In 2004, Jerry Pinkney stood at the podium and began “I am dyslexic.” I was in the audience of more than 300 librarians, teachers, and children’s book lovers to hear his acceptance speech for the University of Southern Mississippi Medallion for his contributions to children’s literature at the Kaigler Book Festival.

Today is the 109th anniversary of Mama’s birth, and I’m thinking about the old 1948 movie title, “I Remember Mama.” I came to appreciate her a bit more in an educational psychology class I took in graduate school.

Kat Pigott’s new book, Rougarou Stew, is out just in time and just scary enough for Halloween. Down in Acadiana, kids know about the monster Rougarou that will eat you and your friends if you don’t eat him first.

Today, they say, is “Face Your Fears Day.” My principal fears have included public speaking, water, travel, and heights. A couple have vanished, probably because I was motivated to face them.

Not that anybody asked why my grandfather’s house was suddenly barn red, but I’ll tell you anyway. First, a bit of background.

I’ve been told that you can’t tell a book by its cover, but this might be an exception. Joy Harjo, in her newest book and second memoir, Poet Warrior, laces her story together in poetry and lyrical prose.

More than a few decades ago, in this house, on this date, a baby girl was born. The house at that time was unpainted. How it came to be barn red is another story for another time.

If you are familiar with the writing of Kathi Appelt, it will come as no surprise that she gets into the minds of animals to tell a spellbinding story. She does this again in her new middle grade novel, Once Upon a Camel.

As this month comes to a close, I celebrate ten years of writing this blog. A 10th anniversary gift is, traditionally, made of tin or aluminum. Tin and aluminum are often used to store things one wants to preserve which seems appropriate since written words preserve everything from ideas to memories.

I wonder when I read beginnings like those in Barefoot Dreams of Petra Luna by Alda P. Dobbs if the writing can be maintained at that level for a whole book.

“The smoking star lit the night sky as women wept, holding their babies close. Men kept quiet while the old and the weak prayed for mercy.”

A daughter-in-law brought illusions

of quiet country life –

eight acres, one house for them, one for us,

on either side of a Mississippi “crick.”

Qian Julie Wang’s memoir, Beautiful Country released on September 7, recounts her family’s coming to what she calls Mei Guo, beautiful country, when she is seven years old in 1994.

In Shakespeare’s sixth season of life, there are spectacles and a process showing life beginning to wither away. Now, I’ve had the spectacles since childhood, but as I mentioned in my last seasonal writing, those junior high students helped propel me into what Louisianans describe as “lagniappe” – not withering away but something extra

Steve Sheinkin brings nail-biting history to life again in his new book Fallout. This book follows his Bomb: The Race to Build--and Steal--the World's Most Dangerous Weapon, winner of a Newbery Honor award and a National Book Awards finalist.

Shakespeare’s next stage of life pictures a justice measuring out wise moral stories with severe eyes. I certainly find some parallels since my career of teaching involved giving of advice and encouraging right actions through the Aesopian stories I told. My students also took immediate warning notice when my left eyebrow rose.

Often what the reader brings to a book makes it either better or worse in the reading. I expected this to be the case when I requested a Net Galley advance reading copy of The Slow March of Light by Heather B. Moore, to be published on September 7.

Taking Shakespeare’s next stage of life, I veer from his swearing, quarrelsome, bearded soldier to that of the soldier’s wife, though that was not our original plan. When we married, our expectation included a long life in a rural community in Pontotoc County, Mississippi.

Niall Williams, born in Dublin, and Christine Breen, born in New York and educated in Boston and Dublin, decided to leave New York City for her ancestral home in Kiltumper in rural Ireland when they were in their twenties. In Kiltumper: A Year in an Irish Garden, written together, is set thirty-five years later after they have raised a family and grown accustomed to the rhythms of their writing and gardening habits.

I’ll continue with Shakespeare’s order of the seasons of life – at least as long as it suits me. He pictures a sighing male in love singing a ballad toward his girl’s beautiful eyebrow. It didn’t happen exactly like that for me, though there was music involved.

I seldom begin a book review by mentioning front matter, but author/illustrator Don Tate’s dedication of Pigskins to Paintbrushes to his “friends at Highlights where this story began” includes strong supporters of children’s literature and inclusion in all its aspects in the Highlights team. This book fits naturally into the same frame.