Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast

MotherReader tagged us in a kidlitosphere-conference meme. As many of you know, the third (I think it is) Annual Kidlitosphere Conference is coming up on October 17th. Here’s all the info you need. Eisha and I can’t be there, but MotherReader, who is working hard to organize this year’s conference, asked us to take a brief trip down memory lane and reflect on the first conference we went to, which happened to be the first-ever one in Chicago in 2007.

Why did you decide to attend the KidLitosphere Conference?

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So, this is very nice to hear: Evidently, 7-Imp was selected by a panel of judges to be on the shortlist for a Book Blogger Appreciation Week award in the category of Best Kidlit Blog. This seems to be the place where we are supposed to direct you if you’d like to vote for winners in any category. And whoa: It’s terrifically flattering to be in the company of the other nominees in our category: A Fuse #8 Production, Jen Robinson’s Book Page, Maw Books Blog, and Shelf Elf: read, write, rave. I mean, really. How can you pick from all those folks? Wow.

Thanks to …er, whoever nominated this site. Not sure how this works. But it’s flattering. Very. Thank you from 7-Imp.

Now, don’t miss my (Jules’, that is) interview below with Marla and Liz! Bring your plate: There will be pancakes.

…and that’s ’cause today is actually her birthday. I simply got things started a little early yesterday. If you want to add your birthday greetings/wishes to the ones from Sunday, by all means, visit yesterday’s post.

I’ll be back tomorrow with an illustrator interview — at least if all goes as I plan. (Well, you know. The zombies could come before then. One just never knows these things.)

I’ll explain in a second why there’s a ukulele here. It’s not as random as it looks.

This post is a respectful nod to two of my Top-Five Favorite Blogs in All the World (oh no sirree, no hyperbole there, even if I tend to get too “most”y at the blog here on a regular basis). And those would be the blogs of public librarian Adrienne Furness, What Adrienne Thinks About That, and the blog of storyteller Farida Dowler, Saints and Spinners.

First, Adrienne. I’ll get to Farida in a second. Promise. Read the rest of this entry �

Speaking for myself only here, I’ll be on a blog vacation all week. (There is some kind of name for this, but I always screw it up: “blogvation” or some such thing? I’ll hit it old-skool and just say: Jules won’t be posting this week, yo.)

Don’t miss, in the meantime, the Summer Blog Blast Tour 2009. The master schedule is here at Chasing Ray. You’re in good hands with all those bloggers, I tell you what.

I hope everyone has a happy and prolific (but only if you want it to be) week. Curtsey. Peace sign. Tip o’ the hat. I’ll see you on Sunday when 7-Imp goes a-kickin’.

Can you believe it’s been a whole year since the last time I broke out the marquee tag? Let’s see if I still remember how this works…

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, JULES!!!!

Yup, there we go.

Jules, for this year’s celebration, I invited Fountains of Wayne to sing a song in your honor:

(Ya’ll should know, if you don’t already, that Jules is a nickname for Julie.) What I love about that song is that, not only does it have your name in it, but it describes EXACTLY the kind of friend you are. You’ve always got my back. Not that I’m special – you’ve pretty much got the entire blogosphere’s back, too.

Oh, and guess who else? Are you ready for this? It’s your boyfriend, Barry Manilow:

I know, right? I didn’t think he’d be available, what with his being 197 years old and his tickets costing about $1000 and all, but when he heard it was your birthday, he was all over it. He said, “Oh yeah, Julie! Wasn’t she that little girl I winked at in the audience of a concert that time? ANYTHING for her! She’s my only fan under 60!”

See, even Barry appreciates how you’ve got HIS back, too.

What I’m trying to say here, is: you’re the best friend and blog-partner a girl could ever ask for. I hope I don’t take you for granted, but I probably do. So for this birthday, to remind you and everyone else how awesome you are, I’m proclaiming…

MY TOP 7 FAVORITE THINGS ABOUT JULES

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This post is a Part Two, if you will, of yesterday’s post, in which the art work of graphic novelist Eric Wight was featured. Eric very graciously created a Mad Tea-Party image just for 7-Imp, and it’s here to the left. Don’t you just love it — and Alice’s face? I didn’t put it in yesterday’s post for different reasons, mostly because I knew I wanted to post about it today. But, as mentioned yesterday, it is already up at the site — in the header of this page. Go have a look and see how fabulous it is! That page, based on the size of our blog’s email in-box, gets a lot of traffic, so we hope lots of folks will see it.

You may remember that 7-Imp is collecting various Mad Tea-Party images to include in the headers of our site’s pages (though we committed to always leaving the classic Tenniel image on the main, or “home,” page of the site.) We also recently acquired illustrator Helen Oxenbury’s version of Lewis Carroll’s Mad Tea-Party, and it has also been added to the header of another page of our site, the “Note for Publishers & Authors” page. It looks like this below, but you can also see it here.

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This is a quick note today to share some of the most very excellent kidlitosphere events going on this month, most of them having to do with National Poetry Month. I mean, really, the kidlitosphere ROCKS. If it were an animal, it would be a rocknocerous. If it were a store, it’d be Rock-Mart. If it were a small village in the distant hinterlands of the British Isles somewhere, it’d be Rockingham. Its rockositude is, quite frankly, off the charts. Here’s proof:

Wait. Who is this guy? Oh yeah, okay. It’s Gregory Pincus over at GottaBook. Who up and shaved on us.

In case you missed it, Greg will be celebrating National Poetry Month in a big ol’ way with 30 Poets/30 Days. Read all about it here, including his all-star poet line-up, but bottom line is that he’ll be posting a previously unpublished poem by a different poet for each day in April. You gotta love that. Jack Prelunsky launches Greg’s event today with “A Little Poem For Poetry Month.”

The honorable Tricia Stohr-Hunt of The Miss Rumphius Effect features Poetry Makers, in which she’ll be interviewing thirty-six rock-star poets during the month of April. The schedule’s here. How fabulous is that? Very, I say.

The multi-faceted Farida Dowler of Saints and Spinners and Minh Le of bottom shelf books (whose response to the curse-word Pivot question back in August 2007 remains my all-time favorite one and which is not appropros to this post, so I apologize) are hosting—starting today!—a children’s-book-sequels contest that calls upon the abundant creativity of their readers. It is entitled, not surprisingly, Unnecessary Children’s Book Sequels That Never Were. (What? You’ve never heard of the doomed, downright DISASTROUS sequel to Wanda Gág’s Millions of Cats, the recently discovered Millions of Rats? Well, head on over to Farida’s site to read about it today.)

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Well, this past Sunday—in which the art of Julie Fortenberry was featured, incidentally, so go check that out, if you missed it—I took a poll as to whether or not the creature below was a Rabbit or a Duck. As you can see, this spread below from Amy Krouse Rosenthal’s and Tom Lichtenheld’s Duck! Rabbit! is slightly different from the spread shown on Sunday, but it’s not much more help for the undecided:

To be official about it all, here were my poll results (my online poll, that is; my five-year-old walked around with the book all last week, quizzing everyone she saw):

• “Um, hello. It is obviously a RABBIT. Okay, so it can also be a duck. But look closely people! As a RABBIT, it is so much cuter! Cuteness always wins. Therefore it is a RABBIT.”
• “I think it’s both, but I agree that the rabbit is definitely cuter.”
• “I vote for Rabbit (he told me to).”
• “I’m very left-to-right-oriented, so that’s a rabbit to me – rabbit ears, then head. If it were a duck, he would be facing the other way.”
• “Duck. I can accept it as a rabbit only if I can accept that rabbits don’t have mouths.”
• “…it looks like a Hesperornis without the scary teeth.”
• “I vote rabbit.”
• “I saw a rabbit.”
• “…Rabbit. 100%.”
• “…that duck/rabbit is messing me up.”

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Jules: As I mentioned yesterday here at 7-Imp, I’m happy to be involved in this week’s blog tour for and by the people who create and engage their readers: teachers, librarians, parents, and people passionate about literacy. Yes, a literacy blog tour: It’s a way to share ideas and celebrate everything reading has to offer our children. I love the idea, and I’m pleased to be one of the many voices this week in this literacy project. It’s called Share a Story — Shape a Future, and it’s the brainchild of Terry Doherty from The Reading Tub. Check out the project’s web site if you want to backtrack and read what you’ve missed this week and if you want to see what’s-to-come. Here’s a master schedule; Day One was devoted to “Raising Readers,” Day Two to “Selecting Reading Material,” and yesterday to “Reading Aloud — It’s Fun, It’s Easy.”

Today, Day Four of the tour, is a day devoted to “A Visit to the Library.” (Check the bottom of this post for today’s—and the rest of this week’s—schedule.) I am joined by public librarian Adrienne Furness. I already gushed yesterday about why I instantly thought of interviewing her for this literacy blog tour, so I’ll try not to make her blush today. Bottom line is that she’s an exemplary public librarian.

Adrienne is one of two Children & Family Services Librarians at the Webster Public Library in the Monroe Country Library System in Rochester, New York. She blogs at What Adrienne Thinks About That, as well as here at the Monroe County Library System and the wonderful Homeschooling and Libraries. She’s the author of Helping Homeschoolers in the Library, published by ALA Editions last year.

We’re here to talk about how patrons can best make the library work in their favor. Adrienne, isn’t it fun to be a part of this multi-blog project? I’m especially happy to be involved, since I am currently not working in a library, though I have the requisite degree and such. I’m working from home, part-time and in my jammies, yet I know from my previous experience as a librarian some of the misconceptions about library use. And I’m glad to play a part, I hope, in helping clear some of them up. (By the way, because I cannot stand to post without images, I’m going to throw in some book covers of titles about libraries. Just below is probably my very favorite one.)

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