Writing Moments of 2007...
To complement my list of great reading moments of 2007, I figure I’d better assess the writing moments of 2007 as well. It was a bumpy year, full of peaks and valleys…
It was just about a year ago I received a phone call from Marvin Terban of the SCBWI, telling me I had won the Kimberly Colen Grant in the picture book category. I was floored! I was just recovering from getting through the worst Christmas ever, the first without my gentle and wonderful father. He loved Christmas and decking out the tree, and it was devastating to spend the day with my mother, in her tree-less living room, and then visit the cemetery. Writing poems about being the daughter of a New York firefighter was one of the ways I had eased my grief in the months after my father died… and this poetry collection was now being recognized with a Colen Grant. Talk about highs and lows!
I went to the New York conference in early February, to mingle, learn, and accept my award. I'm with Randy Colen, brother of Kimberly Colen, in the photo below. It was so exciting! Yet, behind the scenes, I had mixed emotions. My poems were being recognized, yet my father was gone and my mom was sick and could not attend.
My mother died a month later, three weeks after receiving a shocking diagnosis of lung cancer, and ten months after my father died. My brother, sister, and I banded together and did what needed to be done. No writing at all took place in April, May, or all summer. My brain was a bombed out crater!
Summer was a quiet time… lots of reading, pretty much no writing. As I said to my writing friend Allen, I could not write, but I was “rearranging jars on the shelf.” My daughter played Fern in a local theater’s production of CHARLOTTE’S WEB, and that got me out of my cocoon and back into the human race again.
I did make a good decision, however. I decided to attend the SCBWI Summer Conference in LA. For me, the draw was the Poetry Master Class led by Lee Bennett Hopkins. It was a big step, but I did it…. and I had a fantastic time! Going to the conference led to my other big writing moments of 2007…
Meeting and reconnecting with writing friends, like Joni Sensel, Emily Jiang, and Becky Loescher...
Meeting Lee Bennett Hopkins and discussing my work-in-progress with him…
And revising, rewriting, and writing some new poems for my current WIP.
My revised poetry collection, FIREFIGHTER’S KID, is almost ready to emerge from its cocoon. That will be another big moment, when I put it in an envelope and mail it! I look forward to 2008, with hopes that it will be an “onward and upward” kind of year for me.
I wish you all the same.
