Last week award-winning author and poet Eloise Greenfield did a school visit at Hunnewell Elementary in Wellesley, where I was (very kindly) invited to join Eloise, several teachers, and Wellesley’s elementary school librarians for lunch. Eloise was warm and gracious, well-mannered, modest, and apparently very popular with the kids who’d seen her presentation that day. I snapped a photo of Eloise and the librarians, all the while thinking about all the great authors I’ve met even in just the past couple of months.

One of the things I’m learning about running lots of author events at our store and finding adequate time for blogging: the two generally don’t mix. When we’re busy running lots of events, I’m generally too overrun with work to find enough time to blog about them soon after the fact, leaving me with a backlog of unblogged-about events.

Last fall I fell into an unfortunate (but almost unavoidable) trap, thinking "I can’t post about THIS event, because I still haven’t posted about the last two events," but there wasn’t enough time that week to resize all those photos and assemble my thoughts on three events, so I’d postpone that post until the following week when there would generally be another event or TWO, leaving me with five or six events I then needed to post about and… you get the idea. I now have a few months worth of events posts percolating in this here blog tool. Any day now my fall events recap will magically write itself and appear here before your very eyes! Just as soon as I find some magical blogging elves… Or half a day’s worth of so-called "free time."

In any case, I’ve been trying to avoid that same events posting pitfall this winter and (now) spring, but despite my best efforts it’s already been happening again. At the start of February I blogged about our events with Linda Buckley-Archer and Jeff Kinney. But I didn’t have a chance to blog about the events we had a week later with FOUR of our favorite local authors, Mary Kaye Chryssicas, who just launched her new Yoga for Teens Card Deck, Mitali Perkins, whose new novel First Daughter: White House Rules is perfectly suited to the politics of an election year, and the talented duo behind Priscilla and the Hollyhocks, author Anne Broyles and illustrator Anna Alter.

The rest of February was pretty quiet as events go, but March was abuzz with activity, April has been keeping me plenty busy, and WOW. Wait’ll I try to play catch-up on May!

Here, briefly, is a rundown of whose elbows we’ve been brushing at recent in-store and off-site events.

On March 11 I met Laura Numeroff at the Bennett-Hemenway Elementary School in Natick, where she did a writing workshop with a small group of third and fourth graders. After that she did a public event with our store at the Wellesley Free Library, which drew a crowd of about 200 excited If You Give a Mouse a Cookie fans, happy to learn more about the characters in her newest book, The Jellybeans and the Big Dance.

On March 26, during a week when she was visiting two local schools, Linda Sue Park came to the store to talk to a group of eager listeners about her new novel Keeping Score, about which she recently wrote a great essay for Powell’s.

Linda is a great speaker, and as always her presentation seemed perfectly polished, despite it having been the first time she’s spoken about this particular book. And it was so much fun to learn the inside stories about Linda’s research headaches and triumphs! I enjoyed her talk at the store almost as much as I enjoyed the lively conversation we had over dinner afterward with friends Jacqueline Davies and M.T. Anderson. (Isn’t it amazing to be in an industry with people who are this entertaining and intelligent?? I can’t imagine a better job perk.)

Linda gave a talk in our Used Book Cellar, where she showed some slides (in PowerPoint) that tied in with portions of her presentation. In the UBC photo above she’s sporting one of the baseball jerseys and caps Clarion printed to promote Keeping Score. Linda’s birthday was the day before her event with us (March 25), so (again with the cake theme!) we served up slices of this birthday treat to everyone in attendance. (And yes, it came from the same place as the cake we recently gave to our receiver Pete.)

On Saturday, March 29, wonderful bookseller Pat Pereira and wonderful librarian/occasional bookseller Margaret Aldrich worked with me at the first-ever Belmont Children’s Picture Book Festival, held at the First Church in Belmont, which is home to a beautiful space! The day we were there it was also home to a truly, truly delightful afternoon event, for which the credit goes to Melissa Stewart, who pulled the whole thing together.

At the event, six local authors each talked about or gave a presentation about the themes of their most recent picture books. Melissa Stewart had a group of children from the church perform the text of When Rain Falls. Timothy Basil Ering gave a delightfully lively reading of Necks Out for Adventure! Anne Broyles talked about the discoveries she made while doing research for Priscilla and the Hollyhocks. Leo and Laura Espinosa explained how what began as an idea for licensed characters became the book Otis and Rae and the Grumbling Splunk.

James Kaczman, author/illustrator of Lucky Monkey, Unlucky Monkey and Sarah Brannen, author/illustrator of Uncle Bobby’s Wedding  showed a very entertaining video they collaborated on about the history of clothing-clad animals in children’s books. Following the event all of the authors and illustrators present signed books for their eager and enthusiastic fans, who also enjoyed the opportunity to indulge in a slice of the only wedding cake (cake, cake, cake!) I’ve ever seen topped with tux-wearing guinea pigs (Uncle Bobby and husband Jamie).

Unfortunately I’ve got NO photos from our event on Wednesday, April 2 with Barbara Joosse at the Wellesley Free Library, where she read from her new book Grandma Calls Me Beautiful. That morning I was tending to another event (see below) AND I’d taken the store camera with me, which meant no one could use it to snap shots in my absence! With sincerest apologies to Barbara I report that our booksellers, the aforementioned Pat and Lee Van Kirk (our events coordinator) came back raving about how wonderful she’d been with the 50 or so kids and parents in attendance. I’m really sorry I couldn’t have been two places at once that day.

While a pack of preschoolers were being charmed by Barbara, I was with a pack of students at Wayland Middle School, laughing our er… butts off at two presentations by Australian author John Flanagan, who is beloved the world over for his wonderful Ranger’s Apprentice series. John is charming as can be and wildly funny! Here he is holding up one of the paper shields (which didn’t fare well with the camera flash) that Penguin printed and sent us piles of. (It was interesting to note which kids thought they were "totally cool!" and which kids were too cool to be seen carrying them.)

After John’s presentations at the school he came to our store, where we had a booksigning at (of all times) 1:00 in the afternoon. On a school day. WHY, oh why, would I schedule something so crazy? Because the Wellesley elementary schools dismiss at noon every Wednesday, and the Middle School does the same on the first Wednesday of every month, and… John was only available during the day! I figured we might as well give his fans the chance to see him without having to travel all the way to Australia. If they could make it, great. If they couldn’t… well, at least we gave them the opportunity.

Make it they did. Even at that odd hour we had over 200 kids and parents come through the store, brandishing books, OVERJOYED at the prospect of meeting one of their favorite authors! It was fantastic! Amanda Bock, the librarian for the Advent School in Boston, organized a field trip and had 10 students accompany her to the store for this honor. They rode the commuter rail out from the city to get to the event! Some parents from neighboring towns actually took their kids out of school for an hour or so, just so they could bring them face-to-face with their author idol. With apologies to the truant officers in town and the teachers whose lessons these kids were missing, how cool is that?? I just love it when a kid’s enthusiasm for a BOOK (or series thereof) trumps all. John seemed as happy with the event as we were.

Two days later, on Friday, April 4th our store hosted a Define-a-Thon for a group of fourth, fifth and sixth graders that was apparently made for a REALLY fun evening! The event was moderated by lexicographer/editor Steve Kleineder and co-sponsored by SCORE, which sits across the street from us on Wellesley’s main drag and did wonders to help us draw together a crowd for the evening’s competition. As for Steve, word at our store is he was charming and funny and made the kids feel 100% swell, even after they gave incorrect answers to the occasional question. Steve was profiled in a New York Times article on Define-a-Thons last year that I can’t resist quoting from, in part because I think "making dictionaries seem sexy" is a noble cause to which I also aspire, though I haven’t got the tattoo to prove it:

For Mr. Kleinedler, who has a tattoo of the phonetic vowel chart on his back, it is not just about fun; it is about the business of making dictionaries seem sexy. Part of
his job is to debunk the notion that lexicographers are “gray-haired people hunched over a drafting table who never see the light of day,” he said.

And last Saturday Vermont author Phoebe Stone was in our store signing copies of her books, which include the new YA novel Deep Down Popular, and apparently had quite a number of people stop by to sing her praises and purchase her books. Once again I had to miss out on the fun, but I hope to make up for it by reading Phoebe’s novel (someday! hopefully soonish!), which I suspect I’m going to love.

So… after this great run of events, what’s up and coming? Well, Susan Lubner will be taking over one of our Friday morning Story Times to entertain kids with a reading from her new picture book A Horse’s Tale. We’ve got an event at the library to launch local author Katie Smith Milway’s new book One Hen AND the full features of the website that’s been created to go with it. The day after that we’ve got the only public event in New England with… (drum roll please) RICK RIORDAN!! And, as if that’s enough, and because I’m apparently a glutton for punishment, we’ve got one day in which we attempt a children’s event triple-header (a new trick for me) of unprecedented proportions. Try this schedule on for size: a school visit with Blue Balliett in the morning, a public event with Jerry Spinelli at the Wellesley Free Library in the afternoon, AND a public event with Jeanne Birdsall and Annie Barrows at a local middle school that evening! Also in May, local author Karen Day kicks off the publication of her new novel No Cream Puffs, and authors Howard Mansfield and Sy Montgomery join us at the Natick Community Organic Farm for a pig-pen party and celebration of Howard’s new picture book Hogwood Steps Out and Sy’s (still-one-of-my-all-time-favorites) non-fiction account of the couple’s porcine adventures, The Good, Good Pig.

Assuming I live to tell the tale, I’ll be sure to give a full report on all of these, hopefully before they’ve become semi-distant memories!