Tag: writer
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March 25, 2024
I was a kid who loved to read, but I didn’t dream of becoming a writer. Books seemed so magical to me that I couldn’t conceive that human beings wrote them. For my 60th birthday, my friend Ann (who is also a writer) gave me the gift of a signed school library copy of E.B.…
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January 18, 2022
I was standing in the grocery store checkout line, and a small boy walked past me—once, twice, three times. When he came back the fourth time, he was holding his mother’s hand. “That’s her,” he said. He pointed at me. “Don’t point, honey,” said his mother. And then to me she said, “My son’s class…
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April 21, 2021
“Books truly are nourishment for me.” –Elizabeth Acevedo (in a recent New York Times By the Book interview) The first word that comes out of my mouth when someone asks me who I am is “reader.” I am a writer, yes; but first and foremost, I am a reader. I am most at home in…
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July 8, 2020
I received a letter last week from a woman who wrote to me when she was a child. She told me, then, that she wanted to be a writer when she grew up. I wrote her back and told her what a writer once said to me when I was young: keep writing; don’t give…
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May 14, 2020
Here in Minnesota, we are doing a statewide, all-ages read of Because of Winn-Dixie. I cannot even begin to tell you how happy and proud this makes me. I moved to Minnesota from Florida when I was thirty years old. I wanted to be a writer, but I hadn’t written anything. And then, during a…
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June 4, 2019
When I talk to kids about writing—about becoming a writer—I show them a picture of me in my Brownie uniform in second grade. I tell them that it never occurred to me at that age that I could be a writer. I was a kid who loved to read. Books to me were magic. Where…