It starts with storytelling: at the table, in the car, at bath time, at bedtime.

Turn off electronic games and television – no excuses.

BUT, don’t fight the digital revolution! Smartphones and tablets may give reading a cool factor.

Give kids a fun flashlight, and tell them it’s okay to read after “lights out.”

Get kids their own library card; go to the library on a regular basis.

Use visualization early on; help your child picture the story. Ask them what they see in their mind.

Read with your child; make it a participatory activity, not a solitary one.

Read what your child is reading, even if it’s Captain Underpants. Discuss it often.

Select a book that’s part of a series.

Ask kids to bring favorite scenes/passages to the dinner table. Do the same.

Help them write to a favorite author – social media makes this easier than ever.

Make journals together – with leather, bark, cloth.

Ask kids to write one more scene after the ending – type it for them.

Ask kids to draw a favorite character from their book – tape it to the fridge.

Read in a tent, fort, barn, tree with your kids. Setting matters.

For older kids, select from banned books—nothing cooler!

Your attention is the best reward.

Next post: Great books for boys ages 6-12

and making me feel like her:

And her:

And her:

But definitely not her:

After walking up and down the Boston street, thinking I have the wrong address, I finally discover the entrance sandwiched between two buildings. Not having the correct Harry Potter spell to widen it, I squeeze through and proceed up the narrow, dingy stairwell last used by Irene Cara in Fame.

But the upstairs, thankfully and appropriately, is a clean, well-lighted place. I take a deep breath, remembering that the workshop is for all writing levels, and I, as a first-time novelist, will be right at home.

The room is buzzing with graduate-degree angst and SAT words. The writers share a camaraderie that can only come from having unprotected sex with each other in 1985. Intimidating, for sure.

No problem. I will picture everyone in their underwear.

I scan the room.

I try not to picture everyone in their underwear.

I ask where Irene Cara is filming her porn movie, because I think I’ll be more comfortable with her.

A young intern tells me I’m in the right place, and leads me to the kiddie table. She puts a handful of Cheerios in front of me. “Have fun with those. Don’t choke now,” she says.

The students settle into their seats and smile at each other with a warmth that can only come from having safe sex with each other in 1992. They pull out their works-in-progress, and update each other on the literary publications they’re soliciting. I ask the person next to me to pass me my sippy cup.

The instructor enters the room, and quickly acknowledges all the familiar faces. He knows this pool of talent well.

I picture my “Hang in there!” kitten poster from 1968.

We each take a turn reading (out loud) the first couple pages of our manuscripts. The 12 women in the room have written about pain, and the monumental journey they have taken to embrace it. The 12 men in the room have written about their penises; one, a Vampire penis.

It’s three hours into the workshop, and the kitten from my poster is losing its grip. I am the second to last person to read.

I finish, and the instructor says, “Wow!” The room is filled with a hush that can only come from everyone wondering what it would be like to sleep with me. I smile.

“That was the most confusing opening I have ever heard,” the instructor says.

The kitten falls to the ground.

“I mean, did anyone else get any of that?” asks the instructor.

Vampire penis says, “No, not at all.” Others shake their head. My neighbor scoops up my Cheerios, because, clearly, I can’t handle them.

The tree slams to the ground, on top of the cat.

“You need to back away from this narrative, and rewrite it, so we know what the hell is going on,” the instructor adds.

The bus-size NASA satellite expected to plummet near Germany changes course and lands on the fallen tree.

He looks at me for a response.

“Hey, I flossed for you!” I say.

The penises wilt; the women consider writing about my pain, and the monumental journey I’ll need to take to embrace it.

I get up and search for Irene.

Respect

Love

Encourage

Dream

Live

Create

Inspire

Hello

That’s it! That sounds right. Hello. Exclamation, noun, verb, it fits. Shout it, speak it, whisper it, sign it. The word for 2012 is …

If Julia Pearson was frightened as she walked over to her family’s pianoforte, if sweat dripped down her whalebone corset at the smell of fresh cinder, or if her hands trembled under her homemade lace cuffs, she didn’t let on to the frightfully tall Union soldier at her doorstep.

Julia had known this day might come, for stories of General Sherman’s madness and crimes had reached her father’s plantation not long after the men folk had left to fight for the Confederacy. She worried for her young brothers, still in their teens, and her father, aged beyond most of the volunteer soldiers. But duty called, as it called to Julia on this day thick with rain and smoke, a grey that hadn’t let up for weeks. Late in the afternoon on April 21, 1863, General Ben Grierson and his Calvary brigade raided the Pearson plantation near Starkville, Mississippi.

At twenty years of age, Julia should have been wed by now. But men were scarce and Julia was needed to help run the family farm. An order for 200 slaves had been placed by her father before departing, but that was on hold, pending the outcome of the War of Northern Aggression. Even if she were to fall in love, perhaps with one of the many returning wounded, she wouldn’t leave her mother and younger sisters to care for the farm by themselves.

The donkeys brayed as Grierson’s men raided the livery stable, and Julia, in an act of defiance, took to the piano to play a Confederate anthem called Homespun Dress.

Vilhelm Hammershoi (1864–1916) Woman at the Piano

My homespun dress is plain, I know,


My hat’s palmetto, too;


But then it shows what Southern girls


For Southern rights will do.


We have sent the bravest of our land


To battle with the foe,


And we will lend a helping hand;


We love the South, you know.

And while Julia was most certainly frightened, she couldn’t have known that the 36-year-old Calvary leader who came to her door had no intention of hurting her or burning her father’s plantation. For General Benjamin Grierson, who would become a celebrated Union officer for helping to bring down Vicksburg with his daring raid through Mississippi, was a most reluctant Calvary man. He was scared of horses, for one thing.

At just eight-years old, Grierson fell from his brother’s horse and subsequently took a hoof to the face that left him in a coma for two weeks. He spent months sequestered in a dark bedroom. He recovered fully, “a miracle,” the family doctor said. As soon as Ben was able, he grew a thick, full beard to hide the deformity, a look that would become his trademark.

General Benjamin Grierson

After enlisting in the Union army, he quickly rose in rank, recognized by Grant and Sherman for his strategic tactics, relying on quick and stealth travels and the element of surprise over dug-in troops with heavy ammunitions.

Such was the way he tore through Mississippi, wasting little time in each town as he commanded his troops to harm no civilians, burn no civilian homes, but destroy all government property, railroads, and telegraph lines.

Confederates would not be coming to protect Julia. Grierson’s men had backtracked their horses through the mud, and sent a small detachment northward to create a diversion for Grierson’s men to travel by fields unnoticed.

But family lore has it on this day in April, Gen. Grierson would pause his military campaign under the enchantment of Julia Pearson’s solo performance, and perhaps joined her in song.

While it may seem unlikely that a distinguished Union military soldier would be enamored with the musical talent of a Confederate’s daughter, biographers of the war hero would reveal that Ben Grierson was a musical prodigy.

“I was so infatuated with music that I could think of but little else, being unwilling to give up playing . . .even to eat or sleep.” —Benjamin Grierson

When a young Ben Grierson courted his wife Alice, a childhood love that would continue for decades, he would play the flute out his window, hoping the wind would carry the notes to her home across town. Music was what Alice and Ben loved more than anything else.

Not only was Grierson proficient with the flute, he played several instruments, and at the age of 12, became the town’s bandleader. But it was hard to make a living as a bandleader. By the time Civil War broke out, Grierson had no money, and no options but to enlist for the monthly stipend that was puny, but nonetheless vital to his wife and two young sons back home in Illinois.

Perhaps that day on April 21, Grierson felt closer to home, to his beloved Alice, at hearing young Julia’s voice. Perhaps, it gave him hope that one day this horrible war would be over, the Union would be saved, and he could return home.

And if there was ever proof that we are all connected in this American life, it would be in the instrument Julia played. The pianoforte was made by T. Gilbert & Co., a highly regarded piano factory run by Timothy Gilbert of Boston, Massachusetts, where Julia’s great-great-granddaughter would one day live.

One of Gilbert’s colleagues stated, “His heart is full of musical emotions and sweet harmonies.”

Timothy Gilbert

But making pianos wasn’t Gilbert’s mission. His mission, in the name of Christianity, was to help abolish slavery, and his piano factory was one of the largest stations on the Underground Railroad, where fugitive slaves were fed and bandaged. One slave hunter referred to Gilbert as the “grandest abolitionist in Boston.” Friends said “he was as fearless and honest as he was brave.”

Gilbert was known for walking the deserted streets of Boston during the “noon of night” to contemplate the desperate situations of his countrymen. As the bells of his church tolled, he would pause, remove his hat, and say a prayer.

I believe Timothy Gilbert would have been comforted to learn our country’s most violent and deadly war paused for a brief moment on a rainy April day in Mississippi to enjoy the sweet harmonies of a Confederate daughter, a Union general, and a pianoforte manufactured by T. Gilbert & Co.

Oh, and here’s a little funny passed along from a writer friend:

But their light eventually became extinguished by greed, lust, and power, until all the glow girls had perished, except for four.

The world’s kind citizens feared for the remaining girls, so they built a factory prison of the strongest stone just for them, where they could light the world without corruption.

But light can’t be contained within stone walls, because in time even the strongest of stone cracks, and eventually, the girls escaped through fissures undetected by the earnest citizens.

They are the UnDark Girls, and I am writing their story, a dark fable based on the true story of the Radium Girls from the late 1920s.

“These gleamings, which seemed suspended in darkness, stirred us with new emotion and enchantment….The glowing tubes looked like faint, fairy lights.” —Marie Curie, discoverer of Radium

1. Aaron Coffin

2. Raven In A Blue Room

3. Wendy

4. Colleen

5. Wanda Thomas

6. Laura Kay

7. Tanya Ames

8. Mandy

9. Tracey Southerland

10. Heather E Stockwell

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