. . . was the title of a book published by the Modern Curriculum Press of Cleveland when I was a youngster. To my recollection, it was my textbook in the primary grades (maybe as early as first grade), so it must have been available in the 1950s (perhaps it was used mainly in Ohio), though I can’t locate a copy from my standard out-of-print acquisitional aid, abe.com, earlier than 1968.

First Fun in Phonics is the book that helped me learn to read. I hope it helped me learn to read. In the tangled history of that event I remember nothing so much as the encouragement my mother gave me along with a life-changing copy of The Wind in the Willows. About First Fun, I have little real memory — its activities, tests, assignments, pleasantries, what was so fun about it — other than its alliteratively clever title, which I recall loving because it seemed a sort of insider joke, a trick of language for the very young. (Imposters have jumped on the bandwagon recently with such tortured title variants as Fun First Phonics and Phonics Fun. What a falling-off was there!)

Learning to read words, understanding how they work singly and then with one another, and then how they work with the reading mind to signify a meaning that goes beyond the page into the world out there — all this precedes the discovery of anything that the writer of those words intended and, by extension, that the reader can gain from those words.

Series writing — books published originally in paper — is looked down upon by large segments of the children’s reviewing industry, though, if I may, I don’t believe it’s seen that way from the vantage point of either the library or the classroom. Teachers and lovers of reading know the value of books in series. Early or struggling readers will naturally seek out a second book with characters they have already met. And a third. And a tenth. And what happens over the course of these two hundred, three hundred, these thousand pages, but that the reluctant or young reader becomes a more confident reader, better able to discern the words on the page, to move more quickly through the wonder of story, to look ahead as he or she should to more challenging works. Hardcover books are at a disadvantage here. They are not as literacy-friendly as less expensive and more easily available paper series books are. I’m just going to come out and say that paper originals are a more important tool for literacy in libraries and classrooms than single hardcover novels. Of course, a novel’s charge is different. Of course, of course. But before taking on the three-hundred page novel, I betcha young readers, poor readers, distracted readers, most readers get their foundation skills with paper originals.

It’s true, after all, that words are cheap. A writer of any kind of book assembles them by the hundreds or thousands each day, and it’s easy to lose sight — when you are deep into character, story, metaphor, structure, and so on — of the primary, basic need to comprehend what those words are and what they mean.

To realize this is wholly within the spectrum of what a children’s and teen’s writer is about. Sure, set the words on the page. Carve them. They are music. They’re deep thought. They breathe and sigh and curse. They can change worlds. They can change individuals. But in the moment of creation, how dare you think about a reader? You can’t, not at first. Isn’t a reader an end impossible to see — or see clearly — from the vantage point of the beginning? Character determines story. Story determines words. Words are put out there. It’s done.

But, of course, it’s not done. Maybe it’s long after your people and your story have gone from your desk, but readers come to your words. Maybe not many, but that’s okay. It doesn’t take many. Readers come. They come from all sorts of different places and directions. But when they open up the cover — paper or board — then the real mystery of the comprehension and wonder and understanding and thinking and acting and changing begin to happen. So you look backward from the end of your story to the beginning of its absorption into someone else’s consciousness. And you stand back and watch the fun.

Last year I was invited to present a workshop or two at The Primary Conference — an annual meeting of classroom and writing teachers in grades K-3 — on, as the organizer said, “writing techniques you think teachers can share with their kids.”

Hmmm . . .

As I told him, I think of myself as a working writer, and while I do a lot of school and library visits, keynotes, and writing workshops with students, I’ve never actually done a workshop for adult teachers. Looking at the conference website, I was a bit put off by the expertise of teacher/speakers on the one hand and the “performance” aspect of the storyteller/writers on the other.

Besides that, there lingered a misconception from my first days of speaking to adults: that to be successful, one has to rise to the level of the attendees’ usual debates, absorb the intricate and specialized knowledge of their work, and speak in kind, as a fellow worker in the vineyard. To address a room of librarians, for instance, you have to equip yourself with a good knowledge of librarianship; of teachers, with a thorough acquaintanceship of teaching theories and techniques. If you didn’t do this, you would be made to feel underqualified, an outsider, a pretender.

I’ve mostly given up this silly idea. Any seasoned conference goer will tell you this is exactly wrong, anyway. If you are outside a certain field, conference sponsors don’t invite you to be knowledgeable in what they do, but in what you do. Attendees want to decide how your unfamiliar information will help them do their work.

It was the smart organizer who finally convinced me to take it on. In essence, he said: “As a writer of many books, you know this stuff already. You simply haven’t put your knowledge into this particular form yet. Just tell us what you know, and it’ll turn out great.” I totally paraphrase. Looking back at the emails, I see didn’t use the word “great.” He never came close to using the word “great.” But you get the idea. I agreed.

Then, a few weeks ago, I was asked to submit descriptions of the presentations. Uh-oh. My bluff was being called. As anyone will know who writes outlines or summaries of anything not yet existent, these descriptions present a kind of ideal that, being put out there, must eventually be lived up to. Of course, anything months away seems perfectly doable. Besides, over the last few months I’ve been chatting with teachers and other writers and massing notes and texts to help me form the workshops. The conference is in November, still a few weeks away, but the material is gathering. I’ll share war stories afterwards. Here are the summaries I came up with.

Building Stories from the Ground Up

Featured Speaker: Tony Abbott
Target Audience: Grades 2-3

Author of The Secrets of Droon and more than thirty other books for young readers, Tony Abbott shares his own genre series — fantasy, science fiction, adventure, mystery — and discusses how series fiction spurs literacy among reluctant readers in the early grades. He describes the basis of all stories, from Goodnight Moon to War and Peace, details the no-nonsense tips and techniques he uses to write his own works, and shares how these concepts can inspire writing in your classroom.

Ideas are Everywhere. But Just in Case . . .

Featured Speaker: Tony Abbott
Target Audience: Grades 2-3

Children’s author Tony Abbott shares the top secret ways he finds and uses ideas, what fun things you can do to spur ideas in young writers, how there’s no such thing as “writer’s block,” and the care and maintenance of each student’s “imagination machine.” You’ll learn what to do with inspiration when you have it, how to elaborate, to color, to question, and to “twist” ideas, generating more than you and your students can possibly handle.

Wow, I wanna go to these workshops myself! Ultimately, I’ll rely on my fairly good idea of what it means to be a working writer. Maybe it’ll turn out great!

Next to my computer sits the copy of What Hearts that Bruce Brooks autographed for me in May 1994 at the IRA Annual meeting in Toronto. Because my first book had just appeared, I’d been invited to speak on a panel of writers. I was on completely new ground. I knew no one in the industry, didn’t know how to act or speak or move, and when Bruce happened to be breakfasting in our hotel one morning, and something about our paraphernalia indicated we were both there for the meeting, we greeted each other. He was unfailingly polite, cheerful, and giving to a novice, and, aside from my writing teacher Pat Giff, probably the first real writer I had met.

Then I read his books.

Let me start with Everywhere (1990), a gem of a novella that (and I know already that this may not be understood) has this crazy sense of movement — like a young boy moves across a lawn — from beginning to end, and — further — itself ends in a gesture, a flash of motion that not only sums up everything in the preceding sixty-nine pages, but is a gesture that you take with you beyond the book and into your life.

There are few writers’ works that are at once beautiful and successful and resonant, but that also become a primer for other writers — at any level. Bruce’s books carry in their phrases and in their form and in the boldness and subtlety of their dialogue, the full library of American fiction.

What I mean is this: you know how sometimes when you read a book for younger readers, you sense the thinness of the writing, the awkward simpleness of its thought, the frailty of its knowledge base, the sterility of its invention, which all speak to the writer’s disrespect of the adult reader, and ultimately (of course) of the younger reader?

Bruce Brooks’s stories are the antithesis of this pervasive cheapness. His craft, and his art, are calm and wise, and we know when we read his prose that we are in the presence of a someone who has read widely and absorbed it all. Examples are on every page. Here, from the beginning of Everywhere:

The sidewalk along my grandfather’s street was a single, long slab of dimpled concrete. Sidewalks were a pretty new idea in this part of Richmond, and that is how they built them; when someone stepped on it at any point, the steps vibrated along the whole block with a kind of clack and boom.

Rich. Full. Colloquial and aware. Read the words again, and you realize that there are several things going on in them. First, there is the discrete historical reference for a book written in 1990 — Sidewalks were a pretty new idea — showing readers without telling them, that we are in the past. There is also the fact of geographical knowing — in this part of Richmond — which presumes a familiarity with other parts of Richmond, acknowledging the writer’s authority, which young readers easily sense.

Then, for readers of a certain age (who I am certain the author considers as vital to his audience as younger readers), there is the actual recognition of that vibration and the clacking and booming that one’s weight causes on a long unbroken strip of concrete. Simply, we have walked on such sidewalks, whether in Richmond or Cleveland or Bridgeport or St. Petersburg.

For those who have never experienced the sensation, the author’s rich description creates the knowledge. For a reason. It underpins the rest of the paragraph. The book works like this all the way through.

Similar mastery is at play in What Hearts, though of a deeper, more involved sort. The conversation between Asa and his classmate Joel’s mother on the eve of a school show is a model of subtext that is nearly impossible to describe. The words are in no way invented. They are not crafted. The author seems (merely) a scribe to an event that actually happened; though, of course, we know it happened only on his page, and it will only happen again when we read it there. I know I’m telling you nothing about the conversation; you have to read up to it and read it yourself. In this book, context is everything.

One last point about context, the slow build to the moment when the meaning of the book’s title is at last stunningly revealed is one of the finest moments I’ve read in children’s books, and Bruce’s natural artistry here utterly blows me away. In a sense, that brief moment encapsulates what I believe we are all trying to do in books for young readers: notice, describe, empathize with, and make possible the moment when a child moves forward into his or her future. What else is there?

Sorry to miss last week’s Report; more for my own sake than for any presumption of a readership. You know, you get to a stage of your life and it hurts to renege on a promise, even a whispered one. But life takes over. Days sweep on, one after the other, until you look around and find it’s this time next week.

Last weekend I attended the SCBWI Annual Conference in Los Angeles. There are enough round-ups of what happened at the conference seeping onto the Interweb (as Tracy Jordan calls it), that I won’t add to them here. For those writers for children who have never attended, however, the event is nothing less than a celebration and a call to arms. You cannot help but be buoyed by listening to the first rate faculty on such nuts-and-bolts topics as Revision (Lisa Yee) or Story Beginnings (Sara Pennypacker). I found myself taking detailed notes, more than I ever expected to, if only to remember what great sessions those were. The keynotes ranged from boldly inspirational (Bruce Coville) to quietly emphatic (Mark Teague) to funny with props (Rachel Cohn).

If the juggernaut of daily life so easily overwhelms the filmy artist you imagine yourself to be (think armored tanks vs. a lone horseman), this conference is a shield and a buckler, a mighty fortress, for four days, at least, in which every breath establishes the real value of writing for children. And that knowledge is what you take back home with you.

This is about as personal as I think I’ll get, but my own little moment of pride came a day before the conference when I put together a hundred pages of a new novel and sent them to my agent and to my editor. As noted below, I’d despaired of finding the time to do this properly, but in four intense days at my desk got to a place where a sizable fragment, if not complete, would nonetheless give a fair idea of how I wanted to tell the story. And telling the story properly was the only reason to write it.

Now we wait.