Songs for a Teenage Nomad

On She Writes, a fabulous site for women writers, they've invited us to post our holiday buying guide of books by women writers. I thought I'd post a little list of my own here to honor those women writers who've made and continue to make such an impression on me.

Let's start with the YA women writers who continue to remind me why I'm such a word nerd.
I have so many favorites but here are ten that come to mind:

Honey, Baby, Sweetheart by Deb Caletti

Ballads of Suburbia by Stephanie Kuehnert… Continue

My five year old daughter loves the book ISH by Peter Reynolds. It's a lovely little story about being creative without needing to be "perfect," that the joy of creating far outweighs the need for an exact product. When she draws something now, she tends to say "This doesn't look like a lighthouse, Mommy, but it looks lighthouse-ish." In the book, the main character learns that he can also write ISH-fully and ultimately relax ISH-fully. Life, he finds, is in the ISH.

This year, I read ISH to my… Continue

Okay, so I know that not all books are created equal. Even within the same genre, there are good books and not as good books. I certainly don't begin to imagine for a second that every book out there is going to get four or five stars on Amazon, or goodreads, or Shelfari or wherever from every reader out there.

But I've decided that on my goodreads page, I'm only going to review books to which I give four or five stars. Now, now, before you go equating this to grade inflation, let me explain.… Continue

Today my creative writing class and I took a walk. Just for ten minutes. Out around our small town and then back into our classroom. We walked quietly, without talking, and I asked them to just "see and listen and feel." Then we wrote about it it when we got back in our journals.

When I asked for feedback, a couple of the students said some pretty terrific things that I thought I'd share. First, one student talked about how much a walk gives him the time to sort through his thoughts in a way th… Continue

I had an interesting book club meeting recently. We were reading Looking for Alaska by John Green (now I just have to establish that I LOVE John Green and was really excited that we were reading one of his books for my grown-up book club). So I sat down, ready to dive into the greatness that is John Green with the five other women who had read it. Instead, I was surprised by the initial reaction to the book. Everyone loved the book (of course, it's John Green!) but there were some issues with it… Continue