Last month my middle grade novel Sardines won the Maine Writer’s and Publisher’s Award for Young People’s Literature. This was a great night and a wonderful honor.
Something I shared that night was that my road to publication started at a Maine Writer’s and Publisher’s event to match authors with potential agents. There I met Dan who turned into Lauren Macleod who has been my agent for going on 14 years now?!
One of the things I love most about Maine is the small communities within communities. At the awards night I ran into a former colleague, the older brother of a college friend, a few online friends and friends of friends. Those of you from Maine are nodding. This is how it goes in Maine. You can wear your hiking boots to the bar and chances are the woman sitting next to you has a kelp farm with your next door neighbor.
Sardines has also been nominated for the Maine Student Book Award. This means hundreds if not thousands of kids across Maine will be encouraged to read and evaluate it by their teachers and librarians. Sardines is a book about kids in Maine working together in a found family to solve some of the many challenges that kids today face. It makes me so happy that more kids in Maine might have the opportunity to read it.
I love reading class novels with my 7th graders because it brings us together in community around a text. Reading is usually a solo act but reading the same book gives us a common experience and context to bring us together. A few weeks ago the librarian from Newport Maine told me that Sardines was their One Book One Community read for this summer. Newport is a small town, but to think that even ten people might come together to read and talk about Sardines is both humbling and incredibly gratifying. I’ll be heading up there in August to chat about the book, and who knows, I’m sure I’ll run into my mother-in-law’s cousin’s dog sitter or the guy who fixed my flat in Gulf Hagas ten years ago.
Ideas In Things 