Stretchy Librarian

A grant from Fund for Teachers (thank you!) and part of my book’s advance are paying to have a mural painted in my school library of two pages from Substitute Groundhog. I will post photos soon.

What was once only mental images in my imagination are now six foot figures via Kathi Ember’s illustrations painted (with permission) by 3 artists from Trace of Art. They’ve been painting for six days now and are half finished. The layers of paint, the shading, the outlining with tiny brushes–it’s a complex process that the students get to see each day. Groundhog and all his friends will be a part of the Creech library long after I am gone, and that fills me with warm satisfaction.

Have you heard of them? Millenials is the name given to the generation born at the turn of this 21st century and later. Much research has been done already–scanning their eyeballs to see how they read a Web page, checking their use of their brain (they make better use of their gray matter), they cooperate and work together more but have less general knowledge and they are harder workers and better students than the Gen X that preceeded them. Or so this latest article in Texas Library Journal indicates.

For those reasons, it gives me a kick to see how many Boomer grandmothers are buying Substitute Groundhog for their millenial grandkids. Gen X parents are buying them for their kids. It’s reassuring that some things still cross the generations–like the joy of lap reading, sharing a humorous story, and rereading a book one loves. I am so new to hearing from my readers that the novelty and the praise really thrill me. This is definitely the fun part of the writing process!

I had the great joy of reading an advance copy of Substitute Groundhog to my students. I hadn’t told them anything about it, so when I began reading, they were caught by surprise to discover I wrote the book. They were delighted when I read the dedication, which is to my own chldren and to my students at Sue Creech Elementary They had so many questions. “Are you rich now? Are you going to write another one? How long did it take you to write it?” One boy yelled out indignantly, ”Why didn’t you tell me before now?!”

At our book fair a few days later, I sold 161 copies, and autographed them all. It was richly satisfying to sign the books, knowing each was going to one of my students or someone in their family. One copy was traveling back with a visiting former student to Australia.

Am I rich now? Financially–no. Yes in seeing my book develop a life of its own. One mom told me her daughter kept my book under her pillow to reread each night with a flashlight. Another mother said she read it to all the siblings in the bleachers at her son’s baseball practice and they loved it. An earnest five year-old told me it was the best book she ever heard. A first grader patted my hand and told me I was famous now. The 29 rejection letters; the many, many rewrites; and the years of persistence have all been worth the fun at the end.

I was preparing first grade to hear Oh No, Gotta Go! (Susan Elya, Putnam, 2003). To connect the book to their experience, I asked, “When you need a bathroom, where do you stop when you are away from home?” There were a number of expected answers before one of my earnest cherubs answered, “The grass”. I quickly opened the book and began, “We were out driving, down the camino…”