I recently got an email from an editor I like, and he mentioned that he thought he had seen me in San Francisco. Sitting outside a health food grocery. In the sunshine. But he had walked past, not sure if it was me. We hadn’t seen each other for a while, you see. I thought he was in New Hampshire. He thought I was in Chicago. How odd it is, these coincidences. I was only there for a little while. Why does such a thing happen? Does it have meaning, or is it just one of the every day pleasures of being alive?

Lovely news. I just heard that The Paperbark Shoe (aka: Toads’ Museum) is a finalist for ForeWord’s Book of the Year. Goodness, gracious, dearie, me! And that happened on the same day that my first copy of You Lose These and other stories arrived from Australia. You’d think the day would have been perfect already, but my young son, Yossel, came running in from school and he leapt into my arms and gave me a giant kiss, and then got busy tickling me until I absolutely howled with laughter. (He really knows how to get me going!) Yossel, by the way, is a fan of Tintin, and of Bones, and Diary of a Wimpy Kid, and of all other graphic type books. My mother used to say, it doesn’t matter what the child is reading, so long as they ARE reading. It could be the instruction manual to your 1975 Holden…it could be the bad poetry on the back of the toilet door down at the local pub (though one hopes the 8 year old isn’t down THERE)…it could be the ingredient list on that fluorescent cereal you bought by mistake last time you went to the supermarket, the one that makes your kids’ teeth glow in the dark after they’ve eaten it?…future book buyers, one and all! Anyway, I am glad that there is such a thing as Book of the Year, and it’s not something like Wordy App of the Year. Computers, I do not love you.

Picador has done a beautiful job and I’m excited to see the book! Many thanks, and especially to David Rogers.
http://us.macmillan.com/thepaperbarkshoe

Today I drove with the windows unwound and chamber music blasting and the cool spring air running over my skin. I could hardly believe that a couple of weeks ago I was stuck in the disastrous Chicago blizzard, listening to my taxi driver (on Lakeshore Drive, no less) say: “It’s very serious. VERY serious!” This may or may not have been right after he told me that he was about to run out of gas. The big chunks of stuff flying overhead were not, after all, pieces of trees but chunks of ice being blown off Lake Michigan and that car whose windows got frozen open was full of snow. But today was beautiful. Peaceful. There was water on the ground and pigeons mating on the top of lamp posts.

‘Yesssss!’ I thought, high-fiving myself mentally. ‘I’m going to go for a walk in the Northpark Nature Center! Or hang out some laundry! Or at the very least, write a spring blog entry that mentions that it was warm today…’

I recently was notified that I won the Great Lakes College Association’s New Writers’ Award for 2011. Very exciting news! Many thanks to the Association for that vote of confidence in Paperbark Shoe.