Poetry Friday Special Guest: Caroline Starr Rose

Happy Poetry Friday, everyone. It's been raining here in Maryland, and I'm thinking of the poem "November for Beginners" by Rita Dove.

We stack twigs for burning

in glistening patches

but the rain won’t give...

We sit down

in the smell of the past

and rise in a light

that is already leaving.

Read the full poem at the Poetry Foundation.

This week's Poetry Friday host is Bridget
at Wee Words for Wee Ones.
You'll find a feast of poetry posts there.

We are preparing to "sit down in the smell of the past" at my house. It's less than two weeks until Thanksgiving, when we'll gather together for turkey and treats. The biggest treat of all? Our son is coming home from college for a short visit.

This is the time of year when elementary schoolers engage with the past, often learning about Thanksgiving's roots in the history of the United States. The focus is often on Plymouth Colony. But there were other early colonies that deserve our attention and study as well.

Today, guest blogger and verse novelist Caroline Starr Rose is here to tell us more about one of the earliest English colonies in America, at Roanoke Island.

That historical story is the subject of Caroline's most recent novel-in-verse, BLUE BIRDS.

Find out more about the book
on Caroline's website.

It’s that time of year when thoughts turn toward Pilgrims and Plymouth and America’s beginnings (at least as far as the English go). Most of us remember learning in school that Plymouth wasn’t America’s first English colony. That was Jamestown, established thirteen years earlier in 1607.

But not as many of us recall that twenty years before Jamestown, another English settlement tried to take root and failed. This colony, a collection of 117 men, women, and children, started on Roanoke island, 150 miles southeast of Jamestown. All we know about the colony and its inhabitants took place over a five-week period in the summer of 1587.

The colonists had been promised land in the Chesapeake Bay, perhaps not far from the place that eventually became Jamestown. But throughout the voyage, their leader, Governor John White, fought constantly with ship captain Simon Ferdinando. By the time they arrived in Virginia, Ferdinando was done. He left the colonists at Roanoke, refusing to take them any farther.

This and other drawings
from Roanoke Island
by John White can be viewed
at First Colony Foundation.

This was not the first time the English had visited Roanoke. Explorers had come to the island in 1584, and interactions with the Native population had been positive. But by the time the colonists arrived in 1587, the English were no longer welcome. Those intervening years included the burning of a Native village because of a missing silver cup, the Roanoke’s growing frustration as English soldiers who’d built a fort on their island insisted the tribe provide for them, and English diseases that decimated many of the Native peoples. Then escalating mistrust between the Roanoke and English led to English leader Ralph Lane’s pre-emptive attack on the tribe, killing Wingina, the Roanoke chief. When, days later, the English left, they knew there was no chance at reconciliation.

When the colonists arrived, the stage was set for tragedy, and tragic things happened on both sides. I wanted to show this historical truth in my verse novel, Blue Birds, but I also wanted to breathe into the history my own version of hope: Two imaginary girls destined to be enemies choosing friendship instead.

Alis, who is English, and Kimi, who is Roanoke, face many barriers to their friendship, the first being their own perceptions of each other. Both see the other as foreign, inferior, and strange. Kimi, who has lost family members at the hands of the English, understandably is angry. When an Englishman is killed one week after their arrival, Alis understandably is scared. Yet both girls are curious — Kimi about the English women and children that have come to Roanoke this time, Alis about her new surroundings, including the Roanoke girl.

The girls move from seeing the other as an oddity to understanding the humanity they share.

Soon both girls make excuses to leave their homes so they might meet each other. The closer their bond grows, the more risks they are willing to take. While the adults around them rage, these children find a common ground.

This poem, told in both girls’ voices, illustrates just that:

Alis                                  Kimi

This must

remain secret.

My people

would not understand.

We share

no language.

She does not

know our ways.

Because of her tribe,

we live in fear.

The English

tried to destroy us.

Yet she’s shown

me kindness.

She knows

beauty.

She is Kimi,

a Roanoke Indian,

Alis,

an English girl.

She has

become

my friend.

While Blue Birds is rooted in fact, I’ve used my imagination to fill in the blanks. I hope readers will finish the book interested in learning more about Roanoke, England’s very first New World colony. But I hope even more that Alis and Kimi’s bravery might encourage all of us to discover the commonalities we share with those who feel different from ourselves.

Caroline Starr Rose is the author
of the verse novels
MAY B. and BLUE BIRDS.

Thank you so much for this lovely post, Caroline. Alis and Kimi's friendship is timeless, but fraught with tension because of the time and place where they meet.

For those of you who are interested in the history behind BLUE BIRDS, there have been recent archaeological developments in the search for the Roanoke settlement. Check out this New York Times article from August.

REMINDER to Poetry Friday bloggers: 

Spaces are limited for THE LAST FIFTH GRADE book vine. If you’d like a chance to meet Ms. Hill’s fifth grade poets before they debut, read more about it here or sign up now! I’m sending the Advanced Reader’s Copy out on Poetry Friday tour soon.

The Best News Ever

I'm just going to be honest here, friends. I don't know how to start this post. 

Even the title. I can't get it right. Nothing fits, because nothing can contain my cartwheeling-on-cloud-nine euphoria and itchy excitement.

Finally. Finally! I can share the best news ever.

The children's novel in verse I've been working on for six years? It's going to be a book.

Take a deep breath with me, friends and cheerleaders. Here is the official announcement from the Publishers Weekly Children's Bookshelf.

Poet and educator Laura Shovan's debut middle-grade novel in verse, THE LAST FIFTH GRADE OF EMERSON ELEMENTARY, in which a class of fifth graders learns that their school will be torn down and replaced by a supermarket, and then takes their teacher's 1960's political teachings to heart as they fight to save it, to Wendy Lamb at Random House Children's, at auction, in a two book deal, by Stephen Barbara at Foundry Literary + Media (NA).

Any book that takes six years to write and sell must have a lengthy back story. I'll share mine another time. For today, I'd like to thank my agent, the amazing Stephen Barbara. (Did you see his name on this list of top 100 literary agents?) And how thrilled am I to be working with legendary children's editor Wendy Lamb? Most people dread editorial notes. I *can't wait*!

Here's a brief version of my book's back story:

In July of 2008, Stephen, children's author Lois Szymanski, editor Aimee Friedman, and I were at a local SCBWI conference. Over lunch, the four of us talked about novels in verse. Stephen and I were both fans of the classic American verse novel, Spoon River Anthology, by Edgar Lee Masters.

Read the full novel online at Bartleby.

That night -- that very night -- I sat in a college dorm room and sketched out my plan for a Spoon River-type novel set in a fifth grade classroom. 

Six years of revisions, emails with Stephen, critiques with experts and friends, visiting classrooms, more revisions, pitch contests, queries and rejections, and here we are.

If you'd like to read more about THE LAST FIFTH GRADE, this post begins a series about recent revisions to the novel.

Thanks to all of you for being the best cheerleaders around. I couldn't have made it through this marathon without shoulders to cry on and friends to drink champagne with.

Although THE LAST FIFTH GRADE OF EMERSON ELEMENTARY has evolved into a more narrative book than Spoon River, I'm indebted to Edgar Lee Masters wonderful series of intertwined persona poems.

Here is one of my favorite Spoon River poems.

Edgar Lee Masters (1868–1950).  Spoon River Anthology.  1916. 

40. Theodore the Poet 

AS a boy, Theodore, you sat for long hours
On the shore of the turbid Spoon
With deep-set eye staring at the door of the crawfish’s burrow,
Waiting for him to appear, pushing ahead,
First his waving antennæ, like straws of hay,	5
And soon his body, colored like soap-stone,
Gemmed with eyes of jet.
And you wondered in a trance of thought
What he knew, what he desired, and why he lived at all.
But later your vision watched for men and women	10
Hiding in burrows of fate amid great cities,
Looking for the souls of them to come out,
So that you could see
How they lived, and for what,
And why they kept crawling so busily	15
Along the sandy way where water fails
As the summer wanes.

5 Questions for Margarita Engle

Writerly Friends, I am counting the hours until April 1. National Poetry Month begins tomorrow. All month, we will be talking about "Source Poems," pieces of writing that we carry with us, or that shift or thinking in a significant way.

I can think of no better lead-in to our month of guest bloggers on this topic than a conversation with Margarita Engle.

Margarita is an award-winning author of twelve books for children. Many of these are works of historical fiction, written in verse. Margarita's great source is the history of the Caribbean Island and Central America. Her website is: www.margaritaengle.com

Last week saw the publication of Margarita's latest middle grade novel, Silver People. Silver People covers ten years in the Serpent Cut, where laborers from around the Caribbean and Americas constructed the Panama Canal.

Buy it at Petunia's Place independent bookstore.

I knew little about this period in U. S. and Pan-American history. Silver People has significantly shifted my thinking about the Panama Canal, which celebrates its centennial this August.

Five Questions for Margarita Engle

Author Amok: How did you conduct your research, finding such pockets in the story of the Panama Canal as the ocean voyage that brought job-seeking islanders to the work site and the use of child labor? (Mateo, your protagonist, is a fourteen-year-old Cuban--too young to work--but the man in charge “believes” Mateo’s lie that he is Spanish and 20.)

Margarita Engle: It was really difficult to narrow the characters down to just a few, because research revealed such a vast wealth of information, and unlike so many other historical topics, even a vast wealth of first person diaries, interviews, and memoirs.  I wanted to speak in the voices of several countries, so I chose the Cuban voice of Mateo, because Cuba is so familiar to me.  Since Jamaica was one of the largest groups of laborers, and it’s so close to Cuba, I included Henry.  I was fascinated by the image of Mateo and Henry never meeting until they leave their own islands.  The local girl [Anita] and the Puerto Rican naturalist [Augusto] are voices that I could hear very easily, but when I tried to add a Spanish anarchist, it got too complex.  Portraying the politics of Europe was just too much.  I had to leave some aspects of this enormous story for other authors to tell.  I hope that the Canal’s 2014 centennial will stimulate an interest in various stories told from unique points of view.  I can’t wait to read something written by a Panamanian, a Jamaican, a Barbadian, a Spaniard…

Thousands of lives were lost during the canal's construction.
Silver People describes a mudslide that buries the laborers alive.
Source: Fine Art America

Amok: Racism and segregation are a big part of the Panama Canal’s story. There is a scene in a hospital when a newly arrived American welfare worker says:

As soon as Americans arrive in Panama

Even northerners begin to act

Like southerners

I take that to mean racial segregation was an accepted way of life at the work site. In fact, the title Silver People refers to dark-skinned workers being paid in silver, while light-skinned Europeans and Americans were paid in gold. Would you speak about some of the racial and economic disparities you write about it your book? How were you able to communicate this struggle through your characters?

Engle: So many of the American engineers, steam shovel drivers, and their families had never been to the tropics.  They were stunned by the heat, mud, malaria, and yellow fever.  Hearing unfamiliar languages, and seeing so many people from so many countries, many of them wrote diaries and letters that were blatantly racist.  Maybe they would have been the same way at home, if there had been a racially mixed population in Iowa or Kansas. Tragically, the U.S. government’s official policies made racism seem acceptable.  The Silver-Gold payroll system was sheer, undisguised apartheid.  The one shocking image that was most vivid to me was not housing or payday, but lunchtime.  Americans ate in comfortable dining tents with tablecloths.  Spaniards sat on the railroad tracks.  Jamaicans had to stand up.  I read an excerpt from an African-American preacher’s diary.  He said the segregation he’d seen in Panama was far more extreme than Jim Crow in the southern U.S.

Much of the digging was done by hand.
Source: 6 Stories from the 7 Continents

Amok: Early on in the book, Mateo talks about missing Cuba and the home he was so eager to leave. I thought this was a nice moment of self-awareness. As a children’s author, how do you show a young character’s increasing self-awareness over the course of a novel? Does using a historical event as your setting make writing Mateo’s coming-of-age story (we see him grow from fourteen to twenty-four in Silver People) easier or more difficult?

Engle: It was extremely difficult to age a character that much in the space of just a couple of hundred pages of free verse, but that’s how long the height of the U.S. canal-digging effort lasted.  I wanted him to witness the start, and the end. 

Silver men carrying dynamite.
Source: The Silver People Heritage

Amok: Silver People has an ensemble cast. In addition to Mateo, we meet several historical figures, as well as Mateo’s friends: Anita, a local orphan who is raised by an island woman and is her apprentice herbalist; Henry, a Jamaican who is angry about the injustices workers are experiencing; Augusto, the visiting naturalist who takes Mateo as his apprentice. Several times, the book steps away from its human cast. We hear poems in the voices of howler monkeys, poison dark frogs, even Panama’s trees. What made you decide to include the voices of the forest in your book?

Engle: I wanted this book to be my personal love letter to tropical rain forests.  The Panama Canal was the first engineering project of its size, the first to destroy an immense tract of wilderness.  I wanted to see it from many points of view, including the forest itself, and all the creatures that depend on trees.  Perhaps this occurred to me partly because I was trained as a scientist, and I’ve always loved to explore.  Some of my plant collecting trips, when I still worked as a botanist and agronomist, were in central America, where I encountered descendants of silver people who were kind to me.  [from Wikipedia: “Agronomy is the science and technology of producing and using plants for food, fuel, fiber, and land reclamation. Agronomy encompasses work in the areas of plant genetics, plant physiology, meteorology, and soil science.”] They lived in remote jungles, completely dependent on local resources.  All over the world, rain forests are now being destroyed at a frightening rate.  I hope young people who read Silver People will want to become protectors of the plants and animals who speak to them from those pages.

Howler monkeys
Source: The Guardian

Amok: The Panama Canal is considered, by some, to be the eighth wonder of the world. Yet tens of thousands of lives were lost in the effort and—as we have seen—working conditions for most were deplorable. Why do you think this is an important story to share with young readers? How did you balance the darkness of the canal’s history with a sense of hope for Mateo and his friends?

Engle: I’m surprised that so many adults who go on luxury cruises through the Panama Canal have no concept of the history.  They’ve seen the famous photo of Teddy Roosevelt posed on a steam shovel, wearing a “Panama” hat that was actually made in Ecuador, but they don’t know that most of the real work was done by Caribbean islanders with shovels.  Neither do the teenagers who order all sorts of “stuff” online, never realizing that before being “shipped overnight,” all that stuff had to be moved slowly, on a container ship from Asia, through the Panama Canal.  Globalization began in 1914, not with the invention of the Internet.  August, 2014 is the centennial.  I hope the laborers whose contribution was not acknowledged during the 1915 Panama Pacific Exposition, will finally be honored now, through this story.  I know that sounds like an enormous goal for one book, but it was an enormous historical event.

I loved how you made this big story personal in the form of Mateo, his growing relationship with Anita, and how he finds a hodge-podge family in Henry and Augusto. By the end of the novel, we've seen Mateo survive the physical and emotional horrors of digging the canal. He has matured into an intelligent, caring young man who shares his love of the natural world with Anita, his new bride.

Migration of Blue Morpho butterflies.

If you're like me, you'll finish Silver People wanting to learn more about the Panama Canal. Check out PBS's "Then & Now: The Panama Canal" on The American Experience.

You might also like Margarita's other novels in verse. One of my favorites is The Lightning Dreamer: Cuba's Greatest Abolitionist.

Thanks for sharing your
books with us, Margarita!

Margarita Engle is the Cuban-American author of The Surrender Tree, which received the first Newbery Honor ever awarded to a Latino/a.  Her young adult verse novels have also received multiple Pura Belpré Awards and Honors, as well as three Américas Awards, the Claudia Lewis Poetry Award, a Lee Bennett Hopkins Honor, and the Jane Addams Peace Award, among others.

Margarita’s newest verse novel is Silver People, Voices From the Panama Canal.

Books for younger children include Mountain Dog, Summer Birds, When You Wander, and Tiny Rabbit’s Big Wish.

Margarita lives in central California, where she enjoys hiding in the forest to help train her husband’s wilderness search and rescue dogs. www.margaritaengle.com

5 Questions for Kelly Bingham (Part 2)

Happy Poetry Friday, Writerly Friends!

First, some good news. My middle grade novel-in-verse, THE LAST FIFTH GRADE OF EMERSON ELEMENTARY, earned a spot in Pitch Wars! What is Pitch Wars? Read this post.

Before you throw that snowball, stop by Tabatha's place,
The Opposite of Indifference. Tabatha is hosting
this week's Poetry Friday party.

I am very excited to be mentored by playwright and MG novelist Joy McCullough-Carranza. I will also get to know the work of my fellow Team #JoyNTriumph (we're working on that team name) mentees, Davy DeGreeff and Lyudmyla Mayorska. You can read Joy's description of all three team projects at her blog.

Speaking of novels-in-verse, Shark Girl author Kelly Bingham returns today for more of our interview. Yesterday, Kelly gave us wonderful insights into how she constructed the plot for her sequel, Shark Girl Returns (find Part 1 here). Today, we'll talk about the visual elements of a verse novel, as well as Kelly's uproarious twist on ABC books, Z is for Moose.

Welcome back, Kelly!

5 Questions for Kelly Bingham (Part 2)

Amok: Although the Shark Girl books are in verse, you also use letters, text conversations, and email threads in the novels. I like the way that these voices contrast with Jane's yet she rarely comments on the letters (many of which are from her Shark Girl "fans"). Can you talk about how these other text features create tension in Jane's story?

Fan-created book trailer for Shark Girl.



Bingham: My goal was to simply break up the sameness of having poem after poem for 300 pages. An instructor at Vermont College suggested it. I had already included some letters in the book, and she urged me to expand the letters, include more of them, and to find other forms of writing as well. That's when Jane's inner conversations with herself were born. Also, newspaper articles and phone conversations. And in the second book, there are texts as well.

I hope that these things give the reader a visual rest from the poetry. As for story, I feel that these "extra" things are the only way we can exit Jane's head and see things from a perspective other than her own. All the poetry in Shark Girl comes through Jane's eyes... her personal filter. The non-poetry parts are there to tell us things Jane wouldn't ordinarily mention. A newspaper article can fill us in on facts, dates, and locations; things that Jane would not include in her own narrative without sounding unnatural. Phone conversations can engage us as readers by having us listen to what's being said, and then reading between the lines and picking up on unspoken emotions. It is my hope that these pieces invite the reader to connect the dots and figure out for themselves what Jane is avoiding, or not saying.

I particularly like the arguments Jane has with herself in her head. Don't we all have that voice? That nagging, "If only" voice? Jane has something in her that wants to dwell on the terrible thing that happened to her, and to magnify and brood on all the ripple effects she now faces. And for a while, Jane listens to that voice and feels victimized and depressed.

I hoped for an uplifting, empowering moment when, near the end of the book, Jane firmly tells that voice to shut up and go away. Of course, she did not get to that point overnight. I tried to show a graduation separation from that "if only" way of thinking she'd been caught up in. Jane takes baby steps, but finally moves on, and hopefully that scene resonates with readers.

That's a long answer, all to say: I use those other elements to break up the story, to lend a different point of view, so the reader can pick up information that Jane doesn't share with us herself, and to show a progression of Jane's healing, a growth of her belief system.

Amok: I just bought copies of your hilarious picture book, Z Is for Moose, for all of the young readers in my family. I'm looking forward to the sequel, which comes out in 2014. Where did you get the idea for this book? What was it like switching from a serious YA novel-in-verse to a light-hearted (and sparely worded) picture book for little guys?

Bingham: Thank you! I got the idea for this book when my son was three and learning his ABCs. I went to the library and got all the ABC books I could find. There weren't many to choose from. We read them over and over. Only a couple were funny. The rest were pretty straightforward. (This was ten years ago!)

When we'd read all the library books, my son said, "I like funny books. Can you get me another funny book?"

I went back to the library, but that was it for ABC books. I couldn't find him a funny one, so I decided to write this for him. I wrote it by sketching it out in comic book form, so we would have a little booklet to look at together at night.

I knew he would like crazy, wacky things happening, so that's what I made happen. I also knew he'd respond to the moose acting up and disrupting things, creating surprises on every page. I had a great time writing it for him, and because it was just for us, I didn't sweat it or worry about what was good or what someone else might think.

So, even though I was switching gears, it was easy. I never wrote this book with the intention of writing a REAL book that I would show anyone else. I felt no pressure and had no expectations from myself. And that was good, because if I had, I'm sure I would have become too frozen in anxiety to write the book at all. I never thought of myself as a picture book writer up until that point, so I also felt I didn't have any business taking the manuscript too seriously.

Later, I showed the book to many friends and they all convinced me to send it to someone. I was shocked, but took their word for it. I wrote the book up in manuscript form and found a wonderful agent who sold the book right away. It was my first sale!

It turned out that it would be eight more years before Moose hit the shelves, and during that time I finished Shark Girl and sold it and made some big changes in my life. By the time Moose cam out, my son was 13 and of course didn't remember the book anymore. But I dedicated the book to him.

Amok:  How does your background as a story artist for Disney help you as a picture book author and as a poet? What can you share with other authors about telling a clear story, but leaving white space -- both for the illustrator and for the reader to participate in the story?

Bingham: Great question!  My advice, as general as it may be, is:  Don't be afraid of white space.

I would like to add, don't be afraid of ANYTHING, period, when drafting.  When you are drafting is the time to explore. I think sometimes we are afraid to experiment with being dramatic, or even being hilarious, because we think we may come off as pretentious or stupid or fall flat on our faces. But drafting is exactly the time to fall on our faces, because it's all entirely private, and because sometimes, the act of falling on our faces leads to something unexepectedly, wonderfully exciting. We need to step outside our boxes from time to time in order to push our writing into growth. That doesn't mean we have to try something drastically different than we feel comfortable with. (Although, we could!) We could take baby steps, and that would be fine. But when you find yourself holding back out of fear of not quite being able to do what you want, then stop yourself. Just try it. Experiment with a thousand different takes and see what happens--you may be wonderfully surprised! Always be open to exploring new territory.

As for white space in particular, consider it one of your tools, just as much as text, spacing, punctuation, italics, and dialogue are tools.  You can use white space for dramatic or comic effect in many ways.  Grab some poetry novels or picture books and flip through, looking to see if the author has used the white space in any meaningful way. If so, analyze it. Learn as much as you can.

When something dramatic is happening in your book and things are getting heavier and heavier, sometimes a page of nearly all white space is a period on the end of a long sentence you would like your reader to absorb and let settle.  Sometimes it's a rest--both visual and mental--until you turn the page and resume your dramatic, grueling journey.

Sometimes white space can indicate (in a novel) thought or reflection on the part of your main character.  It can be used to indicate hopelessness, distance, regrouping, or overwhelming grief. It can indicate a passage of time. It can be used for many things, and maybe you are the person who will use it to brand new effect in your book!

I think white space can also be used in picture books as both aiding the story and the illustrations.  White space can make something pop, to stand out in a very clear way--something you want your reader to pause and really notice.  It can be used as a silent beat, a reason to catch your reader's attention and help them slow down, then wind-up for the surprise that's coming when they turn the page--perhaps a very colorful illustration that pops out at you right at the same time the story climaxes, for example.

As for the first part of your question:  My time at Disney helped me tremendously in ways I can't quite articulate fully.  For one thing, I spent 12 years surrounded by some of the smartest, most talented storytellers you could ever hope to meet. I absorbed a ton of knowledge by watching everyone around me work.  We made mistakes and threw them away every single day. 

And I learned lessons that apply to writing: 

• Nothing is ever successfully rushed--always take your time. 
• Everyone has something to contribute. 
• New ideas often come from unlikely places. 
• Sometimes starting over is the best path to follow. 
• When one story area is so problematic that you can't figure it out at all, maybe you need to look at what comes before and after--that may be where the problem lies. 
• Don't be afraid to ask for help. 
• Don't guard your lovely, wonderful, precious ideas--sometimes being open to new ideas from others will lead to a greater story than you have now.

Love what you do and surround yourself with others who feel the same way.

As for the specifics of storyboarding; the skills used in boarding are skills also used in writing.  In boarding, you block out your action in panel after panel, like a comic book.  You choose lighting, staging, camera angle, expression and action, all to convey a single moment in one sketch.  You string these sketches together, and soon people are able to see how you imagine your story playing out.

Working this way allows you to see sagging areas that need trimming, or areas that are confusing, perhaps areas that rush by too quickly.  Maybe you see that you tend to stick with the same camera angle too much and that you need to spice things up a bit.

I fully believe my complicated "bulletin board" system is an offshoot of this storyboarding system, and I am grateful for it.

You don't have to be an artist to storyboard, either.  For anyone out there who is writing a picture book, I suggest you try either boarding your story out, or making a rough dummy.  You may find the process stimulates other creative parts of your brain and helps you problem-solve or tighten.  Certainly the process of making a dummy will have you think about page turns and how much text goes on each page, and why.

Moose can't wait for the M page.
Art by Paul O. Zelinsky

And again--if you are a writer (not an illustrator) then no one will see these dummies or boards but YOU. So feel free to let your creative self go and explore and see what happens.  No one will laugh at you, I promise!

Thanks for all of the encouragement, Kelly, and for stopping by Author Amok.

 Readers, Moose has taken over my blog! Due to a Blogger glitch, the phrase "Moose can't wait for the M Page" is dancing around my screen. Please excuse Moose if he interrupts the interview. He's just excited about visiting Author Amok.