Liv, thank you for such a thoughtful piece. I think you'd really like Kate DiCamillo's conversation with Krista Tippett. I agree that we should aim to acknowledge the personhood of those we write about, whether that is children or adults; attempting to see and know a person is a great act of love. At the same time I have a few pushbacks related to writing "for" rather than "about." I tend to avoid binaries in writing (only show, never tell!), and so I am also wary to only to write "for" and never "about." From a fiction point of view, writing "for" is slightly more accessible because the characters are made up, and this is partly why DiCamillo can write "for" so well (among the other great craft things she does. I do not want to minimize her brilliance!). For creative non-fiction, this is more difficult. I cannot write "for" someone without writing "about" them, and this is largely because the people in my life (along with myself) are real characters. My experience of walking in a Japanese school and receiving origami from delightful children is a real observation and experience I had. I am not attempting to minimize the personhood of the children, it's just what happened and what I was able to perceive. This leads to my main pushback: writing "for" people rather than "about" seems to negate the reaction and feelings of the writer, which are still valid even if it is only one side of the story. However, I would like clarify that the way I was taught to write "about" people is reliant on the inclusion of both dignity and depravity in the characters/speaker. This is essential, and goes back to your final takeaway on loving and acknowledging personhood, which I wholeheartedly agree with. At the end of the day, I think we can write "for" or "about" people in a way that does this. I apologize if this came off a bit defensive. Perhaps I am because I am a CNF writer, but really this was incredibly thought-provoking :)
Anna, this is a beautiful counterpoint! I do agree 100% that there's a place for a kind of writing about people--and tried to distinguish in the essay between writing about and writing "about", but maybe that didn't come off well, lol. So a difference between writing about someone in a way that takes into account that they're their own person (which sounds like what you're talking about!) vs. a way of writing about people that *only* focuses on our reactions and emotions. Particularly with children, that can be dangerous, because when we say whatever we want about another adult, there's always the chance that they'll get on the Internet and correct us, and that's not the case with children. So the stakes are higher to be careful and just.
Particularly what bothers me isn't people who write about children, if it's done in a gracious, careful way, (again, DiCamillo does this well, and is certainly drawing on her experience of real children!), but people who write about children *as a means of writing about themselves*, ie, being very open about criticizing their children in writing or treating them as a tool for self-exploration or spiritual discovery, or anything of that sort. Which we can also do with ex-boyfriends, or spouses, or pastors, or any other sort of people. So this piece is just an invitation to think before you write about people, not to stop writing about them entirely.
This essay was very exploratory--I'm wrestling with a lot of these ideas too, how to write truthfully and also protect people. I just personally tend to the side of protectiveness, and wanted to write about why that is. Think of it as something like Lewis' Meditation on a Toolshed: we need both kinds of writing, like we need both ways of seeing, but I find that in certain spaces, one is emphasized over the other, and my goal was to point that out. :)
I appreciate these points of clarification; they make a lot of sense! I am so glad you shared this with us and are considering these ideas. They are so valuable and I’m so privileged to learn through these discussions. On another note, I read Louisiana’s way home a few days ago and adored it!
"...we can’t forget that everyone has as much ontological weight, as much weight of being-alive-ness, as we do."
"It requires something from us: a disposition to act “for” people."
Loved it, Olivia. From what I've gathered from the homeschool world, this was similar to one of Charlotte Mason's main drivers of educational philosophy. "A child is a human person" might seem obvious, but needs to be said and actually considered. These "for" and "about" approaches have ramifications for writing as you point out, and also education.
Haha, yep, my mom texted me afterwards and was like, "I liked this one! ...It's all in Charlotte Mason." 😂 It'd be interesting to compare a "for" education and an "about" one!
You've just told me why I loved the books I loved as a child. That's something I didn't know before, just thought it was "good writing" but never really knew why. Thank you for that gift.
That's wonderful to hear! I took a couple classes on children's literature with a great teacher, and she did a wonderful job explaining how some books are written by adults who remember being kids and others by adults who write like kids are a totally different species, and I was like "Oooooh...that's why I didn't like those books." So all credit goes to her.
This is wonderful! I can not tell you how much I love this. Early on in my parenting journey, my busy mama self was tidying the living room and I watched my small son walk up to a full cup of water on the table and deliberately knock it over and stand there watching as the water ran everywhere. It was deliberate! This child had come in, seen that I was cleaning, and then intentionally made a mess! "What were you THINKING" I wailed as I dashed to dry up what I could. His face was so solemn, his voice so earnest as he stood and watched me, and his words have stayed with me. "I wanted to know how the water would move." He went on to explain a few different ways that he had seen water move in different circumstances, and he'd wanted to know how the water would move between the table and the floor after it left the cup.
You're entirely correct in your assessment. One thing I've learned about being a parent and meeting other parents is that quite a few of them really, truly have no concept of what it was like to be a child. How hard is it to understand that a toddler is going to want to walk along a curb just to see how long he's able to do so? And that that's fun?
I have a few authors I'm willing to listen to when it comes to depictions of children. Ray Bradbury I'll listen to every time, and Stephen King I find is insightful for kids of a certain age.
Are you familiar with Santoine de Saint Exupery's snake/hat drawing? Sadly, our time seems to be awash with hat people.
I'm glad that you find my assessment accurate--I was a little nervous about this one, because I'm not a parent (though I have a good amount of experience with kids), and so my opinions might've been totally missing the mark.
Ray Bradbury, 100%. Kate DiCamillo, obviously. Miyazaki as well! His characters always feel like real children. One really interesting point that Diana Wynne Jones makes in one of her essays is that children never think of themselves "as children"; it's only adults who get nostalgic about childhood. She says that kids are entirely future-oriented: they want to play at being grownups and read stories about grownups, or at least, about kids who have no grownups around and have to *be* the grownups (which is why so many fantasy stories are about orphans or things happening while parents are away on holidays). Which I think is true.
Yes, after reading aloud ad nauseum, you really appreciate the excellent writing of someone like Kate DiCamillo who grants each of her characters personhood, even a stuffed rabbit. Lewis posits that a children's story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good story. He is also wary of obvious morals. These two common failings of children's books are sadly prevalent in Christian literature in particular. Grateful for books that can be enjoyed by adults and children alike: Beverly Cleary, Cynthia Rylant, Elizabeth George Speare, CS Lewis, Andrew Peterson, Sally Lloyd Jones, SD Smith, etc. I have a horror of putting my children's names or faces online, so I was amening from the choir on this piece. My writerly concern would be the other side of the pendulum I suppose. I'm so hesitant to bring my children into any social media that I often orbit on the periphery of what's really happening. I do not allow them to be fully fleshed out characters and have perhaps robbed my writing of any semblance of reality. The same for my family of origin. I think about my parents or siblings reading something I wrote and steer clear of childhood memories that involve more than myself. I suppose this is why I write most often about nature or God or literature. I wish I could find a way to write a more fleshed out version of reality while honoring the personhood of all the other people intertwined. I enjoyed your piece, and it resonated with me on a lot of levels because reading children's literature out loud has been a huge part of my life for the last two decades. As I write this note the answer to my problem seems obvious. I should be writing fiction!
It's so hard to balance between privacy and writing people-as-full-people! In my own writing, I try and keep a sort of balancing act between sparse, yet contextualized detail: that is, not saying more than I need to, but saying *as much* as I need in order to be generous towards the other person. I don't know if that makes sense or not! But it's something all writers have to wrestle with, particularly Christian writers. I don't think we have the liberty to sacrifice other people to our art, which some writers assume. That's a great list of children's authors! I just finished reading Once A Queen, by Sarah Arthur, which was totally lovely. I'm always happy to read a good children's novel--key word being "good"!
I think you're the third person who's recommended that book! I'm going to have to put it on my TBR. Thank you for responding so thoughtfully. It is helpful to articulate the tension I feel in wanting to both record life accurately and vividly and yet also to respect the privacy of others. I think I had chalked it up to some vague deficiency on my part rather than accurately analyzing the balancing act required.
I am relieved that I misunderstood what you meant about "reading about children" when I saw the note preview. I'm not sure my kids are repelled by the children's stories that are overtly pedantic, but I definitely am. There's a large gap between The Wind in the Willows and people who use Winnie the Pooh's IP to write stories like "Oh Bother, Someone Won't Share."
Haha, that was a little clickbait-y, somewhat on purpose. I have friends who've told me that they enjoyed very saccharine, Victorian "this is a story about a good little child" as kids, but I kind of doubt that they actually enjoyed the story--I think it had more to do with enjoying being thought of as a good child by adults. I was very judgy about stories as a kid (and still am, clearly!) I've taken a number of classes on children's lit, and some of it is great, and some of it is very bad.
This was a rather convicting read. I don’t write about others much but I am guilty of talking about others - mostly about my family when talking with other moms. I really want to be cautious about what I say about others and this really spoke to me this morning. Thank you.
It's a convicting point for me too! One of the things I wrestled with while writing this essay was how to write it in a way that's generous to other writers, so it's sort of an ouroboros of trying to speak carefully. :) Words matter! But sometimes it's also helpful to share stories about hard relationships or moments with other people, it's just a question of how we do that tactfully and with prudence.
Thanks for reading, Zane! I think children's poetry is a great genre for writing "for", and it takes a proper enjoyment of children + kind of whimsy to do well, both of which I think come through in your poems. :)
Not wanting there to be too strong of a curated public narrative about my children was one of the driving reason I quit social media years ago. I had been a typically excited new mom, sharing photos of my baby, and it felt appropriate because for the first year or so we *did* feel like one unit. Her personhood existed, but in a circle around me. (La Leche League even refers to a nursing mother and infant as one biological unit). But then as she grew (and I grew, in awareness and confidence as a mother) I began to feel highly uncomfortable with shaping any sort of idea of who my child was for her, for other people to 'consume.' My children are individuals and deserve privacy. Of course I cannot help but write about them since they are the driving force of pretty much everything I do, but I always hope to retain the sense of distance, and to protect their own sense of self -- if I write about children, really it needs to be writing about *me* not them. Very astute essay, Olivia - and it sounds like you had a lovely immersion in the magic of a child's life!
This is interesting to hear! I am curious to know what it's like for women who are already writers when they become moms, or people who grew up with writers as mothers. Having been in the homeschool/classical education world my whole life, 99% of my exposure to "writing mothers" is "mothers who write practical advice about their children", which is, again, not a genre that I care to read: obviously it's a huge part of these women's lives, and a very important and beautiful one, but there seem to be a lot of women who only take to writing (at least online) to chronicle their journey of becoming a stay-at-home mom and figuring out homeschooling, and I'm always curious whether the urge to write was always there, or whether there's something about motherhood that makes people more inclined to swap stories. Contrast with women like Madeleine L'Engle or Diana Wynne Jones, who were mothers, and wrote children's literature ("for" children), but didn't write the type of modern "blogging about kids" articles that I'm talking about here. Idk. Outside my realm of personal experience! Thanks for reading and sharing your thoughts. :)
All the above confirms me, again, in something I've worked out for better or worse: not to try the fatherhood essay genre, nor the marriage essay genre, nor the personal essay at all. (This ethic is one of those concerns that I couldn't help but follow to its stringent point.)
You're wise to seek personhood as a guardrail along which to write loving personal essays, to be sure. But this line made me think again about what it means to render in words: "We flatten other people all the time; we can’t help it." Another stringent end-point, likely more debatable, is that I usually can't treat nonfiction as different from fiction, because the words render real people in the same medium as those that render unreal fiction, and because rendering can't be reality. Rendering, if not flattening, is the means of depiction in written forms — meaning that those forms can't be reality.
This is a strange conviction for me, one that I waver over depending on the day. I'd be curious to hear your thoughts against it. (It was also the idea that Ekstasis let me work out in the most meta essay-and-essay-reading I've ever gotten away with.)
Can you explain a little further what you mean in your second paragraph? I agree that writing about real people in creative nonfiction is pretty much the same as writing fiction (if that's what you mean by rendering), but I'm not sure I've entirely got the point you're making in response to my essay, about flattening vs rendering.
Is this Ekstasis essay published? I'd love to read it!
Sure; I mean that rendering someone in words can always flatten them into mere abstractions, rather revealing them as actual people with real personhood. That's what we can guard against but never fully escape, since to use words requires rendering (if that makes sense).
Liv, thank you for such a thoughtful piece. I think you'd really like Kate DiCamillo's conversation with Krista Tippett. I agree that we should aim to acknowledge the personhood of those we write about, whether that is children or adults; attempting to see and know a person is a great act of love. At the same time I have a few pushbacks related to writing "for" rather than "about." I tend to avoid binaries in writing (only show, never tell!), and so I am also wary to only to write "for" and never "about." From a fiction point of view, writing "for" is slightly more accessible because the characters are made up, and this is partly why DiCamillo can write "for" so well (among the other great craft things she does. I do not want to minimize her brilliance!). For creative non-fiction, this is more difficult. I cannot write "for" someone without writing "about" them, and this is largely because the people in my life (along with myself) are real characters. My experience of walking in a Japanese school and receiving origami from delightful children is a real observation and experience I had. I am not attempting to minimize the personhood of the children, it's just what happened and what I was able to perceive. This leads to my main pushback: writing "for" people rather than "about" seems to negate the reaction and feelings of the writer, which are still valid even if it is only one side of the story. However, I would like clarify that the way I was taught to write "about" people is reliant on the inclusion of both dignity and depravity in the characters/speaker. This is essential, and goes back to your final takeaway on loving and acknowledging personhood, which I wholeheartedly agree with. At the end of the day, I think we can write "for" or "about" people in a way that does this. I apologize if this came off a bit defensive. Perhaps I am because I am a CNF writer, but really this was incredibly thought-provoking :)
Anna, this is a beautiful counterpoint! I do agree 100% that there's a place for a kind of writing about people--and tried to distinguish in the essay between writing about and writing "about", but maybe that didn't come off well, lol. So a difference between writing about someone in a way that takes into account that they're their own person (which sounds like what you're talking about!) vs. a way of writing about people that *only* focuses on our reactions and emotions. Particularly with children, that can be dangerous, because when we say whatever we want about another adult, there's always the chance that they'll get on the Internet and correct us, and that's not the case with children. So the stakes are higher to be careful and just.
Particularly what bothers me isn't people who write about children, if it's done in a gracious, careful way, (again, DiCamillo does this well, and is certainly drawing on her experience of real children!), but people who write about children *as a means of writing about themselves*, ie, being very open about criticizing their children in writing or treating them as a tool for self-exploration or spiritual discovery, or anything of that sort. Which we can also do with ex-boyfriends, or spouses, or pastors, or any other sort of people. So this piece is just an invitation to think before you write about people, not to stop writing about them entirely.
This essay was very exploratory--I'm wrestling with a lot of these ideas too, how to write truthfully and also protect people. I just personally tend to the side of protectiveness, and wanted to write about why that is. Think of it as something like Lewis' Meditation on a Toolshed: we need both kinds of writing, like we need both ways of seeing, but I find that in certain spaces, one is emphasized over the other, and my goal was to point that out. :)
Thank you for the pushback and the thoughts!
I appreciate these points of clarification; they make a lot of sense! I am so glad you shared this with us and are considering these ideas. They are so valuable and I’m so privileged to learn through these discussions. On another note, I read Louisiana’s way home a few days ago and adored it!
"...we can’t forget that everyone has as much ontological weight, as much weight of being-alive-ness, as we do."
"It requires something from us: a disposition to act “for” people."
Loved it, Olivia. From what I've gathered from the homeschool world, this was similar to one of Charlotte Mason's main drivers of educational philosophy. "A child is a human person" might seem obvious, but needs to be said and actually considered. These "for" and "about" approaches have ramifications for writing as you point out, and also education.
Haha, yep, my mom texted me afterwards and was like, "I liked this one! ...It's all in Charlotte Mason." 😂 It'd be interesting to compare a "for" education and an "about" one!
You've just told me why I loved the books I loved as a child. That's something I didn't know before, just thought it was "good writing" but never really knew why. Thank you for that gift.
That's wonderful to hear! I took a couple classes on children's literature with a great teacher, and she did a wonderful job explaining how some books are written by adults who remember being kids and others by adults who write like kids are a totally different species, and I was like "Oooooh...that's why I didn't like those books." So all credit goes to her.
This is wonderful! I can not tell you how much I love this. Early on in my parenting journey, my busy mama self was tidying the living room and I watched my small son walk up to a full cup of water on the table and deliberately knock it over and stand there watching as the water ran everywhere. It was deliberate! This child had come in, seen that I was cleaning, and then intentionally made a mess! "What were you THINKING" I wailed as I dashed to dry up what I could. His face was so solemn, his voice so earnest as he stood and watched me, and his words have stayed with me. "I wanted to know how the water would move." He went on to explain a few different ways that he had seen water move in different circumstances, and he'd wanted to know how the water would move between the table and the floor after it left the cup.
You're entirely correct in your assessment. One thing I've learned about being a parent and meeting other parents is that quite a few of them really, truly have no concept of what it was like to be a child. How hard is it to understand that a toddler is going to want to walk along a curb just to see how long he's able to do so? And that that's fun?
I have a few authors I'm willing to listen to when it comes to depictions of children. Ray Bradbury I'll listen to every time, and Stephen King I find is insightful for kids of a certain age.
Are you familiar with Santoine de Saint Exupery's snake/hat drawing? Sadly, our time seems to be awash with hat people.
I'm glad that you find my assessment accurate--I was a little nervous about this one, because I'm not a parent (though I have a good amount of experience with kids), and so my opinions might've been totally missing the mark.
Ray Bradbury, 100%. Kate DiCamillo, obviously. Miyazaki as well! His characters always feel like real children. One really interesting point that Diana Wynne Jones makes in one of her essays is that children never think of themselves "as children"; it's only adults who get nostalgic about childhood. She says that kids are entirely future-oriented: they want to play at being grownups and read stories about grownups, or at least, about kids who have no grownups around and have to *be* the grownups (which is why so many fantasy stories are about orphans or things happening while parents are away on holidays). Which I think is true.
Yes, after reading aloud ad nauseum, you really appreciate the excellent writing of someone like Kate DiCamillo who grants each of her characters personhood, even a stuffed rabbit. Lewis posits that a children's story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good story. He is also wary of obvious morals. These two common failings of children's books are sadly prevalent in Christian literature in particular. Grateful for books that can be enjoyed by adults and children alike: Beverly Cleary, Cynthia Rylant, Elizabeth George Speare, CS Lewis, Andrew Peterson, Sally Lloyd Jones, SD Smith, etc. I have a horror of putting my children's names or faces online, so I was amening from the choir on this piece. My writerly concern would be the other side of the pendulum I suppose. I'm so hesitant to bring my children into any social media that I often orbit on the periphery of what's really happening. I do not allow them to be fully fleshed out characters and have perhaps robbed my writing of any semblance of reality. The same for my family of origin. I think about my parents or siblings reading something I wrote and steer clear of childhood memories that involve more than myself. I suppose this is why I write most often about nature or God or literature. I wish I could find a way to write a more fleshed out version of reality while honoring the personhood of all the other people intertwined. I enjoyed your piece, and it resonated with me on a lot of levels because reading children's literature out loud has been a huge part of my life for the last two decades. As I write this note the answer to my problem seems obvious. I should be writing fiction!
It's so hard to balance between privacy and writing people-as-full-people! In my own writing, I try and keep a sort of balancing act between sparse, yet contextualized detail: that is, not saying more than I need to, but saying *as much* as I need in order to be generous towards the other person. I don't know if that makes sense or not! But it's something all writers have to wrestle with, particularly Christian writers. I don't think we have the liberty to sacrifice other people to our art, which some writers assume. That's a great list of children's authors! I just finished reading Once A Queen, by Sarah Arthur, which was totally lovely. I'm always happy to read a good children's novel--key word being "good"!
I think you're the third person who's recommended that book! I'm going to have to put it on my TBR. Thank you for responding so thoughtfully. It is helpful to articulate the tension I feel in wanting to both record life accurately and vividly and yet also to respect the privacy of others. I think I had chalked it up to some vague deficiency on my part rather than accurately analyzing the balancing act required.
I am relieved that I misunderstood what you meant about "reading about children" when I saw the note preview. I'm not sure my kids are repelled by the children's stories that are overtly pedantic, but I definitely am. There's a large gap between The Wind in the Willows and people who use Winnie the Pooh's IP to write stories like "Oh Bother, Someone Won't Share."
Haha, that was a little clickbait-y, somewhat on purpose. I have friends who've told me that they enjoyed very saccharine, Victorian "this is a story about a good little child" as kids, but I kind of doubt that they actually enjoyed the story--I think it had more to do with enjoying being thought of as a good child by adults. I was very judgy about stories as a kid (and still am, clearly!) I've taken a number of classes on children's lit, and some of it is great, and some of it is very bad.
Loved this! Have you listened to Read Aloud Revival’s interview with Kate di Camillo? I found it so inspiring- she definitely gets it.
I've read some of her interviews, and loved them--I don't know if I've read that particular one. I'll have to check it out!
This was a rather convicting read. I don’t write about others much but I am guilty of talking about others - mostly about my family when talking with other moms. I really want to be cautious about what I say about others and this really spoke to me this morning. Thank you.
It's a convicting point for me too! One of the things I wrestled with while writing this essay was how to write it in a way that's generous to other writers, so it's sort of an ouroboros of trying to speak carefully. :) Words matter! But sometimes it's also helpful to share stories about hard relationships or moments with other people, it's just a question of how we do that tactfully and with prudence.
Very poignant! You are articulating something here that I have felt but have never put the words to. Thank you.
My hope is that the children’s poetry I write falls into category of writing “for” children.
This will help me stay on that track.
Thanks for reading, Zane! I think children's poetry is a great genre for writing "for", and it takes a proper enjoyment of children + kind of whimsy to do well, both of which I think come through in your poems. :)
Not wanting there to be too strong of a curated public narrative about my children was one of the driving reason I quit social media years ago. I had been a typically excited new mom, sharing photos of my baby, and it felt appropriate because for the first year or so we *did* feel like one unit. Her personhood existed, but in a circle around me. (La Leche League even refers to a nursing mother and infant as one biological unit). But then as she grew (and I grew, in awareness and confidence as a mother) I began to feel highly uncomfortable with shaping any sort of idea of who my child was for her, for other people to 'consume.' My children are individuals and deserve privacy. Of course I cannot help but write about them since they are the driving force of pretty much everything I do, but I always hope to retain the sense of distance, and to protect their own sense of self -- if I write about children, really it needs to be writing about *me* not them. Very astute essay, Olivia - and it sounds like you had a lovely immersion in the magic of a child's life!
This is interesting to hear! I am curious to know what it's like for women who are already writers when they become moms, or people who grew up with writers as mothers. Having been in the homeschool/classical education world my whole life, 99% of my exposure to "writing mothers" is "mothers who write practical advice about their children", which is, again, not a genre that I care to read: obviously it's a huge part of these women's lives, and a very important and beautiful one, but there seem to be a lot of women who only take to writing (at least online) to chronicle their journey of becoming a stay-at-home mom and figuring out homeschooling, and I'm always curious whether the urge to write was always there, or whether there's something about motherhood that makes people more inclined to swap stories. Contrast with women like Madeleine L'Engle or Diana Wynne Jones, who were mothers, and wrote children's literature ("for" children), but didn't write the type of modern "blogging about kids" articles that I'm talking about here. Idk. Outside my realm of personal experience! Thanks for reading and sharing your thoughts. :)
All the above confirms me, again, in something I've worked out for better or worse: not to try the fatherhood essay genre, nor the marriage essay genre, nor the personal essay at all. (This ethic is one of those concerns that I couldn't help but follow to its stringent point.)
You're wise to seek personhood as a guardrail along which to write loving personal essays, to be sure. But this line made me think again about what it means to render in words: "We flatten other people all the time; we can’t help it." Another stringent end-point, likely more debatable, is that I usually can't treat nonfiction as different from fiction, because the words render real people in the same medium as those that render unreal fiction, and because rendering can't be reality. Rendering, if not flattening, is the means of depiction in written forms — meaning that those forms can't be reality.
This is a strange conviction for me, one that I waver over depending on the day. I'd be curious to hear your thoughts against it. (It was also the idea that Ekstasis let me work out in the most meta essay-and-essay-reading I've ever gotten away with.)
Can you explain a little further what you mean in your second paragraph? I agree that writing about real people in creative nonfiction is pretty much the same as writing fiction (if that's what you mean by rendering), but I'm not sure I've entirely got the point you're making in response to my essay, about flattening vs rendering.
Is this Ekstasis essay published? I'd love to read it!
Sure; I mean that rendering someone in words can always flatten them into mere abstractions, rather revealing them as actual people with real personhood. That's what we can guard against but never fully escape, since to use words requires rendering (if that makes sense).
Here's that essay, which more ably describes how this works: https://www.ekstasismagazine.com/blog/2024/a-scene-report-from-a-literary-gathering
This is beautiful, and such a good reminder. Thank you for sharing this.
Thanks for reading!
I agree, with all of this. And gratefully taking the Kate DiCamillo tip, I’ll be passing that on to my daughter.
I love DiCamillo! Need to catch up on all the books of hers that I haven't read.