Beverley Brenna

Music and Words are Powerful Things

21 Comments / Monday Musings / By

Imagine yourself a slave in the Deep South, struggling to survive, struggling to work hard enough to avoid the driver’s lash, then you hear it. A lone voice begins to sing “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.” To an outsider, the slaves are just singing to keep their spirits up, but you recognize the signal. Tonight will be your chance to escape. A conductor for the Underground Railroad is nearby. The hidden message in the song has told you that. You feel your spirits rise, your courage strengthen. Now imagine you are on a long, hard march. You are bone-weary, foot-sore. You have been knocked down by the force of firehoses turned on you and the marchers around you. You have seen people next to you beaten with billy clubs. You don’t know if you can go on. Then someone starts singing softly. “We shall overcome…” One by one the people around you join in the song, as do you. You feel your spirits rise, your courage strengthen. Deep in your heart, you do believe that we shall overcome some day. Music is a powerful thing.

Hanging On… and Letting Go

11 Comments / Title Thoughts Mini-Series / By

The book title that inspired today’s post in my ongoing miniseries is Something to Hang On To, by Beverley Brenna (whose name has come up a couple of times on my blog this week!) The book is a collection of Young Adult short stories, on a variety of topics, some serious, including one heart-wrenching story that opens the book, Dragon Tamer, about the death of a boy’s father; some taking the reader into another culture, such as Gift of the Old Wives, which retells a Cree legend; and some just plain funny, such as Toe Jam, based on a true story of getting one’s toe caught in the vacuum cleaner (ow!). This title led me to some thoughts about writing.

What’s Your Genre-Identity?

43 Comments / Monday Musings / By

Some writers are immediately and exclusively identifiable with one genre. You can’t imagine that author writing anything else. Agatha Christie writing a picture book? Mo Willems writing suspense? For those of us, like me, who are just starting out in our writing careers, our genre-identity is perhaps more fluid, not yet obvious. Or perhaps, like me, there is a desire to write in more than one genre.

Waiting for No One wins 2012 Dolly Gray Award!

36 Comments / Just Want to Say / By

  I am delighted to announce that my cousin Beverley Brenna‘s YA novel about a girl with Asperger’s Syndrome, Waiting for No One, has won the Dolly Gray Children’s Literature award for 2012 along with one other intermediate/YA novel and two picture books. To learn more about Bev’s book, to learn about the award itself, and to find out how you can enter a giveaway for a copy of this book, click on “read more” below…

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