I know, I haven't been posting very often at all. Life has been feeling overwhelmingly busy lately. I think I'm juggling too many things at once. One of them, the
British IBBY/NCRCL MA conference, will be done after this Saturday. I'm quite pleased that it has sold out, and I'm sure it will be wonderful. But part of me will just be happy when it's over. I'll be interviewing
Jamila Gavin and
Mary Hoffman as part of the program, so have spent the day preparing questions. They are both impressive writers who started publishing in the 1970s, and between them have over 130 books published. Not too shabby!
I also just found out that a podcast from my lecture at Oxford Brookes University on October 10th is available. The lecture was called Editorial Reflections: Cultural Expression and Children's Publishing. If you find that you have 45 spare minutes and want to give a listen, you can download it from the Oxford International Centre for Publishing Studies
website. You can even download the Powerpoint presentation. In the lecture I talk about my own experiences working as an editor of multicultural picture books in the states, and give some larger reflections about how the publication process can affect and mediate multicultural children's books. If you listen, let me know what you think!
Oh, and if you've followed the blog for a bit, you'll know that I got a completely random call from John Garden of the Scissor Sisters asking for suggestions of children's literature organizations for the band to support on their current UK tour. It turns out they took my suggestion of
Seven Stories: the Centre for Children's Books in Newcastle. I'm dead chuffed, as they say in England, because I think this is such a fantastic place. This means that Seven Stories will be featured in some way at the Newcastle show. We're dashing back from the IBBY/NCRCL conference on Saturday to get back to Brighton to see the Scissor Sisters show in Brighton. Kudos to the band for featuring a whole host of charities at their gigs. You can read all about it on the
Cato Trust website which has coordinated the charity stuff for them. And you can win free tickets to one of their UK gigs on the site as well, so take a look.
If you are still reading, here's a funny coincidence. My husband is a sound guy who used to tour with bands, and one of his friends from college is Glen Rowe, who runs Cato Music. He started Cato Trust (you can read the whole story on their website) - and we went to his wedding in Sitges near Barcelona about two months ago. So how funny is it that the random call I got from the Scissor Sisters is all being run through Glen's organization. It is a very, very small world!
Oh, and one final thing. For those of you who read about our cat, Thomas, having a lump removed, I'm happy to say that it's all benign, just a cyst. So he should be sticking around for a while, if he can stay out of fights with the locals....
