadian Children's Book News magazines to flip through. I admired the article Helaine Becker wrote on the work of school librarians - and then remembered that, as a contributing editor to Access, I read it before and recommended it be submitted to the periodical. Enough months had passed between collecting contributions and the magazine's publication that I had forgotten - and there's something extra nice about holding that paper copy in your hands, with professional layout all completed, that makes it a different creature than the one I had seen earlier. Then I skimmed the article on Arthur Slade in CCBC's magazine and remembered that I just finished reading his Silver Birch nominated novel, The Hunchback Assignments, and Tweeted about it. (I was excited to see he has a blog as well and promptly added him to my list - he's not a regular blogger, but would I have the time to read all the posts?) Then I read a good book review and realized the the author was Mary Anne Cree, a great teacher librarian at the Bishop Strachan School and contributor to The Teaching Librarian. I still get star-struck by authors and famous folks in school library news, but more and more I notice that it's a small world, where paths cross and intertwine. I look forward to more world-shrinking, as people read, write, share, and discuss all sorts of things. I hope the upcoming second meeting of the National Reading Campaign in Montreal will yield some concrete results. I attended the first one in Toronto and because of it in some parts of the library world I'm known as "that woman that screamed during the National Reading Summit" (remind me to tell that story here on the blog someday; it's a good one). We need to keep talking, and do something with those words.