The Joy of School Visits

And how to do them

Crash the Cub book series is available anywhere you can buy books, but I urge you to please support indie booksellers.

Thank you for letting me be a part of storytime.

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The postscript to a school author visit is often a large manila envelope filled with handwritten and illustrated thank-you cards from the students.

I wish I could take credit for these gems, but I can’t. Perhaps only the minds of K-5ers can achieve this level of freedom in their use of color, design and punctuation. Which was some of the point of the author visit in the first place.

I wanted to share a few choice cards with you (minor edits added by me for clarity):

• Sasha Kahn, Sasha Kahn, this was a happy book. I’m not tired at all after reading it twice.

• I love your book because I love you so much, and books are good food for curious fans.

• I love the bears and now I like classic study because of you.

• This note is from me. I like the story you read to me. I love the story that you just read. I love the story. Love, Me. (hearts)

• That was so much fun. I want to be a bear.

• Thanks for the books. I wanted to give you a gift card but I wasn’t allowed so this is a drawing of me giving you a gift card. I love you.

• I love your discussion.

• My book I wrote for you is about a pig and a big bad wolf, and I hope you will like it as much I love you.

• I’m glad you wrote these books for me.

• Thank you for being a cool author.

• Thank you for putting effort into your books. You’re pretty good at drawing.

• I can’t wait for your books to be installed into the library so I can check them out.

• Protect the bears! Also, your books are very good, I like them a lot, especially the different parts of them.

• The books are good; are you Jewish like me?

• Bear vs. Tiger. Rrrrrrroar.

• I hate honey, too!!! I love you so much!

School visits are part of the joy and job of being a picture book author. They require considerable coordination from the teaching staff, the PTA, and the author. They require resources and funding, which are being cut at every turn.

School librarians are being fired. Technology is crowding into the classroom. Children are reading less and less.

But remember, for a moment, when you were in elementary school… And some adult, who had done things your young mind had barely conceived of, or maybe only imagined, looked you in the eye and filled you with possibility.

Possibility narrows as we get older. Wonder deflates. We don’t ask hard questions about why things are the way they are, penetrating questions like, “Do you think Crash likes starring in a book?” If we sit in a theatre with six hundred people, they are strangers. We don’t move through the moment with abandon, not the way children do. I don’t think I’ve ever given an extended cheer when a bear caught a fish, and I’ve spent a lot of time watching bears.

You don’t have to be a Writer to write. Still, as Mann says, "A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people." Watching a slow-motion replay of a shattered glass reforming comes to mind. It is no small thing to actually write what you mean to write.

I remember the feeling as a child when someone who’d been there, who knew what it all meant, pulled back the curtain, even for a moment. I even remember the pearls of wisdom doled out slyly.

They’ve stayed with me to this day.

For Authors, school visits and resources