Everyone has a story

Karina Yan Glaser is at Gordon this week as the sixteenth annual Karla Harry Visiting Author.
 

She arrived full of very concrete, practical advice for the young writers of second and third grade.
 

A writer needs a place to collect all their ideas and inspirations.
 

A writer needs time in their day to think and daydream.
 

A writer needs friends to share their thoughts with.
 

A writer needs helpers who will keep them focused (even if they have to sit in your lap to prevent you from getting up from the computer).
 

A writer needs fuel.
 

A writer needs projects to distract them when they’re stuck.
 

A writer needs a lot of things.
 

The one thing a writer needs that all of the students already have?
 

Everyone has their own stories.

How do writers discover their own stories?
 

She went back into her own books to connect the dots between her own life and the stories and settings of the Vanderbeeckers books.
 

The streets of her neighborhood became the Vanderbeeckers’ neighborhood.
 

The pets she had when she began the series made it into the Vanderbeeckers’ household.
 

The Glaser family road trip made it into her sixth Vanderbeekers book, The Vanderbeekers on the Road.
 

And her corgi’s experience as a therapy dog went straight into book seven.
 

By the time she’d finished, her audience had already begun cataloguing the elements of their own stories.

 

They are seven, eight and nine years old, but Karina Yan Glaser had helped them see that they already had stories to share.

2022 Book Fair was busy

The story above was just one of dozens of special events happening around Gordon's 2022 Book Fair. 

Here are a few more:

Wednesday celebrating the twentieth anniversary of the Joukowsky Family Library
Wednesday authors and publishers Cheryl and Wade Hudson with second grade
Wednesday author and illustrator Danielle Greendeer with third grade
Wednesday author and illustrator Christopher Denise with first grade

Tuesday author and illustrator Deborah Freedman with Preschool, Young Kindergarten, Kindergarten and first grade
Tuesday author Anika Aldamuy Denise with first, second and fourth grade

Last week author Supriya Kelkar with second and third grade

Note! Guests met with many different grades in a number of workshops. The visits documented above were simply the ones Mr. Griffin happened to catch.