Even though North Country School had to shut down a little early because of that thing that begins with “c” and ends with “d”, the sixth graders and I were able to read One for…
Category: Life Now
Published: Oh Reader
Grief and growth take center stage in The Third Mushroom, a middle-grade novel by the talented Jennifer L. Holm that serves as a follow-up to The Fourteenth Goldfish, a book I shared with my first…
Published: Grief Isn’t Always Center Stage
Long ago I worked as the first communications director for Green Mountain Coffee Roasters. I love coffee and I loved living in Vermont’s capital, Montpelier, but I didn’t love the job. I spent hours writing…
Published: Ticket to Ride
When Shutterfly landed in my inbox in December 2020, I felt assaulted by their cheery message to “push rewind” and relive memories from a family trip nearly a decade ago. So many of us are…
Published: Creating a Grief & Growth Notebook
The process I learned to help clients who’d experienced sexual assault reframe their trauma became an important feature of my own healing 17 years later when I lost my teenaged son to suicide. I call…
Published: Omissions
I started writing Omissions after a real-life examination of my faculty bio on my school’s website midyear into a new teaching position. My sixth-grade students were to profile a faculty member of their choice, but…
Where Reasons End
I’d started this novel by award-winning Yiyun Li at least five times since it was published in 2019. I finally sat down with it, reading once through and then again to take notes, in early…
Melissa
I just finished reading the brilliant middle-grade debut, George, by Alex Gino with my sixth graders this winter. The novel is about George embracing her identity as Melissa. The book layers in so much about…
Turkey Term
We are in that funky period post-Thanksgiving break and pre-Winter Break at NCS. The English Department Chairperson refers to these two and a half weeks as Turkey Term. In sixth grade, we’re working on poetry.…
The First Grief & Growth Notebook Class
Here’s the lowdown on the initial in-person Grief & Growth Notebook class I’m offering at the Lake Placid Center for the Arts (LPCA) on Saturday, October 23, 2021 from 1:00pm – 4:00pm: The G&G Notebook…