As we wind down our week in Cambridge, MA, I’m feeling thankful for all the opportunities, expected and unexpected, these six days in the city have brought.

• Son’s iPhone application programming day camp at MIT. Their days, interestingly enough, sound a lot like our days at my writers’ retreat last week — write quietly for a few hours, eat and talk, play a little, write quietly for a few more hours — only with programming instead of writing. But with that same sense of being around "your people" while you work. 
• Daughter’s afternoon camp at the Museum of Fine Arts. We have arts & crafts programs at home, too, but none where you can walk downstairs to see and learn about the Egytian art before you sculpt your own canopic jar.  Very cool.
• Bike lanes and bike paths. Cambridge has worked hard to make bike commuting a reasonable alternative to driving, and we’ve biked almost everywhere this week. The traffic’s a little nerve-wracking at times, but most people are very aware of bikers.
• Espresso Royale Caffe – the coffee shop not far from MFA where they serve a tasty iced latte and don’t seem to mind if you talk to yourself while writing in the corner.
• Revision time. I’m just about ready to send my dystopian storm book to my editor at Walker/Bloomsbury. (It’s coming next week, MK!)
• Research time.  I have pages and pages of notes for a future project.  All the kinds of tiny details that you can’t really get without being in the place and using all your senses. 
• Writer friends!  We got to meet up with Ammi-Joan Paquette, Loree Griffin Burns, and Valarie Giogas and their families. It’s always so much fun to see writer friends in person when we usually just get to talk online.
• Museum time. We especially loved the MIT Museum with its Artificial Intelligence and hologram exhibits. Today, we’re going to see the glass flowers at the Harvard Museum of Natural History, and tomorrow, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum before we head home.
• Going home tomorrow to see my husband and the lake…and the big crew of family coming to visit on Saturday!

The first time my friend Marjorie and I cobbled together a group of children’s writers for a short retreat, my husband was fascinated. "Really? What are you going to do all day?"

"Write."

He looked at me for a few minutes. "That’s it?"

"Pretty much. We’ll also take breaks to eat and talk about writing."

He nodded skeptically, the same way you might nod at a kid who promises she won’t use that flashlight to read under the covers. Once the retreat started, he came out for a quick visit. "Wow," he said. "I can’t believe everyone’s just…writing."   There were two writers with laptops on the downstairs porch, four more above them on the upstairs porch, a few scattered on couches and chairs, and a handful more at long tables in the designated quiet room.  But really, the whole place was quiet, and my husband was stunned. I think he’d been expecting to catch us setting up the disco ball for the DJ.

Last week, our group got together again, for four days of…yes….mostly just writing. You can have a writing retreat anywhere there are beds and some public space for get-togethers.  We have ours here, at the Valcour Inn and Conference Center on Lake Champlain because it’s a lovely setting and a big space with lots of places for people to hide away and write.

We do take some breaks for talk and exercise — some people went for runs and hikes at nearby Ausable Chasm. We had a yoga instructor visit for a Tuesday morning session to counteract all that sitting time, and there was time to play on the big lawn, too.

But mostly, there was a lot of this…

…writers scattered at tables, in rocking chairs and at picnic tables, on couches and chairs with bare feet tucked up under them, or scribbling in notebooks on the rocks down by the lake.  Sometimes there were walks, quiet conversations about characters or themes or sticking points before people fell quiet to write again.  And every afternoon at 5:00, or 5:15 or 5:27, or whenever we reached that good stopping point, we wandered up to the second floor porch to share what we’d accomplished that day and celebrate one another’s work.

This was one of my favorite parts of every day, hearing what people had done in the quiet hours.

"I really connected with my character this afternoon."
"I finished my proposal, and I’m ready to send it to my editor!"
"I came up with another metaphor."
"I’m halfway through my revision."
"I sat by the lake and wrote down the colors of rocks for one of my settings."

Glasses were raised, accomplishments cheered, and then we went downstairs to eat dinner. The last night, we gathered in one of the big rooms, and everyone had a chance to read five minutes from a work in progress.  These were just magnificent, and I went to bed late that night, still lost in settings and visiting with all those characters in my mind.  I’m so thankful to my fellow retreaters for the gift of their company, the gift of their words.

I’m home now. It’s not quite as quiet, and I’m making dinner every night again, but I’m still working, still revising.   Somehow, the spirit of those four days keeps me going, long after the inn has emptied out.

It’s another hot, sit-on-the-dock, read, swim, and eat-watermelon day, and there is both good news and bad news to report.

The bad news is that my ARC of Laurel Snyder’s PENNY DREADFUL got dripped on a little and is the tiniest bit soggy.

The good news is that I finished reading, and…wait…that’s bad news, too.  Because I’m going to miss this book a lot.  It’s one of those stories that feels like cold lemonade in summer or steaming hot chocolate in winter — timeless and comfortable and homey.  It’s about a rich girl from the city, Penelope, who turns into a not-so-rich girl in the country, Penny.  Where Penelope lived in a mansion and had a tutor, Penny lives in an old country house. She has awesome, eclectic neighbors (Oh, how I wish I could have had zany, messy Luella as a friend!), inner resources, and Adventures with a capital A. 

This book felt familiar to me when I was reading, and it took me a while to figure out why. When I was a kid, I loved Pippi Longstocking.  I wanted to BE Pippi Longstocking. I wanted a monkey and a tree to hang from upside down and braids that stuck out like that. It was a book that I read over and over and wished that I could live inside. PENNY DREADFUL has that same feel to it — that sense of setting off on a wonderful adventure with true friends who might be just a little dangerous and are all the more fun for it.  It was a perfect dock-swimming-summer-day book.  Sorry about the soggy pages, Laurel, but it was too hard to put down.

Other dock reading happening at the Messner house this week:

Son (14) – THE PASSAGE by Justin Cronin

Daughter (8) OUT OF MY MIND by Sharon Draper

Husband (who probably would not want his age mentioned) WEATHER ON THE AIR: A HISTORY OF BROADCAST METEOROLOGY by Robert Henson

Up next for me: THE STRANGE CASE OF THE ORIGAMI YODA by Tom Angleberger

What are you reading this week?

I think I mentioned that we’re reworking a storage room in our basement into a writing room — a quiet place where I’ll be able to get work done, even when the rest of the house is full and noisy.  It’s almost done…and it’s given birth to a related project.  There is an empty, dirt-filled area right outside the window by my writing room desk where I’d like to plant a small rock garden.

About a mile offshore from my house, there is an awesome island with really cool rocks. They are better than regular lake rocks, and I am not just saying that because they are way out on an island and therefore, difficult.  They are really, really great rocks.  Heavy, too.

While we were hiking around the island this afternoon, I mentioned to my husband that what I’d really like is a whole bunch of these special island rocks for the garden.  I thought he’d probably laugh.  He didn’t.  He offered to spend a morning going back and forth with the little motor boat, moving rocks.  I’m thankful for that today.  And for him.

Yesterday afternoon went something like this:

Sit on dock.
Read.
Get too hot to read.
Jump in lake.
Dry off for five minutes to avoid dripping on library book.
Read.
Repeat.

Eventually, I finished this book…

…and then I sighed and just held onto it for a few minutes. (Don’t worry, library people…I was dry by then.)  Sharon Draper’s OUT OF MY MIND is definitely one of the best books I’ve read so far this year.

The narrator of this middle grade novel is Melody, a fifth grader who is smart, spirited, and funny.  Melody is almost eleven and has never walked on her own or spoken a single word because she was born with cerebral palsy.  Being inside her head makes it a little easier to understand what it’s like to feel trapped inside a body that doesn’t work right, and readers will indeed feel Melody’s frustration, anger, triumph, and determination.

Melody tells her life story, a story of parents who try their hardest, doctors who didn’t understand and a wonderful neighbor who always did, a little sister who seemed to be born perfect, a school that sometimes fails her, and classmates who react to her in ways that are heartbreaking and authentic.  All of that leads up to fifth grade — the year Melody begins to leave her special education classroom for inclusion classes and starts using a piece of assistive technology that helps her communicate.  The new computer empowers her to try out for the school’s quiz team, and she surprises her classmates and her teacher with her performance.

Without giving too much away, I have to say that the last fifty pages of this book absolutely floored me.  What happened was not what I expected, and yet it was exactly what needed to happen for this book to pack the real and powerful punch that it does.  Sharon Draper’s OUT OF MY MIND is smart, funny, touching, and dare I say it… really important.  It’s a book that will open minds.  And even though Melody is a little younger than the 7th graders I teach, this is definitely going to be one of the books I share as a read-aloud with my students this year. 

You should read it, too — especially if you work with kids, but really, even if you don’t.  This is one you really don’t want to miss.

1. Today is putting-in-the-dock day at our house.  I am fortifying myself with coffee and thinking strong, don’t-slip-on-the-rocks thoughts.

2. We’ve had a project going on downstairs for the past few weeks, finishing off a storage area in back of the house to turn it into (are you ready for this? It makes me squeal every time I say it…)  a WRITING room.  It will be separate from the house, quiet, and bright with bookshelves, and it’ll be done by early next week, which is good because it is summer and people are everywhere, and I have a book to revise. I’ll share a photo when all the dust has settled.

3. Along those same revising lines, a week from now, I’ll be getting ready for a writing retreat just up the lake from where I live.  Can’t wait to see my writer friends who are coming!

4. My parents and two of my three siblings are coming to visit this weekend!  We are kind of scattered to the winds, so this doesn’t happen too often, and I can’t wait.

5. This will be a busy day of grocery shopping, bed-making, meal-planning, fishing-pole-checking, sparkler-buying, strawberry-picking, dock-putting-in (see #1) and other general preparations for #4.  Hope everyone has a GREAT Fourth of July Weekend!

(Cheating to make this a Friday Five-and-a-half because I just have to share an early blog review for SUGAR AND ICE…)

5 1/2.   Kris Asselin, who has a great blog where she profiles girl athletes in kids’ novels, talked about my  Claire from SUGAR AND ICE in today’s post!

The American Library Association itself is so awesome that it’s easy to forget that there was a whole amazing city outside that convention center.  Thankfully, my kids reminded me, and so in between bookish things, we found time to tour the White House.

The East Room was my favorite, especially the painting of Washington that Dolly Madison smuggled out just before the British burned the White House in 1814.

We had dinner at Malaysia Kopitiam, which was inexpensive and incredibly tasty.

Before our flight Monday, we enjoyed a whirlwind morning on the National Mall…

…visited the Smithsonian Museum of American History….

…where we took a walk through the Star Spangled Banner exhibit…

…and the First Ladies exhibit.  Michelle Obama’s inaugural ball gown is on display there now, a new addition since our last visit a year ago.

We also took a quick walk through the Darwin exhibit at the Museum of Natural History, since the kids had chosen a couple evolution-themed books signed at ALA — THE EVOLUTION OF CALPURNIA TATE by Jacqueline Kelly for my eight-year-old daughter and CHARLES AND EMMA: THE DARWINS’ LEAP OF FAITH by Deb Heiligman for my almost-14-year-old son.  It was fun to see some of Darwin’s actual specimens on display!

There wasn’t nearly enough time at the Smithsonian (is it possible to EVER have enough time at the Smithsonian?) but we were hungry, and the Folk Life Festival was happening outside.

After a quick lunch, it was time to say goodbye to the museums and monuments (and the ducks in the reflecting pool) and catch our flight home after a wonderful, wonderful weekend at ALA.

Sunday night at ALA was the Newbery-Caldecott banquet, which I’ve heard referred to as the Oscars of children’s literature. (Personally, I think it’s way better.)  I was at Table #97 (it is a BIG room!) with the wonderful Walker/Bloomsbury folks and some terrific Texas librarians, including Mary Ann Bell, shown here with me and her Nancy Pearl action figure, who joined us for dinner.

The place setting with this year’s official program was so gorgeous it took my breath away.

Mary Ann’s Nancy Pearl action figure liked the program, too. Only a librarian would have the gumption to shush a lion like that.

The art is inspired by this year’s Caldecott Medal winner, THE LION AND THE MOUSE. Isn’t Jerry Pinkney just incredible?

His Caldecott acceptance speech was so moving. Pinkney described answering the phone on the morning of the announcement and waiting to hear the word "honor."  He’s won FIVE Caldecott Honors but never a Medal until this year…a moment he called "a powerful and stunning turn of the page." 

Rebecca Stead accepted this year’s Newbery Medal for a book that is simply one of my favorites of all time, WHEN YOU REACH ME.  Her speech was as warm and lovely as she is, and she paid tribute to the power of books in our lives, explaining how books kept her from being alone in her mind and let her read about people who had things she couldn’t have (like sisters…and dragons.)

The receiving line after the banquet was kind of like Mount Rushmore only with all these amazing faces from children’s literature (and also, you know, not made of stone). 

Consider this the ALA version of "Where’s Waldo?" Can you spot Rebecca in this photo?

See any familiar faces in this one?

It was a wonderful, wonderful celebration.

On top of all this literary goodness, we managed to sneak in some other Washington, D.C. fun. That’ll be my last ALA post, later on!