Blog Posts for Dashka Slater

Virtual Visits

Dashka Slater — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 09:43:07 -0800

One of my favorite parts of being a children's book writer is going into schools to talk about what I do. Not only is it an opportunity for me to get to get away from the computer and hang out with real people, it's also a chance to unleash my Inner Hambone. My school presentations are usually exceedingly silly, with costumes and props and puppets and goofy jokes and group poetry-writing and as ...

Why We Do This Stuff -- A Reminder

Dashka Slater — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 10:15:18 -0700

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 ...

Bagged Leafy Greens Kill Baby Animals

Dashka Slater — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 11:21:29 -0700

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 ...

Everything I Know About Writing, I Learned From A Children's Book (Part 1)

Dashka Slater — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 15:44:35 -0700

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 ...

The Problem With Parents

Dashka Slater — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 14:22:11 -0700

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 ...

Into The Wild

Dashka Slater — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 12:37:25 -0700

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 ...

Wash Down Those Recriminations with Cupcakes And Water

Dashka Slater — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 20:04:51 -0700

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 ...

Inside the Mind of Illustrators

Dashka Slater — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 22:57:13 -0700

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 ...

If An Author Does Something Horrible, What Should We Do As Readers?

Dashka Slater — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 11:46:48 -0700

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 ...

A Treasure Trove of Old Books

Dashka Slater — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 13:03:16 -0700

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 ...