A tiny person climbed right up in my lap today while we were reading about dinosaurs at Locke Street Farmers’ Market! She wrapped me in a glorious hug and then settled in to stay! Storytime is such a joy for me and I am deeply thankful when I get concrete reminders that tiny people appreciate our time together, too (even if it means I need extra help turning pages because my arms are trapped!).
Thank you, tiny person! ❤ 🦖
I’ll be away from my Saturday home at Locke Street Farmers’ Market on September 07 so I can take two writing workshops with Marie Louise Gay! She’s in Guelph that day as part of the Eden Mills Writers’ Festival. First up is “Inspiring Children to Write,” followed by “Writing for Children.” I am so excited to spend the day with Stella maven and curly hair inspiration MLG! ♥️
Locke Street Farmers’ Market Folks, you are in goooood hands on 09/07! Graemazing will be at Market to amuse and amaze! Locke Street Family Day is also happening 11AM-4PM, with bucketloads of fun, including a bouncy castle, face painting, and lots of family entertainment.
I’ll be at Donut Monster (Locke) for storytime on September 10. When I return to Market on September 14, we’re going to sing songs and read stories about books and reading!
May 10 — I’ll be back at Epic Books for Books Aloud at 10:30AM. Books Aloud is an ongoing Friday morning song and storytime led by the likes of Lisa Pijuan-Nomura, Karen Ancheta, Sue Littleton, and me! Locke St. is under construction, so please leave extra time for parking.
Rehearsals, rehearsals, rehearsals…
**NEW!** May 19 — promoting the Mind Play Theatre Festival on Centre Stage with Lyla Miklos on 101.5 FM The Hawk
**NEW!** May 21 — Storytime at Donut Monster, 10:30 AM
May 25 — I’m helping to coordinate the First Annual Hamilton Silly Walk. We’ll meet at Gore Park for silly micro-workshops and silly stretching and then silly walk our way to City Hall. My friend Shahzi had the idea for the walk when she saw a news piece about a town in Hungary that does one for April Fool’s Day. We’re doing it to raise awareness of Mental Health Month and for our own sanity. After last summer’s Easy-bake Road Trip, this kind of playing feels like second skin. We’re hoping to expand the event in 2020 to include a full day of silly events. #sillyhamont
May 29 — I start taking a month long Creative Process course taught by Hamilton collage artist and storytelling dynamo Lisa Pijuan-Nomura!
May 31 and June 01 — Lightbulb Heart makes its official performance debut at Mind Play Theatre Festival! Although I’ve been in the theatre for almost 3 decades, this will be the first public performance of work under my own umbrella. I’ll be performing Karaoke Visiting Hour, a memoir monologue about the only time I’ve ever sung karaoke and my 12 year boxing match with muscle tension dysphonia. If you want to find out how I’m starting to win that fight, please join me and 6 other companies for Hamilton’s premiere mental health play festival at The Staircase.
Yay, May!
Several people have asked for a list of the books in my easybakeheart roadtrip book bin, so here it is! I chose tales of compassion for self or others, of imagination, and of knowing/finding one’s own self. (*indicates a book purchased on the road)
| Title | Author | Illustrator |
| Across the Alley* | Michelson, Richard | Lewis, E.B. |
| After the Fall | Santat, Dan | |
| Baabwaa & Wooliam | Elliot, David | Sweet, Melissa |
| Bats at the Library | Lies, Brian | |
| Billy’s Booger | Joyce, William | |
| Book of Mistakes, The | Luyken, Corinna | |
| Crysanthemum* | Henkes, Kevin | |
| Dog Loves Books | Yates, Louise | |
| Feeling.* | Johnson, Dylan | |
| Freedom Summer | Wiles, Deborah | Lagarrigue, Jerome |
| Giggle, Giggle, Quack* | Cronin, Doreen | Lewin, Betsy |
| Giraffes Can’t Dance | Andreae, Giles | Parker-Rees, Guy |
| Golden Rule, The | Cooper, Ilene | Swiatkowska, Gabi |
| Gossie | Dunrea, Olivia | |
| Happy Birthday, Madame Chapeau | Beaty, Andrea | Roberts, Dan |
| Heart and Soul: The Story of America and African Americans* | Nelson, Kadir | |
| Henry’s Freedom Box: A True Story from the Underground Railroad | Levine, Ellen | Nelson, Kadir |
| I Like Myself!* | Beaumont, Karen | Catrow, David |
| I Will Never Get a Star on Mrs. Benson’s Blackboard* | Mann, Jennifer K. | |
| If You Plant a Seed* | Nelson, Kadir | |
| In My Heart: A Book of Feelings | Witek, Jo | Roussey, Christine |
| Let the Children March | Clark-Robinson, Monica | Morrison, Frank |
| Little Blue Truck Leads the Way | Schertle, Alice | McElmurry, Jill |
| Miss Rumphius | Cooney, Barbara | |
| Not a Box* | Portis, Antoinette | |
| Quiet Place, The | Stewart, Sarah | Small, David |
| Rabbit’s Wedding, The | Williams, Garth | |
| Rainbow Fish, The | Pfister, Marcus | |
| Rufus Goes to Sea* | Griswell, Kim T. | Gorbachev, Valeri |
| Ruth and the Green Book | Ramsey, Calvin Alexander (with Gwen Strauss) | Cooper, Floyd |
| Story Book Knight, The | Docherty, Hellen and Docherty, Thomas | |
| Story of Ferdinand, The | Leaf, Munro | Lawson, Robert |
| The Thing Lou Couldn’t Do | Spires, Ashley | |
| These Hands* | Mason, Margaret H. | Cooper, Floyd |
| This is the Rope: A Story from the Great Migration | Woodson, Jacqueline | Ransome, James |
| What Do You Do With An Idea?* | Yamada, Kobi | Besom, Mae |
| Whistle for Willie | Keats, Ezra Jack |
Want to know what other books are in my collection? My full Storylady Library is available on LibraryCat!
Stephanie Judkins gave me a tour of the Heifer Learning Center at Heifer Ranch. The Ranch is an incredible place and the people there are doing some seriously compassionate education. Of course, I couldn’t leave the Ranch without purchasing a kid’s book about farm animals…We retired to Stephanie’s tiny house and I read to goats, chickens, guinea hens, and her delightful three-legged dog, Chaplin Sue. I remain smitten with Plushenko, pictured below with Giggle Giggle Quack, by Doreen Cronin.
Pyramid Art, Books & Custom Framing (glorious source of my new favorite book – If You Plant a Seed, by Kadir Nelson), Mosaic Templars Cultural Center (excellent), and the Hillary Rodham Clinton Children’s Library & Learning Center (books! bees! free breakfast and lunch for kids!) before I drove out to Jackson, MS.
Shannon and Joe Frost took me to the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum. The MCRM offers a good example of spacial hospitality (that soft place to land). Each section is a semi-circle fanning out from an open central area with comfortable seats and soft, slowly changing lighting emanating from a swooping ceiling sculpture. Gospel music plays, allowing for an emotional reset for the museum-goer before launching back into the exhibits.
Joe Frost graciously gathered 6 of his alumni and an incoming Freshman: Connor Bingham, Ginny Holladay Jessee, James Kenyon, Laina Faul, Lauren Tobin, Lydia Lippincott, and Nina Frost. They were So Game and threw themselves immediately into play. We tackled experiencing primary emotions while exploring an array of toys, books, and paper.
I had them do the adult step of the Who/What/Where Adult v. Child Self-Care exercise, then asked them to turn their paper over and draw how the opposite of all that goodness made them feel. One of the participants later said that the air was sucked out of the room.
AND THEN THERE WERE GLORIOUS TANTRUMS
One by one, I took their drawings and asked them to approach a blue gym mat and throw a tantrum. They were beautiful in their similarities and differences. Some were long, loud, and took up lots of space. Others were quiet, contained, and utterly terrifying. I asked for a tantrum coach and they guided me through a workplace scenario so I could have a constructive, adult tantrum with a piece of construction paper (which, btw, led directly to a scene I wrote this morning…).
I read In My Heart: a book of feelings, by Jo Witek, aloud and they played while experiencing the emotions associated with the words. We rolled primary and secondary emotion dice and played in the resulting combined emotional states, then wrote four-line scenes corresponding to the combo-states we felt most at home in.
All of the above was really fruitful, and my favorite part came when we took out pictures of our tiny selves and adopted those poses to find a) how we felt then and b) how we might wish to feel now as adults. That’s me in a 20-month-old version of a herkie. My words: open, curious, seen. After a pose was demonstrated and described, the rest of us matched it before moving to the next person. The best roadtrip phrase so far came from this activity: “airport pooping.” Genius. Thank you, Ginny!
By the end, everyone laid on their bellies or sat cross-legged and decorated a large cardboard box. It was marvelous.
Much needed downtime with the Frost Family.
Birmingham, Alabama
I am still processing the 16th Street Baptist Church and Kelly Ingram Park. The Park is home to the Freedom Walk, a series of sculptures depicting police dogs, water cannons, and children imprisoned for marching for civil rights in 1963. After viewing the church and walking the park, I sat down to try to read selected children’s books aloud and started weeping after reading the first sentence of Let the Children March (Monica Clark-Robinson, Frank Morrison illus.). I chose, instead, to self-sooth by reading the books to myself: The Golden Rule (Ilene Cooper, Gabi Swiatkowska illus.), If You Plant a Seed (Kadir Nelson), and The Rabbits’ Wedding (Garth Williams – the book was banned in Alabama in 1959 for “integrationist propaganda”).
Cleveland, TN
Stacey Isom Campbell! Also, I bought a 1978 Easy-Bake Oven in working order 🙂
Writing and resting and real tacos and lemon pie and parallel play with Stacey. A good day.
Tomorrow – on to Charlotte, NC
Lightbulb Heart 