Category Archives: Spring Bear
Reading and Signing at the Top of Maine
UPDATE -5.18.12 – The Fiddlehead Focus, Aroostook’s online newspaper, ran positive student ink on my school visit to Fort Kent. I can blog till I’m blue in the face, but what students take away is what counts. So for the real deal, click the Fiddlehead logo below and read the story.
Fort Kent, Maine 5.15.12– met with Don Chouinard and Jocelyn Saucier’s classes. Continue reading
Creative Writers All
Here’s what happened. It was 12:20; lunchtime. They could have been over in the cafeteria, clumped up tight around the tables, but here they were, hanging out in Christina Benedict’s classroom. A few girls sat around a laptop, absorbed. A tall young man wrote out word scrambles on the blackboard, and the guesses flew — silly, funny, hit or miss. “This isn’t a test” was his attitude. “It’s fun.” Continue reading
Quite a Workout
Up at 6 a.m. and driving on snowy roads by 7 to meet Amber Jeskey’s class, which had just read Spring Bear. She turned out to be a top-notch, no-nonsense English teacher with a sharp literary mind and the skills of a drill sergeant. Continue reading
Class Trip
SPRING BEAR found its audience one warm spring day in in this high school English class in Winthrop ME . It was one of the happiest days of my life. (I’m the lady on the left in the purple blouse, sitting on a desk). Those spectacular teenagers seated to the right either know someone like — or could themselves have been — my Evvie Mallow or Rich Parker. Connecting with them over a world I’d imagined and they’d come to know through the book was –um — sorry, I just can’t find words for it.
But they did. They wrote me letters. Here is some of what they said.
Continue reading
A Trailer in the Making
Day dawned cloudy and raining. Just what we wanted. Up at first light. Fetched Dave Bubier, holding down the lead role of Lester Darrow. He brought the guns. Drove to Roberta and David Manter, gracious providers of the perfect location. Met up with producer Dean Gyorgy (dgmediaarts.com) and his wife Margot, playing the lady from Massachusetts. Dean scouted out the the best camera angles, called for Lester Darrow to come on set. Mounted his Canon 5D Mark II on his Manfrotto monopod and began shooting. Continue reading