I taught high school before I had my children. During the course of a day, I saw maybe 150 students, some of them studying World History, others American Lit, and some singing in choirs and ensembles. At the end of my third year of teaching, I got it into my head to write a letter…
I grew up in an orange grove in central Florida, in the little nowhere town of Fort Lonesome. For fun, my brother and I searched the sandy rows between orange trees for used shotgun shells and shards of colored glass. We lived a good forty-five minutes from town. There were no neighbors, not really. There…
“Celebrations punctuate our year, and our punctuations define us as a people.” –Malcolm Smith The people of ancient Ireland marked their year with eight solar and lunar celebrations. Every six weeks or so, they gathered, performed religious rites, feasted, danced, and held competitions. If a man committed a crime, he could be excluded from the…
“A slim schooner of a woman, driven by strong winds and a broken heart, floundered barefoot across the eastern plains until arriving at the edge of a village.” So begins Jennifer Armstrong’s Pockets, a memorable and beautifully illustrated tale of a seamstress who finds herself in a place where nothing but hard work is valued….
It starts with their very first breaths. We wrap them in layers of blankets, stuff them into backward-facing car seats, and cushion the bars of their cribs with tie-on bumpers. We line the shopping carts with tiny, rounded quilts complete with leg holes. There are germs on those carts, we say. I won’t have my…
Every time I read Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree, I cry. “Once there was a tree, and she loved a little boy.” The story is simple, heartbreaking, potent. On every page, I see the love of God contrasted with my fickleness, my wandering. I see the early days of our relationship, those first sweet meetings,…
This spring, we’ve been reading fairy tales—not the Disney versions, but the more brutal, more frightening collections of Andrew Lang and the brothers Grimm. These stories are far more violent than their modern retellings, and their outcomes are less certain. Sometimes the lovers are not reunited. Sometimes the hero makes a fatal mistake and is…
Writing for Story Warren is an honor and a joy, but it makes me feel like a hypocrite. I talk about how messes are beautiful proofs of the life we’re building with our kids. Then my kids make a mess, and I just want a clean house. I talk about taking time to grieve our…
I’m in a bit of a conundrum. How do I tell you all that I love about Sing the Bible Volume 2, the latest album from Slugs and Bugs?! Truth be told, if you’ve been exposed to any of the Slugs and Bugs albums, you won’t need my recommendation. But maybe you’re new to the…
“We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen.” I’ve just finished a draft of a new book. It’s thrilling to see a world wake up, to follow characters along uncharted paths, to discover a story where, before, there was nothing….
I hope this post is superfluous. Surely everyone has discovered and enjoyed and scoured every page of every book in the I Spy series. (photographs by Walter Wick) Scholastic has been releasing new additions to the series for decades. But then, sometimes we miss things. Hence the value of Story Warren’s Handy Resource Wednesdays. Now…
Star Wars fever has swept the planet, and my family has not been immune. We watched the original movies (IV, V, and VI for you hard-core fans) and now my kids are bounding around scream-singing John Williams’s inspired melodies and motifs. It’s sort of amazing. Seeing the old movies again has brought to mind an…
