Sara Holbrook author/poet/educator
September 9, 2010
Book smart = street dumb
This thinking is ubiquitous in too many of our upper schools. Smart is stupid, dumb is good. To mark the depth of this river, all you need to do is walk in the door. Ivory towers. Sissies. Nerds. Society just doesn’t give that much respect
September 4, 2010
When doing a poetry reading, it is always best NOT to take yourself too seriously. Prepare, yes. Have your papers in order, yes. Rehearse a little. Know your audience. But all of us who read our words aloud have grown to appreciate nobel prize winner Wislawa Szymborska’s sentiment:
September 1, 2010
I read Animal Farm as a kid, maybe third grade or so. It was on the bookshelf by my bed. I remember slipping the slim, green volume in and out surreptitiously to read with a flashlight in bed. Mom didn’t know I was reading this book without pictures in which pigs talked,
August 26, 2010
”Finish every day and be done with it. You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities crept in. Forget about them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; you shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.” – Emerson
Obviously, Emerson
August 18, 2010
August light turns in by eightand night comes early in the forestlullabiedby crickets’ chorus,shrilly sung crescendosby a choir that no one sees.
A piece of poem.Don’t know when I wrote it, but when ripened tomatoes start to sag on drying vines and shadows begin to lengthen in late afternoon, it floats through my mind, looking
August 12, 2010
First impressions are important. As an author, the good thing about making a trailer for your new book is that you get the opportunity to introduce the book to friends in your own words, your own vision. Like introducing one friend to another, the introducer gets to help with the first impression. You can say
August 5, 2010
Singing “kookaburra sits in the old gum tree-ee” makes a whole lot more sense if you have heard the mouthy bird and understand that a gum tree is a sweet smelling eucalyptus. The “baaa necessities” become more clearly defined when you learn that Aussies drop most r’s, don’t run the heat when no one
July 15, 2010
New Zealand, where the air is clear and the pies are steamy, the people are friendly and the internet is expensive, sparse and achingly slow. Michael and I came downunder for the IRA World Congress, a multi-national literacy conference that convenes every other year. We had a few days to take in some
June 4, 2010
So my question to the wise women writers I have dinner with now and then was: Do you think that every generation, when people get to a certain age, they just think the world is going to hell, or do you think the world really is going south this time?
And alternately, we each added
May 29, 2010
When life becomes a blur, about the only thing to do is buckle your seatbelt and wait for the ride to stop. That’s when you stagger away, slightly dizzy, searching for a focus point.
Since my last post I visited Shanghai, North Dakota, Texas, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Virginia, Florida, Connecticut and various points in
