There is helping and there is hindering. Hindering is where you’re actually handicapping the person you think you’re helping so that they’ll never learn the skills necessary to be able to stand on their own. Helping is when you see someone being overwhelmed, and you step in, strategically! It’s very important. You never know when […]

There’s an OISE article about how anthropomorphic animal stories are not as effective at conveying lessons as stories with real children in them. https://www.oise.utoronto.ca/oise/About_OISE/OISE_study_shows_kids_learn_more_effectively_from_stories_with_humans_than_with_human-like_animals.html I am not surprised by these findings. The study was done on pre-schoolers. That age is not conducive to ambiguity. You need to spell it out. And yet so many parents […]

I’ve been thinking a lot about addiction these days. It’s all over the news, the opioid epidemic and it’s starting to hit Toronto, where I live. Two eighteen year old girls recently went into a building downtown and overdosed in a stairwell. There was a fascinating study done about cocaine addiction. They had this rat […]

Children’s literature is an interesting field! There’s a whole canon of academia that wrangles over the minutiae of an author’s choices. It’s quite fascinating to watch them wrangling actually. I went to the IRSCL conference over the last few days, it began with its opening keynote on Saturday evening and then wrapped up on Wednesday […]

I’m so honored to be presenting at the International Research into Children’s Literature conference this year! The venue for this international academically oriented conference changes every two years. This year it’s in Toronto and they invited me to be on a panel with some other authors. The thing is, even though it’s tempting to just […]

I know I’ve been scarce in terms of blogosphere and that is always good news in some ways because it means the writing of fiction is going well! Alhamdu lillah, it is. I’m working on two projects and strangely enough one makes me laugh and the other makes me cry. They kind of balance each […]

I confess I feel a little conflicted celebrating the sesquicentennial of Canada! I’ve been reading a graphic novel about Louis Riel, and I think all Canadians can put away any smugness we might feel about being ‘kinder’ to the native Americans. We weren’t. And a hundred and fifty years later, we have a handsome charismatic […]

I recently got back from my first Highlights Foundation workshop. Highlights Foundation is located on a family homestead in eastern Pennsylvania, a small town called Honesdale. For years they’ve been running writing workshops, retreats, that are lauded as some of the best writing intensives around. They’re affiliated with Boyds Mills Press, a publisher that has […]

It’s so funny that my last blog post was wondering about direction! Yesterday I returned from the Highlights Foundation workshop on Graphic Novels. It was their first workshop on the genre and it was absolutely amazing! The Highlights Foundation is the same that has been putting out Highlights Magazine for more than forty years! The […]

It happened again. The freeze! I was giving the keynote at the SCBWI Canada east conference in Montreal and the audience was completely motionless, completely silent, and it was unnerving a bit. It’s ideal, don’t get me wrong. It means they’re intently listening, but it’s kind of weird. Again I had that feeling that I […]