"What's that Russian saying? 'How do you make God Laugh? - Tell him your plans.'"

This weekend, I had too much to do, and got to go to the MN Book Awards, all of which meant I should have spent every spare minute grading.Instead, I went for a bike ride each day this weekend. Saturday, with Lisa; yesterday, with David and Rachael for sixty miles....

MN Book Awards Gala last night.Our whole writing group--minus Sally, whom we sorely missed--attended at the Crown Plaza downtown, St. Paul. A grand time was had by all (And I'm still full today).Kirstin Cronn Mills didn't win, but she only lost to Kate DiCamillo, who...

Guess what I just did? FILED MY TAXES. April 14. Yup. What a great tradition.I was going to do it over spring break--when I finished my schoolwork--which took the whole week--so I didn't. I was going to do it last weekend, but I had too much grading. Comes down to...

Awesome. My Intro to Humanities students all wrote responses to our trip to the Guthrie and the Minneapolis Institute of Art. What they have to say makes me so, so, so glad that we do this every semester. It's worth every minute of work and every penny to get to see...

This article talks about either the absent parent, or the ineffectual parent, or the dead parent, etc. Any of these set up the protagonist of the story to need to solve his or her own problems. I've thought about this charateristic of YA Lit quite a bit. But it...