It’s Tuesday.
I spent a good deal of yesterday cleaning house, catching up on necessary but boring details, and talking to someone about photography. Check this out. Very nice work and Jennifer is very knowledgeable. I put a permanent link to her site on the sidebar over there on the right.
Digital. It has changed more than the way we write, get news, or play.
In the midst of all this, I may have neglected to report here that I am once more president on the Missouri Center for the Book. I suspect there is a bit of masochism involved in this, although on whose part I’m not prepared to speculate. Tomorrow I head back to the state capitol, Jefferson City, to participate in the Letters About Literature Awards. This year is an especially good one for Missouri because…
…we have a national winner in this year. Imani Jackson, a 6th grader at Lewis and Clark Middle School in Jefferson City, was chosen as a National Honor Winner in Level I, for her letter to Maya Angelou about the poem Phenomenal Woman. This is a big deal. This program is now in all 50 states and often the number of letters tops a thousand in a given state, sometime going to two thousand or more. Nationally, two Winners and four National Honor Winners are chosen at each level, in addition to the state awards. Imani will receive a $100 Target gift card and a $1,000 grant for the library of her choice as a prize.
In the last couple of years some of the data coming out of studies concerning reading has been startling and encouraging. Sharp rises, even among those demographics often seen as “troublesome.” People in general are reading for pleasure more, and a lot of young people are. One might jokingly quip about Twilight and Harry Potter being the main cause of the jump, but I don’t think so. Those books may be “gateway” books. The thing is, these levels are sustained.
So I’m entering this last year of my participation in the Center with some optimism that the work we do, collectively, is having an effect. (Yes, this is my last year—our by-laws require board members to leave after nine years, and for me that’s next spring.) What I’m hoping to achieve this year is to get into place all the things I’d wanted to do last time. Independent funding, the new website, maybe begin a new membership program, and solidly establish the annual Celebrations so they can grow into a state book fair. We’ll see.
It would be helpful if I could get a book sold in the meantime…