 Red Room Writer Profile
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Dashka Slater's Blog
October 7, 2009
- It's a grim time in publishing -- every day I seem to hear about another threat to the very existence of books, magazines, newspapers and writers. And as if the news weren’t awful enough, on Sunday, I read an article in the New York Times business section about how e-readers are leading to the proliferation of book piracy, which, in case you haven’t thought it through, means we writers don't ...
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October 5, 2009
- This week in my environmental blog, I've started blogging about all the ordinary things I run across as an environmental reporter that turn out to be bad for you, or bad for the planet. Like, salad. How can salad be bad? Well, like just about everything, it depends on where it comes from. As I reported last spring in Sierra magazine, the big salad and spinach packagers have imposed some ...
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September 30, 2009
- The title of this post is literally true. Children’s books are what taught me to love writing and reading, and I began my career as a writer somewhere around age 6 by imitating them as closely as I could. Children’s book writers are some of the wisest, most thoughtful people around, and all the best books for children contain marvelous bits of wisdom, some of which has been collected in Anita ...
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September 22, 2009
- I was reading an interview with Rebecca Stead the other day in which she talked about why she had set her new novel, When You Reach Me, in 1979. “I wanted to show a world of kids with a great deal of autonomy,” she explains, “and I wasn’t sure that it would ring true in a modern New York setting. For better or for worse, life is different now.”That difference was the subject of a ...
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September 11, 2009
- There was an interesting article about Spike Jonze and the film adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are in this week’s New York Times Magazine. I’d seen a trailer for the film the week before while catching the latest Harry Potter movie, and wondered “What the ???” If any book seemed unsuited for film treatment, it’s that one, as cinematic as it is. For one thing, the book succeeds ...
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September 10, 2009
- There was an item in the San Francisco Chronicle this week about Make it Better, a bakery in the Castro that packs its goodies in a box that says “I f***ed up.” Cupcakes seem like a good way to signal repentance, and I’d like to suggest that Steve Wasik, the CEO of water-bottle manufacturer SIGG Switzerland, order a few thousand. Because, as Wasik is learning, when a company gets caught ...
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August 24, 2009
- I ended last week's post by observing that genius finds a way. What makes me so certain? Children's books do. Sure there's plenty out there that's uninspired, or only marginally inspired. But there are also books that take your breath away -- books that make me certain that genius is still doing what it has always done -- making readers gasp, sigh, giggle, and swoon.Earlier this summer, I ...
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August 19, 2009
- The other day, on the spur of the moment (procrastinating really), I googled an author whose work I admire. His name is KP Bath, and he wrote a middle-grade book that I think is terrific, The Secret of Castle Cant. By terrific, I mean that I have it on my desk, which is where I put books that are so good that I study them periodically to see how they're constructed. Castle Cant has a kind of ...
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August 17, 2009
- Yesterday, as I was riding my bicycle in the hills near my house, I came upon a garage sale where a man was selling two cartons of old picture books. By old, I don’t mean the discarded, chewed upon Scholastic paperbacks you find at most garage sales, but worn and lovely books from the forties , fifties, and sixties -- the era of Ruth Krauss, Margaret Wise Brown, Charlotte Zolotow, Maurice ...
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October 1, 2008
- I just got word that nominations are open for the Cybil Awards -- the awards from children's book bloggers for the best books of 2008. I love children's book bloggers because they tend to think about children's literature in a deeper way than many mainstream reviewers. These are people who are educators, librarians, and parents who understand that children's books are literature too, not just a ...
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September 11, 2008
- Earlier this year, I got an email from an editor at On Wisconsin magazine, asking if I would be interested in writing a profile of an environmental activist named John Francis, who spent 17 years without talking, and 22 years without riding in a car, train, or plane. I had never heard of On Wisconsin (I was well into the story before I discovered that the name was a reference to the UW fight ...
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May 30, 2008
- One of the more pointless and addictive things you can do when you have a new book out, is repetitively Google the title to find out what is being said about it. And so, even though I have several articles to work on, final rewrites on a new children’s book due, and a promise to deliver a new fiction manuscript to my agent by the fall, I keep googling The Sea Serpent and Me.In doing so, I’ve ...
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May 1, 2008
- The argument this morning was about getting dressed. My son was in his favorite reading chair, engrossed in the pages of a book, and I insisted that he had to get ready for school, right now, and no, you may not finish the sentence. I was very strict, having been through the just-one-more-page and just-let-me-finish-the-chapter conversations enough times to know that pages inevitably lead to more ...
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April 7, 2008
- I said I wasn't going to blog. I said, "I write children's books, novels, short stories, and magazine articles, plus a ridiculous number of emails, isn't that enough?" I said, "Who reads these things anyway? Who has time?" But, then the squirrel tried to steal my sheet.What on earth does a squirrel have to do with writing? It's a stretch, but I'm a demon with the transition ...
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