This was first posted on elizabethannewrites on April 8, 2011. I’m tying this post to Patricia’s post earlier regarding Autism Awareness Month — I hope you’ll read Pat’s thoughtful and thought-provoking post. My cousin, Bev Brenna, who writes thoughtful and thought-provoking YA books (as well as middle-grade novels, and picture books — Bev is versatile)…
Juxtaposition. A satisfyingly long word. In its simplest sense, it means placing something next to something else. In film, it is particularly “the contiguous positioning of either two images, characters, objects, or two scenes in sequence, in order to compare and contrast them, or establish a relationship between them; see also sequence, symmetry, and composition.”…
Improv. Improvisation. Acting without the roadmap of a script. Some actors revel in it, others, I suspect, dread it. A website like learnimprov can help a person to understand the basics, but there’s nothing like just getting up there in front of people and doing it. (Scary as that may sound.) Improvisation is also a…
And the winner of the giveaway for one copy of Waiting for No One by Beverley Brenna is… (drumroll please)… Lucky Number 13, Julie Hedlund! Congratulations, Julie! Please contact me through the contact form on this blog with your mailing address, and I’ll send the book out to you as soon as possible. For those…
Something writer, actor, arts advocate, literacy advocate Julie Andrews stresses, no matter who she’s talking to — aspiring writers, young people wanting to become involved in the arts, whoever — is that one must do one’s homework, be fully prepared, and be ready to recognize and seize opportunities when they come along. I find it…
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…
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…
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,…